Post by ashliy on Dec 9, 2016 18:03:43 GMT
Over the past six weeks, some people have become convinced that Hillary Clinton and other prominent members of the Democratic Party establishment are participating in an international child sex ring. It began in October, when a baseless rumor about emails allegedly discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop made its way through Twitter and 4chan and conspiracy-theorist websites. Eventually, self-deputized online investigators began to comb through the emails of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, which had been published by WikiLeaks. Finding only campaign talk and recipes, the investigators concluded that innocuous terms used in Podesta’s emails were a code: “pizza” for girl, “ice cream” for male prostitute, and so on. Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, D.C. pizzeria that had hosted a Democratic fundraiser, was identified (also baselessly) as a headquarters for sex-ring activities. The conspiracy theory acquired a name, “Pizzagate.”
On Sunday a man wielding an assault rifle entered Comet Ping Pong and opened fire. He said he was there to investigate Pizzagate. 4chan users are confident that the man is part of a false-flag operation being carried out by the establishment to discredit their investigation.
The Clintons have been accused of almost everything over the course of their 30-plus years in politics, though maybe never of something so cartoonishly villainous. But if child-sex-ring conspiracy theories are new ground for presidential politics, they are not so for the United States. This kind of story has a history stretching back at least 30 years. Judging from that history, it’s a story that won’t be stamped out in the near future.
The most famous version of this story is the day care and ritual-abuse hysteria of the 1980s (which I described in my book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s). During that decade, nearly 100 people—most of them child care workers—were wrongly convicted of committing grotesque sex crimes against children, and many more were falsely accused or charged. In southwest Los Angeles, teachers at the McMartin Preschool were thought to have abused around 400 children in secret tunnels underneath the school. Just outside Minneapolis, two dozen people were accused of organizing sex-abuse parties involving games of hide-and-seek played outdoors, in the nude, in full daylight. At the Massachusetts trial of a gay teacher’s aide who would be wrongly sentenced to several consecutive life terms, the prosecutor told the jury that allowing a gay man to work in a day care was like putting “a chocoholic in a candy store.” In a number of these cases, the abuse was said to have been a component of a Satanic ritual, complete with robes, candles, forced abortions, and animal sacrifice. It took more than 10 years for the panic to die down and much longer for its victims to be released from prison.
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_comet_ping_pong_pizzagate_scandal_is_a_child_sex_ring_myth_for_the_age.html
This Pizzagate insanity is not over yet, it is very likely somebody might be hurt by it in addition to those traumatized by a gunman and death threats.
On Sunday a man wielding an assault rifle entered Comet Ping Pong and opened fire. He said he was there to investigate Pizzagate. 4chan users are confident that the man is part of a false-flag operation being carried out by the establishment to discredit their investigation.
The Clintons have been accused of almost everything over the course of their 30-plus years in politics, though maybe never of something so cartoonishly villainous. But if child-sex-ring conspiracy theories are new ground for presidential politics, they are not so for the United States. This kind of story has a history stretching back at least 30 years. Judging from that history, it’s a story that won’t be stamped out in the near future.
The most famous version of this story is the day care and ritual-abuse hysteria of the 1980s (which I described in my book We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s). During that decade, nearly 100 people—most of them child care workers—were wrongly convicted of committing grotesque sex crimes against children, and many more were falsely accused or charged. In southwest Los Angeles, teachers at the McMartin Preschool were thought to have abused around 400 children in secret tunnels underneath the school. Just outside Minneapolis, two dozen people were accused of organizing sex-abuse parties involving games of hide-and-seek played outdoors, in the nude, in full daylight. At the Massachusetts trial of a gay teacher’s aide who would be wrongly sentenced to several consecutive life terms, the prosecutor told the jury that allowing a gay man to work in a day care was like putting “a chocoholic in a candy store.” In a number of these cases, the abuse was said to have been a component of a Satanic ritual, complete with robes, candles, forced abortions, and animal sacrifice. It took more than 10 years for the panic to die down and much longer for its victims to be released from prison.
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/12/the_comet_ping_pong_pizzagate_scandal_is_a_child_sex_ring_myth_for_the_age.html
This Pizzagate insanity is not over yet, it is very likely somebody might be hurt by it in addition to those traumatized by a gunman and death threats.
