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The quote you produced is disinformation all right for the "it's a QAnon reference" framing, but referring to people running "drag kids" events as "groomers" does seem like a serious accusation that deserves a bit more justification than the pointing and invoking of disgust reflexes that it is. The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers. I doubt that most people running or supporting those events are doing so with the intention of entering sexual relations with the kids that attend them themselves (and if "encouraging the target enter sexual relations I want to see more of with someone else" is sufficient to meet the definition of grooming, then it seems that a lot of things in our culture since times immemorial would count!), and if their right-wing detractors believe otherwise, the burden of proof surely should be on them. If they detractors do believe that all these progressives are actually in it because they hope to have sex with the ten year olds that they are teaching about drag queens and non-binary gender, protestations to the contrary and seemingly low rate of such sex actually happening notwithstanding, then yes, they are in fact entertaining a conspiracy theory (as there would need to be a conspiracy to conceal widespread pedophilic tendencies and/or actions).
(edit: Per something I found out downthread, there is in fact a legal definition of grooming in the US, which markedly does not cover "introducing children to icky and widely taken to be age-inappropriate sexual activity" on its own)
Seems like a good riddance to me, because the term was a massive footbullet. The term "cultural marxists" will be resolved correctly by (1) people on your side already and (2) actual cultural marxists, who are in the know about the academic definition drift of "Marxism"; to everyone else, and in particular garden-variety classical liberals who really ought to have been enlisted in the anti-woke coalition much earlier, it just looks like holding up a sign like "actually the main issue I have with my outgroup is that they are dirty commies who want to put limitations on megacorps".
I commented on this a bit up the chain, but it bears repeating--I regard putting children in skimpy clothing and throwing money at them while they dance as sexual exploitation per se. You don't have to touch a child to sexually abuse them; in most jurisdictions, just exposing them to pornography counts. Participation in "family friendly" Drag Kids is grooming toward participation in more sexualized drag events. To my eyes, this is a comfortable fit for the term "grooming."
This is at least a very noncentral example of sexual exploitation, and by implication of grooming. The modal example that the term evokes, and that makes it work as a rhetorical superweapon, is something along the lines of "kid is made to watch as parents engage in 'swinging' and eventually 'invited' to participate" or recently "40 year old creep baits kids on Roblox into sending him nudes and eventually convinces them to meet up offline, keeping it a secret from their parents". If you can have "sexual exploitation" without the "exploiter" deriving a direct personal sexual benefit from it, then the tropey staple chill grandpa who tells the kids of a straight-laced household where in the attic to find the porn stash of his youth is also a groomer.
I understand that "groomer" is an effective rhetorical weapon, but I really don't think it lives up to the standards of discussion we were supposed to be striving for as a community.
In A Brave New World there is a comment about encouraging kids to play sexual games with each other as a normal part of schooling. Would you consider this grooming, even though the adults performing the encouragement are not the ones getting sexual pleasure? Would an adult standing over two five year olds, helping them get undressed, telling them where to put their hands on the other, be grooming?
I think most people regard any outside encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex to be a Bad Thing, and the more severe and direct examples ought to be criminal. Absent any other criminal terminology, people use the word Grooming, regardless of who is getting sexual pleasure.
And yes, technically any adult helping any kid gain access to porn is grooming. Even the cool grandpa and the old fashioned magazines. It is illegal to show porn to minors. Do people forget this?
Not if it's not for their own pleasure, as I see it. I've seen something like this rule mentioned in the past in the context of advice for parents who are unsure if it's socially acceptable to do this thing or another (I think the example was "father applying lotion on female baby") - formulated as "if you do it for the kid, it's okay, if you do it for yourself, it's not".
No, I don't think it's standard to use the word "grooming" for this, and before the current CW battle, I've not seen it used outside of the contexts I mentioned. This was even though culture warring about "encouragement for kids to have more and riskier sex" is something that has been going on for decades now.
"Technically" according to what technicality exactly?
How is that a pertinent argument? It is also illegal to not pay your taxes, but that doesn't mean that tax evasion is an instance of grooming.
You are the one who brought up a grandpa showing pornography to minors as if it was something socially accepted and reasonable.
"Harmful to minor" laws prohibit showing obscenity to minors. Because it is considered harmful in and of itself. Showing pornography to minors normalizes sexual behaviors and is often used in the process of grooming.
Child advocacy groups consider showing pornography to minors as sexual abuse itself.
If someone shows a minor porn and is arrested and accused of grooming, how do they prove that they had no intention of sexually abusing the minor (when the action itself is considered sexual abuse)? Outside of education, which the law allows for, showing porn to minors will be considered grooming behavior.
Yes, it came up in a popular comic, which is probably as good an n=1 argument for it having been considered a reasonably common thing by some nontrivial set of people in the past as it gets.
There is no mention of "grooming" in the "harmful to minor laws" article you linked, nor in the "child advocacy groups" one. Conversely, the "abusers may also show..." article does not argue that each of the things mentioned on their own already amount to "grooming". Just because something is often used in the process of grooming does not mean that it amounts to grooming: Discord DMs and more generally one-on-one chats are also frequently used in the process of grooming, but most people would not use this to conclude that DMing a minor constitutes grooming.
By whom? I think this is what Wikipedia calls "weasel words". I looked this up, and it turns up that there is actually a legal definition of grooming in the US, which does not appear to cover showing porn to minors as written:
Is masturbating to pornography not sexual activity any more? And showing porn to kids is something "for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense?"
To your wider point that the Right has begun using the word grooming in wider and wider contexts, they are not the first to consider the similarities between grooming and political radicalization. Grooming itself is a broader word with multiple meanings - grooming a young politician for a higher office for example. It is not weird or purely waging a conflict for the word grooming to be used to describe persuasion, enticement, or cohesion to ingrain in children sexual politics their parents would not approve of (which is what schools are accused of.)
You cut off the sentence at a convenient point so as to change its meaning. It's "...any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense". I'm not aware that you can be charged with a criminal offense in the US for masturbating to (generally legal) pornography. (Also, let's not forget that we were originally talking about "watch drag queens", not "watch porn". If you think the kids will wank to drag queens, you seem to have a surprisingly high opinion of the attractiveness of drag queens.)
Perhaps it is, but in that case the law as written would apparently apply to someone who is enticing kids to show porn to [other?] kids. (Even if it is illegal for adults to show porn to kids, is it also illegal for kids to show porn to kids? Not that I went to school in the US, but if it is then TIL that this primary school classmate of mine would have broken US law multiple times.)
You can't just cut up a paragraph and form some sort of gestalt interpretation based on the general shape and collection of words that come up in it; usually, the ordering and relation of words actually matters in law (and other domains of life).
This interpretation strikes me as disingenuous. Someone grooming someone for higher office is not usually referred to as a "groomer", and the rhetoric around it is making it amply clear that the intended association really is "drag queen story hour = perverts wanting to fuck your kids".
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