Christian Responses to The Epstein Files Could Make It Worse

Little bit of a different kind of video today because we're under some strange circumstances. With the Epstein files, at least partially released, I've been a little preoccupied by how evangelical Christians are reacting and providing uh commentary incredibly lacking in insight. Let's talk about it.

This isn't left versus right. This isn't establishment versus anti-establishment. This is Jesus Christ versus Satan. Plain and simple. You cannot explain things such as George Bushing and sacrificing a child. Yes, real part of the Epstein files by anything human. Yet, this has been going on since the beginning of time.

So, first of all, these people that are in the Epstein files doing all this bad stuff literally are a part of the establishment. They are heads of corporations, heads of state. There are a bunch of presidents of the United States in the Epstein Files. So yeah, I would say that actually they are a part of the institutions that make up the the fabric of our society. Yes, this is institution establishment versus the people who don't like this stuff anti-establishment.

And when literalist Christians say things like this is not left versus right, what they mean is that this is not Democrat versus Republican. And that's not entirely wrong. very famous Democrats are present in the files, although more Republicans currently in power are implicated in them. But that's not to say this isn't left versus right. All of the politicians and superw wealthy guys implicated in the files are elite parts of our political status quo of capitalism, which is right-wing. Yes, the Democrats are right-wing and anti- capitalists, you know, leftists have opposed Epstein and his buddies for that reason since before the files were even released. So yeah, this kind of is still left versus right. It's really unfortunate that political education is kind of so lacking that people think that left versus right means Democrat versus Republican.

In a lot of ways, I actually don't blame people when they say something like this because this is a normal thing to think in the United States. Unfortunately, the most egregious thing that this guy is saying in this clip, though, is that there's no way to explain the heinous acts that these men have done, except to invoke Satan. That allows us to just throw out any other explanation for how things got as they are. Now, all of the people that are in these files, they were the beneficiaries of a capitalist system, and none of them have been held accountable because that system allows wealthy people to be too powerful to stop. Money does allow you to essentially purchase immunity from the law. And instead of saying any of that, instead of examining any of this, he's saying it is it is quite literally impossible to examine the system that we are a part of. We should not even try. All we should do is um spin a yarn that involves supernatural creatures and entities to try to understand this. That kind of just gets us stuck in the same place all over again, doesn't it? Not being able to stop people who have too much power. When you say it's just about Jesus versus Satan and this can't be explained otherwise, you let the system that enables these men go completely unchecked.

I should also point out that the specific story of abuse which this creator references from the Epstein files is pretty dubious. Both Bushes are equally guilty of thousands of murders in the name of US imperialism. If you ask me, I'm not defending any presidents here, but I doubt this specific incident actually happened. This comes from an FBI agent recounting their 2019 interview with a person claiming to have been a victim of Epstein. The signs that this story is fabricated are these. The interviewe claims to have had his feet ritualistically cut with a scimitar, a sword that's about three feet long, but this somehow left no scarring. I'm not sure how sword wounds heal so perfectly. The interviewee said Trump was there with his wife Melania, but this alleged event took place in 2000, 5 years before Trump and Melania got married. The interviewee was directed to the FBI by the journalist behind True Pundit, a far-right misinformation site. And the biggest red flag to me, this whole incident, the interviewee said, were recovered repressed memories, as in the guy didn't have any memory of this until 16 years after it supposedly happened. I've covered this on my channel before. This is not how memory and trauma work. So-called recovered, repressed memories are typically created in the minds of vulnerable people through suggestion and leading interviews by shady psychologists. The sociological phenomenon of these so-called memories exploded in the 1980s following the wild success of a book called Michelle Remembers, where a psychologist recounts the therapy sessions of a client who, with his help, uncovered repressed childhood memories of satanic ritual abuse. Many of these memories are just scenes from the movie The Exorcist. The real life psychologist and the client also went on to get married and do extremely lucrative book tours together. And finally, none of these stories were ever actually evidenced. This was one of the primary forces behind the satanic panic in the 1980s. And while thousands of people claimed to have had recovered, repressed memories of satanic ritual abuse at this time, none of these were ever corroborated despite many state police departments and federal agents taking them quite seriously.

