America Derangement Syndrome: Why the Epstein Files Don't Matter

Could the furor over the Epstein files finally disband the cult of Donald Trump?

Donald Trump hangs out with an absolute stranger who once called a “terrific guy” (NBC via YouTube)

“It is a peculiar fact that the crime for which negroes have frequently been lynched, and occasionally put to death with frightful tortures, is a crime to which negroes are particularly prone.” — The New York Times

In 1892, an expert identified the cause and developed a cure for a deadly contagion that was causing a national pandemic.

“The strong arm of the law must be brought to bear upon lynchers in severe punishment,” wrote Ida B. Wells in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. "The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual lawbreakers.”

Despite her status as the foremost lynching expert on the planet, Wells' pleas to make lynching a federal crime went unanswered. When she traveled to Europe to appeal to the sensibilities of English citizens, The New York Times called told its “British brethren” to stay out of White America’s business. “It is especially to be deplored that it should take this action at the instance of a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress who does not scruple to represent the victims of black brutes in the South as willing victims,” explained the newspaper.

By 1895, the extrajudicial murder outbreak had claimed the lives of nearly 1,000 more Americans, more than any five-year period in recorded history. So, hoping that facts and data would convince white Americans to make lynching a federal crime, Wells published The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. In 1919, Congress finally considered Wells’ proposal after Rep. Leonidas Dyer read a report from a brand-new organization called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People itemizing lynching statistics by year, state, race, sex and alleged offense.

As the bill sat in the Senate Judiciary Committee, a scholar who used scientific data to pioneer a new field called “sociology” tried to sway lawmakers with an article about mob violence against Black WWI veterans. “[L]lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois. “Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.”

The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill didn’t even make it to a vote.

On Feb. 22, 1938, nearly a half century after the world’s greatest lynching experts had definitively proven that crowdsourced racial terrorism had nothing to do with Black criminality, Congress considered another proposal to outlaw lynching. However, Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo’s Senate floor speech illustrated how far four decades of data, research and facts had moved the needle:

“If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.”

To be clear, lynching was not a Black problem. According to the Tuskegee Institute’s lynching database, more than one-third of the lynching victims between 1882 and 1968 were “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon men.” Rather than accepting facts backed by experts, statistics and evidence, America’s legislators, law enforcement agencies and mainstream media sided with less-informed white people.

This is America Derangement Syndrome.

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America Derangement Syndrome: (noun) A mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their allegiance to whiteness, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason.

When the Associated Press used the white-owned Urban Dictionary to define Trump Derangement Syndrome as a “mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason,” the AP didn’t feel the need to mention that the president had made 4,638 false or misleading statements in 544 days, on a pace of about 16 lies per day. The fact that he had already referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” was inconsequential. It did not matter that there was no legal or historical precedent for his promise to build a wall and invoice Mexico. Apparently, disapproving of corruption, racism and lies is more “deranged” than a corrupt, racist, incompetent pathological liar who ignored a deadly pandemic.

For years, Trump supporters have waited for their dear leader to expose the international child sex trafficking ring headquartered in pizza parlors whose locations were buried in Hillary Clinton’s email server. In February, brand-new Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel reinvigorated the MAGAmaniac conspiracy theory when Bondi confirmed the location of accused child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous client list.

During his first term, Trump hired the man who granted immunity to Epstein. Epstein was only arrested and charged after a blistering fake media Miami Herald report tracked down more than 60 women who accused the multimillionaire of abuse, child sex trafficking and rape. Yet, despite interviews with dozens of victims, years of investigations, numerous sealed indictments and an actual conviction, on July 7, Bondi announced that the client list did not exist.

This is not America Derangement Syndrome.

Trump’s supporters are not happy. According to ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tucker Carlson and White Twitter, suppressing a list of supposedly powerful clients that the FBI, two different federal prosecutors’ offices, state investigators, criminal court judges, civil court judges and the people who type sealed indictments somehow forgot to write down is something that red-blooded Anglo-Saxon, white Trump followers will not tolerate.

This is America Derangement Syndrome.

The notion that MAGAmericans will defect from team Trump is as laughable as believing that scientific evidence is all it takes to convince people to change their behavior because of a deadly virus. For ADS sufferers, truth, facts and reality are just tools used by leftists to undermine ADSers’ faith in things they already know. When faced with reason, logic or information that can’t be disproven, ADSers will ignore the truth or twist it so that the new information confirms their existing belief system.

