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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.
I went through training for this when I worked for the Scouts. If you even had the opportunity to commit abuse, you had already broken most of the rules we learned, which for the most part seemed pretty reasonable to me and I don't think would prevent any mentorship if followed.
No, because as your list of examples indicates, the group itself has basically nothing to do with it, except around some details. I won't pretend to be a mind reader and say why people sexually abuse children, except that, as the saying goes, "power corrupts." (Some) people will do whatever they feel like if they think they'll get away with it. Spend all your free time thinking of a justification to yourself, and you'll find one. Tell yourself enough times "how bad can it be?" and you'll start to believe it. Ideology is irrelevant, just like communist leaders often direct much consumption to themselves.
Also don't forget that caring about power, and about your own position, will always be an advantage over people who are actually selfless when it comes to taking power. Narcissists, sociopaths, and the generally power-hungry are willing and able to lie, to pretend, to work themselves into positions of trust and authority. People are willing to cover for their friends, or to maintain their own power, or for many other reasons. Again, ideology is irrelevant; in some sense, this is just one particular instantiation of "who watches the watchers?" You could also ask why some CEOs steal from their company, or why some politicians take bribes to favor one group over another, or why police abuse their authority and then cover for each other. Has anyone solved this problem?
Between these two statements I think you've struck true.
That said, cultural issues can help suppress or exacerbate these issues. In the case of the Catholic Church I feel like a major part of the problem was that the sort of Catholic who wanted to become a preist out of sincere belief was often the sort of Catholic who was the least equipped to deal with cynical status seekers and social climbers, and accordingly the upper ranks of the clergy have come to be occupied by cynical status seekers and social climbers. Again, as much as I feel like the Quokka is a bit of an overused and uncharitable meme I do think there is something to it in the sense that a lot of WEIRD acedemically-inclined types never really developed that reflexive wariness of bad actors that you see in other populations.
I agree. It's not entirely hopeless (I think the most recent 2 popes are true believers, for example) but it seems like bishops are very hit or miss.
I also wonder if this tendency of academics has any relation to the sorts of easily-abusable policies that they seem to often propose, like "believe anyone who claims to be a victim of a hate crime or sexual assault" or the general slowness on doing anything meaningful about the replication crisis, bordering on acting offended when anyone suggests that fraud and p-hacking are widespread. And seemingly unwavering trust that government bureaucracies will act as "benevolent dictators" in the interests of the people.
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