Sunday, November 27, 2016

"PizzaGate" Combines Right-Wing Myth-Making And The Pedophilia-Obsession of Conspiracy Theorists

   If there's one thing contemporary conspiracy theorists love it's organized pedophilia. In the U.S. this manifested itself most notably during the Satanic Panic of the '80s and '90s. This obsession showed up in the UK recently in myths about "VIP pedophile rings"...basically the same thing we had, but with less Satan.
   Now it's showing up in this bit of pro-Trump/anti-Clinton fake news.
   A couple of years ago /r/worldnews went absolutely bugshit over the VIP pedophile rings nonsense. One very-highly-upvoted comment in one thread asserted that the CIA was kidnapping "tens of thousands" of children every year inside the U.S. and funneling them into sex slavery. That comment was followed by a giant sub-thread of sub-comments all saying things like "I can't believe this can happen here right under our noses!" I commented, in essence, that I couldn't believe it either...because there was no chance whatsoever that there was even the tiniest fragment of truth in it. I mean you should have seen the freak-out about that. Honestly, people go nuts about that stuff. They seem to completely lose whatever tenuous grasp of reality they had.

2 Comments:

Blogger celticman said...

Did you even actually look at any of the photos/emails that led people to beleive that there is truth to this ? The instagram photos Alefantis and followers were posting and commenting on were horrible and I can see why people would beleive that there is truth in Pizzagate and the wording of podestas emails about pizza do not make sense and why would someone email him to tell him small children would be in the pool at the farm for further entertainment ??? You think that is ok?

9:40 AM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Honestly, I didn't.

Post a link, and I'll check it out--ONE link, not a massive propaganda link dump, please.

But look:
(a) These organized pedophilia stories almost never turn out to be true.
(b) The anti-Clinton fake-news industry worked non-stop to turn out this kind of crackpottery.
(c) Your evidence is that small children thing? Small children are entertaining. Almost everybody finds small children entertaining. That you'd cite that as your flagship piece of evidence does not inspire confidence...

There is almost no chance this nonsense is true.

9:50 AM  

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