fascists really love charges of pedophilia. explaining why is really unpleasant. but I'll do so briefly. 1

It's important that the accusation is almost always "pedophilia" rather than child abuse. Generally our society doesn't care much about child abuse, which is endemic and generally committed by parents, family, friends, often against kids who aren't seen as sympathetic.(LGBT kids)

"Pedophiles" in contrast are monstrous deformed strangers who it's easy to hate, not so much for what they do (again, our society broadly doesn't care about harms to children) but because of who they are.

pedophilia as an identity can be and often is conflated with and attached to the identity of other hated identities; Jewish people, Black people, LGBT people. thus the appeal for fascists.

leveraging stigma associated with marginalized identities is central to fascist propaganda. pedophilia is especially effective

because it's linked on one side to other marginalized identities and on the other to the actual problem of child abuse (which again, fascists don't care about at all, as proved by the fact that they are focused on smearing innocent people rather than on listening to victims.)

and obviously it's such a volatile charge that it's very difficult to refute, because even saying, "I've been charged with this and it's false" makes people recoil.

obviously if GOP cared about sexual violence they would not have nominated Donald Trump.

but even writing a thread like this can easily make you vulnerable to smears and attacks.

which is especially bad because making discussions of child abuse completely toxic in this way also makes it really difficult to help victims.

the best way to help young people is generally to provide them with more resources and information, not to use them in moral panics against one's political enemies.

somehow I don't think Ron Johnson supports lowering the voting age, comprehensive sex ed, or no questions asked housing for runaways.

I guess that's /end.