The Republican's Pedophilia Problem Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think
The Right is moving towards the normalization of pedophilia, and it's terrifying.
by Justin Rosario
The Banter’s Bob Cesca and I have different outlooks on the world. While we’re both liberal Democrats who collect nerd memorabilia, Bob is much more optimistic and I am decidedly less so. That’s OK, it keeps our weekly podcasts from turning into a depressing doomcast or a pollyanna cheercast. We also keep poor Ben Cohen from losing his mind while he navigates fatherhood with two small, rambunctious children.
There is one thing, however, in which Bob and I are in complete agreement: The Republican Party is overflowing with pedophiles. I wrote about this back in September and how we really need to pay attention to what’s happening to the GOP. The right’s pedophile problem is getting worse and the fringe (where it’s really out of control) never stays the fringe for long. Today, we will try to understand what might be driving this nauseating deviancy.
Why this matters (beyond the obvious)
“Know thy enemy.” It’s a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason. It’s essential to understand the pathologies that motivate the right (and they really are pathologies). Without that understanding, our response will never be sufficient. At best, it can be completely misdirected, at worst, there may be no response at all.
A good example in recent history is that far too much of the left failed to comprehend that the right is a truly fascist movement. This lack of understanding allowed Republicans to bulldoze their way into office in the 2000 and 2016 elections despite real concerns over whether they actually won, build a violent paramilitary wing, and almost stage a successful coup in 2020. If we had grasped, 30 or more years ago, the reality that the right had fully rejected democracy, we would have been better prepared to counter their assaults on the rule of law.
Now we are faced with another growing sickness on the right. There have been hundreds of Republican pedophiles arrested. So many that the only reason the GOP has not earned the same kind of reputation as the Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts is that the press seems unwilling to connect the dots, so to speak. It’s obvious there’s a pattern of behavior, and the common denominator is the Republican Party.
You will of course find pedophiles outside of the GOP. They exist in every demographic in every country. The difference is that in the last decade or so there doesn’t appear to have been any rapid concentration anywhere else.
This is a problem only the right in America is experiencing, suggesting something has gone terribly wrong with their movement. It certainly explains a lot of what’s happening over there.
It cannot be repeated often enough: Every Republican accusation is a confession. If you, as a Republican, are aware of how many pedophiles are among your ranks, what better way to deflect attention from this than to very loudly smear entire groups of people as “groomers” out to sexually assault children?
Trans people. Homosexuals. Teachers. All of Hollywood. Pretty much anyone you despise is a groomer and you can keep the press focused on your outrageous accusations instead of the horde of sexual deviants in your midst. For every Republican pedophile caught and arrested, there are several more still hidden. That’s an awful lot of Republicans you don't want babysitting your children. These are the people shaping the agenda of the GOP. It gets worse from here.
Legalize it
The Groomer campaign is just one expression of the right’s growing deviancy. Projection is the lifeblood of rightwing America but it never stops there.
If you read my previous dive into right-wing pedo predilection, you’ll recall that they consider girls as young as 14 and 15 “sexually appealing.” So much so that they “rank” higher than women in their 30s. So what does this look like in practice? An awful lot like the grooming the right has been screaming about for the last couple of years, to be honest. More specifically, Republicans have, in just the last several months, twice fought to either preserve or enable legal child marriage. Via Newsweek:
Tennessee Republicans are moving forward with a bill that would eliminate age requirements for marriage in the state.
The bill, HB 233, is scheduled to be heard in the House Civil Justice Committee on Wednesday and would establish common-law marriage between "one man" and "one woman," but it does not include a minimum age requirement. Opponents of the bill said it could open up the possibility of child marriages. The current age for marriage in the state is 17 with parental consent, according to WKRN.
After the public went berserk, Republicans amended the bill. But only after being pressured. If it were a simple oversight, and it could very well have been, why argue about it at all? Lest you think that was a one-off, the Wyoming GOP took issue with a bill put forth by a Republican that would raise the age of marriage to 18. Wyoming is one of 8 states that does not currently have a minimum age for marriage and at least one Republican is taking “protect the children” seriously. The rest? Not so much.
