The Only Side That Matters: The Victims

The Only Side That Matters: The Victims

By Brian Wilson: The Bipartisan Patriot

Please excuse my propensity for pontification, but some topics refuse to fit inside a neat little paragraph. This one deserved the extra mileage. At least it comes from a place with no party badge pinned to it.

My question:

Would the Epstein Files Have Hit This Hard If Trump Lost, or Are We Being Played Again?

Earlier today I was watching the latest round of pundits on cable news, all of them pretending they have a personal window into the truth, when that old familiar feeling crept up the back of my neck. It is the same one I used to get on a bad call, the kind where the supervisors swear the scene is fine but something in the air says otherwise. Politics has that smell too, the smell of something hidden, something rotten, something they are hoping the rest of us are too worn down to notice.

Which brings us to the Epstein Files and the question everyone whispers the second the cameras stop rolling. Would any of this be getting the traction it is getting if Trump had not been the center of the storm again, or is this another round of political arson, the kind where you torch one man and sweep the ashes off the others.

I wish this country made it easy to separate justice from politics. It does not. It never has.

If you strip the noise down to the studs, there are really only two possibilities. Neither paints a flattering picture.

Possibility One: yes, the files still explode, because power protects itself by sacrificing whoever the crowd hates most.

There is a long American tradition of feeding one guilty man to the mob to distract from the dozen standing quietly behind him. If Trump had lost, retired, played golf, and kept his head down, the hunger for spectacle might still have needed something bloody to chew on. The Epstein files are lurid, dramatic, built to hijack attention for months.

A smart political class knows when to toss the public a bone, especially when the public starts asking why nothing ever changes or why the powerful always seem to get the soft landing. This case lets them say, See, we care about justice. Look at the noise we are making.

Meanwhile the rest of the names would get handled quietly, with a seal here, a redaction there, or a committee that begins with fanfare and ends with nothing. The machine is very good at appearing alive without moving an inch.

So yes, the files might have blown up anyway. The country loves a scandal that requires no self-reflection.

Possibility Two: no, without Trump in the crosshairs, the files fade, the list gathers dust, and justice dies the usual quiet death.

There is a simpler explanation. The Epstein scandal is loud because it can be weaponized. Half the country wants Trump gone. The other half wants the people hunting him exposed. Put those forces together and you get a national pressure cooker.

If Trump had stepped out of relevance after round one, the incentives change. Media loses ratings. Opponents lose a villain. Allies lose a rallying point. The whole thing collapses into another grim story people agree is terrible but nobody finds politically useful. Washington does not chase justice unless justice comes with a campaign check.

A Trump without relevance is a Trump nobody bothers to investigate. Yesterday’s fire, still smoking but not worth calling the department for. The other names on the list, the ones with real pull, the ones who can slow-walk phone calls and freeze investigations, would breathe easy again. The victims would get a few sympathetic interviews, maybe a soft-focus documentary pitch, and the cycle would grind on exactly as it did before.

So no, the traction would not be this loud or relentless. Silence works wonders when the silence protects the right people.

Which leaves the ugliest possibility of all. We are watching a political witch hunt and a political cover-up at the same time.

Two things can be true. Trump may deserve scrutiny, and so may the others, maybe more, yet they drift into the fog while the spotlight stays welded to one man like he is the only soul who ever stepped foot on that island.

The goal feels less like justice and more like precision targeting. Take the name that ignites half the country, attach it to the scandal, and let the rest slip out the side door. Beltway 101. Toss one body on the fire and call it purification.

The victims, the ones who suffered things most people cannot even picture, get nailed to the cross twice. They watch the cameras whip back to the political circus while their real stories, their real hurt, their need for something honest, get shoved into the static. I remember holding a girl once, barely older than they had been, shaking so hard her jaw clicked like it was trying to break free, and the fog in her eyes is one of those things your brain files under permanent. These women carried that same kind of weight for years, maybe decades, and now their justice gets tossed around like a stage note someone dropped on the wrong podium.

This is the part that makes me furious. These girls grew into women dragging scars the public will never fully see, and they are used again, this time with microphones instead of hands. Justice gets shoved aside because the show must go on.

So what is the truth.

It is this. The Epstein Files are not a pure pursuit of justice, and they are not a pure hit job. They are a battlefield. Every player has a motive. Every network has a preferred villain. The only group with no power in this at all is the victims.

This country repeats the same pattern. When the powerful sin, the innocent bleed twice.

Maybe someday we get a government that gives a damn. Maybe we get a justice system that cannot be steered like a campaign bus. Maybe the truth wins for once. Hard to say. The track record is lousy.

For now we are watching a spotlight aimed exactly where the political class wants it. Anyone standing just outside that beam walks away unstained.

The victims do not get that luxury. They never have.

If any justice is left, it will not come from Washington. It will come from the people who are tired of being lied to, tired of being played, tired of watching the powerful trade favors while pretending they are delivering justice.

Maybe this time the country refuses to look away.

I would not bet money on it, but I would like to be wrong.

In the end justice for the victims is the only thing that matters, and it should not take a PhD in Jurisprudence from Suffolk Law or a Gallup political map to figure that out. People were exploited, harmed, used like disposable parts in a machine built by men who expected to die untouched. That is the center of the story. Everything else, all the red-and-blue shrieking, all the cable-news theater, all the hyperventilating analysis about what this means for some campaign, is noise that helps the guilty slip out the emergency exit.

Take the politics out of it for five minutes and the path clears up fast. Find out who was involved, in any capacity, and hold them to it. No favorites. No protective bubble for the well connected. No polite winking at donor names. A lot of people seem terrified that justice might land where it should, probably because they are used to watching it get steered like a shopping cart with a busted wheel.

Maybe I am old fashioned, maybe I have lived long enough to stop caring about everyone’s precious optics, but if someone did harm, they face the music. That is it. Plain rule. A kind of Nuremberg clarity where you drop the excuses and the tribal panic and look the truth in the eye.

Justice for the victims. Not a political trophy. Not a media circus. Not a weapon for anyone. Just justice, the kind rooted in reality, not optics, the kind that does not care who you voted for or who you give money to.

Everything else is static. Justice is the signal.