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I think it’s important for people to recognize that the “groomer” panic being instigated by the right is categorically different and more dangerous than what we have seen historically and has greater potential to lead to widespread political violence. My analysis follows.
(1) The strategy use the language of child sexual abuse as a metaphor for disagreements about educational content. This muddles the water about what constitutes abuse by confusing speech acts directed at children, whether good or bad, with physical harm.
Muddying the waters about a crime that harms real actual children is reckless and disgusting but, in addition, it redefines evidence of child sexual abuse. It need not be acts, nor even soliciting speech, nor even general speech, but is, in fact, ideas that motivate the speech.
(2) According to the “groomer” panic, pedophilia isn’t tied to specific acts, but to political claims that are not related directly either to children or sex. IOW pedophilia becomes shorthand for anything the right doesn’t like and any non-conservative speech act can disclose it.
Take this accusation, from Candace Owens, that anyone who disagrees with the Florida statute must be a predator, a charge she then levies at Disney, a line similar to what Rufo had claimed.
Or the accusation that Judge Jackson and any Senator who votes to confirm her, including Romney, Murkowski, and Collins, are "pro-pedophile." Merely disagreeing with the rightwing framework about Jackson and Disney reveals them to be pro-predator.
The paranoid and conspiratorial nature of this–totalizing, manichean, immaterial, and entirely unfalsifiable–is everything that folks like Lindsay and Rufo *project* onto their leftwing adversaries, but turned up a notch. Where did they get it? Qanon.
(3) "Pedophile" is different than most slurs because, for the right, it incites and justifies direct fatal violence. It is different than general subjugating speech, which can justify violence, but is not always or intrinsically eliminationist.
www.mississippifreepress.org/22283/ex-gop-gov-candidate-calls-for-firing-squad-for-trans-rights-suppo...
www.mississippifreepress.org/22283/ex-gop-gov-candidate-calls-for-firing-squad-for-trans-rights-suppo...
"Pedophile" doesn’t attempt to justify the unequal distribution of status, privileges, or resources. The right doesn’t want to make pedophiles “second class citizens.” It wants to put them to death. It regards their existence as an intolerable threat to society's most vulnerable.
If you believe your adversaries are a gang of pedophiles, normal transactional politics is unlikely to proceed. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how democratic governance can be sustained when a large part of the electorate believes that their enemies should be put to death.
This is why, as @jasonintrator argues, these sex panics have been rhetorically central to fascist movements and other eliminationist political projects.
And this circles back to a point @lastpositivist made in his post about liberalism: liberalism is intended to avoid a winner-takes-all political order precisely because that causes endless cycles of disastrous political violence.
Liberals (in the broadest sense) should recognize that generalized charges of pedophilia are a limiting horizon for a liberal polity. They set up the conditions for exactly a winner-takes-all conception of the political order and sanction the most extreme forms of violence.
(4) But those charges are also as old as politics. What’s new now? Many people have correctly noted that the charge of pedophilia has been historically directed at sexual (and racial) minorities to justify violence.
In this sense, there is nothing “new” about charges that a 5th grade teacher is “grooming” his students by casually mentioning his husband to them. This kind of homophobia is very old indeed.
While there is a deep historical precedent at work here, what we’re seeing is also unique in another way: the charge of pedophilia is not just being directed just at sexual (or racial) minorities as it has in the past, but at powerful conservative dissenters.
In fact, it is increasingly central to rightwing in-group/out-group identification such that it is used to discipline and even potentially exclude from the right otherwise powerful people.
Somewhere near half of GOP respondents polled say they believe that it “was ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ true that top Democrats were involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”
Maybe they’re only talking about Epstein, maybe they’re yanking the pollster’s chains, but, whatever it is, this strikes me as an alarming result and one that hardens the in-group/out-group boundary no matter what kind of signaling work was intended by the respondents.
But beyond whether *Democratic elites* are active sex-trafficking children, you can scroll through James Lindsay’s timeline and see who he’s willing to call a groomer. It includes many powerful straight white people who were, until recently, conservatives in good standing.
Hell, they're making that accusation about the 2012 GOP Presidential candidate! Obviously, some of this is countenanced because of Romney's criticism of Trump, but that's rather beside the point. It's the use of the slur to settle other political beefs that's notable.
This shows that while the homo- and transphobic provenance of the charge are obvious, the violence that it can unleash is unlikely to be limited to just queer and trans people, though, as always, they and other racial, ethnic, and religious minorities will be at greatest risk.
IOW this framing may be rooted in homo- and transphobia, but it can be used to advance all the right's projects: militarism, evangelical Christianity, white nationalism, anti-labor and anti-abortion policies, and simply the partisan interests of the GOP and Donald Trump.
To conclude, the charge of “groomer” (1) conflates disagreements about educational content with actual child sexual abuse; (2) has come to mean offering any view that dissents from conservative orthodoxy;
(3) carries strongly an eliminationist implication that is the limiting horizon of liberal governance; and (4) is actively reformatting conservative political identity according to a binary "anti-" and "pro-pedophile" division.
Political pundits and Twitter folks are accustomed to treating the culture war as a spectator sport that is mostly detached from material political struggles. Every new outrage draws shrugs; it’s just more of the noise machine, distracting us from the real struggles.
For the people I call “culture war hustlers,” the job has been to turn small scale material conflicts into fodder for this culture war. I suspect some are oblivious to what they were doing, and others thought that the culture war didn’t really matter, so what was the harm?
Well, there it is. No culture war stays only in the ether forever. People start buying their own bullshit, start believing their own propaganda. I’m not making predictions about where this goes beyond that it seems to me that political violence is likely.
And it is terrifying.
And it is terrifying.
If you found this thread useful, I write about politics, history, sexuality, and farming (!) on my Substack, "The Strong Paw of Reason." I previously analyzed Trumpism and paranoid conspiracies in this post.
bearistotle.substack.com/p/the-apophenic-thrall?s=w
bearistotle.substack.com/p/the-apophenic-thrall?s=w
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Liana Kerzner @redlianak
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Dec 30, 2022
Great thread.