- Joined
- Jun 18, 2018
- Messages
- 38,421
- Reaction score
- 30,957
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- Political Leaning
- Progressive
"Not long ago, the notion that American politics was oriented around a dispute over the merits of child sexual exploitation was viewed as so loopy that not even Donald Trump could take it seriously. It is now becoming the Republican Party’s most energetic idea. The two most prominent theaters of partisan combat of the moment, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation and Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, have both seen a growing swath of conservatives embrace charges of pedophilia as their central theme.
Two years ago, the pedophilia charge was confined almost entirely to QAnon, a sprawling web of far-right conspiracy theories that operated around the fringes of conservative politics. And while some of the details produced by its theories would find their way into the minds of Trump and his inner circle (especially with conspiracy theories centering on the “stolen election”), the broader narrative that American politics was a fight over pedophilia remained marginal.
The pretext for injecting the theme into the Jackson hearings was that, as a judge, she supposedly failed to sentence child predators sufficiently punitively. This conveniently allowed Republicans to waft the allegation of pedophilia under cover of questioning her tough-on-crime qualifications. ...The pedophilia charge has worked in Florida as a way for DeSantis to smear his critics and demonstrate dominance to the right-wing base. ...One irony of this debate is that if Democrats wanted to turn the issue against the Republicans, they would have a much richer fact pattern available to them. Trump, still the party’s effective leader, has been accused by five witnesses of walking in on undressed teenagers. The party’s former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, engaged in horrific sexual abuse of minors. Representative Jim Jordan helped cover up a sex-abuse scandal in college. More recently, Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was credibly accused of sexuallly assaulting minors.
...The spread of this “issue” says nothing about the parties’ comparative permissiveness about sexual assault. It only reveals the existence within one of them of an openness to conspiracy theories and a network of operatives unprincipled enough to exploit it."
Link
The Republican Party is shamelessly grotesque and demagogic. They are treading in very dangerous territory.
Two years ago, the pedophilia charge was confined almost entirely to QAnon, a sprawling web of far-right conspiracy theories that operated around the fringes of conservative politics. And while some of the details produced by its theories would find their way into the minds of Trump and his inner circle (especially with conspiracy theories centering on the “stolen election”), the broader narrative that American politics was a fight over pedophilia remained marginal.
The pretext for injecting the theme into the Jackson hearings was that, as a judge, she supposedly failed to sentence child predators sufficiently punitively. This conveniently allowed Republicans to waft the allegation of pedophilia under cover of questioning her tough-on-crime qualifications. ...The pedophilia charge has worked in Florida as a way for DeSantis to smear his critics and demonstrate dominance to the right-wing base. ...One irony of this debate is that if Democrats wanted to turn the issue against the Republicans, they would have a much richer fact pattern available to them. Trump, still the party’s effective leader, has been accused by five witnesses of walking in on undressed teenagers. The party’s former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, engaged in horrific sexual abuse of minors. Representative Jim Jordan helped cover up a sex-abuse scandal in college. More recently, Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was credibly accused of sexuallly assaulting minors.
...The spread of this “issue” says nothing about the parties’ comparative permissiveness about sexual assault. It only reveals the existence within one of them of an openness to conspiracy theories and a network of operatives unprincipled enough to exploit it."
Link
The Republican Party is shamelessly grotesque and demagogic. They are treading in very dangerous territory.
