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Man, we had this convo just yesterday. See here and here. The "intentional predator ring" doesn't appear in any legal document. Pointing to the absence of wall-to-wall coverage of the most elaborate version of the story as evidence of suppression assumes the elaborate version is true in the first place. Amazing job covering up something that the man wasn't even investigated yet became globally infamous for. And I assume this is the "active defense" you're referring to, the author directly addresses your concerns in the final paragraph:
Other than the Spectator, how many articles do we have doing something so radioactive (on both sides!) as "defending Prince Andrew, the Epstein associate"? The scarcity of such pieces is what you would expect when the social cost of defending process values in this particular case has become extreme.
Exhibit A: the absurd oxygen the UK left poured into "Adolescence", a completely fictional story that flattered a particular set of priors about young males and online radicalisation. Exhibit B: every single pred catcher channel's frisson of righteous confrontation packaged as public service.
Anyway, coming to Arday, you're not wrong that a large portion of right wingers were feverishly licking their lips for a story just like this. A disgraced black academic elevated through DEI culture being outed as a fraud lines up neatly with certain HBD-adjacent priors. And yes, the discourse has unfortunately devolved into a decibel contest of validating narratives. Every inconvenient case is just a flag that must be defended. Even when the details are messy or the individual is indefensible, aura is necessarily spent defending it. The result is, both sides end up being tethered to weak or embarrassing exemplars because abandoning them feels like conceding the broader frame.
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