An excellent piece from The Intercept illuminating how it is that more and more people of diverse backgrounds, ideologies, and religious/spiritual beliefs can be pulled into QAnon. — Molly
EARLIER THIS SUMMER, I noticed this alarming shift in my Facebook feed. Childhood friends and old high school acquaintances began plastering my timeline with posts referring to a satanic cabal of pedophile elites, including hysterical, unfounded claims about the proliferation of child sex trafficking and cultural or political efforts to “normalize” pedophilia.
During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with in Colorado had gotten sucked into QAnon, the sprawling and baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that is deemed a domestic terror threat by the FBI. I remembered them as perfectly reasonable people: some liberal, some conservative, but all frozen in my memory as intellectually curious. Now, online and from a distance, I was watching them change. Young, white suburban women, in particular, were falling for a Q-adjacent movement, “Save the Children,” which raises false fears about child sex trafficking through fabricated stories, pastel infographics, and hashtag campaigns.
“When George Floyd cried for his momma everyone ‘felt that,’ now try to imagine 22,000 CHILDREN A DAY crying for their momma and no one hearing them! Please, ‘feel that’ too!! #SaveOurChildren,” read one post liked by nearly a dozen people I went to school with. Other posts incorporated Covid-19 misinformation or advocated against mask-wearing: “Mask or no mask? What we NEED to ask is where the fuck did 8 million children go???” another image read.
Save the Children is different in tone than straight-up QAnon, which originated on the anonymous discussion board 4chan in October 2017, with an unknown individual (or group of individuals) called “Q” claiming to have top-security clearance within the U.S. government. Q believers think that someone in the Trump administration has been using online message boards to send coded messages, known as “Q drops,” about the president’s secret war against this cabal to the public. Once a fringe conspiracy theory among Trump’s most ardent supporters, QAnon’s latest iteration is taking over white women in suburban communities, particularly mothers, and several other unexpected demographics. In Parker, Colorado, the suburban town I lived in for nearly a decade, and surrounding cities, it now feels like QAnon is everywhere.
Parker is an affluent suburb in Douglas County, the richest county in the state and among the richest in the nation. The population is heavily conservative and predominantly white. In the time I lived there, Parker was about 93 percent white, though it has diversified a bit more in recent years, according to census data. The suburb’s member of Congress, Republican Rep. Ken Buck, is among the GOP lawmakers fueling Save the Children conspiracy theorists. He’s demanding that the Department of Justice investigate the Netflix film “Cuties,” which has faced intense backlash over claims that it sexualizes young girls. The film, a coming-of-age comedy-drama directed by French Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, became an instant target for the pedophile-obsessed.
A few of the friends I spoke with were young moms who recently began posting Q-curious content, adopting the anti-trafficking cause as their top issue — despite openly detesting the Trump administration and otherwise holding left-leaning positions.
Jared Holt, an investigative reporter at Right Wing Watch who has been covering QAnon since its inception, said that this web of conspiracy theories during the pandemic has “spread so much that it’s coming home to roost in places we were not expecting.”
“During the last six months, QAnon has really, as a movement, found a lot of success breaking out of its confines among sort of the far-right fringe,” Holt said. “You are now seeing mommy bloggers, health and wellness influencers, MMA fighters, various celebrities embracing parts or the whole of QAnon.”
The cult-like movement is achieving undeniable influence in the political sphere, including through dozens of QAnon candidates who have run for Congress this cycle and Marjorie Taylor Green’s unsettling primary victory in Georgia. President Donald Trump has praised Q believers as “people that love our country,” while countless Republican lawmakers have avoided disavowing it. Save the Children marches have attracted small but impassioned crowds — notably diverse in race, gender, and age — in cities across the U.S., and some adherents have already committed criminal or violent acts inspired by their beliefs.
People march during a “Save the Children” rally outside the Capitol building on August 22, 2020 in St Paul, Minnesota.
Last month, NBC News reported that an internal investigation by Facebook revealed millions of members in QAnon groups and pages. The following week, the company announced that it would be removing and restricting thousands of QAnon accounts, pages, and groups from its sites, including Instagram.
But the Q believers I spoke with stumbled upon these incomprehensible ideas the old-fashioned way. They say they were indoctrinated (though they don’t use that term) by their parents, other family members, and friends, or introduced to the conspiracy through word-of-mouth, rather than via the algorithms that have received the most national attention. But word-of-mouth alone isn’t enough. The ability of people sitting at home to follow the online rabbit holes downward is critical. Moms are seeing an ever-changing web of trafficking conspiracy theories bounce around their circle of mom friends, like the debunked Wayfair conspiracy theory and USPS phishing text scam. The Jeffrey Epstein saga, a real-life case that involved an alleged sex trafficking ring and was covered by reputable news outlets, has also served as a key gateway into QAnon.
Please continue this article here: https://theintercept.com/2020/09/23/qanon-conspiracy-theory-colorado/
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