JULY / AUGUST 2019 | MOTHER JONES 59LARRY DAVIS/
LOS ANGELES TIMES
/GETTY; COURTESY
PEOPLE
panic. There were other cultural forces
at work. The anti-rape campaign of the
1970s, historian Philip Jenkins writes in
Moral Panic, had “formulated the con-
cepts and vocabulary that would become
integral to child-protection ideology,”
in particular a “refusal to disbelieve”
victims. The repressed- memory move-
ment of that era had created a therapeu-
tic consensus surrounding kids’ claims
of molestation: “Be willing to believe
the unbelievable,” as the self-help book
The Courage to Heal put it. “Believe the
survivor...No one fantasizes abuse.” And
the anti-cult movement of the late 1970s
had raised the specter of satanic cabals
engaging in human sacrifice and other
sinister behavior.
Beck likens conspiracy theories to par-
ables. The ones that stick are those that
most effectively validate a group’s anxi-
eties, with blame assigned to outsiders.
In a 2017 paper on Pizzagate and pedo-
phile conspiracies, psychology profes-
sor Jim Kline, now at Northern Marianas
College, argues that conspiracy theories
“are born during times of turmoil and
uncertainty.” In an interview, Kline goes
further: “Social turmoil can overwhelm
critical thinking. It makes us get beyond
what is logically possible. We go into this
state of hysteria and we let that over-
whelm ourselves.”
The McMartin accusations were a
vivid demonstration of the rot in the
American social structure, as perceived
by conservatives. Perhaps inevitably,
the claims metastasized. Now it was
hundreds of children who had been as-
saulted and subjected to satanic rituals,
and now, instead of just one McMartin
teacher, there was an entire sex ring in-
volved. One boy told of adults in masks
and black robes dancing and moaning;
of live rabbits chopped to bits by candle-
light. “California’s Nightmare Nursery,”
People magazine called it. But soon the
case began to fall apart. The stories of
abuse turned out to have been coaxed
out of children by way of dubious and
leading questioning. Judy Johnson, who
made the initial accusations that her
son had been molested, was found to
be a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1986, a
district attorney dropped charges—at
one point there had been 208 counts
in all—against all but two of the orig-The pedophiles communicated in code:
“hotdog” meant “young boy”; “cheese”
meant “little girl”; “sauce” meant “orgy.”
The theory was easily debunked. Eventu-
ally it was abandoned by the high- profile
internet figures who’d initially given it
oxygen, but not before Pizzagate, as it
was immediately dubbed, had spilled
over into reality. In December 2016, a
28-year-old man named Edgar Maddison
Welch, having driven from North Caro-
lina to Washington, DC, fired an assault
rifle inside Comet in a bid to rescue the
children he thought were locked away
there. No one was hurt. Welch was sen-
tenced to four years in prison.
The QAnon conspiracy picked up
where Pizzagate left off, alleging that
the liberal elite’s pedophile ring extends
way beyond one restaurant and that it is
only a matter of time before Trump ar-
rests Podesta, Clinton, and other Dem-
ocratic power brokers for their crimes.
All of this was fueled by an anonymous
internet poster dubbed Q, who claimsinal defendants. A pair of trials ended
in 1990 with the juries deadlocking on
some charges and acquitting on the
others. After seven years and $15 mil-
lion in prosecution costs, the remaining
charges were dropped.
However flimsy its premises, the
case whipped up a national panic. In
1985, a teacher’s aide in Massachusetts
was wrongly convicted of molesting 3-,
4-, and 5-year-old boys and girls; the
prosecutor had told the jury that a gay
man working in a day care was like a
“chocoholic in a candy store.” Around
that time, employees at Bronx day-care
centers were arrested for allegedly sex-
ually abusing children. Five men were
sentenced before all ultimately saw
their convictions overturned.
Liberals certainly participated in
the hysteria—Gloria Steinem donated
money to the McMartin investiga-
tion—but by and large it was a reac-
tionary phenomenon. What drove the
panic, Beck says, wasn’t just the sense
that children were being harmed. “It’s
that families were being harmed.”in 2016 , three decades after the McMar-
tin trial, WikiLeaks, in cahoots with
Russian hackers, published the private
emails of top Hillary Clinton adviser
John Podesta. In one, Podesta is invited
to a fundraiser at Comet Ping Pong. Am-
ateur internet sleuths blew it up into a
conspiracy theory about a child-sex ring.Down the rabbit hole:
Private investigator Ted
Gunderson (left) shows
a hole dug by parents
searching for an alleged
secret sex room at the
McMartin preschool
in Manhattan Beach,
California. Below: the
February 5, 1990, issue of
People magazine.