Also, even if we just grant that this did happen and even if strange gods were invoked in the process, what would make this satanic? Christians typically view any religious practice other than their own regularly scheduled blood rituals as demonic or satanic. But just because they make that baseless accusation without any evidence, it doesn't mean that we should. Satanism is its own distinct religious tradition which does not equate to anything spooky or violent or idolatrous. And there's no actual documented history of ritual abuse among Satanists as we'll discuss later. Because what God creates, Satan corrupts and he hates what is good. These people are servants of him and they hate Jesus Christ. So what do you think about Jesus? Are you on the same side as them or are you all the way in on him? There is no middle ground. He is the way, the truth, and the life. You must go all in on him and fight for what is true before it is too late.

He's kind of shifting the blame entirely here, right? He's saying that it's not powerful men who do this. It's Satan who ultimately is responsible for this. And it's not just these people in the Epstein files that are doing these things either or who are morally responsible for this. It's actually everyone who isn't in his specific type of Christianity. Because as he says, if you are not allin for Jesus, then that means that you are one of the people who does stuff like this. Because it is there is no middle ground. It's just bad people who worship Satan and serve Satan and all good people who, you know, are serving their master Christ. And I do think that saying that non-Christians have always done this, have always sacrificed children, is actually a form of blood liel. Now, if you don't know what blood liel is, I made this short a little while back that I'll play for you that explains what blood label is and a little bit of the history.

We've all heard the atheists eat babies jokes. If you're a vegan and atheist, what do you eat? Do they make impossible babies? But where did the atheists eat babies thing come from? Here's my best guess. Before atheists started joking about it, Christians made this accusation seriously. But even before that, Christians accused Jews of this. This is now called blood liel. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, blood liel refers to the false allegation that Jews used the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes. The Nazis popularized this in the 20th century, but Christians and Muslims use blood liel in the Middle Ages. And Jewish historian Josephus even says that Greeks used it as early as the 400s BC. There's of course no evidence whatsoever that Jews have ever done this though. In the 4th century CE, Christians even accused other Christians with whom they disagreed of covering babies with honey and spices and eating them. If you want that whole story, I read it at the end of this video of mine. Turns out Christians have been basically demonizing others in this way for millennia. What a surprise.

Now, I'm not saying that accusing the men in the Epstein files of doing horrible things to children is blood liel. No. What I'm saying is it's blood liel to accuse people who are not actually in the Epstein files of doing something similar or being morally responsible for this in some way just because they are not of your religion. That is actually a form of blood liel. I think I don't think the guy I'm responding to here is an evil person. I think that he wants to catch people that do these types of things and prevent them from doing these kinds of things. I think that there's a problem with the approach though. So, he entirely identifies good and evil just based on someone's religious affiliation. We know that several of these men were vocal Christians. People like Trump especially come to mind. And Christians have supported these men because they used this method of saying, "Hey, well, this person identifies as a Christian. They go to church. They say Christian stuff, so they they must be good." And then those people do stuff on the island. And we're surprised. Clearly, this method of trying to identify good people and catch bad people does not work. Maybe we need to do something different than say, "Are you a Christian or are you not?"

