So let’s talk about what QAnon and the “child trafficking” fantasists of MAGA evangelicalism get right. They’re not 100% wrong about everything, and we can acknowledge that.
For instance, they believe that kidnapping, torturing, raping, and murdering children is a Bad Thing — that’s it’s just plain wrong. This is correct. Whatever else we might say about the QAnon people, we must agree that they are and strive to be on the right side of this issue. They are not for the kidnap, torture, rape, and murder of children. They’re against it.
They’re also correct in asserting that anyone who did advocate for such evils — anyone who championed or defended the kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of children — would be a Bad Person. That is to say that they are correct that someone favoring or supporting such evil behavior would serve as a useful, categorical evaluation of that person. If someone tells you that their concept of morality has no reservations about kidnapping, torturing, raping, and murdering children, then you would be correct to regard such a person as monstrously evil.
Shouldn’t we give them credit for being right about those things?
Well, no. Because nobody earns credit for being right about those extremely basic, extremely obvious things. This is the bare minimum. You do not earn points or cookies or gold stars or trophies for such absolutely basic essentials. Yes, it’s good that you oppose and condemn such monstrous evils, but it is in no way exceptionally good or extraordinarily good.
This is where both groups — the rabid conspiracists of QAnon and the “child trafficking”-obsessed white evangelicals — go off the rails. Because while they are both correct that advocating these extreme evils makes you a Bad Person, they both then insist that their condemning such extreme evils makes them Good People — that condemning the kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder of children is sufficient for and equivalent to being a Good Person. They imagine that opposing the most extreme and monstrous forms of evil imaginable makes them special.
This brings us back to our old friends in the Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition. News of horrific cruelty produces nearly universal and unanimous horror, revulsion, and condemnation. And very often, those condemnations quickly give way to weird, non-sequitur assertions of innocence and identity.
Thus when news arrives of some horrible incident of animal cruelty, the comment section will overflow with two different kinds of reactions.
The first is simple and visceral and sticks to the topic. Something like: “That’s terrible! I hope the perpetrators are caught and punished!”
The second quickly glances off the topic at hand and then expounds on its real focus: the moral superiority of the writer. It reads something like this: “You people defending such things make me sick! It might not be ‘politically correct’ to say it, but I don’t care who I offend here, so I’ll just come right out and say what you cowards never will — that the people who did this should be caught and punished!”
The first type of response is about being appalled by the kitten-burning.
The second type of response is about being immensely proud at being appalled by the kitten-burning.
In every such case, you’ll find dozens of responses like the latter one, but you’ll search in vain for any hint of who they’re talking about as “you people defending such things.” The complete absence of anyone making such a defense never prevents the Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition from directing their replies to this audience of imaginary kitten-burning defenders. The wrongness of those imaginary defenders is the bedrock of the AKBC’s identity — of their self-concept. Contrast with such people is how they know themselves to be good and special and extraordinary. It is their assertion of innocence and their defense against moral anxiety.
This is the real and substantive difference between the “two ways to look” at the Jeffrey Epstein case that Cheryl Rofer described:
There are at least two ways to look at the situation: 1) From a relatively normie logic in which most people agree that sex trafficking children is evil; and 2) From a MAGA/ QAnon perspective, which adds a great deal to the normie logic. …
The general QAnon idea is that people in power kidnap children to harvest adrenochrome to keep themselves young. Pedophilia seems to be part of it too. You can probably find many variations, but it’s basically the same story as the antisemitic blood libel. These horrible people are so depraved that they torture children.
The difference between the “normie” condemnation of Epstein’s rape of children and the “MAGA/QAnon perspective” is not all the weird, lurid, imagined details of their conspiratorial fantasy — not the “adrenochrome” nonsense or the bizarre, Warnke-esque fabrications. The difference is that the MAGA/QAnon folks base their entire self-concept, their entire identity, on the contrast between themselves and Jeffrey Epstein. “I am better than Jeffrey Epstein. Therefore I must be a Good Person.”
And, also, “Therefore I must be a Good Person no matter what else I do or do not do.”
The kitten-burners and Satanic baby-killers and sexual predators provide them with both absolution and license.
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