The New Blood Libel
The ancient origins of the anti-trans groomer panic.
“Witch riding backward on a goat accompanied by four putti”. Retrieved from: https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3g06844/
A conspiracy theory now grips the American far-right, although at this point it is far from contained to the fringe. It has become so widespread that it has gotten a record number of anti-LGBTQ laws introduced and inspired several instances of physical violence, peaking with the Club Q shooting on November 19 of 2022. 5 people lost their lives that night, and they are unlikely to be the last.
The tenets of this conspiracy theory will sound all-too familiar to those acquainted with the history of antisemitism. A shadowy cabal of people in the highest positions of power are slowly preparing your children– yes, your children!– for recruitment into a perverted sex cult full of endless orgies, suggestive dancing, and, finally, the permanent mutilation of their genitals. This isn’t about the Satanic Panic or QAnon, but something simultaneously new and ancient. This is a narrative about LGBTQ people and their allies that is definitively mainstream in American conservatism: let’s call it the “grooming” conspiracy theory.
For the purposes of this essay, we’ll define the grooming conspiracy theory as the false belief that members of the LGBTQ community and their allies, particularly in public schools, are systematically attempting to convince children they are LGBTQ, transgender in particular, sometimes to prepare them for sexual abuse.
The grooming aspect of this myth echoes another– that all gay men are pedophiles. This is not the first time it has motivated political campaigns either. Section 28 in the UK forbade classroom instruction on homosexuality or even mentioning its existence. Anita Bryant similarly asserted that since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit children. In the modern day, the grooming conspiracy theory is propped up as an explanation for an apparently disproportionate number of young people identifying as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-binary or queer in some way, although transgender and non-binary children are its primary target. In circles attempting to appear more scientific, it takes the form of the debunked social contagion theory or “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”.
That said, the purpose of this essay is not to debunk these false claims. Rather, it’s to demonstrate how it is simply one in a long line of false accusations directed at marginalized groups from antiquity to the present day. Many others have gone through the same exercise to show QAnon’s antisemitic roots, but I have yet to see many connect that history to the grooming panic or look further back into history than the blood libels of medieval Europe. This is not surprising, as the perpetrators of the grooming libel have stripped it of the more fantastical aspects of its predecessors in order to make it more plausible. The main purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that as hard as groups such as Moms for Liberty try to seem like they have reasonable concerns, their beliefs are rooted in centuries-old fantasies about conniving minorities. To uncover that connection, we have to talk about witchcraft.
Witchcraft in the Modern Day
Belief in witchcraft is most often associated with the witch hunts of the early modern period in Europe as well as the Salem Witch Trials, at least in the contemporary American consciousness. It’s a thing of the past for most people– a belief system whose explanatory power has been wholly superseded by scientific Enlightenment rationalism. Nevertheless, a 2022 study found that roughly a billion people in 95 sampled countries believe in witchcraft, defined as the ability to cause harm via supernatural means (not religious movements that reclaim the term “witch” such as Wicca). Americans, along with Swedes, the French and Italians, surprisingly all believe in witchcraft at a rate of 10%, give or take. The belief is far more prevalent at rates of around 50% in Brazil, Russia and Egypt, and closer to 90% in Tunisia, Iraq, and Greece.
The prevalence–or lack thereof– of belief in witchcraft in these countries was not surprising to the researchers, but was in fact consistent with the hypothesized function “maintaining order and cohesion in the absence of effective governance mechanisms.” In addition, belief in witchcraft is higher in societies and cultures with high levels of conformity and in-group bias. That describes certain sections of American society, such as conservative white Evangelical Christians, to a T. The propagation of conspiracy theories such as QAnon through these communities is unsurprising given the relentless real and perceived disruptions to the social order and daily life of the past few years, namely the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election. In reaction to movements for racial justice and the increasing visibility of queer people, they adopted an explanation that casts a marginalized group as the ultimate evil. In the past as well as the present, the most evil thing imaginable is infant cannibalism.
