When Will KUSI Stop Protecting Child Predators?

Slander for Fun, Profit, and (Maybe) Ratings

Jun 29, 2023

Yesterday local TV station KUSI used social media to join in the right’s national pastime of fomenting hate toward LGBTQ+ humans.

They posted a tweet saying “Will the Biden Administration protect underage children from predators?” in response to a message from the President advocating for passage of the Equality Act, which seeks to incorporate the protections against discrimination toward LGBTQ+ people from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Here’s a screenshot: (in case the TV station decides to delete the Tweet):

In the headline for this post, I’ve opted to flip the script, suggesting the TV station has something to do with crimes against children. Just as it is an onerous suggestion about the president, I have no proof that KUSI is protecting predators.

It’s only fair, given the extreme right’s slanderous accusations aimed at the gay community seeking to suggest pedophilia is included in the term LGBTQ+.

It goes beyond the fear of drag queens reading in libraries corrupting children; any examination of the motivation behind such attacks shows they are simply an incremental part of an effort to roll back all rights for gays.

We’re hearing more of these pedo-obsessive narratives because nationally* June is Gay Pride month, (*It’s celebrated in July in San Diego) the GOP is heavily focused on promoting culture wars. Making people afraid or hate is a proven tactic for building authoritarian societies.

A common trope in right wing circles holds that popular Democrats are recruiting children into Satanic rituals which involve sex-trafficking.

Really!?

A Public Religion Research Institute survey of more than five thousand adults revealed that 23% of Republicans polled believe the QAnon propaganda holding that “government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a sex-trafficking operation.”

This made up justification for hateful rhetoric (and the actions stemming from it) It sounds ridiculous because it is, just as my implying that a TV station has anything to do with pedophilia.

The reality about adults inflicting themselves on children for sexual gratification purposes tells a much different story. Based on arrest statistics, parents should be protecting their children from practitioners of religions, law enforcement officers, and (mostly) lower level Republican officials.

If you’d like to take a dive into the sex stories behind arrests for sex crimes involving Republicans, start here and make a big pot of coffee.

These MAGA warriors also use implied child molestation as a cudgel for other right wing goals, like dismantling public education and using libraries as a battlefield.

The front page of today’s Union-Tribune features coverage about two women who effectively shut down an exhibit about Gay Pride at the Rancho Penasquitos Library by checking out and refusing to return 14 books used in the display.

Their protest goes beyond protecting children from walking past LGBTQ+ oriented books –the display was not in the children’s section and was similar to other exhibits honoring cultures, holidays or causes. These MAGAts want what they consider all “inappropriate content” completely removed from the library.

So today, the hate and lies are about gays. Betcha tomorrow it’s about racism.

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NOTE: Today’s posting is on the short side; I’ve got chemo to keep me occupied and I can’t get ye olde laptop to balance with those lines pumping stuff in.

ALSO: I’m taking a four day weekend starting Saturday. I’ll resume publication on Wednesday.

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News Clips That Almost Fell Off My Desk

How Migrants Flown to Martha’s Vineyard Came to Call It Home Via the New York Times. Lots of Americans aren’t like those asshole southern Governors.

Martha’s Vineyard is not the place they had imagined for themselves, they said, but it has become the place where they hope to put down roots. Mr. Cauro said he would like to bring his wife and two children from Venezuela once his own legal status was secured.
When his family calls him on FaceTime, he tells them to be patient. He has not seen them for a year, but he promises it will not be too much longer.
His 2-year-old son, Reynaldo, wearing a straw hat he rarely takes off, always asks when he will be home.
“I’m already home,” Mr. Cauro replies. One day, he reminds his son, he will also be home with him.

Social Media’s Construction of Imaginary Consensus Via Aaron Ross Powell (Substack)

For someone like Elon Musk—a guy who spends so much time on Twitter that it seemingly represents the bulk of his engagement with people outside his immediate circles—the odd little far-right world of his Twitter feed comes to feel like the whole world. Terminally online, heavy social media users don’t realize how much nonsense they take to be fact because that nonsense, to them, looks like majority opinion, disputed only by a discredited (by their community’s imagined consensus) and unserious minority.
Of course, in-group bias happens outside of social media, and people believed plenty of dumb things before the rise of Twitter. But the illusion I’ve set out makes all of it worse by undermining many of the mechanisms that historically helped us—albeit not always successfully—to correct our nonsense.
The solution isn’t to abandon social media and return to instant messaging and web forums. Technology has changed, and social media has real benefits. Instead, our best path forward is to remind ourselves, again and again, that no matter what it feels like, our online communities are, in fact, quite tiny and unrepresentative—and we should range outside them.

National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers Via the Washington Post. Maybe they can do a photo essay on the inherent poverty of being a gig worker.

The magazine’s current trajectory has been years in the making, set in motion primarily by the epochal decline of print and ascent of digital news and information. In the light-speed world of digital media, National Geographic has remained an almost artisanal product — a monthly magazine whose photos, graphics and articles were sometimes the result of months of research and reporting.
At its peak in the late 1980s, National Geographic reached 12 million subscribers in the United States, and millions more overseas. Many of its devotees so savored its illumination of other worlds — space, the depths of the ocean, little-seen parts of the planet — that they stacked old issues into piles that cluttered attics and basements.
It remains among the most widely read magazines in America, at a time when magazines are no longer widely read. At the end of 2022, it had just under 1.8 million subscribers, according to the authoritative Alliance for Audited Media.

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