A Warning:
The "Groomer" Panic, Global War, and the Threat of Genocide in America
Highlights:
Over a period of less than three days, three separate child rapists were arrested who had made “anti-grooming” right-wing posts to social media. That’s how many drag queens were arrested for raping a child in the last five years. However, this three-for-three ratio is only for those who made such posts on social media: in one twenty-four-hour period, six separate cisgender heterosexual white Christian male child rapists were either sentenced or arrested, which is more than the number of drag queens ever arrested for sexually assaulting a child (258).
To quote Aleksandr Dugin, better known in intelligence circles as “Putin’s brain,” “Today’s Ukrainians are a race of degenerates that crawled up from the sewage. Genocide is in order.”
There are ten stages to a genocide, with stage nine being the part that involves the wide-scale killing and bloodshed that we associate with the word. At present, the United States sits comfortably at stage seven and has rapidly begun the processes of stage eight.
This is a critical disclaimer that the reader must understand:
None of this is a matter of Conservatives/Republicans being innately “bad” nor of Democrats/Liberals being “good,” or vice versa – it’s about manipulation. Very good people can be driven to do very bad things if the right psychological, cultural, and emotional triggers are pulled. To this end, it must be understood, absolutist moral terms such as good/evil only serve to further such manipulation: hence why politicians and demagogues the world over use them with such frequency.
This article details a large-scale psychological warfare operation: it’s global information warfare, and we’re all being played. Politics is a game that can easily be exploited by bad actors, predators even, using a divide and conquer strategy - and we, in the end, are the ones who are unwittingly conquered. Individual bad actors are certainly discussed, but they must be understood as the predators that they are: exceptions to the norm.
1. Background and Historical Context
Of all the social phenomena in the world, genocide and sexual abuse are two of the most poorly understood, and for good reason. No one likes to think for very long about the social and psychological factors that lead to the formation of death camps, the rape of innocent children, or related manifestations of violence and persecution. Yet, it is precisely our refusal to confront such horrific acts that has led to them being misunderstood, thereby increasing the threats they pose to civil societies. Following the genocide of the Holocaust we told ourselves “Never again,” but talk, it seems, is cheap – we are failing to meet our commitment to never allow such atrocities to be repeated: our LGBTQ+ friends and family are rapidly becoming targets of the very kinds of hatred and violence that are precursors to genocide.
According to Dr. Gregory Stanton, the world’s foremost leader on genocide, such horrors always come in stages – ten stages, in fact. Holocausts develop over time in an identifiable progression, and the same progression is evident in the study of crimes against children and persecution of minorities, especially when based on sexual orientation or gender identification. I have come to the horrible conclusion that gross and intentional disinformation about the latter is leading to the former – and if we do not immediately and irrevocably change course, then we are headed toward a humanitarian disaster of our own making.
I first met Dr. Stanton last year when we and others presented evidence of war crimes and genocide against the Hazara population of Afghanistan following the withdrawal of American forces from that country (1, 2). This was not my first experience in addressing the issue of genocide - however, genocide is not my specialty. While I have seen and worked to end genocides across the world from Latin America to East Asia, my actual expertise, training, and education lies in investigating matters of human trafficking and related phenomena, such as crimes against children, domestic violence, and sexual violence. Indeed, this knowledge was part of what first drew my attention to the crisis in Afghanistan: I was the human trafficking expert on the team, not the genocide specialist. I can’t begin to hold a candle to Dr. Stanton’s accomplishments in preventing genocide, but I do know a great deal about all kinds of abuse and sex crimes, as well as the reality of human trafficking, which, suffice it to say, is not what you see in movies like Taken or read about on Facebook statuses.
It is through this work that I first became interested in studying problems faced by the LGBT community. Much as one cannot throw a stone at an illicit massage parlor without hitting an undercover Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) agent, one cannot visit a human trafficking shelter without stumbling across a population that is disproportionately made up of sexual and gender minorities (3). Not even race accounts for predicting such vulnerability to abuse. While black individuals are overrepresented among the trafficked by a stunning two to three times their presence in the general population (4), we find that LGBT persons are represented by a factor of at least six to nine times their presence in the general American population (3, 5, 48, 49, 50), with transgender individuals facing the greatest disproportionate exposure and the most barriers to escaping trafficking scenarios (6, 50). When it comes to child sex trafficking, LGBT children are even more vulnerable than their adult peers (7, 8, 9). Further still, LGBT persons report being the victims of crimes such as domestic violence, physical assault, and sexual abuse/assault/rape at appalling rates that no other population comes close to experiencing (10, 11, 12, 13, 14).
These patterns are deeply rooted in history, and the modern anti-trafficking and child safety movement are hardly the only ones to ignore these vulnerable populations while focusing primarily on white, blonde, and blue-eyed children (15, 16, 17, 64). Weimar Germany made much the same mistake. Home to the modern world’s first gay rights movement, the new Republic did little to protect this population from the vicious character assassination of the Nazis (18). Decried as Jugendverführer and Jugendverderber, “seducer” and “corrupter” of children by the Nazi propaganda machine, queer and trans people were stereotyped as maliciously luring youth into their liberal communities. True to form, the LGBT community suffered extraordinarily under the Nazi regime, and were regarded as even inferior to the Jews in the concentration camps, being forced to wear pink triangles (19). Transgender individuals were particularly scapegoated and subjected to the harshest treatment, being described by the Nazis as “moral criminals of the worst sort” (204). Even when the war ended, those who bore the pink triangle were forced to carry out their sentences by the victorious allies for “indecency” under a Nazi law that remained in force until 1969 (193).
