While 850 Anti-LGBTQ Bills Were Filed, Fox News Was Covering for Convicted Predators — The Numbers Don't Lie

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I need y’all to sit with some numbers for a second. Not opinions. Not feelings. Numbers.In 2025, Fox News ran over 4,000 headlines sensationalizing transgender visibility. In that same year, they mentioned the Epstein files roughly 610 times. That’s nearly five times more coverage dedicated to a manufactured moral panic about trans people than to the exposure of one of the most sprawling child sex trafficking networks in modern American history. Let me say that again so it sits in your chest the way it should: a major American news network chose to spotlight transgender people — who appear in zero Epstein documents — at five times the rate they covered a convicted child predator’s files implicating some of the most powerful people on the planet.This is not an accident. This is architecture.The Graph They Don’t Want You to ReadI put a graph behind me during the video because I believe in showing you the receipts. Research over MeSearch. That graph illustrates a deliberate editorial decision — not a reflection of what matters to the American public, but a reflection of what Fox News needs you to not pay attention to. When you zoom out and look at the data, the pattern is unmistakable. Fox News didn’t just undercover the Epstein files. According to Media Matters, in the weeks following the Department of Justice’s massive January 2026 document dump — we’re talking millions of pages — Fox mentioned Epstein only 239 times over two weeks. In the same window, CNN logged 2,304 mentions. MSNBC hit 3,321. Even Newsmax — Newsmax! — managed 1,464 mentions. Fox News, the network that had spent years demanding the Epstein files be released, went functionally silent once those files started naming people in Trump’s orbit.Meanwhile, researcher Jessica Kant documented that Fox News published more articles referencing the trans community in 2025 than any other news outlet in the entire country — conservative or progressive. More than The Advocate. More than The Washington Post. More than The New York Times. Fox News produced more anti-trans content in a single year than there are days in a year. This isn’t journalism. This is what Stanley Cohen called a moral panic — the deliberate construction of a folk devil to redirect public fear away from the people actually doing harm.The Anatomy of a Manufactured VillainLet me walk you through how this works, because if you understand the playbook, you can never be played by it again.Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” in 1972. He defined it as a moment when a group of people is elevated into a perceived existential threat to society — not because of anything they’ve actually done, but because powerful institutions need a villain. The process has five stages: concern is manufactured, hostility is directed, consensus is engineered, disproportionality is the feature (not the bug), and then the panic either fades or becomes permanent policy. Sound familiar?In 2020, there were roughly 100 anti-LGBTQ bills filed across the country, most of them narrowly targeting sports participation. By 2025, that number exploded past 850 — the most in United States history. Of those, 867 bills specifically targeted transgender Americans. One hundred and twenty-two would ban gender-affirming care. Seventy-seven would restrict bathroom access. Seventy-three sought to eliminate legal recognition of transgender people entirely — revoking driver’s licenses, stripping gender markers, invalidating identity documents. Some bills proposed classifying a parent’s support of their trans child as child abuse, opening the door for state-sanctioned family separation.Not a single transgender person appears in the Epstein files. Not one.But over 5,300 files in the January 2026 DOJ release contained more than 38,000 references to Donald Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club, and related terms. The files revealed ongoing communication between Epstein and Steve Bannon. They contradicted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s public claims about the extent of his relationship with Epstein. They included an email in which Epstein told Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump knew about the victims.So ask yourself: who is the actual threat to children in this story? The trans woman trying to use a bathroom in peace, or the network of wealthy men whose names keep showing up in a dead predator’s files?The Oldest Trick in the BookThis is not new. This is, in fact, one of the oldest mechanisms of power in human history. Scholar Ben Debney calls it “panic-driven scapegoating” — the strategic construction of bogeymen to protect elite privilege during periods of crisis. The formula is ancient: identify a marginalized group, inflate a threat narrative around them, saturate media with that narrative, pass legislation to codify the fear, and while everyone is watching the folk devil, the people in power consolidate theirs.The Red Scare did this with communists. The War on Drugs did this with Black communities. The satanic panic of the 1980s did this with daycare workers. The “super predator” myth of the 1990s — championed by politicians on both sides of the aisle — did this with Black children, turning them into monsters in the public imagination to justify mass incarceration policies that devastated an entire generation.And now, in 2025, transgender Americans have been cast as the folk devil of this political moment. Not