What Now

Pam Bondi has made a career of serving the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of justice for their victims. Unto itself such service is not, alas, unique among attorneys for the state, or among politicians in general. As the Epstein Files has so far shown, the rich and powerful have gotten away with crimes like human trafficking, sexual abuse, and even genocide for so long, because they have a lot of politically powerful people from both major U.S. parties in their pocket, and are able to leverage their wealth to influence public intellectuals across the ideological spectrum. (I don’t think I’ll get over those shots of Steve Bannon and Noam Chomsky chumming it up.) But I think her role is larger than that.

Bondi’s behavior last week in front of the House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Epstein Files primarily serves her main client, a loathsome turd rotting in the White House; it was ridiculous and her statement about the Dow has been mocked widely with some truly beautiful memes. Theater aside, her attempts to cover up for Trump and others in his administration dismiss the pain and suffering of Epstein’s victims, many of whom stood behind her at the hearing and whom she refused to look at, as shown in a now famous photograph of the hearing. Ignoring victims of abuse by rich and powerful men is consistent not only with her position as an elite consigliere, but also with the patriarchal religious power structure the MAGA movement foments, and with the mission of the White Christian Nationalism consolidated in the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission. Sex abuse by religious figures is not exclusive to the right, of course, or to the Evangelicals that make up much of the religious right in the US (cf. the Catholic Church.) But subjugating women and victimizing the vulnerable is an important weapon for maintaining dominance and silencing opposition to sexist discrimination and to other forms of oppression.

The RLC comprises mostly of Christian leaders and one Jewish leader; no other faiths or lacks of faith are on board, and it’s no accident that one Christian leaders fired from the commission was openly critical of Israel’s violence in Gaza. Charges of “antisemitism” have already been used to suppress the movement for Palestinian rights and against genocide (which, to be fair, did not start with Trump; there is plenty of bipartisan shame here.) With the Anti-Christian Bias Task Force, Pam Bondi vows to extend the war on trans children and their parents we have already seen in Florida, Texas, and other states dominated by the religious right, arguing that protecting queer kids from bullies or respecting their pronouns violates the rights of Christians to be intolerant assholes.

In sum, her performance last week in front of the House Judicial Committee Hearing is part-and-parcel of the fascist threat she and the administration pose to everyone.