hmmmmmm… hit piece, crying about pedophiles being persecuted…
This summer, Americans got a crash course in “QAnon,” a pro-Trump conspiracy theory (or possible anti-Trump prank) that has been percolating online for about a year. QAnon’s claims are hard to track, in part because its believers believe so many different things. Conspiracy theory academic Joseph Uscinski noted in an interview that its adherents can basically connect its threads to any number of other conspiracies or beliefs. But most iterations claim that a top government operative nicknamed Q is leaking “breadcrumbs” that show that Donald Trump is secretly working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to expose Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other high-level Democrats’ involvement in a murderous, Satanic pedophile ring. Not many people actually seem to believe in this QAnon stuff, Uscinski pointed out. But even though the theory has largely been out of the news for a couple months, QAnon groups are still active online, and supporters have manifested at Trump rallies.
Naturally, many have drawn a connection between QAnon and Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that blossomed in 2016 and centered around the belief that Democrats ran a ritualistic pedophile ring out of a basement at Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizzeria that doesn't even have a basement. That theory metastasized in late 2016, leading to a December shooting at the pizzeria by a self-proclaimed investigator and sex slave liberator. Even after former Pizzagate promoters like Alex Jones backed off of the theory, it still has proponents. Some observers have slatted these conspiracies into a wider trend on the modern far right of crying pedophile, often using flimsy evidence, against high-profile liberals.
Pedophilia is a real threat. Officials have caught large-scale pedophile rings far more often than one might think, and some of them have involved famous individuals and cover-ups. To many, it is a uniquely evil crime; someone who sexually abuses a child seems capable of anything. But fear of pedophiles can be weaponized and used to whip up mobs that don’t want to wait for solid evidence of wrongdoings to emerge, lest unspeakable horrors go unchecked. In many ways, it is an ideal tool for mobilizing small but highly vocal pockets of opposition against one’s enemies, as it can co-opt some people with genuine fears about child trafficking into perpetuating smear and harassment campaigns. It also offers those who are already predisposed to believing terrible things about the accused more license to hate. Accusations of pedophilia are often taken extremely seriously by law enforcement as well: In 2014, for instance, British police launched a multimillion-dollar investigation into a number of individuals, some of them national politicians, based on one man’s accusations, which turned out to be utterly baseless.
But Pizzagate, QAnon, and other related conspiracies floating around don’t just fit into a long tradition of accusations of pedophilia. As others have noted, the flourishes of these theories—Satanic rituals performed on child victims by depraved cabals, cryptic symbols signaling dark intent or links to the occult, and secret tunnels under ordinary businesses used to abet villainy—actually connect them to a discrete, centuries-old lineage of satanic, or occultic, panics.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59vgwa/the-strange-centuries-long-history-of-satanic-pedophile-panics