These pundits claimed that the children at the Preschool had been hidden in secret underground tunnels, that the McMartin family were a cult of pedophiles that worshipped the Devil and practiced witchcraft, that the McMartins would flush children down the toilet and into rooms where they would be forced to participate in orgies, and that the children under their care had been raped and sodomized in evil, demonic Satanic rituals.
Of course, absolutely no evidence ever emerged to support these lurid and fantastical claims of ritual sexual abuse by these supposed Satan-worshipping pedophiles. But in the eyes of the accusers, evidence did not matter. The McMartins were arrested and charged with child sexual abuse by California authorities, and it was only after a ten-year investigation and trial (which ended in the full acquittal of all of those accused) that the McMartin family's name was cleared.
But even by then, the lurid and ugly accusations had already taken their toll. The McMartins had been humiliated, defamed, and smeared, and their lives and reputations had been utterly destroyed. They were only a few of the countless victims of other fantastical (and false) claims of Satanic ritual abuse during the 1980s and 1990s - a moral-panic phenomenon now commonly known as the "Satanic Panic".
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror, the hysteria over Satanic ritual abuse abated as national attention focused to threats elsewhere, but in recent years it has made a comeback thanks to the emergence of QAnon - a right-wing conspiracy theory that accuses prominent Democrats and so-called "elite" figures of being involved in a global cabal of child sex traffickers who "eat babies" and "worship Satan".
It is important to remember the devastation that the Satanic Panic caused to innocent people - people who had their lives and reputations utterly destroyed by spurious and totally false accusations.
Child sexual abuse is pretty much universally seen as a moral evil of the highest proportions. Many surveys have shown that child molesters and child rapists are considered worse than even murderers by most people in society. So it's no wonder that as soon as accusations of child sexual abuse are levied against someone, few people - if anyone - are willing to come to the defense of the accused. It was through this stigma that the Satanic Panic flourished, and its consequences for those who were wrongfully smeared were catastrophic.
And, unfortunately, with the emergence of QAnon, it seems the hysteria and petty moralistic demagoguery of the Satanic Panic is once again sweeping society, and the consequences of it have been revolting to watch.
Of course, QAnon is hardly a new phenomenon. Ever since early 2017, its proponents have screeched about nonexistent pedophilia rings and Satanism, but it wasn't until recently that their rhetoric became mainstream among the GOP, and it has manifested in a new obsession by the right with "grooming".
Actual "grooming" is, of course, an insidious tactic in which a prospective child abuser establishes a relationship with a child to manipulate them, gain their trust, and be able to sexually abuse them with a lower risk of the victim resisting or reporting the abuse. Grooming is a very real and very prevalent threat to children - which makes it all the more disgusting that the term has now become misused so much by the right that it has begun to lose all meaning.
Accusations of "grooming" have become par for the course among right-wing pundits and politicians, where everything and everyone they disagree with or don't like is smeared as being "pedophilia". In 2022, when President Biden nominated Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the US Supreme Court, Republican politicians utilized this ugly tactic in an attempt to assassinate Judge Jackson's character. Republican star congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, for example, smeared the Republican senators who voted to confirm Judge Jackson as "pro-pedophile".
It is a disturbing - and revolting - obsession that has consumed American conservatives as of late, especially on issues such as transgender rights.
As the LGBT community - and particularly the trans community - in the US has continued to make gains in civil rights, right-wing reactionaries have reverted to shameless and ugly smears that reek of the moral hysteria of the Satanic Panic. Transgender persons working as teachers or educators have been the subject of incessant harassment on social media by right-wing pundits who baselessly accuse them of "pedophilia". Any attempts by schools to educate children about the mere existence of transgender, non-binary, or gay people have been labeled as "grooming" by American conservatives. And, what's worse, bills seeking to curtail LGBT rights have been justified as being "anti-grooming" legislation seeking to "protect children" from "gender ideology" and "indoctrination".
One such bill is the so-called "Parental Rights in Education Act", better known as the "Don't-Say-Gay Bill" in Florida, which was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis last year. The bill prohibits any discussion of gender identity or sexual orientation in the classroom from Kindergarten to 3rd grade.
Governor DeSantis justified this bill by claiming it would "stand up for the rights of parents" and
stop schools from "using classroom instruction to sexualize their kids as young as five years old".