By the end of this video, I think this guy ends up maybe accidentally, I don't know, advocating for even more power in even fewer hands. So, what do you think about Jesus? Are you on the same side as them, or are you all the way in on him? There is no middle ground. He is the way, the truth, and the life. You must go all in on him and fight for what is true before it is too late. So by saying that there's no middle ground on this issue that you're either completely with Jesus and you're innocent of doing things like this or you're not a Christian the way he says and you are therefore guilty of this kind of thing. The majority of the world, the majority of humans who have ever existed actually catch strays for what this group of exclusively elite, wealthy, politically powerful men did as documented within the Epstein Files. This is justification for Christian supremacy and nationalism. This makes us think that Christians need to dominate everyone else even more to try to prevent this from happening because it only happened because Christians didn't have enough control in the first place. And you know, given that Christian nationalists like to use any and every tragedy to manufacture consent for their domination of our world, even if they are partially at least responsible for that tragedy, I'm glad that the Freedom from Religion Foundation is out there fighting Christian Nationalism on the front lines. FFRF is devoted to protecting the separation of church and state in this country. They take legal action against unconstitutional public policies. They defend the constitutional rights of non-religious people. and they step up and protect Americans from the religious privileging that Christian nationalists are trying to enact. I've been a member of FFRF for over 7 years now because they consistently stand up for human rights and fight religious overreach in our government. Go become a member right now to support their expert legal team. The link is in the description and pinned comment. Seriously, if you want to feel a little bit of hope in our current situation, sign up for membership and then read FFRF's regular newsletters and their magazine. They are constantly stopping religious overreach and winning cases, and you can read about it there. It's pretty inspiring to see. Thank you so much, FFRF, for sponsoring this video. It's rare that creators get to work with organizations which not only align with our values, but actually inspire us to fight even harder for human rights. Y'all go click the link below and become a member right now. FFRF absolutely deserves it.

There are Christians in the Epstein Files. Colossians 3:es 5-10 put to death what is earthly in you sexual immorality impurity evil desire Matthew 7 21-23 not everyone who says Lord Lord will enter the kingdom of heavens 13:5 keep your life free from the love of money and be content with what you have proverbs 28:20 whoever races to be rich will not go unpunished Ephesians 5:5 whoever is sexually immoral or impure has no inheritance in the kingdom of God. 1 John 2 15-17. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him. What makes you think these people are Christian? Cuz I could go on. There's more. There's There's a lot more. I I could keep going. Yeah.

All right. Clearly, we can see that this is a no true Scotsman. These people called themselves Christian. That's why we think they're Christian. I mean, again, Trump running the second time. Uh, apparently in part because he's just trying to make America great again like God saved his life to do after the whole ear incident.

In a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear. I was saved by God to make America great again.

Yeah. We think they're Christian because they claim to be Christian gets supported by Christians and their entire regime is predicated on the idea that that the Christian God wants them to be doing what they're doing. That's why we think they're Christians. I get why you want to distance yourself from the idea that these people are in any way affiliated with you. The vast majority of the people, including the creator of this video, think that the stuff in the Epstein files is absolutely beyond heinous. And so, you want to not be a part of that. You want to show that you condemn it. and condemning it is great, but rushing to say that they can't be Christians excuses the fact that evangelical Christians have historically supported the capitalist system that ultimately allowed these men the power to do these things. And then maybe more importantly, the power to escape accountability because money is more important in the the balance of power than law. And also allows you to escape accountability from the fact that Trump again was elected because of evangelical support. I think that saying, "Well, they just weren't Christians." and leaving it at that allows you as a Christian to not reflect and and think about how maybe popular Christianity in this country needs to change so that bad things don't happen because of it.

Also, and this is something that Taylor brought up, if you are listing a bunch of sins and saying that these people committed these sins, therefore they cannot be Christian. Doesn't that kind of have implications that reach far beyond the people that are in the Epstein files? I mean, every Christian, it says in the Bible, right, every person has fallen short of the glory of God. Everyone has sinned and deserves damnation. And uh I mean, I'm sure the creator of this video has seen themsel in these passages saying not to do these things. And so, I mean, aren't you aren't you kind of like swinging a big enough of a of an axe here to accidentally cut yourself down? A person who is definitely not on the level of a person in the Epstein files. Like, definitely not an actual bad person at the end of the day, right?

