A Republican Stood Up to Trump. So Right-Wingers Smeared Him as a “Pedophile.”

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers.Mother Jones illustration; Patrick Semansky/AP

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Notions of white innocence and victimhood—which oftentimes but not always concentrate on the idealized child and family—are incredibly potent…Those ideas helped propel the (bipartisan) war on drugs and mass incarceration, the Second Red Scare, the opposition to busing and school desegregation, the global war on terror, and beyond. Moral/sex panics concerning children flow from these powerful ideas and help shape rhetoric and policy on a whole range of issues in US political culture.