The Republican's Pedophilia Problem Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think

[Celerity]

The Right is moving towards the normalization of pedophilia, and it's terrifying.

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/the-republicans-pedophilia-problem

https://archive.is/aM2Rz



Why this matters (beyond the obvious)

“Know thy enemy.” It’s a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason. It’s essential to understand the pathologies that motivate the right (and they really are pathologies). Without that understanding, our response will never be sufficient. At best, it can be completely misdirected, at worst, there may be no response at all. A good example in recent history is that far too much of the left failed to comprehend that the right is a truly fascist movement. This lack of understanding allowed Republicans to bulldoze their way into office in the 2000 and 2016 elections despite real concerns over whether they actually won, build a violent paramilitary wing, and almost stage a successful coup in 2020.

If we had grasped, 30 or more years ago, the reality that the right had fully rejected democracy, we would have been better prepared to counter their assaults on the rule of law. Now we are faced with another growing sickness on the right. There have been hundreds of Republican pedophiles arrested. So many that the only reason the GOP has not earned the same kind of reputation as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts is that the press seems unwilling to connect the dots, so to speak.

It’s obvious there’s a pattern of behavior, and the common denominator is the Republican Party. You will of course find pedophiles outside of the GOP. They exist in every demographic in every country. The difference is that in the last decade or so there doesn’t appear to have been any rapid concentration anywhere else. This is a problem only the right in America is experiencing, suggesting something has gone terribly wrong with their movement. It certainly explains a lot of what’s happening over there.

It cannot be repeated often enough: Every Republican accusation is a confession. If you, as a Republican, are aware of how many pedophiles are among your ranks, what better way to deflect attention from this than to very loudly smear entire groups of people as “groomers” out to sexually assault children? Trans people. Homosexuals. Teachers. All of Hollywood. Pretty much anyone you despise is a groomer and you can keep the press focused on your outrageous accusations instead of the horde of sexual deviants in your midst. For every Republican pedophile caught and arrested, there are several more still hidden. That’s an awful lot of Republicans you don't want babysitting your children. These are the people shaping the agenda of the GOP. It gets worse from here.

snip

[ItsjustMe]

1. Republican Sexual Predators, Abusers, and Enablers

Republican Sexual Predators, Abusers, and Enablers Pt. 1






Republican Sexual Predators, Abusers, and Enablers Pt. 32

[Celerity]

2. +1

[634-5789]

3. The worst offenders are the ones that molest ' In Gawd's Name'

[canuckledragger]

4. Which is why the religious pedophiles groom their flock to scapegoat others.

It's deflection and projection of course. Like always.

[634-5789]

14. YEP!

[moniss]

5. Add to

the list the GQP states that want to maintain a very low age of consent to marry. Then there are the states that want to do away with child labor laws. Their claim to care so much about children apparently includes showing it by having them clean motel rooms and factories for 40 hours a week and at sub minimum wage.

[DET]

6. Truer Words

Growing up, I had no idea what pedophilia was, let alone the scope of the problem. I could never have imagined that the Catholic Church that I grew up in would accept let alone engage in something so horrific. And I certainly wouldn’t have believed that prominent public figures like politicians would prey on their constituents. But here we are.

Now I’ve come to assume that any right wing politician or pastor who fervently decries homosexuality, transsexualism, abortion, birth control, etc. is probably some sort of pervert and may be a pedophile - especially if they espouse their views ‘in the name of Jesus’. Thankfully, I’m not exposed to these people unless I venture outside the safe confines of my reliably blue county, which rarely happens. I really don’t know how people who have to live around these crazies keep themselves sane.

Now we have Republican sponsored legislation in some states that essentially legalizes pedophilia (e.g., child marriage). This is insane. People have to be held accountable, but I have no idea how to do that when at least a third of the country is in the thrall of a mentally ill/evil cult.

[Kid Berwyn]

7. NXIVM Cult was GQP

How the NXIVM Sex Cult Defended Trump from Media Attacks

Keith Raniere’s women-branding sex cult had a media arm called The Knife, which published hundreds of articles and appeared on “Fox & Friends” defending Trump against “media bias.”

Marlow Stern, Senior Entertainment Editor
The Daily Beast, Updated Aug. 22, 2020 9:56PM ET / Published Aug. 22, 2020 5:02AM ET

If you’re curious exactly how low the bar is to appear on Fox & Friends, the toadying talk show where President Donald Trump appears to get his policy positions, we may have found it.

Yes, the fact-averse place that’s consistently downplayed the novel coronavirus pandemic which has claimed 174,000 American lives and counting—despite one of their own hosts contracting the disease—once welcomed, and then gushed over, a member of NXIVM, the Albany-based women-branding “sex cult” led by Keith Raniere, aka “Vanguard.” The revelation is one of many contained in The Vow, a 9-part docuseries on the predatory self-help group premiering Sunday, August 23rd on HBO.

NXIVM operated a number of businesses that it used to control its members, forcing many to work up to 23 hours a day for no pay. One of these was The Knife Media, or The Knife. Short for The Knife of Aristotle, the site described itself on the NXIVM website as follows: “The Knife Media is a digital news outlet that offers news without spin and rates media outlets for their level of bias. The Knife has a team of 15 editors, writers and anlysts [sic] who are specialized in critical thinking, logic and the company’s analysis process.”