Never mind, of course, that educating children about gender identity and sexual orientation has absolutely nothing to do with "sexualizing children". It is no more "sexualizing children" than tellings kids that boys and girls exist, or that a man and a woman can get married to each other - neither of which the right seems to have a problem with. Such ugly accusations of "grooming" seem to be curiously absent as soon as the conversation about gender and marriage excludes LGBT people.
But the defenders of this legislation have even gone as far as to accuse their critics of being sympathetic to child abusers. DeSantis' own spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted in defense of Florida's anti-gay legislation by calling it an "Anti-Grooming bill", and added "If you're against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don't denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children".
Even when it comes to non-legislative activity, right-wing populists have employed these despicable tactics to smear and defame ordinary people. Drag shows - a style of musical entertainment involving cross-dressing and lip-syncing - have become a primary target for far-right propagandists who accuse these events of "grooming" and "sexualizing" children, despite the fact that most drag shows are not inherently sexual, and the ones that are do not allow children to attend. But this fact has not stopped right-wingers from posting deceptively-edited videos intending to smear drag queens as pedophiles and child molesters - smears which have resulted in many drag shows and performers receiving harassment, death threats, and online hate from anti-LGBT bigots.
Providers of gender-affirming care have also been targeted by these propagandists. Right-wing demagogues have fueled a moral panic over children allegedly being "mutilated" through gender reassignment surgery in the name of "transgender ideology" - a panic that is completely and utterly unfounded in any truth whatsoever. The notion of young children getting gender reassignment surgery or hormone therapy without the knowledge or approval of their parents - something that is required for every medical procedure involving an underage child, as well as being extremely expensive - is a completely ridiculous one that simply does not have any basis in reality, yet it has fueled a raging moral panic among the right-wing who rant, rave, and screech about this nonexistent issue nonstop on a daily basis.
In 2022, the Boston Children's Hospital was falsely accused by a transphobic Twitter account known as "Libs of TikTok" of providing gender reassignment surgeries for minors. This lie resulted in the hospital receiving a bomb threat, as well as a slew of other death threats to staff and employees. Yet the lies about them still persisted.
Even today, Boston Children's Hospital continues to receive death threats from these misguided simpletons, who are still delusionally convinced that they are on some sort of noble crusade to "save the children" from being "groomed" by "pedophiles" into becoming transgender.
This type of rhetoric has already had dire consequences. On the night of November 19, 2022, a man with an assault rifle walked into Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and opened fire on attendees of a drag queen performance, killing five people and wounding 19 others before being apprehended. The suspect, Anderson Aldrich, had a history of spewing virulent homphobic and transphobic rhetoric.
Of course, even the massacre at Club Q didn't stop the right-wing's torrent of anti-LGBT hate. Conservative columnist Kurt Schlichter tweeted after the shooting: "I don't think we have to tolerate pedophiles just because some asshole shot up a gay bar. Frankly a lot of people trying to convince us we need to tolerate pedophiles seem happy to use any excuse to silence their opposition".
Far-right YouTuber Tim Pool joined in with his own series of vile tweets. "We shouldn't tolerate pedophiles grooming kids. Club Q had a grooming event", he wrote in one thread. "How do prevent [sic] the violence and stop the grooming?"
On a livestream a few nights after the shooting, Tim Pool doubled down on his hateful rhetoric. "A bunch of goddamn pedophiles are grooming children and when we're like 'hey, stop associating all LGBT people with pedophiles', y'all keep fucking doing it", he said.
Pool is, of course, no stranger to engaging in the "groomer" obsession that has captivated the right, especially when it comes to LGBT rights. In July of 2022, he falsely claimed that "the LGBTQ community is now dominated by overt pedophiles", and alleged that drag queen events "are grooming your kids".
"We need the police to shut these events down, for a variety of reasons, but it's not going to happen. I fear what will start to happen is more violence", he added.
What's most ironic about the whole "grooming" and "pedophilia" discourse is how revealing it has been as to the nature of contemporary right-wing thought. Never before in my life have I seen a political movement so unnaturally obsessed with, and so monumentally fixated on, children's genitals and child sexual behavior.
It really does make one wonder where this obsession stems from, and how it comments on the mentality of those with such obsessions. Projection, perhaps? Would it be so dishonest to suggest that as a possibility?