A Brief History of People Accusing Each Other of Eating Babies
To understand the grooming conspiracy theory, we must trace its genealogy from antiquity to today. Although conspiracy theories abound throughout history, the specific ones we are examining are defined by containing at least two of the following elements:
They are directed against a marginalized group of people, such as Jews in medieval Europe or early Christians in the Roman Empire
They accuse this group of one of the following:
Killing, sexually abusing, or harming infants and/or children in some way
Ritualized human sacrifice
Cannibalism or blood-drinking
Some sort of gross immorality, particularly sexual immorality, such as incest, sex with evil entities, or plain promiscuity
Consider the similarities between the following examples.
According first-century Jewish historian Josephus Flavius in his polemic Contra Apion, the Greco-Egyptian writer Apion libelously claimed a Greek named Antiochus stumbled into a Jewish temple and encountered the intended victim of a human sacrifice:
“… they used to catch a Greek foreigner, and fat him thus up every year; and then lead him to a certain wood, and kill him, and sacrifice with their accustomed solemnities, and taste of his entrails, and take an oath upon this sacrificing a Greek, that they would ever be at enmity with the Greeks.”
A century later, the misunderstandings of Roman society over the customs of a strange new sect called Christianity lead to very similar accusations. In the second-century work of Christian apologia Octavius, the Roman author Marcus Minucius Felix writes that non-Christian Romans commonly believed early Christian rites involved child cannibalism:
“Now the story about the initiation of young novices is as much to be detested as it is well known. An infant covered over with meal, that it may deceive the unwary, is placed before him who is to be stained with their rites: this infant is slain by the young pupil, who has been urged on as if to harmless blows on the surface of the meal, with dark and secret wounds. Thirstily - O horror! they lick up its blood; eagerly they divide its limbs. By this victim they are pledged together; with this consciousness of wickedness they are covenanted to mutual silence.”
The elements of ritual sacrifice and cannibalism against children are present in this case, although there are not yet elements of sexual abuse. That said, Christians did face accusations of unnatural fornication, namely incest, possibly due to the confusing custom of referring to one another as “brother” and “sister”.
One could likely name example after example of such conspiracy theories in antiquity, but for the purposes of this essay we’ll have to skip a few centuries ahead to medieval Europe. Here, we once again encounter the same elements of cannibalism, human sacrifice, unnatural fornication or gross immorality, and ritualized slaughter of children and infants. This time, the dominant Christian authorities targeted Jews as well as suspected witches, who were usually on the margins of society. Although it is not clear they are directly related to the ones from antiquity, one cannot help but point out the similarities.
According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the year of 1144 marks the first instance of the blood libel, which is defined as specifically accusing Jews of kidnapping, sacrificing and sometimes eating gentile children, among other lurid details such as using their blood to make matzo balls for Passover. An English boy– now known as St. William of Norwich, although the Catholic Church officially suppressed his veneration– mysteriously disappeared. Locals blamed his death on Jews ritually killing him in a mockery of the crucifixion. Although this incident certainly did not originate antisemitic violence in medieval Europe, the blood libel became an enduring justification for it.
Three centuries later in 1486, German clergyman Heinrich Kramer sought to consolidate everything he knew about hunting witches in a manual he titled the Malleus Maleficarum, often translated from Latin as The Hammer of Witches. Part 1, Question XI asserts that witches “are in the habit of devouring and eating infant children.” Witches also supposedly engaged in unnatural fornication with each other and the Devil himself in ritualized mockeries of the Holy Sabbath.
Children continued to be the primary target of supposed witches, including in one of the most famous cases: the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93. The accusers– most of whom were young girls, the oldest being Elizabeth Hubbard, no older than 17– charged that witches would spectrally pinch, prick with needles and even choke them. Tituba, an enslaved woman, became the first to testify that she was directed to torment and even kill the pious children of Salem.
Witch trials eventually came to an end in North America with the 1706 conviction of Grace Sherwood of what is now Virginia Beach. Belief in witchcraft most certainly persisted, and the common elements of harming or killing children, human sacrifice, cannibalism and mass orgies would crop up again with the onset of the Satanic Panic.
In 1980, psychologist Lawrence Pazder published Michelle Remembers with his former patient and wife Michelle Smith. The now-debunked book purports to relate the firsthand account of Smith’s ritualized torture and molestation at the hands of a coven of Satanists– her own mother among them– when she was just five years old. Smith’s allegations are widely credited with kicking off the Satanic Panic, which saw dozens if not hundreds of people falsely accused of engaging in “satanic ritual abuse” (SRA) without a single shred of credible evidence.
In 1984, mental health professionals and social workers used Pazder’s debunked methods of recalling “repressed memories” on children enrolled at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. The children apparently recalled long-repressed memories of sexual abuse, human sacrifice, cannibalism, orgies, and devil worship committed by their caretakers. Their recollections became increasingly fantastical, at one point involving witches taking children for rides on their broomsticks. In a last-ditch effort to prove the abuse, the children’s parents dug up the yard of the preschool to look for evidence of the secret tunnels their children’s abusers apparently used. They found none.
Although no convictions resulted from these bogus investigations, several individuals had their lives ruined by these false accusations. One spent several years in jail having committed no crime. Other daycare center owners fell prey to panic as well: a Texas couple in an unrelated case were only recently exonerated after spending 21 years in prison. Nationwide, 26% of prosecutors reported handling at least one satanic ritual abuse case in a 1993 survey. In total, at least 12,000 cases of alleged SRA were investigated, of which not a single one could be substantiated. Given this colossal blunder on the part of psychologists, therapists, social workers and parents, the Satanic Panic remains dead and buried… one would hope.
In 2006, businessman James Alefantis and his partner Carole Greenwood opened Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria and venue in an affluent neighborhood of Washington, DC. It hosts live music, serves pizza, and offers ping-pong tables as the name implies. Ten years later, a 28-year-old man fired an AR-15 inside it because people on the internet told him there were child sex slaves in the basement.
The individual in question, Edgar Maddison Welch, became convinced of this because of a conspiracy theory called Pizzagate, which rose to prominence in November of 2016 thanks to right-wing influencers and outlets such as Milo Yiannopoulos (who ironically defended pedophilia himself), Alex Jones, and Jack Pobosiec. Instead of Jews, this time the theory went that groups of “elites”– in this case high-ranking Democratic Party members– engaged in a widespread conspiracy of child sex trafficking with Comet Ping Pong operating as the home base, like some sort of mafia front for a sex cult. Welch was sentenced to 4 years in prison– by future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of all people– and the community that inspired his actions continued on undeterred.
As the 2016 election passed and the 2020 election approached, Pizzagate mutated into QAnon. In October of 2017, an anonymous 4chan user calling himself Q Clearance Patriot, commonly known as just Q, used cryptic messages to claim that a cabal of pedophiles inside the “Deep State” regularly sexually abuse, kill, and cannibalize or drink the blood of children and infants in order to harvest their adrenochrome, a real-life chemical that results from the oxidation of adrenaline (but definitely does not extend your lifespan, as the theory claims). Former president Donald Trump is a central figure in the mythology of QAnon, as Q claimed that he would soon arrest all the deep-staters in an apocalyptic event known as the Storm.
QAnon syncretizes a number of different elements from blood libel, witch lore, the Satanic Panic and even Christian eschatology into a truly postmodern conspiracy theory for the 21st century. The idea of blood drinking extending life may even derive from pop culture accounts of witchcraft and vampires, while the casting of Trump as a messianic figure that will usher in a singular event, the so-called Storm, resonates with themes found in the Book of Revelation.
As we all know, however, the Storm did not come. This forced QAnon adherents to either abandon their belief system or innovate new explanations for why none of their prophecies are coming true, fittingly echoing the same theological challenge faced by early Christians once it became clear Jesus was not coming back to destroy the Roman Empire. While the faithful still believe the Storm is imminent, the belief system of QAnon continues to rapidly mutate and incorporate other conspiracy theories and predictions, such as the hoped-for return of John F. Kennedy, Jr. from the dead in late 2021.
Nevertheless, it seems the momentum of QAnon as a political force is dead. It is simply not a prominent feature of the culture wars these days. With the Republican party on the back foot, a new wedge issue was needed to galvanize Trump’s old base. This is where we finally return to the subject of this essay.
Parents’ Rights to Do What?
The common characteristics of the grooming conspiracy theory with these previous iterations should now be more than clear. It may dispense with the most outlandish elements, but it retains the fundamental claim that a widespread conspiracy of elites is engaging in child sexual abuse both for their own gratification and to turn children queer. No matter how much its disseminators want to hide this fact, the roots of the conspiracy theory are as antisemitic as they are ancient. It should come as no surprise that some of the individuals most responsible for spreading this conspiracy theory have little issue spreading others.
Both James Lindsay of the website New Discourses and Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire have disseminated versions of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which claims that the Jews are working to replace whites with non-white immigrants, long before they started calling people groomers. Lindsay’s hypocrisy in this case should also be noted, considering his open association with Nicki Clyne, former member of the sex cult NXIVM, whose founder was convicted of human trafficking. Then again, maybe it was just deep cover research on grooming cults. Speaking of, this brings up the origin of this whole controversy: the rights and welfare of children.
If we take reactionaries at their word that their concerns are rooted in opposition to child exploitation, an apparent contradiction arises. For example, Republican-led states have recently rolled back or attempted to roll back child labor protection laws, with some conservatives arguing that such decisions should be left up to parents. Others have pushed back on attempts to ban child marriage. In 2018, then-New Jersey governor Chris Christie vetoed a bill banning the practice, citing conflict with “religious customs”. Walsh defended teen pregnancy and marriage on a radio show in 2011, and far-right Florida congressman Matt Gaetz came into the crosshairs of federal prosecutors in 2020 for alleged sex trafficking, including paying for sex with a 17-year-old girl.
To some, this begs the question of how reactionaries hold so many conflicting ideas in their heads. If the same people that oppose child exploitation push to legalize child labor and child marriage and even engage in sex trafficking, the obvious conclusion is that they’re just hypocrites.
While it is true that it is hypocritical, there is no such contradiction in the mind of the reactionary. Rather, all these opinions are consistent with the view that children are not humans with independent thoughts and different potential life trajectories, but the property of their parents. Put another way, they see the hierarchical relationship between parents and their children as natural and requiring no justification. They may not agree that ten is old enough to work at McDonald’s, but if their parents say it’s okay, then it’s okay. When groups like Moms for Liberty claim they merely advocate for parents’ rights, they aren’t asserting it as an abstract. Their objections are in response to a specific perceived violation which they don’t mention to avoid seeming bigoted. To find out what they really mean, one must ask, “parents’ rights to do what?”.
The Triumph of Family Values
In addition to antisemitism– or more accurately a pattern of accusing marginalized people of child abuse– at the bottom of all the grooming panic is a series of bigoted myths. To the queerphobe, no child is naturally anything but cisgender and straight, and adults that identify otherwise did not start that way. The only way to become queer is to suffer sexual abuse, the victims of which go on to perpetrate the same against more children once they grow up. In other words, any deviation from the perceived norm is a perversion that necessarily implies any number of other perversions– if you’re willing to have sex with a man, God knows what else you’re willing to have sex with. Underlying this is the restrictive notion that the family is the basic unit of society, and a family cannot be anything but a man, woman, and 1.5 children.
At the end of Walsh’s transphobic propaganda film What is a Woman?, Walsh asks his wife the titular question. She says “An adult human female,” and then hands him a jar of pickles to open. A joke about gender stereotypes is probably the most fitting ending for the “documentary”. It’s a small gesture that points to his larger motivations for producing it: to him, the existence of transgender people are disruptive to the traditional gender roles he promotes. If gender is not clear-cut, then the family– the backbone of society– is lost, and Western civilization along with it (we should be so lucky).
However, this is the relatively more intellectual account of “family values” conservatism. Like eugenics and phrenology, the constant refrain to family values is an attempt to give a rational veneer to something completely irrational. As much as the perpetuators of the trans grooming panic want to make it seem that their concerns are rooted in science and reasonable concerns, their bigotry is in fact an absurd conspiracy theory hundreds of years old.