They just can’t stop talking about child porn. They’re at it again today:
Even Ben Sasse felt the need to call out this inane behavior:
We all know that Graham will be yukking it up with reporters and fellow senators, agreeing with everything that Leahy says there. Cruz too. That’s the most sickening part of all of it. They aren’t trying to hide the fact that they are doing this for TV hits and applause from their right wing supporters.
(I do think Hawley is actually an evil piece of work who is playing directly to the QAnon base very strategically. He is much more dangerous than the other two showboating idiots. )
But in the end, they are succeeding in tarring Ketanji Brown Jackson as some kind of pedophile supporter in order to advance the grotesque belief among the MAGA cult (and others) who believe that Democrats are all child molesters. I actually have a relative who told me she couldn’t vote for Joe Biden because she was told he was a pedophile and she wanted to “save the children.” And she isn’t political.
This story from 2020 explains:
In recent weeks the groups have moved offline and into the real world, using their Facebook pages to organize in-person rallies outside tourist attractions like the Big Red Wagon in Spokane, Washington, and the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon. The believers hold signs that say things like “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking.” They’re often accompanied by their children, wearing T-shirts and onesies that read “I am not for sale.”
At first glance they seem innocuous, like petitioners for a non-profit or an inoffensive social cause. But there are giveaways. Some of the signs bear images of pizza slices, a reference to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that held that Hillary Clinton was operating a pedophilia ring out of a gimmicky Washington DC pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong. Sometimes the rally-goers wear T-shirts bearing the acronym “WWG1WGA,” which stands for “Where we go one we go all,” a fist-pumping slogan for adherents of the elaborate and baseless online conspiracy theory called QAnon.
The QAnon conspiracy theory is vast, complicated and ever changing, and its adherents are constantly folding new events and personalities into its master narrative. But the gist of it is that national Democrats, aided by Hollywood and a group of “global elites”, are running a massive ring devoted to the abduction, trafficking, torture, sexual abuse and cannibalization of children, all with the purpose of fulfilling the rituals of their Satanic faith. Donald Trump, according to this fantasy, is the only person willing and able to mount an attack against them.
The conspiracy theory began on 4chan, a digital cesspool of hate speech and conspiracy theorizing, and adherents derive their beliefs from the cryptic postings of Q, an anonymous commenter who they believe to be a highly credentialed member of the Trump administration who is assisting Donald Trump in his heroic fight against the Satanic pedophile Democrats. The conspiracy has spread widely during the pandemic, migrating out of the dark shadows of the internet and on to Facebook, where it is now spreading among an audience of frightened and credulous parents.
If the stories spun by QAnon conspiracists strike you as inventive or creatively bizarre, that they are not. The fictions of QAnon are mostly regurgitations of other disproven conspiracy theories. The idea of a secret, all-powerful “cabal” of sadistic Satanists preying on children is not a new one. In that part of its lore, the QAnon conspiracy theory borrows heavily from the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, a strange phenomenon in which hundreds of thousands of otherwise reasonable Americans became convinced that secret cadres of Satanists were operating out of daycare centers, torturing and molesting children for rituals.
Meanwhile, the QAnon assertion that Satanist Democrats are farming children underground in order to harvest and drink their blood harkens back to an even older conspiracy theory, the antisemitic blood libel, a medieval fiction that posited that Jewish people stole and murdered Christian children in order to use their blood to make matzah. QAnon may seem detailed and weird in its fantasies, but it is a deeply derivative conspiracy theory, remixing old lies more often than it conjures new ones.
Why do conservatives periodically become fixated on elaborate conspiracy theories involving the rape and torture of children? The details of the QAnon narrative don’t bear any relation to the way that child sexual abuse actually happens. The Q believers are correct that the sexual abuse of minors is much more common than many assume, but any relation between their beliefs and fact ends there. […]
When conservatives take up the mantle of child sexual abuse with conspiracy theories and disinformation, they are assuming a moral position that is usually occupied by liberals: defending the powerless, the voiceless, the disenfranchised. It’s not dissimilar to the psychological function of conservative opposition to abortion rights – it’s about conservatives’ need to see themselves not as the inflictors of pain and needless suffering, but as defenders of the innocent. But as in the abortion debate, the innocent victims in the QAnon conspiracy theory only exist in conservatives’ minds.
QAnon is an elaborate fiction dreamed up by Trump fans to meet the psychological needs of those who cannot allow themselves to admit what is plain as day to everyone else: that the man they voted for and support is mendacious, narcissistic, incompetent, corrupt and horrifically unfit, both morally and intellectually, for his office. He is so ostentatiously unfit to be president that the only way even his most ardent supporters can justify his position is to elevate their own denial into a baroque theology in which his opponents are Satanic pedophiles, and he is the defender of the children.
This delusion has already endangered innocent people and taken lives: one supporter of QAnon famously arrived at Comet Ping Pong with a rifle that he shot into the air, and another QAnon believer assassinated an alleged mob boss on Staten Island whom he reportedly believed was involved in the pedophile ring. If the delusion continues to fester and spread, the violence is sure to continue.
And now the GOP establishment is happily playing along, smearing Ketanji Brown Jackson as an enabler of this crime.
The GOP is the party whose leadership has been involved with child molestation. The former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert did time for a crime associated with his molestation of a student when he was a wrestling coach. Current leader Jim Jordan is likewise accused of turning a blond eye to a team doctor who molested wrestlers when was coach. Former congressman mark Foley admitted to molesting young male congressional pages. And then there was Trump, credibly accused of oogling girls in the Miss Teenage America dressing room. So, I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that the Judiciary Committee Republicans are so obsessed. It’s just the usual projection.
Tarring Brown Jackson with their own issues is disgusting. But what do we expect?