Btw expect it to pick up the pace now that schools are opening and kids start getting the “gay std” monkeypox. Some of the craziest psychos like MTG have already started claiming kids are getting it from being raped by gay men and it’s only gonna become a wider talking point as things get worse.

I think a lot of analysis people put forward on this is completely fucking wrong. It's not really projection, it's strategic and carefully thought through by far right strategists and thinktanks who are the real vanguard of the far right movement.

The tactic is about tapping into deep seated insecurities that people have and weaponising those insecurities into tools of the movement.

Most of this has been about targeting people who are 40+ in age. Everyone above a certain age threshold can see very clearly that younger people have a drastically different worldview compared to them. This needs answering within society otherwise these people will be forced to come to terms with the fact that Gen X and Boomers had drastically different material conditions that resulted in their massively different views compared to Millenials and Gen Z.

Bring in the grooming myth. Young people are gayer and "woke", why? Because the left has GROOMED the youth via academia and WOKE IDEOLOGY.

You explain away the differences of views in society and you weaponise it into a PROTECT THE YOUNG tool. This turns your reactionary movement of proto-fascists into crusaders that believe what they're doing is good and right and for a good reason.

Supporting kids' rights to have a say in their identity (i.e. puberty blockers for potentially trans kids) is grooming to them because they see it as the adults pushing that on them.

And then once the term got around they revived the good old "gays are all pedos" shit and started applying it there too.

And leftists support LGBT people, so "naturally" they support grooming, which makes them groomers.

Yeah they just picked something bad to accuse not just the left but literally every sexual minority off so they'd have a thin pretext to justify mass murder. It's just baby's first blood libel for the 21st century.

The Pizza Gate, then Q Anon adjacent movement turned into "save the children" from trafficking, which is an ostensibly good cause except that they don't seek out actual traffickers or predators, they merely weaponize the accusations against their political and cultural opponents. Who could disagree with stopping child abuse after all, it's a powerful rhetorical bludgeon when people aren't really following what's going on. Epstein stuff definitely added fuel to the fire too

I don't think you should underestimate how much Covid has united cranks and reactionaries of all sorts against the corrupt and incompetent Democrats and the liberal and sadly progressive signifiers they hide behind. Formerly apolitical young people have been swept up in it, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, Q-anon, anti-groomer, homophobia, transphobia is all at a fever pitch and forming a political coalition.

Their narrative is that the liberals are making all the kids trans and/or gay to sexually abuse and traffic them, hence the "grooming" accusations. Like you say, most predators and abusers are on the right and in power, whereas actual progressives have basically no power whatsoever.

Grooming. Pshhh. If you saw my scraggly bearded snaggle toed friends you'd never accuse them of grooming or hygiene or anything

I think there's a big dumb reason that explains a lot and it's when boomers learn a new word. They overuse and overapply it until they completely ruin the word. It can no longer be used for its original intention.

They did this with the word "triggered".

In addition to what everyone else has said:

1. People who act differently to "normal" must be groomers.
2. In general when they don't understand why they disagree with something or someone, they just assume the worst of them, which must mean that leftists are groomers.
3. If you're willing to have sex with people outside of the norm, then you must be willing to have sex with children
4. For religious right wingers, leftists are satanists, and satan corrupts children

There's an interesting mirror to US funded anticommunist strategies in the third world, which often mobilised false accusations of sex crimes (for example, that communist women would chop off men's dicks in satanic rituals) to justify and win support for terror campaigns. Seems like that might be a way of accounting for it considering that key figures in the contemporary US right have intelligence agency ties and where their funding comes from

its a coordinated lie pushed by the media that all conservatives just accept whether they know its a lie or not and apparently its working really well

honestly i think it's almost exactly the same situation as critical race theory as a culure war buzzword