Pizzagate And Child Abuse: The Smoky Trail

A Necessary Caution

Yesterday, popular Youtube pundit Sargon of Akkad uploaded a video on the subject of Pizzagate and the sexual abuse of children. Pizzagate has obliged him to thread a needle, which he's done well. His video on the subject - which includes some disturbing artwork from a sexual-abuse survivor who was driven mentally ill as a result of her abuse - is well worth watching in its entirety:

He starts off by making a very important point about the investigation thus far: a necessary one to calm yourself down if your head is hottened. Since he's an empiric, he zeroes on on a very important point about Pizzagate: thus far, no victims have stepped forward. We can pin down motive, opportunity and means as much as we like - but as Hercule Poirot knew, if there's no corpse then there's no case.

The bulk of his video, though, slams the folks who claim that Pizzagate is nothing more than a ridiculous conspiracy theory or witch hunt. He provides evidence - real evidence - that there have been pedophile rings amongst the powerful. At least one of them was protected by official pressure forcing an investigation to shut down.

After he made the video, another scandal surfaced: "Shocking New Report Reveals 368 Cases of Alleged Sexual Abuse Against Child Gymnasts Since 1996":

According to a comprehensive report in the Indianapolis Star, there have been 368 cases of alleged child sexual abuse in gymnastics over the past 20 years. The acts were allegedly committed against gymnasts by coaches, gym owners, and other adults who work in and around the sport.

The report claims that predatory coaches often move from gym to gym, with the new gyms either unaware of or indifferent towards the previous charges....

Shades of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, another one that was covered up for a long time. There's definitely smoke out there, not to mentioned the ruined remnants of real fires.

What Powerful Pedophile Have Going For Them

I want to expand on something Sargon touched on, because it explains why these abuses are difficult to unearth and easy to cover up.

(Image from here.)

The powerful have an advantage that goes beyond protection from The System. Their real advantage lies in the fact that we normals not only consider child molestation to be disturbing but also unimaginable. We can't imagine what it's like to be a monster that's sexually attracted to children (with one exception, which I'll discuss later.)

Consequently, we easily assume that pedophiles are sickos that have no place in normal society. We fall into stereotyping them as "The Man In The Dirty Raincoat" who lives alone, a semi-recluse, because we simply can't fathom how such a character could live in normal society, let alone thrive and succeed. We assume there'd be too many "tells" because pedophilia is so weird, there's no way that a real one would not be spotted as a wacko of some sort. Because of this unimaginability, we fall into concluding that pedophiles are not unlike Simon and Garfunkel's "Most Peculiar Man":

This easy-to-fall-into, almost necessary stereotyping is what powerful pedophiles count on as camouflage.

Consider someone confronting Jimmy Saville about his pedophilia. All Jimmy had to do was put on a winning smile and reply, "So I'm the man in the dirty raincoat, then!" With dismissive laughter from his many supporters.

"Protecting The System"

Not everyone would have been deterred. Some, particularly with knowledge of what was going on, would have responded flatly: "Maybe you are and we don't know it."

In so doing, he or she would quickly be pegged as "peculiar" in a different way. In addition to finding pedophilia unimaginable, at least in terms of putting ourselves in a pedophile's shoes, we instinctively take into account status signals. Most of us naturally "play the man instead of the ball"; we "consider the source." And we do know that there are folks who resent the powerful/rich/successful simply because they're resentful: they have an axe to grind, are frustrated or are angry at the world. Because most of us have this status-sensing drive in us, and because we all know of people that are motivated by jealousy, it's easy to lump-in the confronter with "those people."

If you're a Pizzagate investigator, I'll bet real STEEM that you yourself have been pigeonholed in that way.

But it's not just our status-sensing that gets in the way of finding out the truth, whatever the truth is. It's the status-sensing combined with the inability to imagine real pedophilia and consequent stereotyping to make sense of it. When the latter part is missing, that block disappears...

The Important Exception

Note that it was not difficult to spread the word about Jeffrey Epstein's "Lolita Island" once it was exposed. That's because the Jeffrey Epstein case featured taking advantage of teenagers, particularly of the "Teenage Dream" sort:

(Image from here.)

Now, this particular case is not hard to imagine. Virginia Roberts, though underaged and vulnerable, was fairly developed. Moreover, she looks like the "teenage dream queen" that we can see a middle-aged man going gaga over. Since very rich or/and powerful men have had a longstanding habit of having "side chicks" that they have zero interest in formally recognizing (let alone formally dating), plus relying on payoffs/favours to buy silence, that imagination barrier doesn't exist for a case like Epstein's. The only mind-barriers are "they're just jealous", "they're just greedy" (i.e., angling for a payoff or some other subsidy), or "they're just spiteful." These countermeasures are a lot les difficult to evaluate or see through than "only a real sicko [the Man In A Dirty Raincoat] would do something like that." This is why the truth was a lot less easy to conceal in the Epstein case than (say) in the Sandusky case.

[Image from here.)

Closing Note On Witch-Hunts And False Accusations

The folks like Reddit's staff who claim that Pizzagate is nothing more than a "witch hunt" have something else going for them too. Back in the 1980s, there was a real witch hunt in this area that led to several miscarriages of justice. It was the Day-Care Sex-Abuse Hysteria and yes, it did claim real victims. Not only in the United States, either.

Note, though, that the victims of those justice-miscarriages were powerless or otherwise nondescript. If you're investigating Pizzagate, please keep in mind that you're basically hard-wired to see pedophiles as "weirdos" and therefore marginalized. This hard-wiring - this healthy hard-wiring! - is the psychological source behind the No Crueler Tyrannies. Guy-Paul Morin for one, was easy to peg as a "weird-type guy."

That said, though, it is a real injustice to you to peg you as a bunch of conspiracy-theorist crazies. There are real cases of System-camouflaged pedophile rings, definitely including some profoundly sicko ones. Even if nothing comes of Pizzagate specifically, there's renewed focus on runaway children and child trafficking in general. That's a real blessing.

(Image from here.)

---

Interestingly, the powerful circles are abuzz with the theory that Vladimir Putin helped steal the U.S. election for Donald Trump. Here's my writings on that topic.