The historical timeline reveals how the targeting of this community was instrumental to the eventual extermination campaigns against other “undesirables.” On May 6, 1933, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the leading institute for LGBT rights, research on transgender issues, and sexual education, was burned to the ground by Nazi browncoats. The books from its vast libraries – which had previously been banned by the regime (20) – were burned in the streets[1]. The identities of LGBT individuals found at the institution led to Hitler’s purge during the Night of the Long Knives, after which the named persons found themselves in either slave-labor or death camps – all under the guise of protecting Aryan children. It would be over two more years before the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, and five more before the horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938.
2. Myths and Misconceptions
Today, the LGBT community is under renewed attack – they’re “groomers,” according to the new fascists, much as they were “seducers” and “corrupters” to the Nazis of old. Grooming, of course, is very real: but it’s also a complicated, multi-stage process, something that this simplistic and naïve propaganda overlooks. Grooming occurs over months or even years, not in the hour or two that Drag Queen Story Hour lasts. Moreover, it involves extensive trust-building and isolation of the target being groomed. Flying a Pride flag or having a book about a penguin’s two dads on a school bookshelf isn’t an act of grooming – the fact that someone would even make such a spurious claim is a strong indication that they have absolutely no idea of what they are speaking about.
Moreover, there’s no indication that LGBT persons sexually offend at higher rates that the heterosexual population, an issue that has been extensively studied (21, 22). Nonetheless, certain groups insist on perpetuating the myth that “transgender women offend at the same rate as cisgender men” – a notion that is demonstrably false, and which relies on purposeful misrepresentation of data to appear valid (23, 24, 25, 26).
In fact, the data is so definitive that, far from protecting cisgender women from sexual predators, bans on transgender athletes only serve to further endanger and discriminate against cisgender women (27, 28, 29, 30, 31). Of course, if one is trying to control women’s uteruses, one particularly Machiavellian method to gather data on their periods is to do so in the guise of protecting them from male rapists who are impersonating women (32, 33, 256) – a tactic that has been directly lifted from the aforementioned MSS, possibly during one of Erik Prince’s trips to build paramilitary training centers for the totalitarian state (106-112, 256). A similarly devious method to begin denying medical coverage to all begins with revoking coverage of “gender-affirming care.” (80, 97, 98, 136, 256)
Accusations of horrific mutilation of children accompany these claims. Yet of course, no one is actually “mutilating” young children. Gender transition surgery does not occur in the United States on minors except in a handful of cases of extreme medical emergency, determined by a trained and licensed medical professional, and not even then on youths under 14 (47). Radical, phenotype-altering surgery (51) is not what’s being most affected where transgender healthcare bans are concerned, but rather life-affirming care that reduces the suicidality of transgender youth by up to 73% - suicidality caused by a lack of acceptance from the very same people claiming to want to “save” them (52, 192). Gender affirming healthcare is literally a form of suicide prevention, and it saves children’s lives rather than endangering them.
Likewise, there is no transgender “ideology” that is being used to indoctrinate children into something they “grow out of:” of transgender youth who do choose to detransition permanently, the vast majority cite discrimination and parental pressure to do so as their reasons for detransitioning, with only a remarkable 0.4% of those who permanently detransition citing that they no longer identify as transgender (74). The only ideology present in this entire discussion is the one in which the biology and existence of transgender persons is denied: that which is being enforced through traditional dress codes which determine what boys and girls are permitted to wear due to the arbitrariness of gender norms (not to mention what names and pronouns one may or may not go by; 219). In 1800s America, for example, pink was considered a manly color, whereas blue was for girls. Cowboys, the epitome of manliness for many Americans, literally wore pink, demonstrating how haphazard a notion these norms are. Indeed, this trend lasted through the 1950’s with Roy Rogers’ son wearing pink in a Sears catalog (226).
Worse is the fact that all this political co-opting of accusations of “pedophilia” and “grooming” actually prevents real victims of sexual abuse from seeking and getting justice (34, 196, 197). Further still is the fact that all this noise has a numbing effect on the average citizenry, desensitizing the public to very real predatory behavior (35) – an effect that may actually be intentional.
3. DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender
Some perspective grants insight into this phenomenon: there are fewer than a mere 50 transgender athletes in schools across the entire United States. However, there are 25 million girls between the ages of 5 and 18 in school (201). Now those young girls are more vulnerable than ever before, as adults demand they reveal their genitalia to prove they are not one of the less than 50 transgender athletes before competing in sports.