So, there is literally no history of human sacrifice among Satanists. There is no history of cannibalism among Satanists. Satanists, people who call themselves Satanists, have never done those things as far as we have evidence for. And we do know that Christianity revolves entirely around human sacrifice. Now, that said, some Satanists online, some people who I actually quite like have said kind of a similar thing to this Christian. They've said that, well, true Satanism is believing in all of these really good things, you know, like the seven tenets from the Satanic Temple. I think they're all very good things and they align with my values very much and uh they definitely go against the things that happened in the Epstein files. And so therefore, these people who did these things couldn't possibly be Satanists, no matter what you say, no matter how they identified, anything like that. While none of the people in the Epstein files identified as Satanists, none of them did, and we'll discuss that a little bit later. I don't think that we should be using no true Scotsman's in order to kind of like defend Satanism here. Ultimately, there is no true essence to any religion. We know at least people who are maybe non-theistic Satanists might agree with this. At least we know that all religions are constructions of people to serve a certain social purpose. There's no like metaphysical substance or process that is central to any religion that makes it true or not true as in genuine versus not genuine. There are Satanists who do and think good stuff. There are Satanists that do and think really bad stuff. And those are both in my opinion Satanists. I think that we can just say, "Hey, uh, people shouldn't be doing bad things, no in the name of their religion, no matter what, because people should not be doing bad things." We don't need to say these people can't be Satanists because Satanism only means good stuff. If you want to say these people were not Satanists, let's take an evidential route rather than an essentialist route and say that there is no continuation of any kind of satanic tradition within this. We'll discuss this a little bit later. Actually, right now, we're about to discuss this right after this clip plays.

The Epstein files have so many theories being proven true, like demonic satanic rituals, no longer really a conspiracy theory, more like something we should legitimately be looking into. There are literally stories about eating people, like dismembering babies, sexual violence, murder. It gets dark. Now, do I personally believe in the concept of like the devil? No. I have no personal religious beliefs. I actually don't believe in anything supernatural in any regard, but I do believe that people do [ __ ] up [ __ ] And I do think that they may have held these beliefs and it probably influenced them and what they chose to do. So, at this point, we need to look into it. The elites certainly like to play God, that's for sure.

Okay, just to be clear, the things that Jacqueline Glenn goes on to say after that part of the video, I don't really have any problem with. She's like, "The Trump administration's been trying to cover this up, and that's very bad. Let's get them out of here." I agree with Jacqueline on that. But up to that point, oh god, this is this is a really, really bad take. Jacine is propping up a clearly ahistorical Christian theological view of Satanism here. Since at least the early modern period, Christian stories have included tales of black masses and witches sacrificing people to Satan, but they have literally never been substantiated in any way. There's no actual evidence for any of these things. And these tales motivated witch trials in the early modern period where thousands were massacred by Christians. Like I'm entirely sure that Jaclyn Glenn thinks that the Salem witch trials were really really bad. But there were witch trials that were much much worse that happened in Europe before that. And those things were all motivated by ideas of that Satanists apparently do all of this stuff to children in a very blood label type of way. But again, there's no evidence any of these things happened. These are Christian stories. Satanism self-described Satanism doesn't seem to have even existed until the 1960s in the United States. Even more recently, there's been serious negative ramifications for satanic panic. the idea that Satanists do all these weird rituals, which they don't actually do. Like in the 1980s, obviously, the the proper satanic panic happened and three innocent teenage boys that are now known as the West Memphis 3 were imprisoned because people thought that they were Satanists who murdered someone. Why did they think that these boys were Satanists? Because they were like loners who wore black t-shirts. there was a miscarriage of justice because these tales were so salient in that area at the time during the satanic panic and more recent satanic panic is largely targeted at trans people. There is this whole idea that pride is demonic because you can find the word demon inside of it as if that means something. There are people out there like Kim Zember who leads up this Christian thing called Rainbow Revival that says that we know that, you know, pride is demonic and satanic because the pride flag has six colors of the rainbow rather than the canonical seven colors of the rainbow as if the rainbow is not a color spectrum.

The flag on the pride movement, they've removed one of the seven colors. So, there's only six.