Instead, the official party line is, I kid you not, sex with children is your constitutional right. Via Business Insider:
In a mass email sent Thursday, the Wyoming Republican Party argued the law raises "concerns about constitutional rights" and denies "the fundamental purpose of marriage" as well as "parental rights."
"Marriage is the only institution in Wyoming Statute designed to keep a child's father and mother living under the same roof and cooperating in the raising of any children that they, together, conceive. That is the NATURAL RIGHT of every child" the group wrote.
Here’s the full email:
Take a moment to understand the full implication of what they are saying here. Despite the language, this is not a plea to allow two wild and crazy kids who had unprotected sex followed by an unwanted pregnancy to get married. Republicans do not want a 15-year-old boy to take responsibility for a baby. The misogyny of the right places all of the responsibility on the girl, always. Unless, that is, she can be coerced into marrying the adult that raped her which is how a minimum of 20% of these marriages go.
And yes, “raped” is the correct word here. Not “had a sexual relationship with” or “engaged in consensual sex with” or any other euphemism Republicans routinely come up with. Underage children cannot, by definition, consent to having sex with an adult. Republicans are, therefore, normalizing and, worse, legalizing the rape of children, aka pedophilia.
It’s important to note, Wyoming Republicans are not fully appealing to their “religious freedom” here as one would expect. Instead, there is talk about historical norms and natural and constitutional rights. This is exactly how one would talk if one were trying to avoid sounding like a religious nut and more like a perfectly reasonable adult who thinks they should be allowed to marry and continue to rape children.
The very same people who view it as acceptable for a grown man to marry a middle school girl would be outraged to the point of violence if a middle-aged woman demanded the right to marry their middle school son.
The point is to lower the age of consent for girls so they become available for men, not the other way around. But why? What is driving this surge in perversion? The right has, historically, always had its fair share of creeps but no more than the left. Something has changed and I have some theories as to what that might be.
Fear of women
Misogyny has long been a central aspect of right-wing ideology. The right has been fighting feminism since feminism was invented. And it’s losing. Badly.
Women have been gaining ground economically, culturally, and politically for decades. The massive effort the right has poured into keeping men dominant has failed to keep women from advancing. That’s not to say every two steps forward doesn’t invite a large step back, but the general direction is still forward.
Women have become a growing presence in traditionally male-dominated cultural spaces like video games, comic books, science fiction, fantasy, etc. And while there is still a significant imbalance in the workplace, especially in the upper levels of management, that is not going to last much longer.
Via The Brookings Institution:
Enrollment rates over the past decade are declining, a change almost entirely driven by men. Women are now much more likely to enroll in college than men, and the gender gap widened significantly in 2020….
At every level, men are graduating at lower rates than women. Men who enrolled in a four-year college in 2013 were ten percentage points less likely than women to graduate within 4 years.
You cannot have women with college degrees significantly outnumber men and still maintain the status quo of men holding the majority of management positions. Eventually, the boardroom will start to look more like the actual population and less like a boy’s club.
Men, specifically white conservative men, are not OK with this. I submit that their fear of women is the driving force behind the right’s descent into pedophilia. Allow me to walk you through my thought process.
The very heart of the modern GOP is white male grievance. They are the eternal victim. But from the perspective of the right, their worst fears are coming to pass: Women are gaining ground in almost every aspect of American life. They are pushing back on toxic masculinity, refusing to accept the age-old “boys will be boys” bullshit that men use to justify rape culture. More than a few women would rather be single than date “good enough.” To a white man who has been told the story that he is the pinnacle of all creation, this is the Apocalypse.
So…what to do? Well, if older women, and by “older” I mean out of high school, are too demanding and have already been tainted by the evils of feminism, go younger. A lot younger. Children are easier to manipulate than women and if you can lock them into a marriage with a baby? It’s extremely hard to escape a predatory relationship when you don’t have the education or financial resources to get out.
