Episode 109: QAnon Makes Human Trafficking Worse feat Michael Hobbes
The 1980's Satanic Panic has many similarities to the 2020 "Save the children" QAnon movement — which is broadening its reach to members of the GOP (and Tulsi Gabbard). We explore how these religious freakouts and conspiracy theories harm actual efforts to combat human and child trafficking with Michael Hobbes, who writes for the Huffington Post & co-hosts the 'You're Wrong About' podcast.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 109 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
The QAnon is wrong about human trafficking episode.
As always, we are your host, Travis View.
And Julian Fields.
This week, we do not have Jake with us.
He's had gum surgery after being shot in the mouth with a paintball gun.
Tragic.
Yeah.
So, you know.
He's at home.
He's recovering.
He's a little high on opiates, but we wish him a quick recovery.
Yeah, please, America, keep feeding people synthetic heroin when they have, like, gum grafts.
There are signs all around us.
A new wave of satanic panic is gripping the United States, this time firmly attached to the soft QAnon Save the Children movement.
And they are wrecking havoc on real efforts to combat child sex trafficking.
This belief in an invisible supernatural war between good and evil is nothing new.
It manifested strongly in the 1980s when many Americans posited that the forces of darkness were actively corrupting, kidnapping, trafficking, abusing, and sacrificing children on a mass scale.
Right under the noses of Christian parents.
In 2020, this intensely misguided belief system is back with a vengeance under the banner of America's favorite catch-all conspiracy theory, QAnon, which often feels more like a research and development project, finding new ways to freak out suburban moms.
But the proponents of satanic panic have come a long way from xeroxing pamphlets in their church basement until the contents go blurry.
They can now copy-paste them for free and share them easily through a web of social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
So first, Travis will be taking us back to the halcyon days of the Reagan era and trace modern satanic panic all the way to QAnon.
Then we'll be sitting down with Michael Hobbs, a reporter for the Huffington Post and the host of the You're Wrong About podcast.
He'll be helping us separate fact from fiction when it comes to child abuse and trafficking.
So yeah, be warned, we will be discussing these topics.
But before all that...
First up, we have owner of Qdrop aggregator site Qmap.pub revealed to be New Jersey Man.
Ah, New Jersey Man.
So yeah, this was some really great investigative work from Logically.ai.
Just for some background on why this is important, like the majority of QAnon followers, they don't read the QDrops right on the source on 8kun.
Instead, they use these QDrop aggregators that collect all the QDrops into a much more sort of friendly user, easy to read format.
And they even title the post.
So they kind of guide your thinking.
And yeah, they also add tags.
So if you want to like see all the posts just on Seth Rich, you can filter all those really easily.
So it's like it's basically like the QAnon Bible.
It regularly receives about 10 million visitors a month.
The developer of QMap.pub was someone only known as QAppanon, but the investigation revealed that the true identity of QAppanon is Jason J. Gelinas, an information technology specialist from Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.
He has also worked for Citibank since 2013.
Nice.
Dude, he sounds like he's part of the Cabal or something.
Yeah, right.
He's an elite banker.
I highly recommend that you read the report from Logically Yourself to see how they all connected the dots because it was a really great thread that they followed.
One of the facts that led to this discovery was a since-deleted Facebook post from February of 2019 seeking translators for QMAP.
That post said this.
Q is looking for someone who can translate English to Hindi.
Now is your opportunity to serve mankind.
Now, a couple of interesting things about the post.
Firstly, it reveals that like QMAP actively sought employees or contractors.
So this might be like a bigger operation than maybe, you know, it might appear.
And secondly, it says that Q was looking for someone rather than saying like QMAP or he just thinks that they all think they're digital soldiers in the service of Q. It feels like we are all Q. Fair enough.
I don't know.
I wouldn't read too much into it, but I did find it interesting.
Bloomberg News reached out to Galenis for comment, but he only said that QAnon is a patriotic movement to save the country.
Okay.
He's super pilled.
But hours after that comment was made, QMap went down.
Damn!
And it's still down this morning when I checked, so this is actually a pretty big development.
I mean, the fact that this site is down actually does hamper the ability for a lot of QAnon followers To access the drops there are other Q would drop aggregator
sites, so it's not like it's not it's not that bad But this was the main one this was the big one they might
have to you know start for the first time Inventing stuff out of thin air Travis. Do you think they'll
be able to I think I think they'll manage I love that this guy was also involved in a new project
called the armor of God Which was supposed to be basically a replacement platform
for your social media And yeah, it just makes me laugh, the idea of digital armor that God gives you to fight your online crusade.
For my next story, Democratic opponent of QAnon congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene drops out of the race.
He's like fully.
I mean, his Twitter's no longer up.
Yeah.
He has disappeared.
Disappeared.
This is very sudden and shocking.
Yes.
Kevin Van Osdall, the long shot challenger to Marjorie Taylor Greene, dropped out of the race very, very suddenly.
His dipping out all but guarantees that the next session of Congress will include a QAnon promoting 9-11 truther, unhinged maniac.
What are you saying?
Are you saying that within like two months they can't present a new challenger and somehow sway that district blue?
No.
We're doomed.
No, no, no.
I don't think that's gonna happen.
Oh, it's actually time to start worshiping Marjorie because we will be serving under her control in the Citadel of the future.
I mean, yeah.
I'm gonna start with worshiping her feet.
I think she's into Jesus, so I'm gonna clean her feet first.
Yeah, Kevin, I'm sorry.
It was reported that the reason that Kevin had to drop out is that he's going through apparently a very difficult divorce that required him to move out of state.