Six being the fall of man. We're in a spiritual battle. There are tons of people who say that trans people recruit kids in order to get them into dark rights that allow them to rebel against God's divinely ordained creation for their bodies. My point in all of this is to say that massive harm happens when we actually buy into this idea that there's some kind of big satanic conspiracy. And in Satanic Panic, elites like the people that Jacquine wants held accountable are never the ones punished. It's regular people. It's often children. I want to say once again, there is no tradition of human sacrifice or cannibalism among people who have actually called themselves Satanists. There's also no tradition like this among people who have canonically called themselves witches. I should clarify that this means that even if we discover that elites actually did do weird violent rituals and even if they showed interest in non-Christian pantheons in doing so, that does not mean they were Satanists doing Satanism. Evil actions do not equal Satanism automatically, just like good actions do not equal Christianity automatically.

Now, you know, Jacquine has been doing effectively the job I'm doing right now for a lot longer than I have. I've been doing this for something like 8 years. And in that time, I have made it my responsibility to educate myself on religious history, on sociology, on all of the things that touch the stuff that I discuss and comment on publicly. Jacqueline has had the time to do this with this subject. She's been talking about, you know, religion and atheism for longer than I have again. And yet, she still is not aware apparently that satanic panic works in this way, that there's no such thing as satanic black masses or dark rights or any of this stuff. I think it's a total abdication of her responsibility as a creator to buy into rumors started by Christians rather than to actually study this stuff so that she can have a more salient critique at least in the first half of this video. All right. Yeah, we we need to talk a little more about the the actual history of ideas revolving around Satan and Satanism. Uh so let's do that in response to the next clip.

This is why I say things like politics are a distraction, okay? Because it's not left versus right. It's us against Satan worshiping pedophiles. And so many people don't believe in God that they also don't believe in Satan. While you are cutting off friends and family members because they voted differently than you, 800,000 children went missing. And if all of us are fighting with each other all the time and can't put our petty little differences aside, then how are we going to fight against this? Every little headline, every fake social media outrage is designed to distract you from what they are actually doing.

I do want to say that any of the people that I am not in regular contact with now because of political strife, um, they all actually support the president who is implicated in in these files and didn't want to release these things. And like I knew really well he did weird stuff to kids before this. Like most people did. I think the real issue is that we were fighting against spiritual attacks and demonic forces. So no, I don't care who said what or who played what song or who got offended by who. I only care about holding satanic pedophiles accountable. And don't you think for a second that I will defend anyone that was involved. I believe 99% of politicians are corrupt anyways. My loyalty is in Christ and Christ alone.

