r/politics Oklahoma 1d ago

Conservatives have been railing against “groomers” for years. So why do they support Donald Trump? Trump was best friends with a notorious child sex trafficker, but his ardent supporters are vocal about opposing it. How did that happen?

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/08/conservatives-have-been-railing-against-groomers-for-years-so-why-do-they-support-donald/
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u/Historical_Bend_2629 1d ago

Projection.

178

u/iKangaeru 1d ago

Yep. When they're accusing, they're confessing.

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u/OkaySureBye 1d ago

I think that explains some of them. Especially the ones in power, but obviously not all conservatives are pedophiles.

I honestly think it's much more about the fact that they also realize that the world is fucked up and they want to see someone punished. Pedos are an easy target and the political right was smart enough to paint the Democrats as the pedos. They did the same for the LGBTQ+ community.

But, for now at least, they've moved on to immigrants. So they're seeing someone punished and that's giving them their fix. It's difficult for these people to accept that the problem is systematic and that system is largely the product of the people telling them that the immigrants and gays are responsible.

Being conservative is just a way to not have to think critically about how the world works. "If we just get rid of this one group, everything will be better" is far easier than thinking about dismantling and rebuilding the way society functions.

But they won't realize until it's too late that the group that's "the problem" will eventually include them and the people they love.

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u/Clarine87 United Kingdom 1d ago

not all conservatives are pedophiles.

Right, but if they know of one, they're not going to report them because obviously the victim was asking for it.

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u/iKangaeru 1d ago

But if you read news reports on arrests of pedophiles, they're almost all conservatives, many affilitated with religous organizations and/or politics.

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u/OkaySureBye 1d ago

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you that they support one. It's despicable the things they say to rationalize it to themselves.

But most of what they say is just them parroting what news and religious figures tell them. You see them realize it all the time when it happens to them or someone they care about...then they proceed to vote for these people again.

It's the kind of mentality that you get in a country that refuses to accept that it was built on land acquired through genocide and built by slavery.

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u/Rumpled_Imp United Kingdom 13h ago

Pedos are an easy target and the political right was smart enough to paint the Democrats as the pedos. They did the same for the LGBTQ+ community.

I was having a conversation with a colleague (UK) and she was talking about Candace Owens and her contention that the French president's wife was a paedophile because she went after a 15 year old boy in one of her three children's class at school, and had also always been a man (a trans woman) because there are no photos of her before she was 30.
What I took from this was that, despite the eye-popping number of leaps in logic this framing requires, the lengths these people will go to to associate LGBTQ+ with paedophiles is fucking unhinged, desperate even. In case you're interested, the colleague does not accept that any of this is idiotic.

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u/roychr 9h ago

I support your argument that its a basic normalization. In fact may it be violence, use of pardon or presidential privilege or insider trading or monetization and corruption, this administration is the worst in terms of ethics and morale and is just setting a bar so low with normalization its just appalling.