Think of the Children!

 

At first glance, they looked like any other group of Trump supporters demonstrating for their president.  They were predominately women and kids, maskless naturally.   A pretty typical news photo featured these days on the website of our local newspaper. 

Something in the story’s headline caught my eye.  These people weren’t actually demonstrating for the president or in solidarity with trigger-happy cops.  No, they were demonstrating against child trafficking. 

The ostensible premise for the demo seemed righteous enough until the spokeswoman for the group explained it to the reporter covering it.  They weren’t wearing masks for the commonly given reasons, such as “freedom” or the mythical Americans with Disabilities Act exemption.  Instead, they claimed mandatory masking facilitated child sex trafficking. 

This got my attention and made me read further.  It isn’t that I hadn’t heard this argument before, it’s just that it appears to be garnering increased media attention.  An article on The Intercept website this morning further piqued my curiosity, tying this latest moral panic to QAnon.  QAnon has advanced from the realm of heavy-gutted, gammon-faced, bearded white men to white stay at home moms in yoga pants. 

The manufactured crisis surrounding organized child sex abuse rings has a storied past.  I came of age during the “satanic panic” of the 1980s, during which a number of innocent adults were prosecuted and convicted for their alleged ritual abuse of kids in their care.  The best-known example was the McMartin preschool case, which dragged on for years amongst intensive media coverage.  

It began with allegations from a mother with mental health and substance abuse issues.  A credulous district attorney’s office investigated.  A child therapist coaxed lurid stories from young ones who had attended the family-owned daycare featuring secret basement passages and animal sacrifices, which prosecutors accepted at face value.  The resulting trials received national attention. 

Fortunately, the McMartin trials resulted in no convictions.  The charges were eventually dropped.  However, the McMartin family lost their livelihood.  Their daycare was sold and torn down.  It did not have a basement. 

A basement figured prominently in a latter-day child abuse conspiracy theory that almost got innocent people killed: Pizzagate.  Pizzagate originated in an email hacking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair, John Podesta.  The texts of the emails first made their way onto WikiLeaks.  From there, they became a front-and-center topic in the wingnut universe aided in no small part by Alex Jones and InfoWars. 

Somehow, certain readers of routine communications among Clinton campaign staffers saw something deeper at work.  References to pizza became coded references to child sex trafficking.  Along the way, a Washington, DC pizza parlor, Comet Ping Pong, became the focus of this nefarious plot, though other businesses were implicated as well.  Comet Ping Pong allegedly had a tunnel network running from its (nonexistent) basement through which the Clinton sex slave ring moved their victims.  As the autumn of 2016 progressed, Comet employees and patrons were harassed by the believers. 

What happened next was a consequence of Jones’ audience trolling.  His on-air persona depicts him as a voice in the wilderness; he frequently tells his followers he can’t do it all alone.  He can’t fight the darkness by himself.  And so, a couple of weeks before Christmas 2016, a deluded nutter named Edgar Welch decided to “self-investigate” Comet Ping Pong.  Armed with an AR-15, Welch drove to DC from his North Carolina home.  Along the way, he recorded a “goodbye video” addressed to his daughters explaining what he was about to do. 

What he did could have been considerably worse.  No one was injured by the three rounds Welch fired into Comet Ping Pong.  Finding no child sex slaves, he exited the building and surrendered to the police waiting outside.  He is currently serving a four-year prison sentence for interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit an offense and assault with a dangerous weapon.  Welch’s soulmates in the alt-right disavowed him, calling the Comet Ping Pong shooting a “false flag” operation designed to discredit them.   

This brand of wingnuttery has been a part of the social landscape since forever, but it gained quasi-respectability in ‘90s when all kinds of absurd rumors swirled around Bill and Hillary Clinton.  It became more accepted during the Obama years.  The Trump upset in 2016 brought its adherents to the forefront. 