Such an instance occurred just this past June, when a 9-year-old girl was competing in fourth grade shot put competition. The grandfather of another competitor accosted the child, demanding that her parents provide certification that the 9-year-old was born female. He then accosted another young girl stating, “well if she is not a boy, then she is obviously trans.” (198, 199) The man’s wife then started calling the parent of the initial girl, “a genital mutilator, a groomer, and a pedophile” while demanding that the child submit to a genital inspection to prove she was biologically a girl. A genital inspection that is not medically necessary, of course, is sexual assault. The moral panic about what amounts to fewer than 50 children’s identity overall led to two grandparents wanting to sexually assault a 9-year-old girl simply because she was doing better in a competition than their grandchild. What was this couple’s reasoning for questioning the young girls’ femininity?
They both had short hair.
This was hardly the first instance of women who don’t appear “feminine” enough being harassed and having their gender questioned. A professional nanny who had recently cut her hair short recorded her assault in a Las Vegas casino bathroom by another woman who accused her of being transgender (202). In similar fashion, a male police officer in North Carolina forced a woman to leave a Wendy’s bathroom because her baggy clothes did not appear to be feminine enough to him, and thus was obviously a man despite the numerous witnesses screaming at him that he was accosting a woman (203).
Then, there is the accusation of grooming that gets leveled against LGBT persons. I see cases of actual grooming every day in my work, as does, I suspect, the right-wing provocateur who first popularized this vicious slur, albeit for altogether different reasons (36). James Lindsey is very, very close friends with Nicki Clyne, who just happens to be a high-ranking member of the NXIVM cult found to have sex-trafficked countless women. Indeed, as one looks closely at those pushing the Nazi “groomer” narrative about gay and transgender individuals, a very familiar pattern emerges. Stop the Steal’s Ali Alexander sexually groomed minors, Trump acolyte Milo Yiannopoulos openly supported pedophilia, and known antisemite (and Kanye West bestie) Nick Fuentes actively covered for both of them – all while publicly avowing his own personal desire to marry an underage bride (37, 38, 115). Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA even recently aligned itself with a registered sex offender and convicted child sex trafficker for their Pastor’s Summit, justifying the move because the predator had allegedly “repented” for his crimes against children (174, 175). The words and actions of Anton Lazzaro, Donald Trump himself, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Dennis Hastert, Roy Moore, and the Boebert family are also worth examining in this context.
A pattern emerges that closely mirrors what many investigators are seeing in the field: the intersection of white supremacy, incel ideology, and pedophilia (69, 70, 71, 72, 73). Hatred is hatred after all, and if one cannot have sex with a woman, predators will opportunistically turn their attention to those they perceive as being more vulnerable and easier to manipulate. Moreover, there is a strong correlation between authoritarianism, domestic violence, sexual offenses, and human trafficking that is well documented in the academic literature – including how the narrative of fighting human trafficking is frequently adopted by totalitarians to institute further authoritarian control (151-164). To paraphrase Joseph Goebbels, accuse your adversary of that which you are guilty.
This gaslighting results in anti-slavery efforts and narratives being twisted and distorted to reinforce existing inequities which render people vulnerable to exploitation in the first place. Instead of eliminating trafficking and child exploitation, demand is fueled (249, 256). In turn, the twisting and amplification of nonsensical, conspiratorial narratives around a very real problem results in those attempting to stem the tide of paranoia and rising hatred dismissing human trafficking completely as a “moral panic” (262, 263). This back-and-forth creates an atmosphere where predators and grifters alike can operate at will, disguising themselves as would-be saviors of children while the bewildered public is left to sort fact from fiction, losing sight of real victims of exploitation (34, 35, 196, 197).
Just how badly is the public missing the forest for the trees in looking for drag queen “groomers” as opposed to, well, actual predators? How often are predators using this political chaos to mask their intentions, parading themselves as noble protectors of children while secretly preying on the most vulnerable?
The data on this matter is simply shocking. Over a period of less than three days, three separate child rapists were arrested who had made “anti-grooming” right-wing posts to social media. That’s how many drag queens were arrested for raping a child in the last five years. However, this three-for-three ratio is only for those who made such posts on social media: in one twenty-four-hour period, six separate cisgender heterosexual white Christian male child rapists were either sentenced or arrested, which is more than the number of drag queens ever arrested for sexually assaulting a child (258).
This brings up the issue of Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), a rather infamous “anti-trafficking” organization. O.U.R. utilizes a highly militarized style of “rescues” that have been shown to only further traumatize victims, target children and families who are not actually being trafficked, in addition to placing individuals (including children) who have not been exploited into situations where they actually might be sexually victimized for the first time, fueling demand (264, 265). Much more important is how O.U.R. “operators” were directed to have sex with trafficked victims in order to “keep their cover,” (249) further fueling demand.
Make no mistake, this is pure exploitation and victimization on the part of O.U.R.
Professionals simply don’t do this.
Ballard’s ultimate goal for all of this is well documented: not to necessarily save children from sex traffickers, but rather to proselytize his Mormon faith – to “bring them to the covenant” – all with the backing of the Mormon Church, which, incidentally, has been described by survivors as one giant sex trafficking ring unto itself (259-261). Ballard, of course, is behind the new movie The Sound of Freedom – which, incidentally, was funded by a sex trafficking ring under the guise of an “angel investor” who allegedly “saved” the movie after it was sidelined by “woke” Disney. The same ring was also used to place prostitutes on school boards to subsequently push anti-trans narratives (246-248).
