As Republicans smear everyone as pedophiles, jonathanchait writes on how conspiracy theories operate on different levels
Not long ago, the notion that American politics was oriented around a dispute over the merits of child sexual exploitation was viewed as so loopy that not even Donald Trump could take it seriously. It is now becoming the Republican Party’s most energetic idea.
On the surface, the Republicans appear to be concerned simply about sentencing criminals. But at the same time, they can seed more absurd and heinous charges they don’t need to defend openly. Whether DeSantis and his supporters believe any of this is beside the point. Conspiracy theories often operate on multiple levels. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy famously accused Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and ultimately Dwight Eisenhower of allowing a network of Communist spies to operate inside their administration.
Nobody, of course, denies that child pornography and other sex crimes are real. The debate is over the claim that somehow Democrats want to permit those crimes to occur. Hawley’s gambit is to pretend any dismissal of a conspiracy theory is a denial of the crime. In DeSantis’s case, that task has been taken up most energetically by Christopher Rufo, who is employed, believe it or not, at a think tank, the right-wing Manhattan Institute. Rufo has made his name principally as an opponent of critical race theory, a label he has applied to a wide array of left-wing pedagogy and rhetoric including, but by no means limited to, critical race theory itsef.
One irony of this debate is that if Democrats wanted to turn the issue against the Republicans, they would have a much richer fact pattern available to them. Trump, still the party’s effective leader, has been accused by five witnesses of walking in on undressed teenagers. The party’s former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, engaged in horrific sexual abuse of minors. Representative Jim Jordan helped cover up a sex-abuse scandal in college.
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