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Supporting kids' rights to have a say in their identity (i.e. puberty blockers for potentially trans kids) is grooming to them because they see it as the adults pushing that on them.
And then once the term got around they revived the good old "gays are all pedos" shit and started applying it there too.
And leftists support LGBT people, so "naturally" they support grooming, which makes them groomers.
In addition to what everyone else has said:
its a coordinated lie pushed by the media that all conservatives just accept whether they know its a lie or not and apparently its working really well
honestly i think it's almost exactly the same situation as critical race theory as a culure war buzzword
even the ones that don't believe it's real phenomenon will happily take the excuse to kill people
I think there's a big dumb reason that explains a lot and it's when boomers learn a new word. They overuse and overapply it until they completely ruin the word. It can no longer be used for its original intention.
They did this with the word "triggered".
I think a lot of analysis people put forward on this is completely fucking wrong. It's not really projection, it's strategic and carefully thought through by far right strategists and thinktanks who are the real vanguard of the far right movement.
The tactic is about tapping into deep seated insecurities that people have and weaponising those insecurities into tools of the movement.
Most of this has been about targeting people who are 40+ in age. Everyone above a certain age threshold can see very clearly that younger people have a drastically different worldview compared to them. This needs answering within society otherwise these people will be forced to come to terms with the fact that Gen X and Boomers had drastically different material conditions that resulted in their massively different views compared to Millenials and Gen Z.
Bring in the grooming myth. Young people are gayer and "woke", why? Because the left has GROOMED the youth via academia and WOKE IDEOLOGY.
You explain away the differences of views in society and you weaponise it into a PROTECT THE YOUNG tool. This turns your reactionary movement of proto-fascists into crusaders that believe what they're doing is good and right and for a good reason.
Yeah. "Groomer" is not an accusation really, it's a fatwah.
To dovetail into your excellent comment, this is entirely anecdotal but I think the (white, Christian) age 40+ crowd is also also seeing what they consider their core religious beliefs and values not getting picked up by younger generations. It's been the case in the US that younger generations aren't as Christian as their parents for a long time, but this is really accelerating at a breakneck pace now.
Evangelical Christian parents are hyper focused on keeping their kids indoctrinated for as long as they possibly can. There are a number of reasons for this - social reproduction, status in their community for having "good Christian" kids, a fear that their kids will end up in hell, and so on (:zizek: ). But the solution for them is to keep their kids on social lockdown at least through age 18. That's one reason why schools are so much of their focus. For these parents who can't afford private school (and they're working on that with vouchers), schools are the one place they can't shelter their kids. So the idea of classrooms being a welcoming environment for LGBT kids is what draws the most of their ire. That's also why they will fight tooth and nail for the US to continue all our evil policies regarding how anyone under 18 is basically the personal property of their parents. Start talking about how kids should have rights that even parents can't abridge, and hoo boy you will see the Evangelicals get whipped up in a fury of anger even more intense than their hatred of wearing masks for the purposes of public safety
Just look at the current reactionary furor over Boston Children's Hospital. They cannot conceive of a young person having some agency and wanting to make a choice for themselves about their own body. Nope! To them the parents are the final arbiters for their kids. We all understand why it's important to make sure, for example, trans kids can confide in a teacher at school. It's usually someone saying "my home situation is horrible I can't be myself there like I can in school". But these parents see it as some teacher is directly violating their "rights" as a parent. Same situation, two very different interpretations of it.
As always, death to America.
The Pizza Gate, then Q Anon adjacent movement turned into "save the children" from trafficking, which is an ostensibly good cause except that they don't seek out actual traffickers or predators, they merely weaponize the accusations against their political and cultural opponents. Who could disagree with stopping child abuse after all, it's a powerful rhetorical bludgeon when people aren't really following what's going on. Epstein stuff definitely added fuel to the fire too
I don't think you should underestimate how much Covid has united cranks and reactionaries of all sorts against the corrupt and incompetent Democrats and the liberal and sadly progressive signifiers they hide behind. Formerly apolitical young people have been swept up in it, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, Q-anon, anti-groomer, homophobia, transphobia is all at a fever pitch and forming a political coalition.
Their narrative is that the liberals are making all the kids trans and/or gay to sexually abuse and traffic them, hence the "grooming" accusations. Like you say, most predators and abusers are on the right and in power, whereas actual progressives have basically no power whatsoever.
Btw expect it to pick up the pace now that schools are opening and kids start getting the “gay std” monkeypox. Some of the craziest psychos like MTG have already started claiming kids are getting it from being raped by gay men and it’s only gonna become a wider talking point as things get worse.
There's an interesting mirror to US funded anticommunist strategies in the third world, which often mobilised false accusations of sex crimes (for example, that communist women would chop off men's dicks in satanic rituals) to justify and win support for terror campaigns. Seems like that might be a way of accounting for it considering that key figures in the contemporary US right have intelligence agency ties and where their funding comes from
(for example, that communist women would chop off men’s dicks in satanic rituals) to justify and win support for terror campaigns.
:sicko-fem:
I think this was mentioned on the chapo episode about the Jakarta Method book
That's where I read about it. It's an excellent book btw!
Yeah they just picked something bad to accuse not just the left but literally every sexual minority off so they'd have a thin pretext to justify mass murder. It's just baby's first blood libel for the 21st century.
100% this. Last century, the Nazis used the same groomer rhetoric even prior to the Holocaust. It's the same fascist chuds, ofc they'd say the same exact shit with the same tactics and horrific ends in mind.
Grooming. Pshhh. If you saw my scraggly bearded snaggle toed friends you'd never accuse them of grooming or hygiene or anything