The purpose of randomly accusing your political opponents of the most heinous crimes, or at the very least of enabling or sheltering those who commit those crimes, is to pre-justify extreme action against them. This is the somewhat misunderstood impulse at the root of QAnon, and Pizzagate before it. While there is a kernel of conspiratorial truth there—the Epstein flight logs did feature Bill Clinton's name, just as there is video of Donald Trump partying with Jeff—it's not about specific allegations or investigating actual crimes. It is a kind of blood libel in service to violent reaction. Pizzagate took as gospel that the cabal was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a pizzeria that did not have a basement. The most basic tenet of QAnon is that Donald Trump, who hired as his Labor Secretary the federal prosecutor who cut a sweetheart deal with Epstein down in Florida, is the superhero who will break the cabal.

But the fantasy does not hold that the villains in question will be investigated, charged, and tried before a jury of their peers in a civil proceeding according to our Constitution. The QAnon dream, echoed by the spouse of a sitting Supreme Court justice, is to see American citizens rounded up by the American military, shipped to Guantanamo Bay, and subjected to military tribunals. In some versions, they are summarily executed. Those are the theories. In practice, these cults of information have led people to violent action. Pizzagate inspired a man to go to the aforementioned pizza parlor with a gun, because he received the core message: our enemies are not merely advocates of more government intervention in the economy or marriage rights for same-sex couples. They are an organized cabal of pedophiles and their enablers, and anything is justified to stop them, including violent force.

Now the scattergun accusations of pedophilia—and sympathy for its heinous perpetrators—have hit the mainstream with some of the Republican lines of questioning at Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson's confirmation hearings, and with some defenses of a vague new Florida law that, through its vagueness, could easily become a weapon to marginalize LGBTQ people. We know from experience that the higher up in the power pyramid these insinuations go, the more dangerous the situation becomes. You can disagree about what age kids should start learning about sexual orientation and gender identity without calling people who disagree with you pedophiles.

united states december 3 sen lisa murkowski, r alaska, left, sen susan collins, r maine, sen bill cassidy, r la, and sen mitt romney, r utah, depart from a meeting with senate majority leader mitch mcconnell, r ky, in his office in washington on thursday, dec 3, 2020 photo by caroline brehmancq roll call, inc via getty images

Senators Murkowski, Collins, and Romney have been branded "pro-pedophile" by a member of their own party.

Caroline Brehman // Getty Images

We've seen this before on issues like immigration, where people arriving at the southern border are increasingly characterized on the right as an "invasion" of faceless hordes bringing disease, or even an entirely dehumanized force "poisoning" our pure all-American towns. The man who shot up an El Paso Walmart in 2019 left a manifesto obsessed with the idea of a "Hispanic invasion of Texas" and the so-called "Great Replacement" of white people—the latter a notion that has fueled mass shootings in New Zealand as well as the United States. At the bottom of these theories is the notion that one's political enemies have committed crimes against the nation and its true citizens so grave that anything is justified in response—except due process according to our constitutional standards. That would involve supplying some evidence that might stand up outside the nation's digital message boards.

It's hard to look beyond the old adage (mistakenly attributed to Voltaire) now getting such a workout in our troubled times: "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." A mob of people sacked their own national Capitol building on the belief that an election had been stolen across seven or more states—some of which were run by Republican governors and election officials who openly supported the candidate they said it was stolen from—by still more shadowy cabals. In some cases, these theories of the case involved chicanery by Hugo Chavez a decade or more before the 2020 election. It had to be that long because he died in 2013. But there is no burden, or even expectation, of making sense. These folks didn't want Hillary Clinton locked up over her email protocol, or the Wall Street speeches, or even Benghazi. They wanted her locked up because she was Them—a standard-bearer for The Enemies. Even Republicans, as some senators found out this week, are not immune to becoming Them—and getting smeared as the worst kind of criminal sympathizers—if they fail to march in lockstep with Real America.

We have entered a space where huge numbers of people have been drenched in propaganda for years about how their country is being stolen away from them by their fellow citizens who hate them—and who, in every way that matters, are not Real citizens of this country at all. Maybe it was inevitable that some subsection of that group would turn to more specific visions of invasions orchestrated by cabals, and another subset still would turn to a proper blood libel. After all, one fairy tale tied up in all this maintained that Hillary Clinton literally drinks the blood of children. There is almost an internal logic to the notion that, in response, anything would be justified to get such people out of power. It's just that, consciously or not, this is rooted in a reactionary motivation to replace them with members of the right tribe at all costs.

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