If Donald Trump chooses to release his tax returns — which he could do at any time — we'd get some answers to a few nagging questions. We'd have a better sense of how much Trump had earned in income and the sources for it. We'd learn how much he pays in income tax, if anything. We'd at last get an answer to the question of how much he gives to charity — and if it exceeds the $10,000 total our David Fahrenthold has tracked down.
One thing it would not tell us is whether Trump has sponsored an organization that supports pedophilia.
A certain grungy corner of the Internet has decided that the best way to goad Trump into releasing his tax returns is to imply that they hide records of a generous gift to the North American Man-Boy Love Association, a semi-real group that advocates for ending "the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships," per its website.
The Daily Beast's Ben Collins walked through the effort to imply a link between Trump and the group. It includes an automated Reddit bot that replies to comments about Trump's tax returns on the site with a question about donations to NAMBLA and a push to link Trump to NAMBLA on Google. Collins notes that there's another layer of trolling involved in the effort: aping the vague "some people say" formulation that Trump uses to imply he's just over here asking questions about huge conspiracy theories.
This is a troll, pure and simple. There is no contribution to NAMBLA in Trump's tax returns, which we know because NAMBLA is not a nonprofit organization. There are membership fees listed on the organization's website, but it's not identified as a 501(c)(3) at the nonprofit-tracking site Guidestar. If Trump or any of his trolls wanted to donate to the group, they could do so in complete anonymity (as most people would presumably choose to do).
Why choose NAMBLA as the target of the joke? Because pedophilia is one of the most reviled crimes in American society, and NAMBLA is an institutionalization of it.
It's not clear the extent to which NAMBLA still exists as a constituted group. Earlier this year, Vice found that there were only a handful of members left. That's in part because of the emergence of the Internet. Why give a group that supports pedophilia your name and home address to get a newsletter when you can visit a website anonymously to find others that share your obsession?
The emergence of pedophilia as a focus of scorn and disgust is fairly recent. Google's broad index of books that it has scanned shows a slow increase in use of the terms "pedophile" and "pedophilia" in the latter half of the 20th century.
The New York Times only started referring to pedophiles in the 1970s, with mentions peaking in 2002 thanks to the Catholic Church scandal.
In other words, pedophilia has been sort of … weirdly trendy as a concept that can be used to disparage others. NAMBLA, as the bureaucratic face of the practice, offered itself as a nifty punch line. Collins notes that Jon Stewart used to make NAMBLA jokes in the early days of "The Daily Show."
Which was not recently. NAMBLA jokes are sort of played out by now, in a weird sense. I remember those jokes from when I was in high school two decades ago, which reveals both how old I am and how old they are. NAMBLA jokes aren't even popular on Reddit anymore.
The closest analogue to the did-Trump-give-to-NAMBLA effort is the Ted-Cruz-is-the-Zodiac-Killer meme that was threaded through the Republican primaries. That similarly grew out of social media and lent itself to all sorts of bizarre riffs and variants, in part because it was so goofily implausible that (almost) no one took it seriously.
Important to remember #ZodiacTed #RNCinCLE pic.twitter.com/rgjeHyMkmu
— Disco Berger (@dfberger23) July 21, 2016
Trump should release his tax returns, as every candidate for the past four decades has done. He should also reveal how much he's given to charity, given how frequently he has bragged about his generosity in the past. But this NAMBLA thing? Even Internet trolls can do better than this.