I’ve always had a low opinion of Dave Smith, and for a long time have believed that pedo hysteria is out of control. Last week, however, I saw a clip of Smith posted by Michael Tracey that still left me quite surprised, and reinforced my view that there is something spiritually and intellectually rotten here that is worth analyzing and working to discredit. In the five-minute video, Smith informs his audience that it is bad enough when a 25-year-old man has sex with a 15-year-old woman, which should lead to prison. But he then says it is clearly much worse when a 55-year-old man has sex with an 18-year-old. One can maybe debate whether the age of consent should be say 18, 19, or 20. But he’s not interested in splitting hairs. The normal male response is to want to kill anyone who would engage in such “pedophilia,” and also just to be safe, kill anyone who would split hairs over the behavior of the offender.

So here we have an argument that not only should the age of consent probably be raised, but violence is a normal and healthy reaction toward anyone who takes the opposite view, or in any way expresses skepticism about the possibility that legal adults should not be allowed to enter into whatever kind of relationships they want. You can watch Tracey and me respond to this video and others here. I’ve previously said that the real target of pedo hysteria is age gap relationships, and here we have a major influencer saying that age gap relationships between adults are so offensive that the thought of their existence should fill us all with murderous rage.

I realized while watching this video how central pedo hysteria is to low quality influencer discourse, and also that the derangement goes much further than I thought. Pedophilia is defined broadly, declared to be everywhere, and put at the center of our politics. Having spent a lot of time in academia and among educated elites, very few consider pedophilia to be a major societal concern. But for Low Human Capital movements, it is central. Before the Epstein craze, you had QAnon, which understands the entirety of the Trump phenomenon as a cosmic struggle against Satanic pedophiles. Note this started completely organically and unlike most political movements was not responding to signals coming from elites – at least ones whose meanings weren’t completely imagined, anyway.

In Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance discusses how his poor and dysfunctional relatives lived in constant fear of their kids getting molested. He tells about the time he got lost at a funeral service.

When I failed to appear in the crowd of mourners leaving the church, Mamaw and Papaw grew suspicious. There were perverts even in Jackson, they told me, who wanted to stick sticks up your butt and “blow on your pecker” as much as the perverts in Ohio or Indiana or California. Papaw hatched a plan: There were only two exits to Deaton’s, and no one had driven away yet. Papaw ran to the car and grabbed a .44 Magnum for himself and a .38 Special for Mamaw. They manned the exits to the funeral home and checked every car. When they encountered an old friend, they explained the situation and enlisted help. When they met someone else, they searched the cars like goddamned DEA agents.

Ok, I guess.

Think about how strange this is. Pedophilia is a crime, but so are trespassing, robbery, aggravated assault, and murder. Yet nobody builds a political identity around hatred of any of these other crimes while expanding its definition. The idea that our society goes soft on pedophiles is insane. There is so little pedophilia that Jeffrey Epstein had sexual contact with post-pubescent girls two decades ago, and this story is currently dominating political headlines. I’ve seen TikTok videos where ex-cons talk about how child molesters are considered the lowest of the low in prison, and nobody finds it strange how men who have sexual relations with 14-year-old girls are in many cases considered worse than murderers. Had Epstein been convicted of killing someone and served his sentence, there would be less outrage directed at those who stayed friends with him than there currently is.

American society seems prone to always be moralizing about sex. Maybe this is part of our Puritan inheritance. As women have gained the freedom to be more openly promiscuous and homosexuality has been destigmatized on the grounds of individual liberty, more attention has shifted to focusing on the forms of behavior that one can argue do not involve consent, and so are still potential targets. It’s a Low Human Capital obsession in particular because losers feel the need to look down on someone else. While elites can take comfort in having prestigious jobs and being more intelligent and harder working than others, those ...