She starts with this idea that politics are a distraction, but then she ends this video with a political statement. I mean, obviously there is something political here and I I agree. This is a political issue. She says that she wants to hold these people accountable and that's good. like we are allied in that she is making a point that is right in that the majority of people are actually kind of united against this level of horrendous harm. But saying that it's all about Satanists shifts the conversation away from any real means to hold anyone in these files accountable. Just saying their ultimate evil is not helpful if we want to change anything. The religion scholar David Frankfforter wrote about this in his book called Evil Incarnate. I want to read this quote to you. When society labels people as evil, it places them outside humanity where others don't have to think about motivations or context in any critical way. Use of this label amounts to intellectual laziness and has led consistently to the worst atrocities we know about. Speaking of evil leads people to evil, Frankfforter says. So there's two points to unpack there. one, if we just say ultimately this has to do with an invisible, supremely evil guy who's pulling all these strings, doesn't that kind of terminate any of our thoughts further about this? Doesn't that make us not think that we might need to examine the political uh the democratic democratic and the economic systems that are in play and allowing these guys to ultimately do stuff like this? Like we're not asking about where Epste got his money or how he avoided, you know, legal cases or how any of these other people did or or how presidents of the United States did all of this stuff and all of the politicians around them just said like, "Eh, I'm not even I'm not even going to come out and say anything about that." Even when they were on the other side of the aisle, you know, politically, we're not going to talk about that. We're just going to talk about the devil. And also let's think about who is really in the business of utilizing narratives of ultimate evil of God and Satan in order to make political gain. It's people that are in the files. Like I'm not saying that Clinton is actually much better than these guys. Like [ __ ] that guy completely. He's a horrible piece of [ __ ] But Trump specifically again had this whole narrative that they were being led by God. They were doing God's will to fight against the forces of ultimate evil. Whether it was, you know, in the war on terror, whether it was immigration, whether it was the Democrats, like whatever, they utilized the same narrative that this creator is using in order to get themselves in positions where they could do all of this stuff to kids without any accountability. It is incredibly convenient for powerful people if we just pursue this idea of ultimate good and evil and we fail to examine any of the material conditions or political forces that allowed them to do any of this stuff. They kind of get off scot-free in a way. In fact, I think that the people in these files are probably quite happy that there are so many people using this narrative of ultimate evil because this discourse about dark rituals and ultimate evil is historically political propaganda in order to serve the powerful in itself. So in 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles of the Old Testament in the Bible, King Josiah does genocide against people in Judea who were not of his specific type of Judaism. As far as I understand, there are many scholars who believe that there is actual historicity to this embellishment, sure, but some historicity. Yes. The justification for this genocide was that communing with idols like Baal and Asher is wrong. And the effect of this genocide was to consolidate his own political power in Judea. The Old Testament records all of this as if it is a good thing. And so it amounts to ancient political propaganda itself. Dr. Dr. Ela Paggels has written in her book, The Origin of Satan, about how both Jews and Christians actually invented the idea of Satan to literally demonize their political enemies. Politics is Satan's origin. So when you're making points about Satan, about the satanic pedophiles, yeah, you're still engaging in political discourse, both now and engaging with a historical tradition of a certain type of political discourse that has never actually served to help regular people like me and you. Ironically, in trying to hold these elites accountable and calling them, you know, satanic pedophiles, Christians like this creator are engaging in a form of discourse which powerful people invented and use to escape accountability in the first place. I promise you when you wield these narratives, when you swing these around, they only ever historically hit and hurt marginalized people.

Now, what do I think needs to be done about the Epstein files? So, when this stuff was released and people were really freaking out about the amount of harm that these elites do, I did have a little bit of trouble empathizing with a lot of the folks who were so freaked out because not because I thought that any of these things were acceptable, but because, you know, I I feel like I'm already kind of pretty aware that all of these elites, whether Democrats Republicans, business owners who've never been in politics, whatever. These people are already beneficiaries of a system of capitalism that only works when you're going to war, when you're exploiting people. These people all already in my mind are uh corrupt to the highest degree and honestly they've already done things to more people that are on the level of the bad things that are in the Epstein files. Like dropping bombs on civilians is pretty bad and just as bad as any of the stuff that's in the Epstein files, if not worse. So my, you know, proposed solution to any of this corruption is the same to any of the problems that we knew existed before the Epstein files were released. That is, we need to eliminate capitalism. We need to eliminate ultimately in my mind uh hierarchical systems of power where people are supposedly representing us but actually allowing this stuff to happen because it somehow serves their own bottom line. I think that we need a more direct form of democracy and we don't need people holding more power than any other person. We all are actually equal in value. We need a system that actually reflects that and we don't have anything close to that right now. I am glad that even some evangelical Christians that I've shown here are willing to say things like we are too divided over small issues and we need to band together against these types of people. That is in my mind, you know, a seed of class consciousness which is necessary in order to make this stuff go away. It is just very discouraging to then see them fall right back into ultimately political propaganda invented by elites like this in order to try to solve the problem. I don't think these people are really even to blame for this. The propaganda has been so thoroughly spread throughout most of civilization around the world that, you know, it's not their individual fault for not knowing this stuff, but it still is quite frustrating to see. And hopefully this video helped a little bit to break through some of that propaganda. All right, thank you guys for watching this kind of unusual video. Oh, he sneezed on me. like and subscribe and all that kind of stuff. There's resources linked in the description to help you find community and mental health support. Praise be unto River, our lady and the savior of this channel. And even though the content of this video can really make your blood boil, please be kind to others in the comments. And remember that even the people who voted for some of these people ultimately don't sign off on most of this. So navigate conflict with some nuance please, the best you can. And until next time, stay skeptical.