Note: This essay is entirely about child abuse.
Note: This is mostly a political essay, and it shouldn't be confused with anything authoritative on the experiences of abused children — which I only know secondhand. For something along those lines, I'd recommend Barry Lopez' devastating essay "Sliver of Sky”.
Among the many strengths of the first season of True Detective, a less appreciated asset is that the conspiracy motivating the show is — in at least some sense — believable. Although the evil has all the style of a Bosch, its actual mechanisms remain practical. The scope of the case is not global but provincial. The conspiratorial network links aristocrats with untouchables and brings a whole new meaning to the republic of cousins. To prey on women and children, men need only access and authority. In one reading of the show, the real villain is a school voucher scheme. It is perhaps the best critique of the religious right made in this century.
The story is caught out of time, but comfortably so. One half of the investigation takes place in 1995, at the tail end of the Satanic panic. The other half plays out in 2012 and seems to predict — or even program — the obsessions of modern conspiracy. The season was occasionally maligned by high-brow reviewers, but these critics could not see — could not yet see — that the show was a fairly robust piece of historiography. I can’t think of an earlier work — except those works of actual conspiracy theory — to bridge these panics.
Amid the ongoing shitstorm over the Epstein files, it’s hard not to savor the comeuppance of the conspiratorial right. These people spent years spinning grand narratives about pedophilic elites, only to backpedal as soon as it seemed that their elite were the pedophiles. They ginned up all this intrigue only to get caught in the machinery. You almost feel bad for them.
Almost. I — for one — am absolutely delighted to see rightwing influencers freeze up as their own mobs turn on them. These people are ontologically evil, and I wish them all the suffering I can legally put to ink. I don’t mind if the pain of your enemies doesn’t amuse you. If anything, that’s probably for the best. But I do hope you can see that the undoing of your rivals might carry some consequence.
Because of where I live and how old I am, I know a lot of Democratic staffers and strategists. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve asked them how their offices are handling this Epstein controversy. Each of them has explained that their young colleagues are eager to throw some mud, but their older leadership is reluctant to dirty their hands. The general consensus is that this is a distraction from kitchen table issues. At some point, you have to wonder when these people last sat at a kitchen table.
I tend to think that their reluctance is more like a learned helplessness. For the past decade, liberal individuals and institutions have been slandered as perpetrators of some vast conspiracy to harm children. This has been the conceit of most rightwing politics from outright conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon to culture war campaigns against Bud Light and Disney to astroturfed meltdowns over drag queen story hours and LEGO sets.
The conventional wisdom is that a political actor — in the face of such accusations — should do his best to ignore them. By engaging with the accusations, this thinking goes, the slandered only raises the salience of the issue. Unfortunately, this is a terrible strategy. In an oversaturated information landscape, only a few issues are going to break through to the median consumer. The abuse of children will always be one of them.
Let me make this point through another reference to a police procedural. I’ve recently decided to watch all twenty-six seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and this has given me lots of time to think about denial. I’m thinking less about the psychological denial of repressed memories or the legal denial of airtight alibis and more about the rhetorical denial of interrogation rooms. What does a denial do? How does a denial work?
In almost any investigation of a child’s murder, the detectives begin with the child’s grieving father as their prime suspect, so the tension of the first act is to figure out if his grief is authentic. The detectives do this by bracing the man, through insinuation or intimidation, and seeing how he responds.
If his denial is meek — “Are you suggesting I had something to do with this?” or “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer . . .” — the cops decide they like him for it. But if his denial is bold — to leap from his chair or to upend a table or to try to swing at the questioning officer — they figure he’s not their guy.
No defense attorney on earth would condone this strategy — any lawyer’s advice in any situation is to shut up and ask for a lawyer. But most Americans are not lawyers, and many of them have been trained on decades of Law and Order or similar stories. The average American knows that some guilt-innocence problems require honor-shame solutions. (This is why I half-believe that presidential debates should do away with all fact checkers and instead keep a set of dueling pistols at the ready.)
When liberals are accused of perpetrating some conspiracy against children, their instinct is to ignore the accusations or wave them aside as baseless. Methinks the lady dothn’t protest enough. Let them realize what every military-political theorist from Washington to Mao has known, that the best defense is a good offense, that the worst defense is no offense at all. When liberals are accused of perpetrating some conspiracy against children, let them do what they should have always done.
Let them tell the truth.
The first truth is that the conspiracies are real. There are powerful, globe-spanning organizations that facilitate child abuse. Groups of men — otherwise well-respected — prey on young children. They hunt with near impunity, shroud their sadism in ritual, and shield one another from consequence. Over the course of generations, they’ve loosed their appetites on countless American children.
The second truth is that the cabals are not hidden. Child abusers seek only access to children and authority over them, and they gravitate to organizations that offer those amenities. The right would have you believe that the conspiracies are invisible or peculiar, but the Illuminati doesn’t run summer camps, and drag queens don’t coach Little League. The simple fact is that no institution has facilitated more child rape than the Roman Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts of America. To pretend otherwise is at best misguided and at worst misdirection.
The third truth is that the American right revels in child abuse. I’m not talking about some disinvestment injurious to minors — food stamp cuts and school book bans — I mean real, kinetic, hands-on-kids child abuse. If you give them a chance, they’ll tell you so.
