Kathleen Stock at UnHerd

She's got a pretty good piece: "The Hypocrisy of the Epstein Panic" -- yet one more indication that there are some saner minds out there. She starts out as follows: QUOTE It is with some reluctance that I point out the obvious: things are once again going bonkers on the internet. First came the excesses of #MeToo; now we have #JeeToo. Thanks to the recent Department of Justice file dump, the knives are out for every non-trafficked person who ever sent a friendly message to Jeffrey E. Epstein’s “vacation” email account. Guilt-by-association is the medieval method of diagnosis, and reputational destruction the cure. Talk of moral panics is cheap, but during an actual one, what is going on becomes difficult to name. Usually keen detectors of collective cortisol spikes go quiet, for the category of perceived evildoers has now started to expand chaotically. Make one incautious statement about insufficiency of evidence or the importance of due process, and you might find yourself in there too. Still, it has to be said: there is definitely something dysfunctional going on. To press this point is compatible with noting matters of genuine public interest in the files: for instance, indications that Peter Mandelson and the former Prince Andrew passed on privileged financial information to Epstein, now being reviewed by police. Other countries are also belatedly realising that when politicians or royalty get too close to billionaires, national interests can start to look horribly parochial. But there isn’t much excitement in a whiff of financial corruption on its own — as demonstrated by the relative silence on a recent Wall Street Journal scoop involving a UAE microchip contract and $500 million investment in a Trump-owned firm. The presence of colourful sexual scandal is clearly the magic extra ingredient that ensures a feeding frenzy. And yet, strangely, the files don’t offer much in the way of interesting new information in that respect. UNQUOTE "The presence of colourful sexual scandal is clearly the magic extra ingredient that ensures a feeding frenzy." You got that right, lady. SR