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Last week, right-wing gadfly David Cole wrote a banger exploring the parallels between the childhood transgender craze and the “childhood sexual abuse”/“ritual satanic abuse” panics of the 1970s and 80s. Cole points out the irony of the “say groomer” obsession on the right, and the larger moral panic in right-wing spaces about how the “trans kids” phenomenon is primarily about “sexualizing children”, given that the first wave of moral panic about the molestation of children was driven primarily by leftist women, which is the same demographic now primarily driving the movement that is in turn being accused of molesting children. I think Cole makes a very convincing case that the “groomer” thing is a red herring, a distraction which has blown up into a full-blown purity-spiraling moral panic in the hothouse ecosystem of the Extremely Online right. If you think that the people teaching kids that they’re trans are primarily doing so because they’re interested in molesting kids, why are they so overwhelmingly women?
His observations ring true for me; from the constant sharing of the Auron MacIntyre sign-tapping meme and the Sam Hyde quote, to Pizzagate and the obsession with Epstein, the right wing is proving that it’s every bit as susceptible to purity spirals and moral panics as the left wing. And as Cole points out, it’s especially odd because the “groomer” panic on the right is itself a response to the “trans kids will all kill themselves unless we affirm them” panic on the left. The “groomer” panic also features the same obnoxious and cancerous motte-and-bailey strategic-equivocation tactics that rat-adjacent rightists despise so much when it’s used against them; figures like James Lindsay, Rod Dreher, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene, are all involved in a linguistic shell game, wherein they use a word which they know for a fact is supposed to refer to grooming children for direct sexual abuse, and when pressed they retreat into “well, they’re saying that children have a sexual identity, which is kind of like sexualizing them, which is the same thing that child molesters do.”
There are certain topics that I won’t publicly touch even in a space like this; I’ve thought about one day trying my hand at starting a Substack and joining the right-wing online commentary/content-creation ecosystem, and there are certain subjects where I fear that if I deviate too much from the party line, I will be cast out into the outer depths before I even begin. The whole issue of child sexuality, how it relates to teen sexuality, whether or not queer theorists want to rape kids, etc., seems like the most high-voltage of any of those third rails. Being seen as an apologist for child molestation is a hell of an accusation to face, no matter how specious and lacking in credibility, and it’s nice to see a writer with some level of clout in right-wing commentary stick his neck out there and identify this moral panic for what it is.
I’m even hesitant to offer too much more of my own larger commentary on the issue, but I wanted to put this piece out there for commentary, particularly for those who do take the “groomer” thing more seriously than I do.
There are some in the Dissident Right that counter-signal the conservative moral panic for the reasons you allude to. The DR is not conservative, so when and if it finds itself sharing the exact same rhetoric as the conservative boomerwaffen, some hesitancy is warranted. Especially because there is a bunch of Q-Anon nonsense among that demographic, which is adjacent to the "pedophilic elite" conspiracy, which is in turn adjacent to "groomer" rhetoric. Your enemies are going to use their full power to tie the "groomer" rhetoric to Q-Anon, and I've already seen that comparison made more than once.
Yesterday I found myself thinking about how tragic it is that the rainbow, a solar symbol with a rich history of meaning, is now appropriated for gay and trans activism and you can't see a rainbow without identifying with or against the movement. You could say "they shouldn't have done that, that's an unfair move to take a neutral symbol and use it to rally a cause", but they did and it's extremely effective. It's the work of the Symbol-Manipulators that Hlynka consistently underestimates. I think this is why the accusation of a conservative "moral panic" usually comes across as concern-trolling, because where and how exactly are conservatives supposed to provide pushback in similar measure?
One of the most effective and prolific tricks of the LGBTQ movement is to use the word "phobic" to denounce, insult, and shame their opponents by associating their beliefs, and themselves personally, as pathological. You're transphobic. You could write a post breaking out the dictionary definition of a 'phobia' and say "Ghee, you all on the LGBTQ+ community should stop accusing conservatives of transphobia, because their beliefs don't really describe the dictionary definition of a phobia." I think you would appreciate how feckless that would be, and if it's effective why would you expect them to not use the term? Or do you just accept that the LGBTQ movement will use such rhetoric to extreme effectiveness, but you think its opponents should be more principled and consult the dictionary before they engage with in-kind rhetoric?