No one beats more children than the states of Mississippi and Texas. Every year, Bible Belt states beat tens of thousands of children. They beat children as young as three years old. They beat children with special needs. They beat children for sport. In any other context, this would be illegal — to strike a free adult would be at least simple assault, to strike a prisoner would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment — but an agent of the state putting his hands on a child is not only allowed but encouraged.
I should note that every state that facilitates the beating of children by government employees is a state under the complete control of the Republican Party. This abuse only happens because Republicans like it.
This gets passed off as some folksy oddity — akin to the nuns who rapped a ruler across my grandfather’s knuckles back in the ‘40s — but the reality of school beatings is startling. When I was in college, my friends would occasionally tell me what it was like to grow up under the specter of this ritualized abuse. One boy told me that he had to change high schools after watching his teachers beat so many of his Black classmates. One girl told me about a vice principal pulling her from class, taking her to a windowless room, bending her over a desk, and paddling her seventeen-year-old body.
The fourth truth is that child abuse is profitable. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the so-called troubled teen industry, a broad constellation of youth residential treatment centers, wilderness programs, boot camps, and therapeutic boarding schools. Many of these programs essentially function to outsource child abuse from parents to for-profit businesses. Children are abducted, restrained, drugged, stripped, starved, tortured, raped, and murdered. In exchange for their services, these programs receive about $23 billion of public funding every year.
All this is to say that the large-scale abuse of American children has been institutionalized or industrialized or both. But none of this should distract from the fact that the majority of child abuse remains individualized, interpersonal, or — to use the clinical term — intimate. A leading study of juvenile victimization found that 33 percent of sex offenses are perpetrated by a family member and that 58 percent of sex offenses are perpetrated by an acquaintance outside the family, compared to the 4 percent of sex offenses perpetrated by a stranger. No one has more constant access to a child — or more complete authority over a child — than the child’s own family.
The grim reality of child abuse offers one more reason to be wary of the conservative family model. Gather together some of their beliefs. First, as Margaret Thatcher put so succinctly — that there is no such thing as society, that there are individual men and women and there are families. Second, as modern conservatives have come to demand — that parents should enjoy pure dominion over their children. Third, as postliberal conservatives have come to openly declare — that husbands should expect the subservience of their wives. These claims, structured together, describe the rightwing ideal of the American family, insular and sovereign.
For the predator, this kind of family is a miniaturization of the conspiracies described earlier. It offers access to children and authority over them. It fends off any sort of accountability. It organizes itself and reorganizes itself, shapes itself in its own interest.
It should be surprising to no one that a society so dedicated to maintaining the ideal conditions for child abuse also produces so many child abusers, and this groundswell is reflected at the highest levels of the conservative movement. As Samantha Hancox-Li wrote earlier this summer:
Dennis Hastert, Republican Speaker of the House, was a pedophile. Roy Moore, Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, was a pedophile. R.J. May, Republican State Representative, was a pedophile. John Jessup, Republican County Commissioner, was a pedophile. Mark Foley, Republican Member of Congress, sent sexually explicit messages to teenagers. Matt Gaetz, Republican Member of Congress, had sex with a 17 year old—count that one if you like. Edward Coristine, one of Elon Musk's handpicked DOGE staffers, founded an image-sharing website tailor-made for sharing child porn. The list goes on and on.
. . .
There are not this many pedophiles in every political party. Both sides are not the same. When Slate went looking for an equivalent list of Democratic pedophiles, they were able to come up with: a random donor, the head of a local Young Democrats, and Anthony Weiner's sexts.
It’s terrible that one half of the American government is so thoroughly infested by pedophiles. And it’s made worse by the fact that their perversions are so clearly reflected in policy. Republican lawmakers consistently defend the legality of child marriage. Earlier this month, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that a Republican state senator weakened age of consent laws after his family member was charged with raping a child.
I could spend a great deal of time pulling many more examples of this predation, but my week and your day have already been ruined.
Besides, the real question is what to do about it.
When conservatives accuse liberals of hurting children, liberals should not keep quiet. They might consider the accusation a distraction — it likely is — but they should recognize that it’s an effective one.
If this were the nineteenth century, the appropriate response would be to actually throw down the gauntlet. In the ensuing duel, the insulted should not delope but actually aim to kill. But this isn’t the nineteenth century, and there’s little honor left.
The next best thing is to see the insinuation as projection and to meet the baseless accusation with a real indictment. The political operative should have already prepared a battery of examples, and he should deliver this litany with real hatred.
When Greg Abbott persecuted trans children, the appropriate response was not to fact-check his claims or to explain the social construction of gender or even to make some play at parental rights in the face of government overreach. No, the appropriate response was to remind the public that Greg Abbott presides over the state-funded abuse of tens of thousands of children every year. Tell the most horrific stories you can find. Pick the real number and double it. Make him correct you. Make him say: “Actually, we only beat seventeen thousand students last year.” See how that plays.
When Tate Reeves pushed for a parent’s bill of rights, do not merely ask what the rights of a child should be. Instead, ask why thousands of Mississippi children have been married off in recent years. The man has three daughters — ask him how old they should be when they marry. Ask why there is no minimum age for marriage in Mississippi. Ask if a twelve-year-old bride is acceptable to him. Ask if he thinks a fifth grader is marriage material. The slippery slope is only a fallacy to people who know what a fallacy is. Ask Tate Reeves if he would marry a fetus.
These people hate you, and you need to find the courage to hate them back.
If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your children.