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I'm going to say something I can't truly back up but I'm noticing the belief forming so I'll throw it out there
It says something about the psychology of this particular ideology that so many prominent lefty leaders turn out to be rapists and/or pedophiles. It genuinely now seems like there are fewer such leaders, political or otherwise, in the last 100 years that DON'T have such credible allegations than those that do, now.
Likewise, look at the most credibly implicated parties on the alleged Epstein list, and note their overall political bent (Looking dead straight at you, CHOMSKY.)
Like, here's the most absurd way I can characterize it:
Even the Boogeyman of their entire political movement, Adolf Hitler himself, did not rape anybody.
I don't think Vladimir Putin has been credibly accused of rape either.
Trump has of course been accused of rape and other forms of sex assault (and yes, "grab 'em by the pussy" counts in its own way) but I am genuinely pretty sure he has never forcibly penetrated anyone in his life, I read him as his ego requiring him to believe he successfully seduced someone.
And how many male feminist types have been outed as sex pests in the last 10 years alone?
And no, I'm absolutely, positively not saying "right wingers are less likely to commit rape or practice pedophilia."
I think I'm gesturing off in the direction of "right wingers tend not to elevate rapists and pedos as leaders, and are certainly NOT prone to censoring or rewriting history to cover up such traits in their leaders." And perhaps a side of "Right wing leaders tend not to use their power to indulge that particular cruelty, despite the various other atrocities they will impose."
Happy to accept some correction on this point, but Googling (in an incognito window) terms like "Did Pinochet/Franco/Napoleon/Bolsonaro rape anyone" usually turns up results related to torture tactics used by their regime and not acts they themselves were known for.
Well, there are allegations against a dude named Franco but he's yet another of those male feminists.
And I DID turn up some credible claims about Mussolini. We could probably argue for a few hours about whether he's truly right wing, but I will not push that button.
The better view is that the right wing equivalent is religious leaders. I don't typically indulge in the priest jokes (except the funny ones), but it's a pretty universal problem:
The Witnesses the Southern Baptists:
The pattern isn't: Left Wing political leaders engage in sex abuse because leftist libertinism. The pattern is: Religious Leaders engage in sex abuse, Left Wing political leaders are religious leaders. Leftists like Chavez are preaching a religion, an ultimate truth about Life the Universe and Everything, and once you get in that deep the sex abuse starts.
If pastors preaching chastity can get handsy, it's not the values being taught, it's the power and the hierarchy.
If we want to make that comparison, then do public school teachers, too.
This "comeback" whataboutism sucks. Priests and political activists don't have limitless access to children for 8 hours a day, 300 days a year. Of course teachers fuck kids, but on a per-hour-around-kids basis, religious leaders are in their own special class.
Catholic priests before the 2003 reforms(which cut clerical sex abuse cases down to a rounding error) did have near unlimited access to kids for enormous amounts of time, often long stretches of time.
That doesn't make sense. In what context were priests getting identical amounts of access to children as teachers?
Many Roman Catholic high schools were almost exclusively staffed by priests back in the day, so for the age range in which most of the abuse occurred, their level of access was identical. It was also common for priests to help run orphanages, institutions for troubled youth, boarding schools, youth camps, etc., giving those priests 24/7 access to kids. Most priests also have regular contact with child and teen altar servers still to this day, and it used to be unremarkable for priests to go on unsupervised trips and retreats with select male altar servers in order to help groom them for the priesthood. There were also plenty of cases of priests unofficially adopting youth from unstable homes—in some cases legitimately and in others just to abuse them. All that to say, while any individual priest might not have had as much access to kids as teachers do, there were plenty of cases where they had as much access or more.
But that's my point. Even pre 2004 the Catholic school systems I'm aware of had between 0-1 priests as teachers.
The only way to compare this is per capita hours/year with children. It's very popular on this forum to say "Public School Teachers!" As a rejoinder every time this is brought up, and it's not convincing at all.
I think the problem there is that you’re looking at the number of priests who worked closely with children in the early 2000s when the scandal broke, but you should be looking at the numbers in the 1960s and 70s when the abuses were most common. Many people don’t realize this, but the number of cases began dropping significantly already by 1985, even though it took another two decades for the coverups to become common knowledge. It was far more common for priests to work full-time outside the parish (as teachers, principals, missionaries, directors of orphanages and charities, etc.) back then, as the church wasn’t suffering from any sort of priest shortage in those days.
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