Why Is the Far Right Obsessed with Pedophilia?

Updated | On October 30, a troubling image made its way across Twitter. It showed student activists at Columbia University in New York City protesting Mike Cernovich, a pro-Trump journalist and author who was delivering a speech to a Republican group on campus later that evening. The photo showed several people hoisting a banner. “No white supremacy,” it said. “No Mike Cernovich.”

Between those two messages was another: “No pedo bashing.” At the bottom of the banner was the rainbow-colored logo of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, also known as NAMBLA.

Cernovich’s supporters quickly lit up the internet with a combination of derision and outrage: Liberal activists and social justice warriors had presumably become so unhinged, they were now defending sexual deviants. NAMBLA, they implied, was leading the resistance to the Trump administration.

Well, not quite. A report emerged on Gothamist the following, written by freelance journalist Jake Offenhartz. He described how he’d seen right-wing counterprotesters unfurl the banner. “What they wanted,” Offenhartz wrote, “was for people to share photos of the stunt online, which I did, noting in a tweet that the banner was planted by the Alt Right.”