Zoë Royer, a 23-year-old youth advocate based in Denver, said QAnon and Save the Children is everywhere. 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. 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 ability of people sitting at home to follow the online rabbit holes downward is critical. 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. 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.īut the Q believers I spoke with stumbled upon these incomprehensible ideas the old-fashioned way. Last month, NBC News reported that an internal investigation by Facebook revealed millions of members in QAnon groups and pages. 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.” The film, a coming-of-age comedy-drama directed by French Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, became an instant target for the pedophile-obsessed.Ī 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. 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. Ken Buck, is among the GOP lawmakers fueling Save the Children conspiracy theorists. The suburb’s member of Congress, Republican Rep. 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 population is heavily conservative and predominantly white. Parker is an affluent suburb in Douglas County, the richest county in the state and among the richest in the nation. 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.
“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. 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. Now, online and from a distance, I was watching them change. I remembered them as perfectly reasonable people: some liberal, some conservative, but all frozen in my memory as intellectually curious. 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.ĭuring 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.
Earlier this summer, I noticed this alarming shift in my Facebook feed.
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