The far right's fixation on pedophilia is dangerous

I’ve just experienced another attack on social media. The harassment on X, as Twitter now calls itself, usually lasts around 36 hours, and while most of the nasties are trolls and bots, I can’t pretend that the hundreds of comments don’t have an effect. I’m a priest, progressive, outspoken. No point in complaining. But a disturbing new aspect of these bombardments are the repeated and constant false accusations of pedophilia – not a libellous dribble, but a flood.

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It’s not really about me of course, and I’m in good company. Last month in Belleville, Ont., when Justin Trudeau was swarmed by a right-wing mob, one of the hysterical shouts clearly heard was that he was a child molester. It’s grotesque nonsense about the Prime Minister that swamps social media. In fact, there aren’t many politicians and activists on the left who haven’t been accused of this awful crime.

And with a horribly convenient timing, a new movie, Sound of Freedom, is currently the talk of the far right. Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ) stars as Tim Ballard, a former government agent who rescues children from sex traffickers. As the critic Sam Adams wrote perceptively for the online magazine Slate, it “arrived in theatres surrounded by a cloud of innuendo put forth by its star and its noisiest right-wing supporters – conspiratorial insinuations about who doesn’t want this story to be told and what real-world traffickers are really up to.”

[The author is an Anglican priest. ~ Beege]

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