Pizzagate and the Genetic Fallacy

The Unz Review reports on Pizzagate:

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal first “broke” in the far-right blogosphere. The accusation they made was that these gangs were being allowed to operate undisturbed because everyone was too afraid of “appearing racist” to properly investigate them . . . and nobody listened to the far-right bloggers who were breaking this story because they were afraid of “appearing racist” if they gave any credibility to those far-right sources, too. Never mind that it seemed paranoid to rely on bloggers to report truths like these when the allegations were so wide-reaching, involving a literal conspiracy within the police force.

And yet, years after no one was willing to take them seriously, the far-right blogosphere turned out to be right.

Well over a thousand (mostly) white young girls were being abused by (mostly) Pakistani gangs.

And the authorities were covering it up.

We are now, once again, in the stage of an evolving scandal that Mehrdad Amanpour described his experience with above. Just to be clear, I’m not going to commit myself to the idea that this is going to be as huge as Rotherham was. We should be careful: we don’t know what would or wouldn’t be confirmed with a proper investigation. The question here is not whether we’ve gotten to the bottom of this online. The question is whether there is enough here to justify thinking there should be a proper investigation.

And the parallel with Rotherham is that the relatively small number of people asking for that are mostly the loathsome kinds of people who run “racist far-right websites.” So, since the claims are inherently conspiratorial, and the mainstream doesn’t want to be associated with those people who are talking about it, it is once again all too easy to just dismiss the claims out of hand as paranoia run wild.

Again, the evolution of the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was an extremely painful lesson that the mainstream can be wrong and the “paranoid racist far-right” can be right. And that lesson was far too expensive to simply let go to waste.

The name of this scandal is Pizzagate.

It is always a mistake to dismiss facts because one does not approve of the messenger. It is, in fact, a formal failure of logic known as the Genetic Fallacy. The sun does not become the not-sun simply because the Alt-Right calls it the sun anymore than a man becomes a woman because an SJW calls him a her; that is a form of magical thinking and it is intrinsically illogical.

The fact is that we don’t know what lies beneath the smoke of Pizzagate. There may or may not be hellfire there. But one need not subscribe to all of the 16 Points to scent a distinct odor of sulfur. In any event, this is a useful summary for mainstream readers who are understandably reluctant to venture forth into the dank swamps of the chans.

It’s intriguing to see that the fake “attack” on Comet Ping Pong appears to be convincing Hillary Clinton voters to look further into Pizzagate.