I will always be grateful to QAnon cranks for making “sex trafficking” rhetoric unpalatable to anyone outside of the MAGA cult, thus causing the moral panic to implode. Oh, we still have to put up with “sex trafficking” being used as an excuse for evil and tyranny, but at least we no longer need endure endless racist memes of black men’s hands over white girls’ mouths; parades of taped-mouth morons walking around or standing on lawns; or creepy fetishists demanding people draw red Xs on their hands, dye their hair blue, make paper airplanes, or wave origami birds in strange women’s faces. It’s like the Drug War: still being used as excuse for State violence, but no more fried egg commercials or “classes” where cops encourage kids to rat their parents out to the Gestapo. Still, I’d much rather see the yellow press furiously backpedaling from a hysteria they eagerly promoted for two decades, describing it with words like “unfounded” and “right-wing conspiracy theory”, than breathlessly espousing pure idiocy such as “4% of all US adolescents are ‘sex slaves’“, “It’s possible for a woman to be raped by 100 men a day without the neighbors noticing“, “300,000 13-year-olds vanish every year without the news being able to name even one“, “Women are so incompetent, they are unable to book hotel rooms or travel“, “Only a tiny minority of men pay for sex, yet it’s enough to sustain one of the world’s largest criminal industries“, and even “34 – 7 = 13“.
Thank Heaven for small mercies.