For his part, Ballard is now working with known sexual predator Tony Robbins (252, 253), friend of Erik Prince, to accuse Poland and Ukraine of child sex trafficking – all without any evidence, and all while ignoring the abduction of over 700,000 Ukrainian children by Russia (250, 251, 262). The latter is itself an act of genocide and a matter of transnational child trafficking, which the Russian mob is well known for trading in.
Moreover, Operation Underground Railroad has not filed a federal tax form 990 for three years, automatically revoking its non-profit status under IRS rules – just in time to profit off of The Sound of Freedom’s success at the box office (254, 255). This shameless profiteering only adds to the approximately $30 million the organization had in its coffers, raised from donors under the auspices of providing direct services to trafficking victims that had, somehow, gone unaccounted for. Perhaps law enforcement should take a peek into Angel Studio’s “pay it forward” campaign for The Sound of Freedom, as countless tickets being purchased and “paid forward” only for sold out theaters to be completely empty is a clear sign of money laundering and astroturfing (258).
4. Global Context
The hateful targeting of a minority group is but one of many currently taking place in the United States and abroad, and they are not unrelated. Indeed, this is indicative of the increasingly globalized war being waged between superpowers, often unfolding in the information sphere to exploit societal moral panics – with results that all too often spill out into the real world (138, 139). In this vein, one can begin to understand the global war on terror as the mere 20-year staging for global war on an unprecedented scale that it was, with the hasty and deadly withdrawal of official American forces from Afghanistan in turn setting up a volatile proxy state to wage holy war on the Iranian regime (165-168, 181-185). To this end, various vulnerable populations, as is always the case in realpolitik, have clearly been deemed acceptable losses by the key players (169-173).
A prime example is the war of aggression launched by Vladimir Putin against the Ukrainians. Much as Donald Trump kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches by his bed, Vladimir Putin is also a fan of the late German dictator (39). Indeed, Putin took a page directly from the Nazi playbook to assert his total control over Russia, revealing that the twin assaults on Ukraine as well as that against LGBT populations in America are far more interconnected that one might realize. A mere year before he invaded Ukraine in 2014, Vladimir Putin began a renewed oppression of LGBT persons in Russia through the passage of the so-called Gay Propaganda Law, which was passed by the Russian Duma “for the purposes of protecting children” from “non-traditional family values.” The law resulted in the murder of LGBT persons across Russia (211).
The moral crusade served a dual purpose: to distract the Russian populace from very real problems at home and to serve as a justification for the future expansion of the war against Ukraine. Ukraine had to be “de-satanized”: it was home to too many LGBT persons who threatened the moral fabric of Russian society. Russia was fighting an existential war against Satan himself; Ukraine had “permitted” gay pride parades in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa, and thus had to be destroyed according to Kremlin propagandists (206). Indeed, part of the Kremlin’s larger game plan since reclaiming the presidency in 2012 was to directly connect global geopolitics to gender politics and LGBT rights, or the direct opposition to them. Holy war was necessary to fight this great Satan, a “Eurasian Jihad” to bring both Christian Russians and Muslim Chechens into the fight against the west and Ukraine (208).
The key to this narrative, of course, was a doubling down on the anti-LGBT narrative that the Kremlin had spent the past decade building, and which it doubled down on as the three-day special military operation sputtered out into a long war of attrition to keep the Russian population under control despite mounting losses and problems on the home front (210). The problems the Russian population faced weren’t caused by their obviously infallible leaders, but rather gay and transgender individuals – and so everyone from the typical Ukrainian to Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself was naturally a transgender pedophile that had to be eliminated; a narrative correspondingly adopted in the United States by a remarkably similar cult of personality (205-212). Indeed, the entire groomer panic appears lifted from the words of Vladimir Putin himself, (230-232)
“Do we want children from elementary school to be imposed with things that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want them to be taught that instead of men and women, there are supposedly some other genders and to be offered sex-change surgeries?” (207)
To quote Aleksandr Dugin, better known in intelligence circles as “Putin’s brain,” “Today’s Ukrainians are a race of degenerates that crawled up from the sewage. Genocide is in order.” To this end, the Russian state press agency RIA Novosti published a handbook openly calling for the eradication of over 20 million Ukrainians a mere two days after the first reports of the atrocities in Bucha began to spread (191). Likewise, Russian leaders and media personalities openly talk about solving the “Ukrainian question” much as their German predecessors spoke of finally “remedying” the Jewish one (188-190).
