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
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