I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.

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.