Due to the Trump administration's arrests of human trafficking rings, the number of reported cases is dropping drastically.
See
https://www.geoffreygnathanlaw.com/t...ng-in-america/
It's good to see that human trafficking is getting back down to Obama-era levels after peaking 1 year into Trump's presidency--assuming that graph is accurate.
This is from The Spectator--a right wing conservative pro-Trump publication:
Fear and adrenochrome --The conspiracy theory right is addicted to crazy ideas about a drug
Tommy G, the QAnon-supporting, Twitter blue-tick- sporting host of the
No Mercy Podcast, posits that drug-crazed celebrities are ‘running out’ of adrenochrome. A depleted adrenochrome stash, Mr G suspects, might explain why Madonna has been making weird videos about roses and fried fish. The diminishing number of rational observers, I think, assume it is because Madonna is an attention-starved eccentric with no taste.
QAnoners are also big fans of comparing flattering and unflattering photos of celebrities. This is supposed to illustrate the devastating effects of adrenochrome withdrawal, but instead it illustrates the aging process and the possibility that people look different without make-up and an expensive hairdo.
The broader adrenochrome theory is based on two strange ideas. One, which is ubiquitous in QAnon circles, is that 800,000 kids go missing every year in the US. This is true but misleading. More than 99 percent of these children are reported missing but found. Of course, even one permanent disappearance is a tragedy. But this is not quite the startling statistic the QAnon crowd imagines.
The idea of extracting adrenochrome from a living body comes not from science or history but, as mentioned before, from Hunter S. Thompson. Given that Thompson created the literary form ‘gonzo journalism’, which explicitly prioritizes atmosphere and emotion over facts, trying to do this seems inadvisable. In fact, just as you can create testosterone without extracting it from the testicles or ovaries, you can synthesize adrenochrome in a lab.
Opinions are mixed on its psychoactive properties. In the 1960s, Abram Hoffer suggested that adrenochrome was a neurotoxic and might account for schizophrenia. True or not, I am not sure that a drug which makes you feel ‘changes in thinking…similar to those observed in schizophrenia’ would be such an attractive one, especially among people whose drug of choice is generally cocaine. I wanted to try it out myself, of course, but ran into objections from
The Spectator’s lawyers and accountants.
Adrenochrome fascinates the QAnoners less as a drug than for its role in ritual: drug-crazed Luciferian elites sacrificing young children on an altar. Any aspect of this nightmare would be horrifying, but never so memorably as when child abuse, drugs, Satanism and secret societies are mixed together. In this aspect, the fantasies of QAnon are little more than an online echo of the Sixties counterculture at its most depraved.
The idea of Satanic ritual abuse, a bundling of everything awful in the psychological shadows, is not new. Tearing like wildfire through the 1980s, it led to appalling miscarriages of justice like the McMartin preschool case, in which the hapless owners and employees of a daycare center in Manhattan Beach, California, were accused of being depraved Aleister Crowley-like abusers. Satanic ritual abuse does occur — in 2010, a cult was discovered in Kidwelly, Wales, for example. But the imaginative power of the concept leads to exaggerated claims of its practice. And we might wonder whether the proliferation of false claims gives the actual practitioners a script for their depravities.
The presidency of Donald Trump has added a radical edge to the QAnoners. This is not due to extremism in his administration’s actions — but because of their moderation. He egged on chants of ‘lock her up’, but Hillary Clinton is still on Twitter insulting his policies. He encouraged ‘build that wall’ but the wall does not exist. A truly radical administration would contain radical followers. The increasingly dramatic and esoteric fantasies of Trump’s militant fringe are an attempt to rationalize the mundane reality.
I would like to suggest that there is hope for people who think Donald Trump has arrested Tom Hanks on charges of torturing children to harvest adrenochrome, but there is not. Their passions are so intense and their beliefs so elastic that if each claim were patiently disproven, they would twist the rest into newly preposterous shapes. The way to stop people from sliding down the long slope to fantasy is to teach them how to evaluate fact claims, to educate them about historical contexts, and also to encourage a vital sense of comic absurdity.
This article is in The Spectator’s May 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to get yours.
