The American mainstream Left, it seems, is experiencing a minor-crisis over the "pedophile" menace in these end-time days of Epstein.

We might ask on the one hand; are pedophiles something the Left should run away from like startled kids, or even deny, as per the drag-panic and groomer-libel we have all become far too familiar, and frankly bored to death with? Or is pedophilia a hysteria-de-jour they should instead continue to sow the seeds of, lest the pedo-smear one day become profitable as it now promises to be with the incoming release of the "Epstein Files"?

Commentators, naturally, appear not only to want it both ways, but just like Epstein and his pals, in as many ways as possible!

"Pedophilia", the fashionable Left scream, is an exceptionally awful crime, a crimen exceptum. Any person so unfortunate as to become tainted by association with this vile psychopathy, is without a doubt - garbage, an "awful human being", totally irredeemable, they would say. Yet "pedophilia", they also contend, is all around us! So much so, that pedophilia is culture itself - an inevitable example of everything that is wrong with cis-hetero-patriarchal society and the cynical elites who control it. So the heroes and heroines of the mainstream Left are not only ogling their pedophilic cake, they also want to wolf it down their starved throats just like Donald Trump in the locker-room of a Miss Teen America contest.

Megyn Kelly takes aim, and feels the blowback

Recently, famed conservative commentator, Megyn Kelly took the mainstream Left's bait in a segment of her show where she drew a sharp distinction between Jeffrey Epstein's harem of teen "jailbait" on the one hand, and on the other, de facto pedophilia. That is, an attraction to small children before the age of puberty.

Despite the predictable and mind-numbingly bovine fallout ("diet pedophilia" was one such coinage), Kelly was of course spot-on. For decades now, professors of Sexology and Mental Health Practitioners have been warning us of just how important this distinction is. In addressing and defending the umbrella-term "Minor-Attracted Person", we have already reflected those concerns here, at Mu.

Young people and sexual minorities are yet again silenced

Failing to distinguish between attraction to adolescents and attraction to prepubertal children, as well as being deeply unscientific, also does a grave disservice to young people. This is best understood when we acknowledge that for 99% of the population, "pedophilia" is wrongly assumed to be a criminal, often forcible act, rather than an attraction per se. And since we are now in effect talking about criminal acts, we already know who will inevitably be caught in the crossfire; AMSC debutantes and abuse survivors.

In the first instance, older youth who are developing their own sexual identities, are infantilized, and their agency is simply denied as if they were little children. If they are willing to internalize this surface-narrative, they are likely to interpret their experiences through a singular lens; that of perpetual victimhood. A never-ending childhood of "stolen innocence". If they try to deny it, they are seen as part of the problem!

In the second, young child and infant rape victims who truly had no say in their abuse, are forced to contemplate darker ideas if they question the surface narrative. Were they Epstein-tier jailbait, just like the teens who were simply "asking for it"? In any event, they are forced to live with the societal role-play of the convenient "tick-box problem", namely the idea this "pedophilia" is some kind of "cultural malaise", a moral transgression of arbitrary law they might just have to "get over" for their own good. The #metoo strait-jacket is deliberately intended to conflate both child victims and fully grown young adults, gender their assumed passivity and disempower them for clicks and coverage. The individual and their lived experience is buried under a pile of other peoples' cultural "discourse".

The conflation also does a disservice to the most despised of all groups - young Minor-Attracted People who are coming to terms with their sexuality.

Those who find themselves attracted to adolescents are told by preening Zoomer social media "influencers", they are hideous monsters and rapists for fancying "literal children". This amounts to a deeply unhealthy and potentially destructive start in life. True pedophiles, who fancy small children are then dismissed as the lowest of the low, when in fact, all they have evinced is an attraction they have neither acted nor intended to act upon. In effect, what we have is a cruel moral shell-game where whatever your non-normative orientation, society gives you the worst end of the equation, and deliberately so. But what this does not account for is the fact that closeted MAPs are stakeholders in this society whether their haters like it or not. So their mental health matters. A lot.

And what about the numbers behind the prejudice? The child sexual offending risk-factor for a minor-attracted man roughly doubles that of a "control" (average) male. Yet the child sexual offending risk-factor for men who serve as police officers, and the sexual assault risk-factor for men representing certain ethnicities, is still greater by multiples! A similar effect can be found for sexual abuse survivors.

In a civilized, peacetime society, no one should be calling to lynch Cops, Abuse Survivors, nor socially-disadvantaged Black Males for the outsize "sins" of their fellow-men. No one should be calling to hang MAPs for their statistically rare dalliances, either. The offending baselines are so low, it is the Eugenicists who should instead hang their heads in shame.

Prohibited Images: Conflating teens with children has yet more victims

In another example of the moral dead-end where one-size-fits-all thinking takes us, laws against adolescent porn are now so strong in the US, as to perversely banalize true hurt-core, and child-rape material. Graphic material, with real, unwilling victims. The legal distinction is in fact almost non-existent, given that much of the self-directed illegal adolescent content involves penetration (usually with own fingers and objects) putting it among the most "extreme" according to official systems of deviancy-classification.

Unsurprisingly, this means that truly extreme content of very young, non-consenting children has become all the more attractive on the dark-web, as punters demand something that is more taboo, and more tangibly different to legal pornography. At least more so than than "boring", but equally illegal older-youth erotica featuring almost-adults. The penalties are after all the same, so if the taboo is what you are really seeking (and news articles suggest this is often the case), why not go after the really young stuff, with no further penalty?

What way, Western Pedophile?

Taking a broad as possible a view of the dramas of 2025 and what awaits, we are left to ponder what will become of the empty and baseless talk of "the Left" and "LGBTQ+" trying to "normalize pedophilia". Might it in fact be the case that "normalization" of attractions between youth and older people is far more likely to happen slowly, as a result of society airing its dirty laundry and simply coming to terms with human nature? Insufferable moralists of all stripes, might then be blessed with the opportunity to scream unceremoniously in the coming decades, rolling their eyeballs and performing anger until all the free money for their little hate-project dries up.

Normalization? Under the virtuous guise, and wasted effort of a political war-game, perhaps so.

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Footnote

Kelly is not unique in making this argument. It has been employed recently by Alan Dershowitz and Peter Schiff, to cite just the examples that caused controversy or public outcry.

For more, direct defense of Megyn Kelly, see Catholic League.