I do endorse the groomer rhetoric because it's actually engaging in the debate on a symbolic level in the way progressives have only been able to since the conservative defeat on gay marriage. I don't think it's a moral panic for conservatives to appreciate the symbolic humiliation of drag queen story hour:
Children learn their lessons- their notion of reality and right and wrong, through stories. A story hour is a safe place for childen to learn through stories, and furthermore the storyteller is usually a trusted figure in the community like a teacher, mayor, or president. There is something symbolically revolutionary about children sitting in a circle around a flamboyant drag queen and being told a story. That symbolically matters. As hesitant as I am to endorse the rhetoric of the boomerwaffen, I can't fault them for picking this battle and I think it's gaslighting honestly to call their discernment of a sexually-charged augmentation to a symbolically important community ritual involving children a "moral panic."
Wait, why is that unfair? People use existing imagery and ideas and recontextualize them for generating tribal division all the time. The simplest example would be school mascots and animals, but the stakes are obviously less dire in those contexts.
Moreover, you can 100% see rainbows w/o connotations of the LGBTQ+ movements, and that's in children's books and media. And before someone jumps at trying to tell me this is a sign of attempting to groom kids, no, the ones I'm referring to are shown at a beautiful part of nature. I worked at places that used rainbows on the walls of the rooms where children were kept for this exact reason.
But even discounting the LGBTQ+ movements, I see little importance placed on the rainbow among adults. It's nice to look at, but I think there's a reason the "double rainbow all the way" guy went viral - everyone found his fascination abnormal and funny.
Sorry I think it was unclear, I don't think it was unfair I think it's how you win a culture war. You do it by changing the meaning of symbols and words, or stretching them here and there to suit the battle you are fighting at the time. People complain about the culture changing the meaning of words and symbols, they don't realize it's the reverse: you change the meaning of words and symbols in order to change the culture. I don't oppose that, I recognize the reality of it. It's why I would usually dismiss progressives as concern trolling when they break out a dictionary to test if it's really grooming. The correct response to that is "Ok, groomer" and I think that is going to work.
That's a stretch. If you polled people with a rainbow color array and said "What does this mean?" 20 years ago, do you accept that would be radically different than the association people would have with it now? 50 years ago?
You said it, I provided a modern counter-example.
20 years ago was 2003, three years after The University of Hawaii changed its sports teams' name to "Warriors" from "Rainbow Warriors", initially defended as avoiding confusion with the gay rights movement, so even then, it seems like people thought of the flag that way. They might not have included the "Trans" or "Queer" part of it, but the sentiment is the same.
50 years ago was 1973, which was before the use of the rainbow flag as an LGBT symbol, so yeah, I guess you're correct on that one.
"Rainbow Warrior" was the name of the first flagship of I-can't-believe-it's-not-ecoterrorism group Greenpeace, bought and renamed in 1978. At the time, the rainbow represented peace and nature, and the choice of name was inspired by a fake Native American legend on that theme. Greenpeace continue to use rainbows on and off in that way (e.g. in their maritime pennant). Rainbow flags identical to the gay flag except for "PEACE" written across them were still being used as a non-LGBT-specific peace symbol in Cambridge UK as late as 2002, although the gay meaning was the primary one by then.
OG Rainbow Warrior was sunk in port by French special forces in 1985, and Greenpeace bought the second Rainbow Warrior in 1987 and the third in 2011 - at this date they still felt for whatever reason that there was no risk of being confused with an LGBT group. The rainbows painted on the first (I couldn't find a colour photo) and second Rainbow Warrior don't look like the gay flag though.
tl;dr - rainbow flags were being used by other hippy-adjacent groups before they became gay flags, and the older meaning has not fully been lost
Here in Italy I still see them used that way, if it matters.
That is interesting. I suspect it reflects less-than-complete Americanisation of Italian leftism - I don't think you could get away with a rainbow peace flag in an English-speaking country in 2023.
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