Studies from journalists, Stanford economists, immigration experts and even conservative think tanks can’t convince Trump’s minions that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than good, Jesus-loving Caucasian families. They will never believe that 93% of people detained by ICE have never been convicted of a violent crime. More than 65% of detainees have never been convicted of any crime. But to Trumpians, “innocent until proven guilty” does not matter.

While ADS has been mislabeled as “economic anxiety,” deranged Americans are not anxious enough to be upset about Medicaid cuts, rising college costs or tax cuts for the wealthy in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” They call themselves “fiscal conservatives” but support a president and policies that will increase the national debt. Then again, the people who prefer the Affordable Care Act to Obamacare also believe that tariffs will lower prices. It’s not that they don’t know. They are just mentally incapable of accepting any version of reality that conflicts with the doctrine that affirms their whiteness. History, math and actual reality won’t change their minds.

While numerous studies have dismantled the “good guy with a gun” myth, white Americans are the only demographic that believes increasing the number of firearm owners will make them safer. They don’t believe in science–unless, of course, it comes from a billionaire, white supremacist, race scientist and “inventor” who has never invented anything.

The mainstream press is equally culpable. They might know the actual meaning and origins of “woke,” critical race theory and DEI, but they don’t mind giving space to propagandists trying to redefine words that already existed. (You should also read The New York Times’ op-ed from Kimberle Crenshaw, the scholar who coined the phrase critical race theory … as soon as it exists.) They report on these made-up issues as if they were real, not the figment of a collective white imagination.

To be fair, America Derangement Syndrome is not just a white, conservative problem. There are Black people who believe Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship will only affect people with funny accents because a document called the U.S. Constitution makes Black Americans “undeportable.” John “The Wokeness Slayer” McWhorter would fire off 1,500 words about Black culture’s destructive breathing habits if he thought white people wanted more oxygen. Perhaps the Democrats’ biggest problem is the party’s willingness to cast aside the progressive policies supported by its loyal base to attract white moderates. They truly believe swing districts, soccer moms and suburban voters will come to their senses if they just knew the facts. So they waste resources and wait for something that will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever happen. It is cancer that only goes into remission in non-election years.

But truth and logic are insufficient remedies for this problem. Because the anti-woke mob is proud of living in a factless, impermeable dreamstate, they will never wake up. The current Caucasian chagrin over the Epstein files is just another blip on the Trumpian radar that will rain zero drops on the MAGA parade. Believing this controversy could finally disband the cult of Trump might actually be more delusional than joining the MAGA religion. Then again, I’ve heard that some people believe America is not a racist country.

Now that’s deranged.

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In 1955, every single member of an all-white jury voted to acquit Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam of lynching 14-year-old Emmett Till. Despite her son having a gunshot wound to the head, multiple skull fractures, lead fragments recovered from his skull, a fractured femur and missing teeth, Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, decided to have an open casket funeral because, as she explained: “The whole nation had to bear witness.”

In 2007, the Emmett Till Interpretive Center erected a sign to commemorate the brutal event that historians consider as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement. In 2008, the sign disappeared. When the marker was replaced, vandals fired bullets into the replacement sign. Soon, the bullet-riddled reminder of a white supremacist murder became a landmark where men like Ben LeClere, John Lowe and Charles Howell Logan gathered to celebrate whiteness.

In 2021, 125 years after Ida B. Wells came up with a cure for lynching, a century after the U.S. Senate did absolutely nothing to stop terrorist mobs, 65 years after the FBI did nothing about Bryant and Milam’s public confession, four years after it was revealed that Carolyn Bryant Donham confessed to the lie that sparked Till’s lynching, three years after the University of Mississippi did zero things about the pro-lynching influencers enrolled at the college, the U.S. Department of Justice closed the cold case investigation into Till’s murder, citing lack of evidence.

“Even if such evidence could be developed, no federal hate crime laws existed in 1955,” said the DOJ memo. “And the statute of limitations has run on the only civil rights statutes that were in effect at that time. As such, even if a living suspect could now be identified, a federal prosecution for Till’s abduction and murder would not be possible.” If this country had done anything in the 125 years since Wells exposed America to the truth, the plague of injustice symbolized by Till’s murder would also “not be possible.”

Yet, for some reason, the conspiracy theorists who want to protect innocent children from abusers and human traffickers were unbothered.

Let’s be clear; none of this means that people should abandon facts, logic and truth-telling. Regardless of what deranged individuals do, facts remain important. Journalism will always have value, and truth-telling will always have meaning. If there’s one thing Black people have learned, it’s that pleading with this country to recognize its inherent inhumanity has always been a fruitless endeavor. But that has never been our goal.

We bear witness.

Because America is deranged.