A slightly worrisome thought
There is one belief that currently unifies everyone from Bill Maher, to Joe Rogan, to AOC, to Elon Musk, to CNN, to Candace Owens, to the Democratic Party, to Netflix, to TMZ, to the British Parliament, to the United Nations, to the Iranian government, to the right-wing podcast circuit, to the left-wing podcast circuit, to the apolitical entertainment-oriented podcast circuit — and is currently the consensus view across all major social media platforms: X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Rumble, etc.
That belief is as follows: the Western world is fundamentally governed by elite pedophilic sex-trafficking networks, enforced by blackmail. Staggering numbers of children have thus been raped, and a massive coverup is being orchestrated to protect the pedophile perpetrators, who also currently rule over us, and whose rule is fundamentally organized to advance pedophilic interests.
That’s it. That’s the grand unifying dogma of our age, such as one can be said to exist.
Yeah it's all completely insane.
The dreaded "P" word is a clinical term originating from psychiatry, still used today to designate a person who has a predominant sexual attraction to people before puberty. "Puberty" is defined by the American Psychological Association as roughly under the age of 13, since scholars recognize that puberty varies from person to person and has varied across time and place (i.e. depending on nutrition, etc.)
Americans in particular, and now the wider world that their media permeates out into, have massively expanded and altered the meaning of the once clearly defined P word to an absurd degree.
Now, online at least, the P word gets used to mean anyone who shows the slightest hint of possible erotic interest or fascination in a person (or even cartoon character), who is or could appear to be under the age of 18. Depending on how you parse it, that could mean everyone. Everyone who fancies Belle Delphine and women who look young - "PEDO." Anyone who's okay with flat chested women - "PEDO." Anyone who's tall and has a short gf - "PEDO". And the list can go on and on...
It's all very strange, unproductive, and certainly not based in anything approaching "facts and logic" that don't care about your feelings... In fact, a whole host of academics, from Allyn Walker and Stephen Kershnar to Jacob Breslow (to name a few), have been "cancelled" for coming to unpopular / challenging conclusions on these issues, or for simply having used language and word's that other's didn't like or found upsetting...
Instead of thinking "hmm, these are experts who've spent literally years in their field; it makes sense they'd come to conclusions that are different to the masses who aren't specialists on these subjects. Maybe we should listen to them, read their books and articles and come to our own conclusions, maybe even 'debunk' them if they're so obviously and provably wrong despite their years of research..."
Instead of that, all we get are keyboard warriors screeching "PEDO" - some of whom would've been the same people complaining about "SJWs" and "cancel culture" before going on to do the exact same thing in a different context!! 🤦♂️🤷♂️
It's a weird situation and there are scholarly explanations for the rise in discourses of "abuse," "trauma," "victims" and "survivors" - and even scholarly histories of how the figure of the "child molester" or "monstrous ped*phile" have changed across time, from historians such as Phillip Jenkins and Steven Angelides. But, broadly speaking, scholarship isn't widely read by the general public and has a negligible impact...
That's why it's so good that you, Michael, and Richard Hanania and other journalists and public figures, are bringing forth a critical discourse that is so sorely needed. Nowadays, academic jobs are so precarious, the online bullying of the past so severe, that scholars and researchers who could provide food for thought have either left Twitter or social media altogether, or never bothered to begin with...
Thanks Michael, for what you do. You give me hope that there are journalists out there with integrity. 🙂
The apparent fact that so many consumers of online media currently seem to be fascinated, obsessed, in a moral panic or otherwise consumed by all things Epstein is a far more significant indicator of societal disintegration than anything Epstein may have done in real life.