because they pose any measurable threat to public safety — the data is unambiguous on this point — but because their visibility coincides with a period in which powerful people need the public looking anywhere else.Stuart Hall wrote about this in Policing the Crisis back in 1978. He argued that crime statistics are routinely manipulated for political and economic purposes, and that moral panics are deliberately ignited to create public support for authoritarian responses. Hall was talking about mugging in Britain, but the framework maps perfectly onto what we’re watching today. The trans moral panic isn’t about bathrooms. It isn’t about sports. It isn’t about children. It’s about manufacturing consent for a surveillance state that monitors bodies, controls identity, and punishes deviance — while the actual predators walk free.Victimization Is When You Build the Narrative for Your Own AbuseI said something in the video that I want to expand on here, because it’s the key that unlocks this entire apparatus: victimization is when you create an entire narrative for you to be abused by. That’s what this media ecosystem does. It constructs a reality in which the most vulnerable people in society — trans folks, queer folks, Black folks, immigrants — are presented as the aggressors, and the most powerful people in the world are presented as the victims of some vague cultural assault.Fox News didn’t just fail to cover the Epstein files proportionally. They actively worked to cushion the political fallout. When Attorney General Pam Bondi’s initial “Phase One” rollout of Epstein documents was widely criticized as inadequate, Fox’s on-air personalities blamed the deep state. When the files started implicating people close to Trump, the network pivoted to relitigating Russiagate. When House Democrats released emails specifically referencing Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s victims, Fox News was silent for hours. Host Greg Gutfeld went on air and warned viewers that future Epstein releases would be “distorted.” Jesse Watters — the same man who once asked on camera, “Who protects a dead pedophile when children are raped?” — began deflecting and dismissing the story entirely.This is what manufactured consent looks like in real time. This is what Noam Chomsky was describing when he outlined the propaganda model of media. The coverage gap between trans panic and Epstein accountability isn’t a journalistic oversight. It is an editorial policy designed to protect a class of people who benefit from your distraction.The Numbers Behind the SilenceLet me give you one more set of numbers, because this is Education is Elevation and we believe in data.A December 2025 Reuters poll found that only 23% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the Epstein case. A January 2026 CNN poll found that 49% of Americans were dissatisfied with how much of the files the government had released. Two-thirds of respondents believed the government was deliberately withholding information. When Attorney General Bondi initially told Fox News in February 2025 that the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” the public expected transparency. By July 2025, the DOJ released a two-page memo claiming no client list existed, no credible evidence of blackmail was found, and Epstein died by suicide. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times subsequently reported that Bondi had informed Trump in May that his name appeared in the files alongside what officials described as “unverified hearsay” — and that advisors had recommended against public disclosure.Trump called the files falsified and filed a defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal.Meanwhile, in state legislatures across the country, lawmakers were filing their 850th anti-LGBTQ bill. The ACLU documented that attacks on transgender people grew “exponentially” between 2023 and 2025. Research linked these legislative attacks to a 72% increase in suicide attempts in some states. The CDC reported that one in four transgender youth had attempted to take their own life in the last year.So who is actually under threat? And whose safety is actually being prioritized by this media ecosystem?Consciousness Precedes TransformationHere’s what I need y’all to understand — and this is the throughline of everything I do on this platform. You cannot fight a system you do not see. Consciousness precedes transformation. If you cannot name the mechanism, you cannot dismantle it. And the mechanism here is as clear as it has ever been: moral panic is the weapon, media is the delivery system, and legislation is the payload.Trans people are not destroying your healthcare system. Trans people did not invade any country. Trans people are not the reason you can’t afford education. The Epstein files — the actual documents — implicate wealthy, powerful men who trafficked children. And the network that ran five times more headlines about trans people than about those files made a calculated decision about what you should and shouldn’t be outraged about.Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you have a responsibility to say something.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Think about what we just walked through together. A billion-dollar news network is spending its airtime constructing folk devils out of trans people so you don’t ask questions about convicted child predators. The histories that explain how and why they do this — moral panic theory, propaganda models, the political economy of scapegoating — are being systematically defunded and removed from public education. This Substack is the counter-curriculum.