Against this backdrop, it is unsurprising to find that a belief in conspiracies has gone mainstream.  The Intercept article reflects how far it has penetrated the consciousness of ordinary, otherwise reasonable people.  It is no longer outlandish to believe Donald Trump is engaged in a secret war against well-connected pedos, that climate change is a hoax, that the Chinese concocted the coronavirus in a secret lab, that vaccines cause autism, that mandatory masking in public encourages human trafficking, that the survivors of the Newtown and Parkland shootings were really “crisis actors,” that Black Lives Matter is led by Marxists, that antifa is an actual organization, that the Democratic Party is part of the radical left, and so forth.   

The internet democratized access to information.  In the process, it has given respectability to uninformed opinion by making it ubiquitous.  It has also made traditional print journalism economically unviable; the shift to online content rendered full-time reporters redundant.  The concomitant decline of investigative journalism created a vacuum filled by innuendo and rumor.  Post-truth has become real.  

But as the Bard said, the fault lies not in the stars but in ourselves.  Americans are poster children for the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  We routinely substitute our personal judgment for empirically established facts.  We scorn science in favor of our own self-serving conception of “common sense.”  Worse still, we ignore the lessons of history and willfully support the counterproductive polices of our political and business leaders. 

The protest moms are undoubtedly sincere in their convictions.  Too bad they ignore the real threats to our future generations.

 

 

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

From Within

This week marks six months of confinement for me.  Winter has turned to spring to summer and now to autumn.  From within four walls I’ve watched the world sink into madness.

The worst of it has been the senseless loss of people murdered simply going about their daily lives – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd.  Then there are all the other maladies afflicting us at the moment.  The alt-right’s escalating provocations against civil rights protesters has made me increasingly uneasy as the November election draws nigh.  Wildfires are running amok in my part of the country, leaving the air thick with smoke and staining the sky an ominous orange hue.  Then there’s the pandemic, which shows no sign of abating and has already added several more months to my sentence now that my college has decided to stay “remote” through spring semester.

There are all kinds of things I could do outside which carry little or no infection risk, but I feel unmotivated.  Perhaps a more accurate description of my mindset is that I’m suffering an uncharacteristic agoraphobia that has gotten worse with time.  I miss being with others even as I dread any human interaction.  I pass the days in a state of free-floating anxiety.  I’ll doodle around the LMS for a couple hours, grade assignments, answer student emails, and violate the sanctity of my own home each Monday holding my required office hour on Zoom.  I’ve come to detest Zoom nearly as much as I’ve come to hate the phrase “unprecedented times.”

Watching the societal breakdown beyond my front door is my main pastime.  Divisions which seemed intractable before March have morphed into insurmountable fissures.  As events careen into bounded chaos, some verities about contemporary politics are made clearer. 

The first is that so-called post-truth politics have become the norm, at least on the right.  The “base” at this point will uncritically believe any crazy assertion put forth by the President, administration officials, or their pundit toadies.  Some examples from this week alone point up the trend.  There is the claim from U.S. Department of Health & Human Services official Michael Caputo that he received death threats because of his collusion with Trump to suppress information concerning the coronavirus pandemic.  Caputo then doubled down, stating there were left-wing “hit squads” ready to stage an armed insurrection to stop the President’s reelection.  He then advised people to “buy ammunition.” 

Another batshit statement that seems to have originated from a northwestern firefighting official and has since gone viral on Facebook is that “antifa” started the wildfires in Washington and Oregon.  (I’m amazed at how Facebook has gone from being a mindless timesuck for teens and twentysomethings to a mindless timesuck for aging wingnuts.)   

If the origin of the antifa arson rumor is true, it can only erode trust in public safety workers.  Law enforcement seems particularly fertile ground for the QAnon conspiracy fad, though we’ve only had small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clues.  In July, the NYPD union president gave an on-air interview to Fox News with a QAnon coffee mug visible in the background.  Last year a Broward County sheriff’s deputy was photographed greeting Vice President Pence with a QAnon patch visible on his tactical vest.  Another unnerving trend is the appearance of the Punisher logo on tactical police vehicles, no question about the intended message there. 

