Here's a subject I haven't really gotten directly sermonizing about for a bit, in large part because of the chilling effect of what I'm going to lay out in the rest of this thread.
For a good long while, one of the most popular public faces of the modern fascist movement was a creep whose name I'd prefer not to directly invoke, both because I know it's still a trauma trigger, and because he changed his name to a long one from a culture he does not actually have roots in with the intent of encouraging people to normalize racist parodies of it. Wrote for Breitbart, bunch of scandals, you probably remember him.
And you may also remember, or maybe not, that the moment the tide turned on him and his ability to get anyone to pay him any attention started to plummet when, in doing a background check because he was slated to speak at a more mainstream right-wing event, that he'd been filmed in a TV interview some years prior speaking candidly about his views on the subject, which I should very much slap a CW on this whole thread for, of pedophila.
Specifically, he was in favor of it. Which also caused people to pay a bit more attention to all the teenage ghost writers he was offloading his assignments to and his close ties to a website whose whole primary purpose was distributing related images and tips for grooming and full on abduction, and the long and short of it is that while society at large apparently didn't have a serious problem with all the other unspeakably evil things he was (and to the degree he has any remaining power, still is) involved in, pedophilia was The Line it turns out. Step over that and you're done.
This was pretty shocking to his fellows (who, again, generally all hang out on the other side of that line themselves) and over the past several years, they have been making a really concentrated damage control effort, not to make sure that none of the rest of them would be outed as pedophiles, but to make sure when it happened in the future, people would just roll their eyes about it.
And this has been playing out across a lot of different fronts. The first and most obvious of course was a test drive of whether it was a powerful enough accusation that it could also destroy people with blind shots at the biggest available targets, with the whole "Pizzagate" thing. I hope we all remember that one still? washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/… Right wing conspiracy types claiming a random pizza place in D.C. had a basement and in that basement they were sexually torturing and/or ritually sacrificing children and also by "they" I mean roughly every member of the Democratic party who were also Satan-worshipping lizard people, and this remains the basis for its direct continuation as the whole Qanon thing, largely fueled by this guy?
They got more mileage out of that than should really have been possible (again, this is still the central pillar of the whole Qanon thing, which is popular enough to have backers serving in the freaking House of Representatives) these days, but didn't really draw anyone in who wasn't already drinking the far right conspiracy Kool-Aid as it were.
And alongside this, we of course have the British Women's Fascism Brigade and their various supporters running full tilt with the old "queer people are all child predators" thing which is a battlecry it's not like anyone's ever fully retired, but it's been really given a megaphone lately and focused more directly at trans people (mainly women) specifically as basically everyone alive today personally knows too many gay people to really buy into it with them anymore.
Also I point this out what feels to me like damn near every time I approach the topic these days, but as he still has a career and says this crap in broad daylight, I must once again observe that in trying to pretend they have any facts on their side, that crowd keeps trying to present this guy as an expert everyone should trust if we want to keep children safe from predators: archive.is/4F5Gq
Archive link, again, not because that isn't still up on his feed, but because even if I've already thrown a content warning on this thread I don't want to darken your feeds
with a big bold direct quotation.
At the moment though, it generally feels like the phase of going "I know you are but what am I?" has generally run its course, and the newest part of the strategy is to make obviously baseless accusations of pedophilia such a common sight that people are trained into dismissing them offhand, even when they see ones that are actually serious, credible, or even fully documented and prosecuted.
Kind of a Spartacus approach to the matter, if you will.
This, incidentally, was the main thing that inspired that post I made
the other day that absolutely blew up-
The biggest fascist "op" running these days is to indoctrinate teens (and/or impersonate said teens) with this idea that any time anyone writes something, draws something, or films something, it is imperative to scan it for "secret pro-pedophile messages" like (and these are all real examples) romantic couples whose ages are 2 or more years apart regardless of what age they are, couples where one person is taller than the other, couples where one person has a better job, adults commenting on media aimed at children in any way, where "media aimed at children" includes, like, Star Wars movies. Writing or reading fan fiction, just in general, producing children's cartoons, marking adult content as such ("why would you say your art is 18+ if you didn't want to lure in children who don't respect boundaries!?") or of course "defending or associating with" people in any way involved with any of the above.
So yes, in practice, this covers... basically everyone who has ever lived. And accordingly, I'm willing to assume that everyone reading this (or at least all the queer people since, again, fascists are trying to focus things on queer people in particular, years of witch hunts lending extra credibility there, etc.) has seen at least a few absolutely bonkers witch hunts along these lines aimed at people who clearly have never done or said anything remotely related to those accusations.
And again, that's the point. When it's normalized that basically everyone in the world has a bunch of witch hunting weirdos calling them pedophiles, and everyone understands that those accusations are utter BS, the next time someone points out that some politician is facing criminal charges for sexually assaulting a child, or freaking James Cantor is petitioning to have LGBT+ antidiscrimination laws extended to pedophiles, or Mike Cernovich is on the talk show circuit trying to get us to forget he wrote a guide on how to rape women and not be arrested and was giving legal advice to the founder and then-owner of one of the better known hubs for child pornography on how to keep it from getting shut down, people will also dismiss THAT as "a baseless witch hunt," and tada, the one atrocity that can end the career of a total monster when it comes to light is fully disabled.
So, let's all please start playing hardball with the little creeps crying wolf constantly.
