Why Low Human Capital Obsesses over Pedophilia

The passions behind this are really ugly and should be opposed by all decent people

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 I 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 with lower status need something else to grab on to.

So they tell themselves “at least I’m not attracted to children.” Talk about having low standards. Of course, they do not simply admit this is their motivation and stop there, but must give their desire to kick down a noble justification. Thus conspiracy theories are born. I don’t simply hate pedophiles because they’re the only people I can look down on. In fact, quite the opposite. Pedophiles are running society! They’re much higher status than I am, but I’m still better than them because they’re evil, and I get my news from Alex Jones and Dave Smith instead of mainstream newspapers, which are either run by pedophiles or cover for them.

Since again, there is very little elite pedophilia going on, Low Human Capital can either make up facts, or take true events and declare they involve pedophilia despite what the word has traditionally meant. Epstein was a pedophile because some of his sexual partners may have been under 18. But if there’s too big of an age gap, can’t an 18-year-old be a victim of pedophilia too when you think about it? They’ve decided to get mad at adults having sex with children first, and then will keep playing with definitions until they get the thing that they are desperate to be mad at.

If I went around saying how I hated bank robbers and wanted to make them suffer as much as possible, people would justifiably find this deranged, even if they did not like bank robbers. Recently in the UK, three teenagers were convicted of beating a man to death after he arranged to meet a 16-year-old girl, who was above the age of consent. The toxic mix of low-status hatred and moral righteousness leads to a very ugly place. Videos of “pedophiles” getting abused and publicly humiliated rack up huge numbers on social media, and again we have to think how strange this would be for any other crime. Often, these aren’t even men who we have any reason to think make such behavior a regular habit, but were instead entrapped by the pedo hunters. It’s not enough to punish those who are actually guilty of this particular crime; we must find out who is even theoretically capable of engaging in it, and try to destroy them.

The left-wing version of pedo hysteria is less conspiratorial, consistent with leftists being less conspiratorial as a general matter. The far left doesn’t need to imagine elites eating babies, because they agree with Dave Smith that older men having sex with younger women is bad enough, especially when the men are wealthy and there are power differentials (as if young beautiful women are completely lacking in that respect). Interestingly, you find the most extreme pedo hysterics on the left to be those of relatively lower status – the Bluesky crowd, who are the types more likely to complain that The Atlantic or The New York Times is racist than be quoted in either publication. “Pedophilia,” or whatever they describe as “creepy” sexual behavior, is a cudgel with which to attack those they hate, like Yglesias and the Abundance Bros because someone in their network at some point might have had a tenuous connection to Epstein. But the disagreement is ideological, tied to the leftist critique of mainstream liberals that they don’t take power disparities seriously enough. Thus, those who think it should be stigmatized if not illegal for older men to have sex with 18-year-old women also think that economic issues should be approached primarily from the perspective of how to dismantle corporate power.

Dave Smith might have arrived at a similar place from the right, but I think he’s appealing to an audience that is lower than MAGAs, in the realm of “too stupid to be ideological.” In mainstream MAGA, rich older men with younger women is accepted as normal, as I’m sure a brief glance around Mar-a-Lago would demonstrate. This crowd tends to have a strict cut-off of 18, above which they do not judge.

As I’ve written before, there is harm in just letting the proles have their fun. More than prison sentences that are often unjust from any rational perspective, I think that pedo hysteria is tied to a whole host of other negative societal trends. It reinforces therapy culture, since you need to pretend that sexual relations between teens and adults are so inherently traumatic that it justifies the extremely punitive social and legal punishments people desire to inflict on adults who break this particular taboo. It also reinforces extended childhood. Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and saying the age of consent line has to be drawn somewhere and not getting too bent out of shape about those who violate the law any more than we do about other crimes – which would be the healthy approach – when we say that 17-year-olds are by some law of nature inherently unable to consent to major life decisions, and that sex with anyone above a certain age will permanently destroy their souls, we are not getting them ready for adulthood. Dave Smith thinks 18 might be too young. Can people of that age even be considered adults then? On what basis can they make decisions about their careers or where to live? If 18 is too young for sex, when exactly can you start thinking about buying a home or starting a family?

You’ll often hear pedo hysterics assert that 16- and 17-year-olds are “children.” But we never refer to them as children in any other context. Imagine you say to someone that you went to a restaurant and your waitress was a child. Or that you accidentally hit a child with your car. Nobody would think you were talking about a 17-year-old in either case. To call someone of that age a “child” is infantilizing. It’s done with a very specific agenda only when the topic is sex. And maybe you can limit this infantilizing to one narrow area of life, but I doubt it. Calling older teenagers children in one context seems like it’s going to affect their self-perceptions in others. And given that extended childhood is one of the main social pathologies of our time, we must push back against any cultural trend that is moving us further in that direction.

Watching Dave Smith has made me realize that there’s another reason to fight pedo hysteria. This is the fuel that drives so much of low human capital involvement in politics. Trump has never made being anti-pedophilia a major issue, to say the least. But because he appeals to stupid people, they’ve adopted him as the leader of that cause. It’s similar to how he came to be an avatar for the anti-vaxx movement despite Operation Warp Speed. The logic of “stupid people are anti-vaxx and stupid people love Trump” was too strong for him not to shift on this issue. Trump is not the best spokesman for the side of the angels in a cosmology founded on pedo hysteria in any way other than the fact that his base is the bottom of the barrel in terms of human capital, where such passions are found.

One might say elites need to be tough on pedophilia, because otherwise stupid people will be very upset and then destabilize society. This reminds me of debates about immigration, where it can be argued that you need stricter borders lest populist authoritarians take up the issue and become powerful. But I think attitudes toward sex are too important to leave them to be shaped by the instincts of the most resentful and lowest status members of society. The Epstein thing has taken off because elites have joined in the pedophile hysteria, as it is consistent with Democratic political goals and the culture of MeToo, not because elites haven’t taken pedophilia seriously enough. Left-wing pedo hysteria makes sense in the context of a larger political project involving using government and social coercion to infringe on individual liberty, while the right-wing version is part of the larger story of conservatism’s human capital decline. Few causes in politics involve standing up against both of these forces, and that makes the battle worth fighting.