The juxtaposition of QAnon and other alt-right phenomena with the agencies tasked with keeping us safe is troubling.  Right-wing hysteria over Black Lives Matter and antifa illustrate the true role of policing.  The right has all but conceded that law enforcement’s mission is not about protecting and serving all citizens equally, but to defend the propertied classes and act as an occupying force dedicated to enforcing white hegemony.  

The personality types disproportionately drawn to law enforcement reflect an authoritarian streak as it is.  Some are cruel or indifferent to cruelty.  For instance, I recently had a student who had just gotten out of the military.  She was beginning work on a criminal justice degree with an eye toward joining the local police department after graduation.  During a classroom discussion about Abu Ghraib and the Detainee Treatment Act, I noted that torture is considered an ineffective interrogation technique.  My student countered that her NCOs had taught her differently.  It appears my student and her sergeants had slept through their mandatory Geneva Convention trainings.  It also left me asking myself just what kind of police officer she would be.  I suspect I’ll be reading about her in the news someday.  

The valorization of armed violence is as old as American culture.  To be more specific, it’s armed violence by Christian white males that we glorify.  Let’s consider the attitudes of the police to the rise in vigilantism.   The 17-year-old boy who shot three protestors in Kenosha, killing two, walked unchallenged through a police cordon carrying a semiautomatic weapon.  He seemed to be under the delusion that he was there to assist law enforcement, and the nonchalant attitude of the cops did nothing to dissuade him.  After the shooting he walked away, again unchallenged, got in his car, and calmly drove home to Chicago.   

Part of me wants to make allowances for the Kenosha shooter’s youth.  But what can we say about the motives of his adult defenders?  President Trump claimed the shooter acted in self-defense, never mind that the fact he came armed and was presumably looking for trouble.  Then there’s the legal defense fund started on a “Christian” fundraising platform which has netted nearly $1 million so far.  The soliciting organization is #FightBack.  This lovely band of trolls proclaims their mission is to “fight back for [a] forgotten America,” notwithstanding the high media profile of said forgotten.  

Time for an aside.  It comes as no surprise that Christian groups are rallying to the shooter’s defense.  Christianity of the evangelical Protestant strain is inextricably bound up with the American right.  The various churches may differ in theology, but their shared ideology emphasizes exclusion and punishment to a degree that can be construed as poorly veiled white supremacism.  Considering that the months of protests arose from civil rights abuses against people of color, their support for a killer of protesters causes the veil to slip further.  

Back to the vigilante problem.  As we have seen, law enforcement has no problem turning a blind eye if they use force against their own preferred targets.  And the problem isn’t new.  George Zimmerman’s acquittal of murdering Trayvon Martin foreshadowed much of what we’re currently seeing.  Of course, being white doesn’t afford absolute protection against violations of civil liberties and civil rights by both official and non-official actors.   

The militarized response to the protesters has emboldened the aggressive element always present among the political right.  One example from this week’s news involves an NPR news crew covering the Oregon firefighting effort.  They were run off public land by armed men who did not identify themselves and probably had as much authorization to be near the fire zone as the reporters.  Another example are reports that armed men are setting up unauthorized roadblocks along evacuation routes, potentially endangering evacuees.

Although isolated incidents, they demonstrate entitlement on the part of civilians being allowed to intimidate their fellow citizens with impunity.  The official stance toward the proliferation of paramilitary “patriot” groups resembles that of the German authorities toward the Freikorps immediately following the First World War.  Rather than being sanctioned for their extralegal actions, they are regarded as allies in preserving the existing order.  As we stumble blindly toward the November election, this stance carries the potential of emboldening further violence against vulnerable populations regardless of the outcome at the polls.   

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar