Some reality checks:
1. White suburban women flocked to the Qanon cult during the pandemic:
It’s ironic but not actually counterintuitive, therefore, that pedophilia became a source of stability for a segment of our disoriented populace—as well as a much-needed basis for unquestionably correct moral action
2. Unsurprisingly, there is also a pandemic of pedophilia in conservative-leaning churches worldwide… because where else would you go if you were a burgeoning pedophile looking for victims and a community that would do almost any unimaginable thing to avoid hurting their brand? We’re all familiar with the disgrace of the Catholic church, but the problem also seems to exist wherever conservative institutions are more concerned with maintaining bigoted views dictating that women and children are subservient to men and where these institutions prioritize protecting their reputation and funding over protecting those same women and children:
The Southern Baptist Convention was forced to admit last year ahead of its massive Dallas convention that the church had long "wronged women, abused women, silenced women, objectified women." …
More than 220 leaders, including ministers, pastors and Sunday school teachers from the Southern Baptist Convention's 47,000 churches have been convicted of sex crimes, which included disturbing and heart-wrenching anecdotes of church affiliates raping young children.
Some victims were as young as 3 years old at the time they were molested or raped.
3. Heterosexual men (often socially conservative) who prey on very young women (and often girls) have always seemed as American as apple pie and shrugged off as “just guys being guys,” with men like Donald Trump and Matt Gaetz openly treating it like sport. These attitudes permeate the frat-bro, misogynistic, machismo-fueled lifestyles that are more often the rule than the exception in rural and suburban America especially, where conservative Southern values have been exported as “culture” throughout the country by bad actors like Fox. But the reverse simply isn’t the case:
In reality, abuse of boys by gay pedophiles is rare, and the abuse of girls by lesbians is rarer still.
4. More than ever, conservatives live entirely cocooned inside their own cultural universe and have little need or desire to look outside of it. This was by design and they claim to be proud of it. But therefore, so many of their complaints about the things they see around them are actually in many ways simply projection. For example, they unconvincingly suddenly “realize” their God King was a friend of Jeffrey Epstein and probably a pedophile. They see pedophiles being outed at their churches, but frankly many of them knew it was going on and didn’t raise a stink. Southern hospitality and all. And so, subconsciously crushed with guilt and self-loathing at an obviously repulsive culture they created all on their own, they project their fears onto everyone outside their bubble in ways that to any reasonable person appear simply… delusional. The same is true of their rhetoric about “Nazi leftists,” BLM and Antifa activist violence, and so on. It’s just them looking in the mirror and not being able to handle what they see.
“What Republicans did so successfully, starting with critiquing the media and then creating our own outlets, became a bubble onto itself,” said Ross Douthat, the 32-year-old New York Times columnist.
“The right is suffering from an era of on-demand reality,” is how 30-year-old old think tanker and writer Ben Domenech put it.
Citing Kael, one of the most prominent Republicans in the George W. Bush era complained: “We have become what the left was in the ’70s — insular.”