If this was really about protecting children from "grooming" and "pedophilia", where were these right-wing child saviors when Roy Moore was running for senate in Alabama? Roy Moore has long been a darling figure among the religious right and American conservatives for his anti-gay and Christian nationalist history. He has compared gay marriage to bestiality, and once referred to same-sex activity as "an act so horrible it is beyond one's ability to describe it."
In 2017, after he won the Republican primary for senate in Alabama, nine separate women accused Moore of sexual misconduct when they were teenagers. The youngest accuser, Leigh Corfman, alleged that when she was 14, Moore - at the time a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, flirted with her as she sat outside a courtroom during a custody hearing, asked her out on a date, and later drove her to his home where he took off her clothes and fondled her over her bra and underpants.
Moore, of course, has denied the accusations, but if these accusations are true, I believe the word to describe Moore's actions would - funnily enough - be "grooming".
But apparently the religious right didn't think so. Not only did the Republican party stand by Moore throughout the entire scandal, but the conservative newspaper The Federalist published an op-ed which defended Moore's conduct as alleged, claiming that "To have a large family, the wife must start having kids when she is young. The husband needs to be well-established and able to support the family, in which case he will typically need to marry when older".
Alabama governor Kay Ivey even told reporters that she believed Moore's accusers, but would vote for Moore in the election anyway. (Moore would ultimately lose the election to his Democratic Party opponent by a margin of approximately 1.7%).
Or how about a more recent example? Let's take the case of Patricia Kent, a 2022 GOP candidate for county clerk and auditor in Washington County, Utah. Kent ran for office on an unabashedly anti-LGBT platform.
In October of 2022, Kent led a rally where she repeated the same tired fearmongering about "groomers" and "pedophiles" that has lit up the far-right.
"These are children, teenagers at best, being promoted to the ideology of same-sex transgender", Kent said while displaying pictures of children attending a drag show. "This is supposed to be the new exciting lifestyle and everybody's supposed to love it. They are grooming our children for immoral Satanic worship".
Now, it's curious to see how quick Patricia Kent is to condemn "grooming" of children, especially when considering her own past.
Prior to becoming a right-wing activist, Patricia Kent was a middle school teacher in Utah - a position she was forced to resign in 2000 after her "relationship with her young female students became a matter of public knowledge in the school community", as quoted by the Utah Professional Practices Advisory Commission (UPPAC). This misconduct allegedly included Kent writing explicit notes to students, giving them gifts, discussing her sex life with them, and "using her position to foster intimate and dependent relationships with young teenage girls" - some of whom were as young as 11 and at least one of whom allegedly engaged in a sexual relationship with her.
Kent, like Moore, has also denied the allegations - allegations which, like with Moore, seem to be the textbook definition of "grooming".
Or how about Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, a rising star in the far-right movement who is currently under federal investigation for trafficking and paying a 17-year-old girl for sex? Does that also count as "grooming"? Should we call the GOP "pro-pedophile" for continuing to stand by Matt Gaetz throughout this entire scandal?
This is also the same party that, in a widely-publicized case - sought to force a pregnant 10-year-old girl to carry her rapist's baby to term rather than allow her to have an abortion. For a party that routinely accuses its opponents of trying to normalize child sexual abuse, they sure have a track record of condoning the exact same thing.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The notion that any of this right-wing panic about "groomers" is sincerely about "protecting children" is profoundly false.
None of this - absolutely NONE of this "grooming" hysteria that is consuming the right-wing - has anything to do with the right-wing's supposed concern for the children. None of this is about protecting kids, and it is revolting that anyone even pretends that it is.
Like with the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the demagogues pushing this moral panic about "grooming" and "pedophiles" are completely insincere in their arguments, projective in their accusations, and dishonest in their motives.
They are merchants of fear; vile and twisted hatemongers who manufacture nonexistent enemies and spew fearmongering falsehoods in a concerted effort to delegitimize and dehumanize those they hate.
I hope in the coming months, as this sort of vile bigotry inevitably continues to sweep the GOP, that the voters will be able to see through the moralistic, demagoguic nonsense that is shielding the hatred within, but I am not optimistic.
If anything, the abundance of "groomer" and "pedophile" being used to smear anyone who disagrees with someone else only goes to show that the voting public no longer seems to care about actual issues anymore, and have devolved to the same kind of political nuance, civility, and decorum that one can expect from a middle school boys' locker room.
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