This Is How Normal People Defend the Indefensible
Not evil intentions... trained reflexes
This morning a friend I work with pulled out his phone and said, “have you seen this yet?” I hadn’t. I never watch Fox News. Honestly, I haven’t really watched any cable news since around 2020. It just came up in conversation and he showed me the clip from The Five.
I was completely floored.
It was a group of hosts sitting around talking about Jeffrey Epstein, and the tone wasn’t serious. They were laughing and joking. One of them described him like he was basically a “fixer,” just a guy helping powerful people manage things. Another threw out a strange religious-sounding label- “sex Rabbi”. Everyone kept it light, casual, almost playful.
And that’s what hit me. Not just the words… the comfort. The ease of it.
We’re talking about someone tied to the abuse of minors, and instead of the kind of gravity you’d expect, it sounded like they were searching for softer language so the audience didn’t have to sit with what that actually means.
I’ve seen that before but not on TV.
In church.
I grew up in a world where evil was very clear as long as it lived “out there”. We preached about it. Warned about it. Felt brave opposing it. But when harm showed up inside the community, the tone changed. Nobody announced it. It just happened. The questions got gentler. The certainty faded. People started explaining instead of confronting.
The goal quietly shifted from “tell the truth” to “don’t tear the family apart.”
There’s a term for that pattern: DARVO. It means deny what happened, attack the person bringing it up, then flip the story so the accused becomes the victim and everyone else becomes the actual problem. I didn’t know that word back then, and honestly I wouldn’t have accepted it if someone tried to explain it to me. Because when you’re inside it, you don’t feel dishonest. You feel protective. You think you’re guarding something good from exaggeration or attack.
That’s why moments like this matter. When you hear people start softening something that used to be obvious, your brain wants relief. If the person is “ours,” you look for a way to make the story smaller.
And as a pastor, I want to speak directly to my conservative Christian siblings…
It’s time to open your eyes.
This isn’t about anyone getting to say “I told you so,” (even though I did ). This is about your integrity. About whether right and wrong stay the same no matter who’s involved.
You know this already. If Biden or Obama had been mentioned in those files this many times, you wouldn’t be joking about context or waiting for nuance. You’d call it evil immediately. You’d say protecting kids matters more than protecting power.
So don’t call it complicated now.
There’s no shame in admitting you were wrong. Your own faith teaches that. Repentance just means telling the truth once you can see it clearly. It’s not weakness. It’s honesty.
For some of you, that will feel like betraying your people. It isn’t. What breaks communities isn’t truth. It’s pretending not to see.
At some point we all have to decide whether belonging matters more than reality.
And the people hurt by all this don’t get the luxury of us choosing comfort.