Kind of weird the one political development of the past decade I haven’t seen the QAnon types attribute to elite child prostitution rings is the party-discipline parliamentization of the US Congress, given the U.K. investigation into similar things a few years ago touched on party whips using “dirt books” of secrets to blackmail MPs into toeing the line

I dunno. It would certainly be weird if there weren’t youth brothels in the capital of the greatest empire the world has ever known. And I mean, it probably connects to people you’ve heard. Given Jefferey Epstein. Given how our sitting president sourced his companions from NYC “modeling studios” in the ‘80s, srsly.

But that’s what it looks like. It’d be a Georgetown townhouse or a NoVa mansion or a Silver Spring penthouse, not the basement of a busy public pizza parlor, what the fuck, numbskulls. And that’s speaking as someone who’s actually known a pizza place that had slaves in the basement. (The owner brought over guys from his old country village, took their passports, and gave them $8/day as cooks)

I think these folk panics seem to serve the purpose of mythologically concretizing forces that are too abstract for the people to congeal against directly. Like I think in the ‘80s, day care workers were NOT in fact abusing children as part of satanic rituals. I think that was transposed from the underlying Christian conservative concern “the decline of traditional religion and rise of working mothers threatens our ability to shape children to reproduce our society as is”.

But who do you punish for that? What law do you charge them with? How do you create a spectacular enough narrative to make working mothers feel abusively neglectful? So, the myth steps in, to concretize things and provide scapegoats.

Something you learn looking into the hounding of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing is that anti-gay repression was understood as a play to the working-class who understood queer shit as like “part of rich toffs’ decadent leisure for which they take and consume our sons”. Which given how class stratification and rent boys and rough trade work, hm ok (there was a big male brothel scandal in 1889 London that started with a 15 year old messenger boy found carrying the absurd sum of fourteen shillings and eventually threatened to tangle up the Crown Prince), but it’s hard to miss that that’s also a transparent concretization of capitalist exploitation