Dugin himself is particularly well-connected in American right-wing circles despite, or perhaps because of, his bloodthirsty tastes. The wife of Richard Spencer – the mastermind of the 2017 Unite the Right protests that left a woman dead and chants of “Jews will not replace us” forever seared into the American consciousness – serves as his most preeminent English translator (40). Michael Flynn similarly named one of his QAnon tours after one of Dugin’s books (41). QAnon, it must be remembered, is the ludicrous conspiracy theory positing that Satanic celebrities and Democratic Party elites sex traffic children in order to harvest their blood. My colleagues and I spend a great deal of time debunking this kind of nonsense as part of our human trafficking awareness efforts. Dr. Stanton himself has condemned the QAnon phenomena as nothing more than a “Nazi cult rebranded for the modern era” (42). Indeed, the now infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion that went on to inspire much Nazi propaganda was originally a Russian publication. One shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn that noted antisemite and convicted domestic violence perpetrator Mel Gibson served as the final editor for the QAnon film, The Sound of Freedom (239, 241). Much more to the point, and highlighting how DARVO is used in a psychological/hybrid warfare context, is that Flynn is now using The Sound of Freedom to recruit and train individuals to hunt “pedophiles” using the paramilitary methods displayed and glorified by O.U.R.: having redefined “pedophiles” to be Democrats, LGBT+ persons, and anyone who criticizes the film as opposed to those who have an actual sexual attraction to children (245).
Even more to Stanton’s point is the fact that a great deal of QAnon lore originated on Andrew Anglin’s Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, hence the innate antisemitism and racism of much of the 2020 #savethechildren disinformation campaign (75, 76, 196, 197). Anglin himself argued that the age of consent needed to be lowered to 14, and for arranged marriages to take place once young girls turn 14 (77) – not unlike noted conservative and anti-transgender influencer Matt Walsh, who made similar comments about 16-year-old girls (78). Of course, many on the right rallied to defend Walsh’s comments, arguing he was being “cancelled” by those on the left (79), once again revealing the unholy trinity of incel ideology, white supremacy, and pedophilia masquerading under a much more palatable moral crusade to protect children (195).
Indeed, the Republican Party’s obsession with Russian propaganda and QAnon disinformation is clear: they are one and the same, much like American Christian Nationalism and the militarism of the Russian Orthodox Church (which, incidentally, is headed by a former KGB agent, the same as Putin, who has played a critical role in the scapegoating of LGBT persons in Russia; 207, 208, 243, 244). For those for whom the connection is not readily made, one need only look at the Schutzstaffel tattoos of Dmitry Utkin, the founder of the paramilitary Wagner Group (named after Hitler’s favorite composer) and which is headed by Yevgeny Prigozhin who has admitted to – and is under federal indictment for – interfering in the 2016 Presidential Campaign on behalf of none other than Donald Trump (43). None of this is new, nor is this merely a surface-level critique of the American conservative movement: the late John McCain accused Rand Paul of being a Russian asset in 2017, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently lamented the firing of Tucker Carlson by Fox News (44, 45). All of this has been enabled by a continuous flow of dark money into GOP coffers from longtime political dynasties with extensive, well-documented connections and sympathies to the absolute worst of the Nazis atrocities (59, 60, 61). Thus, these facts should come as a surprise only to those who are otherwise unaware of the political origins of the phrase, “America First.” (46)
Much to this point is that remarkably similar ideology is behind much of the surge in the modern anti-vaccine movement, with extensive associations to the eugenics crusade becoming clear during the Covid-19 pandemic as it related to non-white, disabled, and elderly lives (81-91, 242). In fact, this doctrine can be clearly traced back and be seen as driving Ronald Reagan’s response to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s (134, 135). Such outright social Darwinist ideology drove the trucker protests that shut down Ottawa and other parts of Canada, and tropes of “pure blood” highlight this white supremacist mindset present in anti-vaccine talking points (92). Indeed, Republican legislators are moving in some states to outright prohibit the vaccinated from donating blood in order to preserve this perceived blood purity (93). The result is a total assault on democratic norms across the world unlike any other since the dawn of the atomic age.
5. The Role of the Media
None of this has happened in a vacuum: rather, a steady stream of misinformation and propaganda packaged as news coverage and info-tainment over a long period has culminated in the perfect storm that we are now witnessing. While all American media has played a role in this, conservative media and Fox News in particular are the worst offenders, having often spread Russian propaganda verbatim: hence Lavrov’s lamentations over losing his top mouthpiece, Tucker Carlson. On June 14th, Fox News tweeted that the Progress flag that was hung at the White House’s pride event was actually a “transgender flag” that promoted grooming and pedophilia. Of course, this occurred a mere 23 days after Fox News personality Greg Gutfeld celebrated a 38-year-old math teacher having sex with her 16-year-old student (214, 225).
Conservative media has a storied history of simultaneously promoting or endorsing pedophilia while accusing others, such as the LGBT community, of being the real predators – a perfect example of the DARVO phenomenon examined earlier.
In 2014, in a remarkably similar case, Fox News’ Jesse Watters made similar comments about the statutory rape of another sixteen-year-old boy in which he claimed it wasn’t a serious offense because the female perpetrator was attractive (224). Tucker Carlson made even worse comments in defense of child marriage, arguing that having sex with a child bride was not “the same thing exactly as pulling a child from a bus stop and sexually assaulting that child.” He proceeded to discuss how he loved the concept of young girls sexually experimenting, and that criminal charges against convicted sex trafficker and Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints leader Warren Jeffs were “bullshit,” saying that Jeffs was only in prison for being “weird and unpopular” and that if Carlson made the laws, “Warren Jeffs would be out on the street.” (221)
Lavrov should be proud indeed, and Putin even more so: birds of a feather flock together, after all – hence convicted pedophile Scott Ritter’s eager support for the dictator (233-236).
