Suffer the Little Children

For They Shall Lead Us to the Scaffold

If there’s one thing the new conservative/hard right populists care about, it’s children. We know this, because they never stop trying to warn us that children are in danger from drag queens, woke teachers, abortionists, Muslim ‘grooming gangs’, migrants, the Clintons, and paedophiles. Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon, ‘Tommy Robinson’, Katie Hopkins, Suella Braverman - they are only trying to protect children from the forces of evil that the media/elite/left/woke establishment dares not confront and may even be colluding with.

According to the QAnon cultists, Trump became president specifically to save children from deep state paedophile rings, and would have saved them, had he not been cheated out of his rightful electoral victory.

That’s the kind of guy he is. And the kind of people his supporters are. The kind of people who, in the summer of 2020, used the #Savethe Children and #stophumantrafficking hashtags to promote an entirely baseless conspiracy theory in which a satanic/child-murdering network was supposedly trafficking 300,000 children every year.

And that’s only the start. Because the QAnonists would also have you believe that liberal Hollywood stars and Democrat politicians are torturing children in order to ‘harvest’ the adrenaline-related adrenochrome from their brains that would keep them forever young. Adrenochrome is the psychedelic chemical that Hunter Thompson gets high on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which he insists can only be extracted from ‘a living human body.’

Thompson was just having fun. The QAnon circus barkers are absolutely serious. Hilary Clinton. Bill Gates. Tom Hanks. Oprah. Celine Dion, George Soros (of course) - they’re all businly sucking eternal youth from children’s brains. Even the Wayfair furniture company was involved in the trafficking business, apparently because it once sold a pillow with the same name as a missing child.

Bear that in mind next time you send off for a bedside table.

It’s easy - and necessary - to mock such howling drivel. But we shouldn’t laugh too much, because nonsense like this does have a purpose. History has shown again and again that if you want to make people hate and fear, one of the best ways you can do it is by accusing your enemies of harming or wanting to harm your children.

This is why fantasies of the Jewish ritual murder of children so often feature in outbreaks of medieval antisemitism, and in the twentieth century in the pages of the Nazi newspaper Die Sturmer:

The QAnoners have no problem reaching into these sordid anti-semitic tropes, because these are the toxic waters they swim in, and would have us all swimming in. The people who propagate and subscribe to such ‘theories’ inhabit a political space in which simply having ‘political opponents’ who you disagree with or don’t like is no longer enough - you have to hate them and everything they stand for. They need their target audience to remain in a permanent state of fear, horror, and outrage at the absolutely depraved evil being perpetrated by absolutely depraved conspiracies against children.

If this means convincing them that Hilary Clinton and Bill Gates are drinking the blood of children at sex orgies, then so be it. And if you can make people believe that a furniture company names its products after kidnapped children, then you can convince them of pretty much anything. It’s not for nothing that QAnon supporters segue so easily into ‘scamdemic’/anti-vax/anti-mask/5G-n-your-veins’ hysteria, and depict the pandemic and everything related to it as another Diabolical Evil Conspiracy Product.

And whatever the scam, you can guarantee that children will be part of it. Why were children forced to wear masks? To make it impossible to identify their faces so that the abductors and human traffickers can get hold of them more easily. Why did Bill and Melinda Gates vaccinate children against polio in Sierra Leone? To give them polio.

And so on and so on. And as mad and hateful as these stories are, they are also useful to people who don’t necessarily believe them

One of those people is Donald Trump, who last month held a special screening of the ‘QAnon film’ Sound of Freedom at his golf club in New Jersey, with the likes of Kari Lake and Steve Bannon in the audience, in addition to the film’s lead actor Jim Caviesel. The film is ostensibly a thriller, about a US government agent who rescues Honduran kids from Columbian sex traffickers, who just happen to be members of the FARC.

Though its director has denied any connection between his movie and the QAnon movement, Caviesel has embraced ‘adrenochrome’ stories and QAnon has embraced the fim. Sound of Freedom has been widely-criticized by anti-trafficking organizations for portraying child sex trafficking as primarily a cross-border/inter-state activity.

Not that Trump and his cronies care. One of Caviesel’s line ‘God’s children are not for sale’ has become as well-known as the film itself. ‘Wow.Wow. Wow. GO SEE #SoundofFreedom’, tweeted a clearly-distressed Ted Cruz, while Senator Tim Scott praised a ‘powerful film that reveals the horrifying reality that is human trafficking.’

I haven’t seen it, but I am pretty certain that Cruz, Bannon and Trump don’t give a damn about Honduran children or any other children who can’t be useful to them politically. Because these are people whose concern for children is very selective. It doesn’t extend to ‘children in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, including foster care,’ ‘runaway and homeless youth’ and ‘unaccompanied foreign national children without lawful immigration status’, listed in the 2020 U.S Department of Justice report on ‘Trafficking in Persons.’

It doesn’t extend to the migrant children who were locked up in cages and taken from their parents and given to other families during Trump’s administration. Or the migrant children who are being denied water at the Texas border. Or the children who die week after week in American schools because of the country’s insane gun laws.

So the question is, why was Trump showing it and associating himself with it? The answer, and it isn’t rocket science, is that Trump is playing to the QAnon narrative of the child saviour in order to keep his base foaming at the mouth. Immediately after the screening, the Great Man promised to ‘end the child trafficking crisis by returning all trafficked children to their families in their home countries, without delay’.

No surprises there, but Trump also made a promise to introduce the death penalty to ‘anyone caught trafficking children across our border.’

