Technically, it’s ephebo . . . actually, fascism

Via commenter Taylor, here’s a really perceptive take from Josh Marshall on the whole “child sex trafficking” obsession of the more extreme sections of the American right wing. (That the more extreme sections of the American right wing have taken over the Republican party completely — that Marjorie Taylor Greene is VASTLY more representative of the contemporary GOP base than Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney — is one of those things that elite political and cultural institutions in this country remain in almost complete denial regarding).

One of the most telling aspects of this MAGA obsession is the focus on the punishment of the “elites” who are behind it. At a basic level, the victims never really take center stage. And that is the heart of it. In the MAGA world, pedophilia isn’t a crime or abuse that needs to be stopped. It is more a legitimating tool which provides a license for cleansing acts of retributive violence and revenge. This is what’s at the end of the story in every far-right/MAGA conspiracy: a wave of eliminationist, cleansing violence led by someone like Trump in which the bad guys, the liberals, the Democrats, the globalist elites, etc etc are wiped out. And that’s why whether it’s Pizzagate, QAnon or the more outlandish versions of the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories, they always keep coming back to pedophilia. Because pedophilia summons a level of disgust, anger and revulsion that makes the perpetrators seem uniquely inhuman, less than human, people against whom total violence is acceptable and necessary. In other words, these conspiracy theories are systems of thought that provide sanction and legitimation for what you want to do to your enemies. They’re about the enemies. The role of pedophilia in these stories is just a means to an end, making what you want to do with your enemies okay.

This is obvious to most people who’ve observed these alternative worlds for any length of time. But it’s worth stepping back and noting how this dynamic plays out in the current news environment. It’s why MAGA can be really, really obsessed with vengeance against any of Epstein’s co-conspirators but basically couldn’t care less about the prospect of Trump raping or assaulting any other number of women or even an 18 year old. Who cares? None of that matters. Pedophilia — or what’s technically called ephebophilia, a sexual attraction to people in their mid to late teens — isn’t something they really care about in itself. They’re obsessed about it as a legitimator of a certain level of hatred and mass violence.

“The pedophiles” are just the Enemy, internal and external, that must be purged from the body politic they have contaminated, by a redemptive violence unconstrained by law or moral boundaries of any kind.

Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.