Jack Cashill started his April 24 WorldNetDaily column with a lot of lazy guilt-by-association attempting to link prominent Democrats to child sexual abuse:
As revealed in the explosive new five-part 2024 Max series, “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” Hollywood has long been a hotbed of child sex abuse.
The show focuses on Nickelodeon and its disgraced producer Dan Schneider. Not surprisingly, Schneider was a friend of the Obamas.
In 2012, an election year, Schneider produced a show on the long-running series “iCarly” that featured Michelle Obama and her “Joining Forces” initiative. Network president Cyma Zarghami was paraphrased as saying that the episode was “in no way a political statement.” Of course not.
Those were the circles in which high-profile Democrats ran. Malia Obama interned with Harvey Weinstein. Bill Clinton logged frequent-flyer miles on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express.”
Hillary Clinton intimate Huma Abedin married pervert Anthony Weiner. A few years earlier, Hollywood gave child rapist Roman Polanski a standing O and an Oscar.
In 2020, Barack Obama did a one-on-one interview with the granddaughter of Democrat mega donor Edgar Bronfman, Hannah Bronfman, a reputed “influencer.” A month prior, Hannah’s aunt Clare was sentenced to 81 months in prison for her role in a sex trafficking ring that did not check the IDs of its young female victims.
From there, Cashill leapt to defend pushers of the discredited Pizzagate conspiracy:
During the years this was going on, the media savaged anyone associated in any way with the mysterious QAnon given its strong association with a conspiracy known as “Pizzagate.” This reputed high-level ring of pedophiles involves, most prominently, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chair.
The Left, of course, ridicules Pizzagate, and the respectable conservative media dare not even mention it, but before readers dismiss it, they might watch the movie “Out of Shadows.”
Among the people featured in the film is Liz Crokin, a veteran reporter and columnist who sacrificed any career ambitions she might have had to report on child sex trafficking.
Said Crokin, “I was basically embraced by the mainstream media until I started reporting on Pizzagate.” Her deconstruction of the coded language in the Podesta emails obtained by Wikileaks could make Hillary sweat.
“I’d be willing to debate anyone who thinks Pizzagate has been debunked,” said Crokin. She is dismayed that “there has not been one single investigation into any of it.”
The media’s eagerness to tar anyone who addressed the pedophilia issue with the “QAnon” brush says more about the media than about the person tarred.
If one googles “Liz Crokin,” for instance, the first item that appears after her Wikipedia page is a CNN article from 2022 headlined, “Trump Poses with QAnon, Pizzagate Conspiracy Theorist at Mar-a-Lago.”
But Cashill offered not one shred of evidence that Pizzagate is real, nor did he quote Crokin offering any. Further, his claim that Podesta is part of a “high-level ring of pedophiles” is a lie; conspiracy theorists like Cashill decided that stolen emails from Podesta released by WikiLeaks contained coded language that purportedly discussed pedophilia., an accusation that was never proven.
Further, if Crokin’s career was ruined by her obsession with Pizzagate, it’s because she ruined it by spreading baseless conspiracy theories and recklessly accusing people of being pedophiles. For instance, she declared that Tucker Carlson eating pizza on what turned out to be the final episode of his Fox News show was somehow code that his departure was linked to Pizzagate (and not, say, the fact that his guest in the segment was a pizza delivery guy who stopped a robbery).
Cashill then brought another film into his little conspiracy:
In the summer of 2023, the tide started turning. “Sound of Freedom,” a film about real-life Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent Tim Ballard’s efforts to stop child sex trafficking, proved to be a box office hit.
The film’s success surprised the media. Critics were anticipating a dud. Disney, after all, had sat on the finished product for five years before selling the rights back to the producers.
The film’s marketability was not the issue for Disney. The film’s message was. Disney’s history with the sexual abuse of minors was as bad as Nickelodeon’s.
Explained Time magazine, the film became “mired in controversy over criticisms that it features misleading depictions of child exploitation and plays into right-wing conspiracy theories associated with the QAnon movement.”
The fact that the film was made before anyone even heard of QAnon only made the Left more anxious. Those “theories” suddenly seemed less fanciful.
Cashill didn’t mention that Ballard has since been hit with allegations of sexual misconduct and that the film’s star Jim Caviezel has totally bought into QAnon conspiracy theories.
Cashill summarized his conspiracy at the end of his column: “A party that’s OK with ‘killing babies’ – a phrase Maher has actually used to describe abortion – does not have soul enough to care about the sex trafficking of children. The party is, however, strategic enough to care until November.” Yet we don’t see Cashill being so concerned about “killing babies” that he will demand the arrest, imprisonment and possible execution of every woman who has ever had an abortion.