This is where the love of children invariably takes these crusaders - to the gallows, the electric chair and the lethal injection. Because there’s nothing like a little capital punishment to make a certain kind of politician seem tough and caring. Both Trump and his would-be challenger Ron DeSantis have put the death penalty back on the political agenda, using child sex traffickers and child rapists as a pretext.

Because they too want to #Savethechildren and exploit whatever political capital they can get from the blood lust that inevitably accompanies both real and imagined crimes against children.

Let no one think there is anything uniquely American about this tawdry demagogic cynicism. In a country like the UK, punch-drunk from rightwing populism and its failed promises, and clammy with incipient fascism, it was inevitable that the monstrous crimes of Lucy Letby would be exploited by exactly the same people who have exploited so much else these last few years.

In little more than twenty-four hours after the verdict, GB News had called for at least twice for ‘debates’ on whether the death penalty should be brought back. Elsewhere, fascistoid numbskulls like Brendan Clarke-Smith and Lee Anderson were also tightening their knuckles round an imaginary noose, and Peter Hitchens could be found boasting about the two executions he has already witnessed.

On GMB, the shrivelled husk-like visage of the sadly ubiquitous reptilian sado-pundit Andrew Pierce could barely contain a grin at the prospect of dragging prisoners out for sentencing in chains and a gag.

In the Telegraph, the insipid altar boy Tim Stanley called for a ‘proper debate’ on the death penalty. Even though he opposes it himself, Stanley still thinks we should ‘remain sympathetic towards the instincts surrounding calls for the death penalty, and wary of attempts to dismiss or suppress them.’

Why should we be sympathetic to anyone but the people directly affected by this awful crimes? And why should not dismiss people who get some vicarious satisfaction at the prospect of someone hanging from a rope? Because, according to Stanley, ‘the murder of a child, so innocent and vulnerable, sparks rage in normal people.’ And also, ‘the modern world, rejecting the doctrine of original sin, often operates in ignorance of people’s capacity for wickedness.’

One can picture Stanley kneeling by his bedside in a monk’s robe with his hands clasped and a beatific smile as he came up with those lines. And yesterday the Telegraph returned to the same subject with a piece explaining how ‘the debate around reinstating the death penalty has re-emerged’ and headlined with a reader quote that ‘ The death penalty is the ultimate act of justice and it should be applied to child killers.’

This ‘debate’ has only ‘re-emerged’ because the likes of the Telegraph see Letby’s atrocious crimes as an opportunity to engage in some reactionary back-to-the-future posturing. No one is calling for a debate about original sin or the death penalty beyond the scrapings of our political class, the rightwing press and the dregs of Twitter and the rightwing comments pages.

Once again, it would be easy to conclude that the only fault with people like this is that they love too much, but vengeance is the goal here, not justice. And the death penalty has always had a morbid ability to stir unhealthy emotions in a certain kind of right-wing voter who thinks that ‘prison is a holiday camp’ and we need a ‘deterrent’, even though, like flights to Rwanda, there is no evidence that hanging has ever provided any such thing, or that it would have stopped someone like Letby from carrying out her atrocious crimes.

The US-imported astroturf ‘student’ movement Turning Point UK knows this very well, and has tried to turn the death penalty into a genuinely rabble-rousing cause célèbre, with advertisements like this:

And these are the reasons that it gives:

-The death penalty gets justice for victims & their families.

- A rope is eco-friendly as can be reused.

- Execution is cheaper than housing the most evil criminals for life.

-The death penalty has 100% guarantee of stopping reoffending.

- The death penalty deters future crime.

Nice. And the vicious vulgarity of that second ‘reason’ really gives an insight into the new age of barbarity that these people would like to take us towards. In their world, forwards is always backwards. If they have to use the murders of children to get there, let no one think they will hesitate for a second.

But we don’t need to have a ‘debate’ about the death penalty. We know the reasons for and against it. That debate was won in 1965, when capital punishment was suspended, and confirmed when it was made permanent in 1965, and again when it was finally abolished for all crimes in 1998. Had that not been the case, the Birmingham Six would all have been hung, and so would Barry George, Stefan Stiszko, Judith Ward, and Sally Clark, and let no one think that Lee Rigby’s killers would have been deterred from doing anything.

We don’t need to revisit a debate that already took into account murders that were no less atrocious than Lucy Letby’s crimes.

The only thing that has changed is that the country has become crueller and nastier, and the right would like to make it nastier still. Because capital punishment is part of its emotional comfort zone, and it is intended to appeal to the same kind of people who want to use gunboats against migrants, put soldiers in classrooms, and all the other ‘tough’ things that they think make us better.

In this country, a flailing hard-right movement desperate for anything that can serve its interests has even more reason to go down this reactionary path when so many of its promises have gone up in smoke, and when it no longer has any limits regarding the type of voter it is prepared to appeal to.

Bringing back the rope is just one more ‘victory’ its more extreme fringes would like to win. At the moment, these demands are mostly clickbait. But don’t be surprised if the death penalty becomes another rightwing ‘culture war’ issue - perhaps linked to withdrawal from the ECHR.

It’s even possible to imagine a Conservative Party election promise to hold - ahem - a referendum on capital punishment, regardless of the fact that Margaret Thatcher - who believed in capital punishment, refused to this.

Nothing is really off the table in these deranged times. But when we see these hard-faced tough guys on our tvs and mobile phones calling for executions, gags and chains in response to crimes against children, we should remember who they are, and what they want, and feel the same disgust at their shameless exploitation of these crimes as we do towards the crimes themselves.