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Notes -
And In Today's Round of America's Favorite Game: Is There Any Group That Doesn't Eventually Have a Sex Scandal?
A Right Wing hanger-on of Milo and Fuentes, Ali Alexander (nee Akbar) appears to have propositioned 15 year old boys for nudes and sex, using access to his "network" of right wing activists and donors as a lure to get budding right wing boys to fuck him. Thoughts on Sammy Diddles Jr.'s little sex scandal:
-- Ali appears to be a victim of the demand for extremists outpacing the supply, with left wing outlets hyping him as a major figure, while I've never heard of him before. I'm not that into the online DR, and he does seem to have had enough friends to hang out with Fuentes and Milo, and to get outed by Milo on his podcast. Milo stated that he chose to out Ali because Ali had used Milo's name as part of his pitch, Ali was telling young (presumably queer?) Republican activists that they could get introductions into Milo's circles if they boned Ali. He is cited as having "founded" Stop the Steal, but I'm not clear on exactly what that means. It's not clear to me that, eg, Donald Trump or Kelly Conway let alone Ron DeSantis had any idea who this guy was. Milo and Fuentes are themselves way overhyped, being fairly comic and unimportant clowns. Predictably, when a political activist gets embroiled in scandal he is always listed by his enemies as the single most important member of their opposition, representative of the entire category. And when one group is under pressure, they tend to target the outliers among their opponents to take off pressure. @HlynkaCG 's theorem that when you get a lot of flak you're over the target, as the Groomer accusation becomes ever more prominent. The problem being that no one has actually ever run the numbers to my satisfaction to show who does it more, and if someone did it would be No True Scotsman'd or "That's just what is reported on"'d into oblivion anyway.
-- Ali Alexander's entire career appears to be further proof that nowhere is Affirmative Action as aggressively practiced as among Right Wing political groups. He was a convicted felon, with no notable academic or business achievements, who somehow became a prominent enough conservative voice during the Obama years to get the attention of activists and donors. Be Black and a conservative, you only have to be about as clever as your average twitter ReplyGuy (let alone your average Mottizen or SSCel) to make it to the Big Time. Clarence Thomas, the Hermanator (RIP king), and Candace Owens are the big dogs; but the tendency runs all the way down to the college Republicans, where every school I ever attended had one Black Conservative who made his whole personality being Black and conservative. It was enough of a gimmick that at 21 it would invariably get him included in every student delegation to meet Newt Gingrich or whichever other red potentate was visiting the school that day, where a conservative white guy would have to win an SGA election or publish a law review note to get that same spot. The sheer rarity of Blacks in conservative circles mean that if conservatives choose to care about representation, they gotta take whoever they can get. The result is that the conservative critique of affirmative action is most true among conservatives themselves: never trust conservative Blacks, they have high odds of being morons or grifters because they need almost no qualifications. Being Black and conservative is the single easiest grift in America.
-- Does any organized group avoid child sex scandals over the long term? I'm a Catholic, and I've been enduring the pedo jokes for most of my life flung against my church. Only to watch as Babtists, non denominational groups, men high in academic and artistic circles, and of course politicians and teachers get consistently caught up in the same scandals. What is the solution to all this? Disapproving of homosexuality doesn't seem to work. Disapproving of all sex doesn't seem to work. The kinds of protections that need to be put in place to keep kids from ever being in positions of risk undermine youth mentorship, they force kids to lean purely on increasingly disjointed and "mixed" family lives when they have no male leadership outside the family. I grew up with older male role models all around me, from Scoutmasters and Priests to coworkers and bosses, in addition to my father. How would I have grown up if I had been isolated from those men by barriers of propriety, and if like so many boys I grew up without a father? How do we raise kids when we must protect them from virtually all men? The only solution that occurs to me is to avoid all organized structures, avoid giving men power, but that seems too pat an answer, an anarchist panacea that works in a smoke filled dorm room.
-- The whole thing strikes me as so sordid, precisely because the boys targeted were so close to being of age. I just can't understand it. Why risk literal federal prison soliciting lewd photos from a 17 year old? It is beyond understanding for me that Ali Alexander couldn't wait a year if he was so very enamored of the boy. This goes in general, I can sort of understand when Pedos or "MAPs" (vomit) say they're attracted to minors in that I can imagine being attracted to things I'm not attracted to, after all lots of people are attracted to things like men or fat women or instagram face that I am not attracted to, I can't understand when they say they can't resist the urge. How is "just don't!" not an effective solution? Maybe I'm speaking from privilege in that I haven't had trouble dating in so long (thanks honey!) that I'm not familiar with the feeling of a dry spell anymore? Maybe we need to work not particularly on why fucking minors is bad, but instead on building willpower. Maybe we just need to work on teaching people to delay gratification and pass the marshmallow test, so that people get "tempted" and just say no. That also seems too pat an answer, willpower seems like it will work on a bodybuilding forum but not in real life.
Having worked for the Boy Scouts for 3 years and attended more youth protection training sessions than I can count, I consider myself to have at least a fair to middling knowledge of the subject, and it basically boils down to vulnerability. When abusers use the Boy Scouts to target victims, they aren't looking at the popular kid who advances regularly and has a ton of merit badges and serves in leadership positions and enjoys long hikes. No; they're looking for the kid who's unpopular and stuck at Second Class and comes from an unstable family situation and whom both youth and adult leaders tend to roll their eyes at because he's always complaining about something. It's the same dynamic that allowed Jerry Sandusky to run rampant in the Second Mile.
Now zoom out and look at the social ecosystem for minors as compared with 18 year olds. What are the social dynamics of high school versus college or working full time? While I can't speak from personal experience, I can understand how the closed environment and limited independence of high school could cause a sense of alienation that wouldn't be as likely to arise in an environment without the same level of overt social stratification. Any public figure with a young fanbase knows on some level that there are a lot of disaffected kids who look up to them. This might even be more relevant in politics, considering that political figures diagnose societal problems and often propose solutions, rather than simply providing a means of living vicariously.
So you have a 16 year old boys who's having a rough go of it in high school and spends a ton of time online in lieu of actual in-person social contact and becomes convinced that wokism and liberal politics are the cause of his problems, and looks up to Ali Alexander. Then Alexander starts sending him DMs and the kid's now getting direct recognition from someone he greatly admires. And then he follows the routing of a real groomer and starts testing boundaries to see how the kid will react while he still has plausible deniability, before finally making a move. While this playbook is certainly possible with someone who is of age, it's much harder to get a read on their social situation and much less likely that it will be of concern to them.
Seems to me like the test would be ‘what do grooming rates look like for teenagers who aren’t in a conventional high school situation’.
That leaves us with 19 year olds and homeschoolers. The latter are an atypical population in lots of other ways, so what do grooming rates look like among 19 year olds compared to 17 year olds?
Define grooming rates?
I want to say really high, but I’m thinking of a broad range of relationships. College freshmen sleeping with seniors, shift managers screwing the new employee. A whole series of porn tropes that are (hopefully) overrepresented. It’s not that these all have to be exploitative—but I would start from a point of suspicion.
The law sets a clear line for grooming when it comes to children. Step beyond that protection, and angling for sex is more or less legal by default, even in very sketchy situations. At what point would you say that it’s still grooming?
That’s a fair point.
If we pick a major state with an age of consent below 18 and limit it to sexual interactions with adults over 21, we might be able to create a more-or-less reasonable definition.
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