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The coverage gap is the story. Fox News ran approximately 5x more headlines on transgender people than on the Epstein files in 2025. This is not journalistic proportionality — it is a deliberate editorial strategy to redirect public attention away from powerful individuals implicated in child sex trafficking toward a marginalized community that appears in zero Epstein documents.* Moral panic is a technology of power, not a spontaneous public reaction. From the Red Scare to the War on Drugs to the current anti-trans legislative surge, the construction of folk devils follows a documented, repeatable pattern identified by sociologists going back to 1972. Recognizing this pattern is the first step to resisting it.* The legislative consequences are measurable and devastating. Over 850 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed in 2025 — the most in U.S. history. Research has linked this legislative environment to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among trans youth in some states. Meanwhile, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November 2025, has been met with heavy redaction, staggered releases, and bipartisan criticism of the DOJ’s noncompliance.* Fox News’ silence on Epstein is as revealing as its obsession with trans people. When the DOJ released millions of pages of Epstein files in early 2026, Fox mentioned the story 239 times in two weeks — compared to CNN’s 2,304, MSNBC’s 3,321, and even Newsmax’s 1,464. The network that had demanded the files’ release for years went functionally silent once the documents implicated figures in its political ecosystem.* Consciousness precedes transformation. You cannot dismantle a system you cannot name. The mechanism at work — moral panic as a tool of manufactured consent — has been documented by scholars from Stanley Cohen to Stuart Hall to Noam Chomsky. Understanding the playbook is the prerequisite for resisting it. Education is elevation.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS* Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972. — The foundational text on moral panic theory. Cohen defines the five-stage process by which societies construct perceived threats from marginalized groups, providing the theoretical framework for understanding how trans Americans have been cast as folk devils in contemporary media.* Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. — Hall and colleagues demonstrate how crime statistics are manipulated for political ends and how moral panics are ignited to justify authoritarian state responses. Essential for understanding the relationship between media coverage disparities and policy outcomes.* Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. — Outlines the propaganda model of media, demonstrating how corporate ownership, advertising dependence, and source selection systematically filter information to serve elite interests. Directly applicable to understanding Fox News’ editorial choices around Epstein versus trans coverage.* Debney, Ben. The Oldest Trick in the Book: Panic-Driven Scapegoating in History and Recurring Patterns of Persecution. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020. — Traces panic-driven scapegoating across centuries, establishing a five-stage model of how elites construct bogeymen to protect privilege during periods of crisis. Debney argues this mechanism is one of the primary ways history repeats itself.* Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. — Documents how the War on Drugs functioned as a racial caste system, using moral panic about crack cocaine to justify mass incarceration of Black Americans. Provides historical precedent for understanding how manufactured fear translates into discriminatory legislation.* Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. — Expands Cohen’s framework to identify five key indicators of moral panic: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility. Essential for evaluating the current anti-trans legislative surge against objective threat assessments.* Erin Reed / Erin In The Morning. “Over 850 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills Filed in 2025; Most in History.” April 2025. — Primary data source documenting the unprecedented volume of anti-trans legislation. Reed’s legislative tracker provides the empirical foundation for understanding the legislative dimension of the current moral panic.* Media Matters for America. “Compared to Other Cable News Channels, Fox News Is Hiding the Latest Epstein Revelations from Their Audience.” February 2026. — Quantifies Fox News’ coverage gap on the Epstein files, documenting 239 mentions over two weeks compared to CNN’s 2,304 and MSNBC’s 3,321. Provides the empirical basis for the media analysis in this article.* Kant, Jessica. Research on Anti-Trans News Coverage, 2023–2026. Reported in PinkNews, February 2026. — Longitudinal data tracking Fox News’ anti-trans article output, documenting that the outlet produced more articles referencing the trans community than any other publication in 2025, exceeding one article per day for nearly four consecutive years.* Freedom House. “To Find an Authoritarian, Just Follow the Scapegoat.” 2018. — Argues that scapegoating of marginalized groups — particularly LGBTQ communities — is a hallmark of authoritarian governance globally, functioning to distract from governance failures, bolster support, and isolate domestic opponents.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe