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Wild claims of Jews killing Christian children and using their blood in rituals-the “blood libel”-date back to at least the 12th century and have popped up every so often since then, and long before that Christians were suspected of performing similar rites. Both of course were fictions.Ĭonspiracies centering on the vulnerability of children are neither new nor distinctly American. Both drew on natural fears about child safety and supercharged them into national phenomena with real-world ramifications.
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Both spun off into new theories: Amid a full-on national hysteria, McMartin spawned a series of day-care conspiracies, while Pizzagate has led to QAnon, an even wilder conspiracy theory that postulates that President Donald Trump is on the verge of arresting a throng of liberal elites for facilitating and participating in a sprawling child sex ring. Pizzagate was concocted during the 2016 presidential campaign and alleged that prominent figures in the Democratic Party were running a child sex ring in tunnels beneath the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in a residential Washington, DC, neighborhood. The McMartin saga, which began in 1983 with accusations made by one boy’s mother, came to encompass fantastical claims about a massive pedophile ring lurking beneath a preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Even though the supposed crimes unfolded thousands of miles and several decades apart, under very different circumstances, the two conspiracy theories share the same rough contours. The McMartin preschool scandal of the 1980s was a sort of analog version of the more recent Pizzagate, part of a lurid and misbegotten moral panic about subterranean child abuse. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of otherwise normal, relatively well-adjusted Americans truly believed that a massive ring of occultist pedophiles was operating right under everyone’s noses. “Everything fell into place,” one of them said. Nor was there any clear evidence that it was actually happening. Not that anyone else witnessed the abuse. And it all happened in the middle of a safe neighborhood where crimes were not supposed to happen, let alone such unspeakable and horrific ones. In total, some several hundred children were subjected to this treatment. Sometimes the kids were filmed for pornographic purposes. Their captors drank blood in front of them and staged satanic ritual sacrifices. The children were being sodomized in secret underground tunnels.