Much to this point, many of those who have engaged in the targeting of LGBT persons and transgender individuals in particular through conservative media are characteristic of Goebbels’ strategy made manifest. Andrew Tate, now under arrest in Romania for human trafficking, has bragged about having sex with underage girls and has even taught courses on how to manipulate them (220). Child pornography, more appropriately referred to as child sexual abuse material or CSAM, was found on Alex Jones’ phone during his Sandy Hook trial (222). There are many, many more examples revealing how the right-wing infosphere has been turned into a mere psychological projection mechanism for uninformed viewers to project their very worst tendencies onto the hated LGBT community (213, 223). In many ways, the current threat facing the transgender community was almost inevitable: it has been building slowly for decades.
This is evident when one considers the convergence of popular culture icons with conservative media. Kid Rock, rock and rap sensation of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s who is now an icon of the MAGA movement given his unwavering support of Donald Trump, has played a critical role in hastening the speed at which the LGBT community is facing violence. Following Budweiser’s partnership with transgender actor Dylan Mulvaney, Rock bought several packages of Bud Light only to shoot it with a semi-automatic submachine gun in protest, proceeding to upload the video to the increasingly radicalized and hate-filled Twitter platform (217). Kid Rock, of course, wrote the popular song Cowboy which involves the singer describing how much he wants to start an escort service, a form of sex trafficking under the United States’ TVPA, as well as the particularly troubling lyrics to Cool, Daddy, Cool:
Young ladies, young ladies
I like ‘em underage see
Some say that’s statutory
But I say it’s MANDATORY!”
Clearly, Kid Rock is a paragon of family values, as is another rock singer popular in conservative circles, Ted Nugent. Nugent has become a popular conservative commentator in recent years, having both denied the existence of Covid-19 and transgender individuals (229). Nugent has frequently been hosted on Fox News by Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, former Governor of Arkansas, and father of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump press secretary and current Governor of Arkansas who recently succeeded in bringing back child labor to the state (55). In one such appearance, Nugent and Huckabee played Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever, which contains numerous references to women’s genitals (2018). Huckabee defended Nugent when confronted about this incident, all while simultaneously condemning then President and First Lady Obama as being bad parents for allowing their daughters to listen to Beyonce whom Huckabee described as “vulgar.” Of course, Beyonce, unlike Nugent, never wrote a song titled Jailbait with lyrics to the effect of,
Well I don't care if you're just thirteen
You look too good to be true
I just know that you're probably clean
There's one lil' thing I got do to you
…
It's quite all right I asked your mama
Wait a minute officer
Don't put those handcuffs on me
Put them on her and I'll share her with you!
This bait-and-switch occurring in conservative media has a dual effect: it both normalizes an obviously dangerous behavior amongst viewers while characterizing the viewers’ political adversaries as the “true” culprits of crimes against children. It is important to remember at this point that sexual predators do not merely groom their victim, but literally everyone around their victim as well to avoid being caught and to deflect suspicion should their victims speak out. To this end, it is important to understand that consumers of conservative media are similarly being groomed.
However, it is important to note that conservatives in the media do not bear all the blame. Traditional media outlets in the United States have also fanned the flames of this hatred by fundamentally refusing to simply speak to the facts. Insisting on reporting on “both sides” of the “controversy” and instead of merely reporting actual facts, reporters and media outlets across the spectrum have misled the American public about the realities of gender-affirming care, child sexual abuse, and more. To this end, The Associate Press in June revised its style guidelines, further blurring reality by preventing journalists from even calling a spade a spade: terms such as “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” and “gender-critical” were too political for reporters to use. Instead, the Associated Press argued, journalists should outline opponents of transgender rights’ specific arguments instead of using these terms – even though these terms were invented and popularized by these opponents to describe themselves in the first place. To quote one Twitter user, the AP, “recommends reporters not discuss fascists without uncritically repeating their propaganda” (215).
6. Stages of a Genocide
What this should reveal to the reader is that all of these struggles are deeply interconnected – as are the perpetrators of these collective abuses (100, 116-131, 140, 176, 177, 186). Similarly, one can ascertain the nature of fascist movements: things build slowly for a very long period, then things happen very, very quickly. But most important for the reader to note is the fact that fascists never stop – until someone else stops them. The Nazis didn’t stop with “protecting” Germans in Poland or “protecting” Aryan youth from queers, nor did Russia stop with “protecting” their interests in Chechnya. Once the “threat” of the LGBT community “mutilating” young children is over, what else will this new breed of American fascist feel the need to protect children from?
