60 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
MIXED MEDIAto be a government insider.
With Pizzagate and QAnon, the mo-
lesters have changed from day-care
workers to the liberal elite, and the pol-
itics behind the theories now are more
explicitly spelled out. But the general
context is more or less the same: con-
servative retrenchment after a period
of progressive social gains. If women’sentry into the workplace in the latter
half of the 20th century triggered deep
anxieties about the decay of traditional
gender roles and the family unit, in the
21 st century it was same-sex marriage,
growing acceptance of transgender
rights, and the seeming cultural he-
gemony of a social justice agenda. “Q
found that fear,” says Travis View, a con-
spiracy theory researcher and a host of
the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
“While Q directly never touches on
trans rights or those sorts of things,
there is a great deal of anxiety on those
sorts of issues,” he says, referring to the
QAnon community at large. “They’re
concerned generally on the sort of
accep tance of trans people and the
oversexualization of children.” On the
matter of transgender rights, the con-
spiracists are aligned with “normal”
conservative politics; from the state leg-
islatures to the White House, Repub-
licans have made considerable hay out
of attacking and overturning various
protections that had been extended to
trans people.
QAnon adherents also share with
tradi tional conservative culture warriors
a vivid eschatology in which judgment
will at last be rendered against liberals,
and the nuclear family will be restored
to its proper place. In QAnoners’ par-
lance, this is “The Storm” or “The Great
Awaken ing.” “One thing they often talk
about after ‘The Storm’ is that they imag-
ine that the economy will be restored sothat a single income can support a family
again,” View says. “They imagine tradi-
tional gender roles and norms will be
upheld and how children are raised will
return to what [it] used to be.”
The differences between the pedo-
phile conspiracies of the 1980s and
those of today are telling in their own
way. There’s the matter of scale. The pe-
dophile witch hunt of the ’80s managed
to mobilize entire institutions, with
much of the media uncritically ampli-
fying its falsehoods and police taking
action based on shoddy nonevidence.
Lives were ruined around the coun-
try. But except for some reckless far-
right pundits and websites, the media
hasn’t taken the claims of Pizzagate and
QAnon seriously. Earnest conversations
about the conspiracies are limited to
online image boards and social media.
There’s also the nature of the tar-
gets. Where the pedophile conspiracies
of the 1980s attacked the institutional
emblems of feminist progress, the
pedophile conspir acies of the 2010s
attack the cultural emblems of creep-
ing cosmopolitanism. The ritual abuse
of the 1980s supposedly happened in
the suburbs in state or state-licensed
institutions such as schools and child-
care facilities. Today the abuse hap-
pens in businesses in cosmopolitan
cities. Comet Ping Pong, in the Chevy
Chase neighborhood of DC, is known
as a welcoming space that regularly
showcases progressive diy artists and
musicians—“a tangible emblem,” in the
words of University of New Haven so-
ciology professor Jeffrey S. Debies- Carl,
“of inclusivity, tolerance, and other pro-
gressive values that are threatening to
the conspiracy- prone alt-Right.”british historian Norman Cohn,
in his book Europe’s Inner Demons,
finds elements of pedophile conspir-
acies throughout history. In the 1st
century B.C., members of the Catil-
ine conspiracy, an aristocratic plot to
overthrow the Roman Republic, sup-
posedly swore an oath over the entrails
of a boy and then ate them. And in the
witch hunts of the 15th–17th centuries,
tens of thousands of people were tor-
tured and killed over allegations that
they’d performed ritual child murder,among other heinous acts.
The conspiracy theories documented
by Cohn are fundamentally political. The
rituals they describe are the means “by
which a group of conspirators affirms its
solidarity,” he writes, with the ultimate
goal of overthrowing “an existing ruler
or regime and to seize power.” The mass
witch hunts that followed are political
too, based on the “demonological obses-
sions of the intelligentsia.” The history
of American political reaction is full of
sex demons. Jim Crow was buttressed by
myths about black male virility. Likewise,
North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill
was sold in part on the fear that preda-
tory men could say they’re transgender
to gain access to women’s bathrooms.
Opponents of abortion rights continue
to conjure gory fantasies of promiscu-
ous women committing “infanticide,”
an incitement that Trump turned into
an applause line in an April rally.
In this way, pedophile conspiracies
act as a sort of propaganda of the coun-
terrevolution, a fun-house reflection of
the real threats to the social order. This
is what connects QAnon and Pizzagate
to McMartin to the witch hunts of the
Middle Ages to the dawn of major reli-
gions. The demons may take different
forms, but the conspiracy is basically the
same: Our house is under attack.
“Decay of morals grows from day to
day,” goes one despairing account. A
secret cabal is wreaking havoc across the
land, the man complains to his friend.
Its members “recognize one another
by secret signs and marks,” and “every-
where they introduce a kind of religion
of lust” that subverts “ordinary fornica-
tion.” There is a rumor that they worship
the “private parts of their director and
high priest.” Maybe the rumor is false,
“but such suspicions naturally attach to
their secret and nocturnal rites.”
In this dialogue, written by Marcus
Minucius Felix in the 2nd century, the
Roman pagan Caecilius Natalis speaks of
Christians the way Pizzagaters described
John Podesta and his fellow liberal elite.
Natalis is particularly incensed by the
cult’s initiation ritual. The details are as
“revolting as they are notorious”: New
members are initiated into the cult, he
reports, by stabbing and killing an infant
who has been coated in dough. nPedophile conspiracies
act as a sort of propaganda of
the counterrevolution.