By Terry Manning
My thoughts on pedophiles are pretty cut and dried.
If the offenders can be rehabilitated, keep them out of situations where they might relapse.
If they cannot be rehabilitated? Throw them in prison. Bulldoze that prison. Set it afire. Shoot whatever escapes the flames.
Notice I didn’t say it mattered whether the offenders were Black, white or brown. Male or female. Rich or poor. Democrat, Republican or whatever else. None of that matters to me when it comes to hurting children.
But I cannot support the constant one-sidedness of how conservatives use accusations of pedophilia to demonize liberals.
Remember Pizzagate? That was the 2016 story where the Wikileaks hackers targeted the campaign of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and released a trove of emails from top officials. Someone found the name of the owner of a Washington, D.C.-area pizza parlor and from that single wisp of info users on the old 4chan message board wove an entire conspiracy theory.
They accused the store owner of imprisoning children in the restaurant’s basement so high-ranking Democrats could come in and take advantage of them. The BBC reported the tale crossed over from the extremist 4chan to the more mainstream Reddit, where one reader got so upset he took matters into his own hands.
In December of that year, a 28-year-old North Carolina man, Edgar Welch, drove from Salisbury to Washington, D.C., to liberate the alleged child abuse victims. Welch was arrested after firing a round from an AR-15 into the restaurant’s ceiling, demanding to see the children and searching for himself.
Despite the lengths the conspiracy theorists had gone to to manufacture the story, they overlooked one key fact: The restaurant didn’t even have a basement.
Then there was the Wayfair scandal.
QAnon, an offshoot of right-wing message boards, revolted when one of its members tweeted about the high prices of storage cabinets sold by the online retailer. When users noted some of the cabinets shared names with girls in missing child cases, they concluded the girls were actually inside the cabinets and were being auctioned off through the site and shipped to buyers.
The Associated Press reported at the time that mentions of Wayfair and “trafficking” exploded on Facebook and Instagram, with hashtags #Wayfairconspiracy and #WayfairGate showing up millions of times on TikTok.
Wayfair corrected server glitches it said produced some of the issues QAnon pointed to as proof of their involvement in human trafficking. The blame game persisted even after some supposed abductees revealed they were not missing and had never been detained.
The passion of conspiracy theorists can be powerful, something Donald Trump knows all too well, having leveraged that power to his advantage on previous occasions.
He launched his political career claiming Barack Obama lacked a birth certificate proving his eligibility to be president. He bolstered his re-election campaign by promising to release the client list of notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
That is what QAnon and MAGA want: For Trump to take on what they view as the pedophile-protecting “deep state.” This despite the fact Trump was a known associate of Epstein’s. Trump biographer Michael Wolff produced taped interviews where Epstein called Trump his best friend.
When tech billionaire Elon Musk had his public falling out with Trump, he alleged point-blank, “Trump is in the Epstein files.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi assured the president’s supporters she had the client list and that it was “under review” for imminent release.
Then last week, the Department of Justice and FBI released a statement saying there was no “incriminating ‘client list’” (their word choice.) A substantial number of MAGA supporters cried foul, claiming Trump had been taken in by the deep state and become part of the coverup.
Even some of the president’s highest-ranking appointees had problems with the sentiment of letting Epstein fade into memory. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino threatened to step down if Bondi wasn’t more forthcoming with information about the promised Epstein files.
Trump’s response? First he asked reporters at a press conference after the Texas flooding, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? … It just seems like a desecration.” Later he defended Bondi directly, writing on Truth Social that she was doing a “fantastic job” and he “[didn’t] like what’s happening,” in reference to criticism of her for the presumed coverup.
Part of me thinks this is the inevitable result of Trump courting conspiracy theories and the people who believed them. At some point, reality and truth must be served.
In the meantime, I hope MAGA keeps pushing for the truth, whether they find out there really never was a list and they got played for their votes and financial support, or they find out there is a client list and it contains names they didn’t want to see.
They can’t be ride-and-die (let’s go kill somebody) when a Democrat is accused, but stay ride-or-die when Trump might be implicated.
Terry E. Manning worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