Of course, protecting children and saving lives doesn’t actually matter to those pushing these bans, as one Republican Montana State Representative demonstrated recently when discussing her own daughter’s suicidality (53). The death of those who are socially undesirable is, in fact, the point – the final solution, if you will – as much recent chatter indicates. Indeed, none of this pretend paranoia is actually about protecting children at all (133), as evidenced by the fact that the very people trying to ban gender-affirming healthcare are the ones most vocally defending child marriage and leading the charge to bring back child labor (54, 55). In my field, child labor and child marriage are known by another term: human trafficking. Clearly, Goebbel’s words again reverberate through the actions of these politicos.
Much to this point, we see how such anti-LGBT laws as the one the Kansas legislature most recently passed render this population even more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Despite experiencing domestic violence and sexual assault at rates unthinkable to other populations, transgender individuals in that state are now also prohibited from seeking help or safety at domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers. The new law even takes the additional horrifying step of declaring intersex persons “disabled” (56). This goes far beyond merely taking away basic human rights – rather, this is precisely how you prepare a population for a genocide (96, 114, 194).
To this end, a growing internal refugee crisis has already begun in the United States, with approximately 130-260,000 transgender individuals having fled oppressive laws and the people responsible for passing them (198).
This makes recent developments all the more alarming. The Department of Homeland Security recently warned about the potential for increased violence against minority groups in the run-up to the 2024 election (149). DHS has reason to be concerned: those on the right have reacted with violence and threats against the LGBT community in frighteningly increasing numbers, and now their terroristic tactics are being turned against anyone who appears to lend support to this community in much the same way that white southerners rolled back civil rights in the reconstruction era and that religious fundamentalists suppressed the later pro-choice movement (148, 150, 187). Target stores nationwide have been forced to remove signs, displays, and goods for the LGBT community in order to protect the “safety and wellbeing” of their employees, with a number of stores being subjected to bomb threats over their display of LGBT friendly goods and displays (141-143, 216). Budweiser similarly suffered a rash of bomb threats at their factories across the nation after conservatives became outraged that the beer company partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney (144). Even churches that are friendly to the queer community have been subjected to bomb threats over being too welcoming to this community, and such terror tactics now accompany everything from efforts to remove LGBT books from school libraries to shuttering Title IX bulling investigations (145-147, 178-180).
Terrorism works, it seems.
After studying the genocides in Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere, Dr. Stanton characterized ten stages of genocide that may overlap or coexist with one another (57). The first step of genocide is classification: differences between people are simply not respected, and “us” versus “them” thinking begins to creep in. The second stage is symbolization: we give names or symbols to the groups identified in the previous stage, such as differentiating people by manner of dress. This does not always lead to genocide unless it is paired with fear and hatred. Such pairing, however, leads to the third stage, discrimination, where a dominant social group uses their power to deny the rights of the vulnerable minority group, most often through codified law. The 1935 Nuremburg Laws and the Black Codes of the Reconstruction Era are examples of this.
This discrimination often leads to stage four, dehumanization, where the dominant group denies the humanity of the minority group. Jews were “vermin,” the Tutsis “cockroaches,” indigenous peoples “savages,” with gays and lesbians being “abominations.” The goal of this stage is to overcome the natural human revulsion against homicide, to teach the majority that the world is better off without these “animals.” QAnon is a prime example of dehumanization: political opponents are made out to be satanic, pedophilic, blood-drinking baby murderers – so of course it’s okay to kill them. If you don’t want to murder such people, you must be a satanic pedophilic blood-drinking baby-murderer yourself, after all. To combat this stage, Dr. Stanton suggests that “incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech.” Obviously, the “free speech” crowd dropped the ball here (132).
Stage four leads to stage five: organization. Extrajudicial militias and paramilitaries are formed, typically with specialized military training. The Nazi SS and SA are prime examples, as are the Ku Klux Klan, the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and the Oath Keepers (58). Recruits for Flynn’s “pedophile hunting” training program, drawn from The Sound of Freedom propaganda, also fit this description. Stage six is polarization: extremists drive the groups apart while mass media – such as Fox News and Musk’s Twitter – broadcasts reasons for targeting a minority. They’re pedophiles; rapists; freaks; illegal, subhuman scum who subvert elections. Dr. Stanton notes that moderates from extremists’ own groups are the most able to stop genocide and are the most likely to be targeted first: hence the expulsion of GOP moderates like Adam Kinzinger and even Liz Cheney from the Republican Party.
Then comes stage seven: preparation. Often, genocide is disguised as an act of self-defense: if we don’t kill them, they will kill us. Our way of life is threatened, so we must destroy the new way. Think of the children and what awaits them. Moreover, planned actions are always framed as a purification or a cleansing, not explicitly anything to do with death or killing – it’s a storm, not a genocide (101). Fear of the targeted group is built up, as are armies and weapons. This is currently reflected by the fact that, as of 2017, a mere 3% of Americans owned 50% of the civilian-available guns in America, and while there’s a gun in the United States for every American, less than a third of Americans own a firearm (62, 63). Then begins persecution, stage eight. Victims are sorted out by identity and death lists are drawn up: such as those made by the Oath Keepers for their assault on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Targeted groups are deprived of even the most basic necessities – such as healthcare (113, 227, 228) – and indiscriminate killings begin (102, 103, 104). If there is no widespread international condemnation, it is taken as evidence that the international community will either condone or be silent as stage nine, extermination, begins. It is an extermination to those committing the atrocities and not a genocide as they don’t believe their victims to be fully human. It is a deliberate, systematic campaign of targeted violence by a hate group against the minority. This is always followed by the tenth and final stage: denial. The killers deny what they have done by blaming the victims themselves and intimidating witnesses, in turn fully exterminating even the memory of their victims until the oppressors are driven out by force. Denials always prime a people to engage in future genocides, such as the refusal to acknowledge the holocausts against indigenous or African peoples.
