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XPost: alt.fun, alt.politics.democrats.d
The long history of the right’s obsession with child trafficking means it won’t
be easy for Trump to make this story disappear.
By Jia Lynn Yang
July 25, 2025
There is no cause on the American right quite like the quest to save children from sex abuse.
The harming of children is at the center of Pizzagate, the wholly fake theory that began circulating around the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was running
a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor. It’s the ultimate sin in the tales spun by QAnon followers, who believe
that millions of children are going missing, their bodies harvested for a drug enjoyed by elites.
The obsession can be found closer to the mainstream, too. Conservative activists
have stoked fears that transgender adults are “grooming” children for abuse. In
the summer of 2023, the movie “The Sound of Freedom,” a thriller about a swaggering federal agent who rescues children from sex trafficking, was an unexpected blockbuster, powered by loyal conservative fans.
And now the great MAGA meltdown over Jeffrey Epstein.
Unlike QAnon or Pizzagate, Mr. Epstein’s abuse of minors has been proved in a court of law. Theories about his connections to powerful figures and the records
of his crimes have been fodder for right-wing media for years. Now, Mr. Trump’s
insistence that the whole thing is a “hoax” is being met with disbelieving anger
from the MAGA base. Polling shows that the issue is the rare case where Trump supporters break from the president.
“Mr. President- Yes, we still care about Epstein,” the actress Roseanne Barr
recently posted on X in a fit of frustration over the Justice Department’s reluctance to release more Epstein documents. “Is there a time to not care about
child sex trafficking? Read the damn room.”
“It’s a binary decision to stick to your guns and to say that we should not have
any safe haven for child predators,” said the right-wing provocateur Benny Johnson on a recent episode of his podcast. And if you are enabling a child predator, he added, “then you deserve to have your life destroyed, and it’s something that we’re not going to back down on.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/25/magazine/the-conservative-crusade-thats-about-so-much-more-than-epstein.html
Most of this right-wingnut obsession with child trafficking is complete nonsense
— it just isn't going on as the Republiscums/QAnon shriekingly say it is. But it
does mean that they're not going to listen to Orange Fat Fuck about "moving on" from Epstein.
And of course, Trump is one of the predators.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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