58 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
MIXED MEDIAthe children were being sodom-
ized in secret underground tunnels.
Their captors drank blood in front of
them and staged satanic ritual sacri-
fices. Sometimes the kids were filmed
for pornographic purposes. In total,
some several hundred children were
subjected to this treatment. And it
all happened in the middle of a safe
neighborhood where crimes were not
supposed to happen, let alone such un-
speakable and horrific ones.
Not that anyone else witnessed the
abuse. Nor was there any clear evi-
dence that it was actually happening.But people were sure it was real. It made
too much sense, they all agreed. “Every-
thing fell into place,” one of them said.
Hundreds, maybe thousands, of oth-
erwise normal, relatively well-adjusted
Americans truly believed that a massive
ring of occultist pedophiles was operat-
ing right under everyone’s noses.
The McMartin preschool scandal of
the 1980s was a sort of analog version of
the more recent Pizzagate, part of a lurid
and misbegotten moral panic about sub-
terranean child abuse. Even though the
supposed crimes unfolded thousands
of miles and several decades apart,
under very different circumstances,
the two conspiracy theories share the
same rough contours. The McMartin
saga, which began in 1983 with accusa-
tions made by one boy’s mother, came
to encompass fantastical claims about a
massive pedophile ring lurking beneath
a preschool in Manhattan Beach, Cali-
fornia. Pizza gate was concocted during
the 2016 presidential campaign and
alleged that prominent figures in the
Democratic Party were running a child
sex ring in tunnels beneath the Comet
Ping Pong pizzeria in a residential Wash-
ington, DC, neighborhood. Both spunoff into new theories: Amid a full-on
national hysteria, McMartin spawned
a series of day-care conspiracies, while
Pizzagate has led to QAnon, an even
wilder conspiracy theory that postu-
lates that President Donald Trump is on
the verge of arresting a throng of liberal
elites for facilitating and participating
in a sprawling child sex ring. Both drew
on natural fears about child safety and
supercharged them into national phe-
nomena with real-world ramifications.
Both of course were fictions.
Conspiracies centering on the vul-
nerability of children are neither new
nor distinctly American. Wild claims
of Jews killing Christian children and
using their blood in rituals—the “blood
libel”—date back to at least the 12th
century and have popped up every so
often since then, and long before that
Christians were suspected of perform-
ing similar rites. “Hurting children is
one of the worst things you can say
someone is doing. It’s an easy way to
demonize your enemy,” says Kathryn
Olmsted, a professor of history at the
University of California-Davis, who has
studied conspiracy theories.
Why do child-abuse conspiracies ex-
plode into public consciousness at cer-
tain moments? Explanations offered for
the peculiar resonance of Pizzagate and
QAnon tend to focus on pathologies in
the media ecosystem—epistemic bub-
bles, polarization, the unruly growth of
social media. But years before the frac-
turing of mass culture and the dawn of
Reddit and 4chan, the McMartin accu-
sations fed a national spectacle during
which scores of people were wrongly
accused of sex crimes against children.
The continuities between the McMar-
tin case and Pizzagate suggest a broader
explanation for pedophile conspiracies:
They aren’t the residue of malfunctions
in our media culture. They’re an out-
growth of the normal workings of reac-
tionary politics.author richard beck, in We Believe
the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s,
locates the roots of the McMartin con-
spiracy theory in the social progress
of the previous decade—particularly
in the gains won by women. “In the
’80s you had a strong, vicious anti-feminist backlash that helped conspir-
acies take hold,” Beck tells me. “In the
’70s, middle- and upper-middle-class
women had started to enter the full-
time workforce instead of being home-
makers.” This was the dawn of what the
economist Claudia Goldin has termed
“the quiet revolution.” Thanks in part to
expanding reproductive freedom, career
horizons had widened sufficiently by
the end of the 1970s for women to
become, in Goldin’s words, “active par-
ticipants who bargain somewhat effec-
tively in the household and the labor
market.” They were now forming their
identities outside the context of the
family and household.
The patriarchal family was under
siege, as conservatives saw it, and day-
care centers had become the physical
representation of the social forces be-
deviling them. “You had this Reagan-
driven conservative resurgence,” Beck
says, “and day care was seen as at least
suspicious, if not an actively maligned
force of feminism.”
Day care held a prominent place in
right-wing demonology. As far back as
the 1960s, conservatives were warn-
ing darkly that child care “was a com-
munist plot to destroy the traditional
family,” as sociologist Jill Quadagno
writes in The Color of Welfare. In 1971,
President Richard Nixon vetoed the
Comprehensive Child Development
Act, which would’ve established a
national day-care system. In his veto
message, Nixon used the Red-baiting
language urged upon him by his spe-
cial assistant, Pat Buchanan, saying
the program would’ve committed “the
vast moral authority of the national
government to the side of communal
approaches to child-rearing against the
family-centered approach.” In a decade
of rising divorce rates, at least conspir-
acism and reactionary social conserva-
tism could enjoy a happy marriage. By
the time Judy Johnson came forward in
1983 with allegations that a teacher at
the McMartin preschool had molested
her child, the country had been primed
to assume the worst by more than a
decade of child-care fearmongering.
Certainly it wasn’t just the movement
of women into the workplace that cre-
ated the conditions for a reactionaryThe general context
is the same: conservative
retrenchment after a period
of progressive social gains.