Why Low Human Capital Obsesses over Pedophilia

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 ...