A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?
There are a few different ways to answer this. At one level, in MAGA world, Donald Trump is different. No rules apply to him. It’s good to be the king. At another level, it’s a complicated question comparing the horror of different kinds of sexual predation, or whether a person who does one is likely do do another. But there is one level of MAGA’s hyper-focus on pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy theories which needs to be emphasized. Because at a basic level, that obsession has nothing to do with pedophilia as a thing in itself — not as most of us might understand it.
One of the most telling aspects of this MAGA obsession is the focus on the punishment of the “elites” who are behind it. At a basic level, the victims never really take center stage. And that is the heart of it. In the MAGA world, pedophilia isn’t a crime or abuse that needs to be stopped. It is more a legitimating tool which provides a license for cleansing acts of retributive violence and revenge. This is what’s at the end of the story in every far-right/MAGA conspiracy: a wave of eliminationist, cleansing violence led by someone like Trump in which the bad guys, the liberals, the Democrats, the globalist elites, etc etc are wiped out. And that’s why whether it’s Pizzagate, QAnon or the more outlandish versions of the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, they always keep coming back to pedophilia. Because pedophilia summons a level of disgust, anger and revulsion that makes the perpetrators seem uniquely inhuman, less than human, people against whom total violence is acceptable and necessary. In other words, these conspiracy theories are systems of thought that provide sanction and legitimation for what you want to do to your enemies. They’re about the enemies. The role of pedophilia in these stories is just a means to an end, making what you want to do with your enemies okay.
This is obvious to most people who’ve observed these alternative worlds for any length of time. But it’s worth stepping back and noting how this dynamic plays out in the current news environment. It’s why MAGA can be really, really obsessed with vengeance against any of Epstein’s co-conspirators but basically couldn’t care less about the prospect of Trump raping or assaulting any other number of women or even an 18 year old. Who cares? None of that matters. Pedophilia — or what’s technically called ephebophilia, a sexual attraction to people in their mid to late teens — isn’t something they really care about in itself. They’re obsessed about it as a legitimator of a certain level of hatred and mass violence.
Of course there are very real pedophiles. There are very real sex traffickers. Jeffrey Epstein was one of them. And any actual accomplice or co-conspirator should be held to account today. But we shouldn’t confuse that reality with the ideational world of the MAGA pedophile conspiracy theories. There’s some overlap. But they’re mainly just different.