As we can see, there are ten stages to a genocide, with stage nine being the part that involves the wide-scale killing and bloodshed that we associate with the word. At present, the United States sits comfortably at stage seven and has rapidly begun the processes of stage eight. The country is prime for a repeat of stage nine, an extermination, as the harsh emotions triggered by the denials of stage ten are rapidly and repeatedly being stoked by those pushing for the extermination by raising such “culture war” issues as critical race theory and abortion to stoke notions of shame and guilt in the targeted population (237, 238, 240).
The harsh truth is that, from Russia to Cambodia and elsewhere, the horrors of death camps are already returning. I know because I’ve seen them with my own eyes in various parts of the world. Now, more than ever before, we risk them occurring in the United States. Indeed, much of the infrastructure is already in place (67, 68). We have very limited time left to address this fascist threat before those responsible can establish a Fourth Reich – and before the bloodshed that is occurring elsewhere takes further root here.
Key to this fight is calling a spade a spade and no longer equivocating that the threat is Nazism, as good people prevaricating is exactly what fascists rely on to gain and maintain power. One needs only see Elon Musk’s recent tweets “just asking questions” about the Allen, Texas mass shooter’s social media to see this ploy in action (65, 66, 94, 95, 99, 105, 137). We cannot let scores of people die – and make no mistake, they are already dying – all because we are afraid to come out in front of our friends and family and condemn actual Nazis as Nazis. Fascism is here: it’s not coming someday, and it’s no longer a hypothetical threat – we’ve passed that point. We must choose sides, as Elie Wiesel told us, since neutrality aids only the oppressor; silence, the tormentor. Our opponents have shown us who they are, time and again. Now, more than ever, we must show them who we are.
Our very survival as a species may depend upon it.
7. Supporting and Contextualizing Documentation
DARVO and its role in abusive relationships
A guide to understanding DARVO and gaslighting
Polaris’ report on QAnon, the Wayfair Disinformation Campaign, Human Trafficking, and the Extremism Nexus: And how the Wayfair Incident took up enough time to investigate 42 cases of actual human trafficking (Great work, Tim!)
Statement by Human Trafficking Organizations against QAnon
How QAnon politicized the trauma of child sex trafficking, by a survivor of child sex trafficking
Exposing the lies and stolen valor of Tim Ballard
Tucker Carlson fawning over yet another human trafficker
The deep connection between Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys terrorist group
Russia’s assault on transgender persons
Genocide and filtration camps 2
The return of the Russian Gulag
Tim Ballard’s motives and who he keeps company with
Matt Schlapp
Tony Robbins
Tony Robbins 2
The damage O.U.R. tactics cause
What happens when O.U.R. tactics are duplicated
Chronological timeline of the psychological war against America
The purpose of QAnon, red-pilling, and more
The psychology of QAnon, red-pilling, and The Sound of Freedom
Mike Flynn himself ties The Sound of Freedom to the QAnon notion of harvesting adrenochrome, revealing the true purpose of the film
Sex trafficking, School Boards, and Funding the Sound of Freedom
DARVO, Peter Thiel, and blood libel
Breitbart, Gamergate, Mercer, Covid-19 conspiracy theories, and Trump
Mormonism, cults, and human trafficking:
Pt. 1
Pt. 2
Pt. 3
Black, E. (2012) IBM and the Holocaust: The strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s most powerful corporation, expanded edition. Dialog Press.
Black, E. (2017) Nazi nexus: America’s corporate connection to Hitler’s holocaust. Dialog Press.
Black, E. (2012) War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race, expanded edition. Dialog Press.
De Jong, D. (2022) Nazi billionaires: The dark history of Germany’s wealthiest dynasties. Mariner Books.
Dutton, D. G. (2007) The psychology of genocide, massacres, and extreme violence: Why normal people come to commit atrocities. Holtzbrinck.
Horesh, T. (2020) The fascism this time: And the global future of democracy. Cosmopolis Press.
Jacobsen, A. (2015) Operation Paperclip: The secret intelligence program that brought Nazi scientists to America. Back Bay Books.
Kühl, S. (2002) The Nazi connection: Eugenics, American racism, and German national socialism, revised edition. Oxford University Press.
Onishi, B. (2023) Preparing for war: The extremist history of white Christian nationalism – and what comes next. Broadleaf Books.
Smith, D. L. (2011) Less than human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others. St. Martin’s Press.
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[1] The now infamous photo that adorns the site’s cover photo is from this very event.