This “analysis process” was devised by none other than Raniere, a self-described genius who graduated college with a 2.26 GPA. “You know, we get the negative press, and I think I know where it comes from,” Raniere says in The Vow. “But the good side of it is, in learning about it and watching how it’s done and watching how it’s done to me, I was able to come up with a useful toolset that can really transform media, and that can transform how people interact with media—and the data within media.”

Former NXIVM members in The Vow allege that Raniere created The Knife in order to train his physically and psychologically-abused adherents against media criticism of the cult. One of these members was Mark Vicente, a documentary filmmaker most famous for helming 2004’s What the Bleep Do We Know!? Vicente says he was a founding member of The Knife, along with Rosa Laura Junco (daughter of Alejandro Junco de la Vega, the founder of Mexico’s REFORMA newspaper); Battlestar Galactica star Nicki Clyne; Smallville actress Allison Mack; and Jens Erik Gould, a former Bloomberg and TIME reporter.

Continues…

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-nxivm-sex-cult-defended-trump-from-media-attacks

[Scrivener7]

8. Great article.

[malaise]

9. +1,000

Rec

[Roisin Ni Fiachra]

10. If I were raising children today, I would never leave my kids alone

alone with any Republican. The lack of empathy, self awareness, and a healthy code of ethics among Republicans is frightening, and universal. Not to mention that most of them suffer from unhealthy sexual repression brought on by bad religion, exemplified by the number of christo-fascist preachers arrested and convicted for various sex crimes, very often pedophilia.

Imagine one of these psychos, such as MTG, Santos, Gaetz, DeSatan, Gaetz, Noem,or Bobo the Clown, babysitting your children.


Creepy is a feature, not a bug, in the consciousness of a Republican.

[brewens]

11. Charter schools are the new church camps. I can just imagine the little Evanpedical freaks

knocking themselves out to get teacher certifications in states that have relaxed qualifications to get to work on the kids. Wanna bet we see a way higher percentage of men teaching little kids in those schools compared to public schools?

[Sympthsical]

12. I'm not sure I like the politicization of child abuse

It's an interesting article, and there were parts of it where I nodded along. (The child marriage issue is slam dunk alone for broken cultural normalization in some quarters of the Right).

But the author conflates a lot of things. I mean, a lot. He will even admit he's talking about fringe stuff he finds on the internet, but give him a few sentences, and he'll just fold it into the Right as a whole. It's an ultimate "Let's throw everything at the wall, see what sticks, and then just conflate it with the entire Right."

And the reason I dislike this is, I could easily write this same article and start pointing it in the other direction. Very easily, particularly as a gay man who has lived and existed in a world where a lot of ideas have gotten thrown around about things like age of consent for a very, very long time (MAPs, anyone?). Which is what the Right does when they're invoking their groomer rhetoric. When I was a young gay teenager, Peter Tatchell was doing his thing and unloading his ideas into the community in away that had real effects. I had fights and ended friendships in my late teens and early 20s over the stuff. I literally had a shouting match with a friend in his 30s and almost got physically violent with him, because he was talking to 14 year olds online and telling me how he would've wanted adult attention at that age, and it was like, "Are you out of your fucking mind!?"

And that's a reason I dislike the politicization, "The Right are pedophiles, the Left are groomers!" It's because once you get that tribal bug in there, people will ignore abuses on their own side super, super easily. I take child abuse too seriously to play that game. There was a report not too long ago about sexual abuse in Chicago Public Schools. I posted it here, because it was one of the craziest things I read in a while. And it wasn't a right-wing hit piece. It was a report by the CPS's own inspector general.

Sank like an absolute stone. No one - literally no one - cared. If it had been about the Catholic Church, people probably would've cared. You'd have seen the report everywhere. We ignore problems unless it's the "other side" doing it.

Child abuse is a human problem. If it becomes a political problem, a partisan problem, a tribal problem, then what happens in our own midst - what we're most likely to see and encounter and puts us in a position to act - can go unnoticed, unremarked upon, and unaddressed because there grows incentive to not highlight it out of narrative interest.

This isn't to say the author doesn't highlight some shit. The purity/virginity stuff has always creeped me way the hell out. The child marriage shit should not be happening in this country. Just full stop on some of the items he mentions that are absolutely firmly ensconced in places like the Christian Right.

But I really, really find the "It's not us, it's the other side," stuff distasteful on these topics. The Right is writing these exact same articles but using other examples. I mean, that is all Libs of TikTok practically is. Highlight every violation you can find on the other side.

If we can't make child sexual abuse nonpartisan and keep it that way, one wonders what issue we could actually unite on and call out universally. And if we turn an issue as serious as that as a tit for tat battle, a lot of kids are going to go ignored in the wreckage of our political slap fights.

I think this article could've been written in a much different way to a much different purpose. And it's unfortunate so much gets ignored unless it's specifically written in this way, because it's overtly appealing to partisanship instead of humanity.

[tanyev]

13. Kick.