They aren’t even trying hard to hide their embrace of pedophilia anymore.
Yes, I know that some of you think I am an alarmist or even a conspiracy theorist for saying that the Left wants to normalize pedophilia, and for some people, no amount of evidence will suffice to change their minds until they see actual sexual assaults on children in the streets.
Likely they will shrug when that happens, as they do with so much deviant behavior these days.
But for those of you who still are members of the human race and hence despise pedophiles, let me put yet another brick in the wall of evidence that is building up before our eyes: Bloomberg Opinion, one of the more “respectable” press outlets in the country, just published a critique of Sound of Freedom, the anti-child-sex trafficking movie, written by an actual advocate of pedophilia.
No, I am not kidding, and not exaggerating.
Is 'Sound of Freedom' a QAnon dog whistle, or is it just another thriller? @nberlat saw the movie and has an answer. https://t.co/qmk1Sa7DNg via @opinion
— Bloomberg (@business) July 15, 2023
Noah Berlatsky, the author of the piece, gives your typical liberal critique, using the piece more to attack Republicans than the movie itself, and smear all of us and, ironically, Hollywood, with a bunch of hooey about how child sex trafficking is mischaracterized and dramatized for political and dramatic effect. No doubt, at some level, that is true, because that happens with every issue in politics and movies. If you have ever watched a Hollywood movie that is “based upon real events” you know what I mean.
But that isn’t much of a critique, and the QAnon smear is the real point. Pay no attention to the issue because it is overblown, he suggests. It is all about promoting fascism.
Scholar Robert Paxton argues that fascism is marked, among other things, by “cults of unity, energy, and purity” and that it pursues goals of “internal cleansing.” The far right is motivated by myths of corrupted innocence and corruption avenged. You can see that in QAnon. But you can also see it in Hollywood’s own trafficking narratives.
So, is Sound of Freedom a QAnon dog whistle, or is it just another thriller? The answer is that — whatever the filmmaker’s intentions — it functions as both. These narratives do little to help victims. But they can create coalitions of feeling, disgust and righteous rage that connect conservative conspiracy theorists with the mainstream.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear about a single case of child sexual abuse, I tend to experience disgust and righteous rage, while Berlatsky pretty clearly wants to link our emotional reaction to it as fascistic. Why?
Well, perhaps because he feels quite differently about it.
No perhaps, he just does feel differently; he thinks that pedos are misunderstood and victimized by society.
The person who wrote this Bloomberg opinion piece is leftist activist Noah Berlatsky @nberlat. He was the spokesperson for M.A.P. (minor-attracted person) advocacy group, Prostasia. In 2017, he tweeted that pedophiles are a stigmatized group who get designated as deviants for… https://t.co/SGqZ5CEqbB pic.twitter.com/6yq7LGqfgJ
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 17, 2023
Well, that puts a slightly different spin on things, doesn’t it? Perhaps Berlatsky isn’t getting quite so worked up about child sex trafficking because he doesn’t get quite so worked up about using children for sex.
Now before I go further, I don’t mean to suggest that Noah Berlatsky approves of any sort of human trafficking–I have no reason to believe so, and as a heterosexual, I don’t support adult female sex trafficking, even though I am attracted to adult females. One’s sexual proclivities need not make one approve of slavery and violence unless those are your things.
But clearly, the reaction of the public to the subject is especially strong because children are being exploited. It is deeply ingrained in human psychology that the weaker and more innocent among us deserve special care, which is why men on the Titanic let women and children escape while they froze and drowned to save them. If you aren’t as devoted to protecting children from sexual exploitation, you are going to react less strongly to the movie and the message.
And continuing with the theme of letting minors consent to sex, Noah Berlatsky wrote about children's bodily autonomy through a neuroscience argument.
"The fact that adolescent brains are different than older people’s brains doesn’t mean that older people make better… pic.twitter.com/4eiZ02tl1J
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) July 17, 2023
In case you don’t know, the Prostasia Society is an advocacy group for “Minor Attracted Persons,” and one of the ways that it goes about its business is by arguing that children are not fundamentally different than adults and that they need to explore things in order to find out who they are and what they like.
The reality of Prostasia is hardly as they portray it; in one sense their claim that they oppose child sexual abuse may be considered true, but only in the sense that they want to normalize it as something other than abuse.
Prostasia calls pedophiles ‘minor attracted persons’ or MAPs, which is an undisguised attempt to rebrand pedophilia as a sexual orientation such as homosexuality. In the past, it has condemned Tumblr removing “MAPs’ and allies’ blogs”. In a post on its website, Prostasia went on to claim that removing such content would harm children.
The post claimed, “An entire community at the “ground zero” of child sexual abuse prevention is being censored, and it’s children who will ultimately suffer the most.” The foundation also claims that “stigma” against pedophilia is a consequence of “alt-right conspiracy theorists” and “sexual conservatives”.
Regarding censorship of “MAP” content, Prostasia opined, “In combination, this has left the support professionals who work with non-offending MAPs at a disadvantage, and has largely reduced spaces for public online discussion about minor-attraction to the echo chamber of alt-right conspiracy theorists and sexual conservatives, who wield the stigma around pedophilia as a potent weapon to undermine the progress of the LGBT movement, the anti-fascist movement, and their other political enemies.”
Sound familiar? All the tropes used in his critique of Sound of Freedom.
Bloomberg isn’t the only news organization to latch onto Berlatsky. NBC, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and other mainstream outlets have lent their credibility to his writing.
None of these organizations would ever dream of advocating pedophilia, of course. So they hand over the pages of their newspapers and magazines to allow Berlatsky to do so. Because Berlatsky claims he abuses child sexual abuse, they can deny any complicity in promoting pedophilia.
The way in which pedophilia will be normalized is not through making “Minor Attracted Persons” seem less threatening, although Prostasia certainly tries to do that, but rather in redefining childhood itself. By turning children into sexual beings who need to experience the full range of possibilities out there–see what is being done in schools right now to sexualize children–it will soon be argued that it is oppression to suppress the “desires” of children and not let them be “who they really are.”
It will be a children’s rights movement, not a pedophiles’ rights movement through which this will happen.
It is happening already.
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