This is not a new idea. It’s explicitly one of the goals behind eliminating access to both abortion and birth control: Cut off as many paths to self-sufficiency for women as possible. That would make it so much easier to keep them in line. The new twist is normalizing men dating (or rather, preying on) teen girls. The goal is the same, though: Control.
You can see this thinking at work in how the (for now) fringe talks about women. The right has long been obsessed with virginity and “purity.” But this was meant to keep women from having premarital sex. The logical extension of this is to simply not wait until they are women.
This is why the fringe constantly talks about the “body count” of women and how much better it is to find an underage girl. In this context, if you haven’t guessed already, “body count” refers to how many men a woman has slept with. This is a very pervasive topic in the Manosphere, the collection of men whose unifying ideology is how much they despise women. The need for purity gets weirder from there:
Yes, you read that correctly. There is a widespread belief that the DNA of every sexual partner lingers forever and ever in a woman and will eventually be incorporated into the DNA of any child they have. The Manosphere is very…focussed on women and semen.
But just like that, men have a “scientific” basis for their hatred of sexually active women as well as a justification for…pedophilia. Teen girls are just as good, if not superior to older, “damaged” women so why not make it normal and legal? And if that just happens to keep them under the thumb of men for the rest of their lives? That’s as good as it gets for society.
White men really are not OK
There is plenty of misogyny from the Black community and Latinos. Don't even get me started on how disturbing Japanese Hentai can get (another rabbit hole that I promise you do not want to go down if you want to sleep tonight).
But the drumbeat of legalization? The increasingly loud push to normalize pedophilia? The rationalizations and attempts to give it an intellectual veneer? This is coming overwhelmingly from the white, conservative men.
This is a group of people who see the independence of women as an existential threat to their most precious possession: Their masculinity. Remember, fascism is deeply invested in masculinity as a core principle. Feminism is the absolute antithesis of fascism when it comes to gender.
Embracing pedophilia may seem extreme but the right is extreme and their moral compass does not exist. I know it’s difficult to acknowledge such a twisted worldview but here a few facts to consider: These are the same people who venerate the slavers of the Confederacy and long for the good old days when lynching was legal. These are the same people who have started to see the Nazis as the good guys. These are the same people who openly talk about pregnancy by rape or incest, including little girls, as “the will of god.” They have argued repeatedly that sex with underage girls is OK.
The American right wing is not only capable of accepting pedophilia as normal, they are primed for it. Their dwindling power combined with the increasing pressure from society to change has created a toxic mentality on the right that the only way to return to their “deserved” status as the apex of American everything is to create a vast gender imbalance.
Don’t kid yourself that such a thing could never be normalized in the United States. There are thousands of marriages a year, right now, in which a child is forced to marry the man who raped her in order to avoid a scandal in a good Christian community.
10 years ago, the idea that abortion would be completely illegal anywhere in the United States was laughable. The idea that America wouldn’t be a safe country for Jews was ludicrous. The idea that one of our two political parties would try to violently overthrow the government was unthinkable. Yet, here we are.
It is time to remove whatever mental block exists in your mind that keeps you from seeing the absolute worst in Republicans. They defend pedophiles and they are moving towards normalizing pedophilia. Unless you want that to become a way of life in America, it’s time to start taking the deep perversion and depravity of the right wing seriously. Because they certainly do.
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The Twitter Files Elon Musk And Matt Taibbi Don't Want You To Know About
This was a real attempt to suppress free speech, and it wasn't by the Democrats or the FBI.
by Ben Cohen
We’ve spent a lot of time covering the #TwitterFiles story at The Banter, not because the files reveal anything particularly interesting, but to reveal the true motivations of those responsible for publishing them.
It has been a tricky story to report on given all of the moving parts, but a clear picture emerges when examining crucial context and the incentives of the publishers. As we’ve shown, instead of revealing a Democratic/Big Tech/Deep State conspiracy, the TwitterFiles story has really exposed a new, powerful media coalition dedicated to spreading misinformation and further fracturing America’s fragile media system.
In a new, bizarre twist to the story though, it appears the characters involved in the story were more irresponsible, more misleading, and perhaps more sinister than we previously thought… continue reading here.
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