Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies so Obsessed With Pedophilia? (Mother Jones)

[jberryhill]

Last edited Fri Dec 13, 2019, 11:51 AM - Edit history (2)

I'm not convinced this is an exclusive preoccupation of just the "right wing". The McMartin mania drew from across the spectrum, as did the "Franklin Scandal" and more recent manifestations of this phenomenon...


https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/why-are-right-wing-conspiracies-so-obsessed-with-pedophilia/

The story is the same, from the day-care panics to QAnon: It’s not really about the kids. It’s about fears of a changing social order.

Conspiracies centering on the vulnerability of children are neither new nor distinctly American. Wild claims of Jews killing Christian children and using their blood in rituals—the “blood libel”—date back to at least the 12th century and have popped up every so often since then, and long before that Christians were suspected of performing similar rites. “Hurting children is one of the worst things you can say someone is doing. It’s an easy way to demonize your enemy,” says Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at the University of California-Davis, who has studied conspiracy theories.

Why do child-abuse conspiracies explode into public consciousness at certain moments? Explanations offered for the peculiar resonance of Pizzagate and QAnon tend to focus on pathologies in the media ecosystem—epistemic bubbles, polarization, the unruly growth of social media. But years before the fracturing of mass culture and the dawn of Reddit and 4chan, the McMartin accusations fed a national spectacle during which scores of people were wrongly accused of sex crimes against children.

The continuities between the McMartin case and Pizzagate suggest a broader explanation for pedophile conspiracies: They aren’t the residue of malfunctions in our media culture. They’re an outgrowth of the normal workings of reactionary politics.

[mopinko]

1. i wonder how many of the people that this resonates w so

are victims themselves.
i remember the whole "recovered memory" thing. not hard to believe that fear of abuse of our children is hard wired into our brains.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. One of the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal. was outspoken in her challenging of

questionable allegations of sexual abuse.

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Dorothy Rabinowitz is an American journalist and commentator.

She was born in New York City, and attained a bachelor's degree at Queens College. She worked toward a doctorate at New York University from 1957 to 1960, but did not graduate. She has worked as editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal since June 1990 and has been a member of their editorial board since May 1996. She is a regular panelist on the Journal Editorial Report.

Pulitzer Prize

Rabinowitz was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for a series of articles published in 2000 covering aspects of U.S. social and cultural trends. Previously, she had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times, but in 2001 "she was not a finalist [but]... the Pulitzer board, which makes the final decisions, reviewed the jury's original three finalists and decided it wanted 'a broader choice.' The jury offered Ms. Rabinowitz as an alternate selection.". "[A]mong the ten articles cited by the board were five articles challenging questionable allegations of sexual abuse. Four of the cited articles commented on the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the remaining article discussed Rudolph Giuliani's recommending a pardon for Michael Milken."

She was previously nominated in 1996 for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary "For her columns effectively challenging key cases of alleged child abuse" and had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995 "For her writing about television", and in 1998 for "her tough-minded, critical columns on television and its place in politics and culture."

No Crueler Tyrannies
See also: Day-care sex-abuse hysteria

Rabinowitz wrote exposés of the dubious sexual abuse charges filed against the operators of day care centers and other individuals, notably that of a family named Amirault in Malden, Massachusetts and those in Wenatchee, Washington. These exposés earned her a 1996 Pulitzer nomination, formed half of the articles cited for her 2001 Pulitzer win, and were the basis of her book No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times.

Rabinowitz told C-SPAN that her work on these cases began with the Wee Care Nursery School case:

I was working as a television commentator. I was at WWOR-TV in New Jersey, doing three times a week some sort of media criticism. And ... I saw this woman in her 20s ... accused of something like 2,800 charges of child sex abuse. Oh, I thought, well, that's very odd ... I thought, How can one woman, one young, lone woman in an absolutely open place like the child care center of the church in New Jersey that she worked for—how could she have committed these enormous crimes against 20 children, dressed and undressed them and sent—you know what it is to dress and undress even one child every day without getting their socks lost?—20 children in a perfectly public place, torture them for two years, frighten and terrorize them, and they never went home and told their parents anything? ... This did seem strange.

Her work on this story led The Wall Street Journal to hire her.

[jberryhill]

3. It takes guts to stand up for reason

Particularly when there is no cost to go along with the belief of the mob.

[mr_lebowski]

5. Sage words my friend ... (nt)

[Aristus]

4. Misdirection.

Ever notice how many of these hammerheads turn out to be perverts of the grossest, most soul-killing kind? Rapists, child molesters, child pornographers, etc.?