So, very sorry to hear that.
It's always rough, but I don't mean to make you feel even worse than you already do, but your divorce may be accelerating the rise of fascism.
That's unkind to him just demographically.
You know, even if he had had the support of the DNC or something overt or even decent coverage from the media, which he didn't have, I think he would have been, like you said, a long shot.
Let's not accuse poor Kevin of being in league.
But yeah, I guess rest in peace that campaign and our hopes that anyone will stand in front of Marjorie, even temporarily, even in a long shot.
Even the slimmest of odds are now gone.
So yeah, great.
Yeah, Biden's gonna do this, right?
Like a month out?
For my next story, Mike Pence cancels fundraiser with QAnon followers after report from the Associated Press.
Are you happy?
I am happy, actually.
So this past week, Vice President Mike Pence was scheduled to attend a fundraiser in Montana.
Now, normally there's nothing that wrong with that, but AP reported that this particular fundraiser was being hosted by a couple of QAnon enthusiasts named Karen and Michael Borland of Bozeman, Montana.
So after that report was published, the Trump campaign told the Associated Press that Pence wouldn't attend the fundraiser after all, but they didn't provide a reason.
No, because it has nothing to do with that.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
I mean, I really like this development because it shows that even the Associated Press, they're taking seriously how cozy the Trump administration, the White House, is with QAnon and QAnon followers, and they're trying to expose when they try to like, you know, nuzzle up to them.
I mean, this kind of thing.
For example, when a QAnon follower, you know, entered the White House in like 2018, That was an Associated Press story, but now it feels like the mainstream media are like, I don't know, they're doing the kind of work that I like to see.
For my next story, Connecticut state legislator defends QAnon.
So this past week, Twitter user YoungNutmeg, which is a great name, shared a photo of Connecticut State Senator Eric Bethel's car, and this car displayed a Where We Go One We Go All sticker on the rear windshield.
Nice.
So this naturally raised questions about whether Bethel is into QAnon, and in a statement to Connecticut Public Radio, Bethel confirmed that he is a QAnon believer, but he claimed that he holds to a more moderate version of it, saying this.
I don't believe in many of the wild-eyed theories reportedly associated with the QAnon movement about pedophile conspiracies or satanic cults.
However, stopping corruption in politics, holding government accountable, and protecting individual freedoms are values I do believe in, which the movement has come to represent.
Like many movements occurring across our nation today, I think it has allowed for people who have previously felt disconnected from public policy and government to be part of the conversation.
Like, you don't need to believe in the Military intelligence letter on 8coon in order to be
against government corruption. I mean this is this is worrying that people it's like
Oh, oh, yes the satanic pedophile stuff. I'm not on board with that. But yes, I think QAnon is good
No, no, no, no, you don't just shake off that baggage at all
That's you're that's coming with you you fucking moron Travis is back to the old him according to Alex Kaplan at
media matters a Bethel is actually the third known incumbent state
legislator nationally who has expressed support for QAnon.
Oh, great.
The other two are Florida's Anthony Sabatini and Tennessee's Susan Lin.
That's three state legislators who are right now pro-QAnon, not in the future, right at this moment.
That is really inspiring.
For my last story, Oregon police beg public to stop calling in false reports blaming Antifa for wildfires.
Yeah.
And for putting together fucking homemade barricades and stopping cars.
To do what?
Scan them for Antifa-ness?
And then what?
Drag them out in citizen's arrest?
We are really fucked.
It's very worrying.
So, yes, as you may know, the West Coast is a fiery inferno right now.
It's miserable to breathe.
The sun is a blood red.
It has all the aesthetics of dystopian apocalypse now.
It looks like what Ted Cruz has always thought Los Angeles looks like.
That's true, that's true.
Normally I resent the idea that California is some sort of hellhole.
I'll give it to you now.
Right now it is.
We're living hell.
Now, as public officials are trying to contain the flames and the chaos that it's causing, they're also trying to fight the rumors that the wildfires were caused by Antifa arsonists.
At least six groups have issued warnings about the false rumors.
For example, the Douglas County Sheriff's Office in Oregon wrote a Facebook post on
Thursday which said this.
Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 911 dispatchers and professional staff are
being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an untrue rumor that six
Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires in Douglas County, Oregon.
And there were, weren't there like journalists stopped by a militia who had come to take
photos of the fire and they were stopped because they were suspected of being Antifa.
So we're just going to now look at someone and if they look a way that we don't like we can be like Antifa or just pedophile and then we can decide if we do citizens arrest execution.
Trump is fine with either.
I mean.
Yeah.
The sheriffs in Jackson County, Oregon and Mason County, Washington posted similar warnings, begging locals to stop spreading unsubstantiated claims.
A firefighters union in Washington State called Facebook, quote, an absolute cesspool of misinformation right now.
Wow.
On Friday afternoon, the FBI's Portland field office tweeted that reports about extremists setting wildfires were untrue.
Yeah, because lost in all this is that now we have news items that just accept that Antifa members is a category of person.
And so the question is, did Antifa not do or do this thing?
Not, is it a fucking imaginary scare from the beginning?
So we're now, the Overton window is now, who is the satanic child trafficker?
Is this a valid way to categorize somebody?
You're right.
A lot of these reports and these statements work on the assumption, like, hypothetically, the roving gangs of Antifa could start the fires.
But they didn't do that.
They did, in this case.
They did something else, you know?
Like, held up a 7-Eleven.
And they made sure that you don't have the vapes with the special flavors anymore.
Of course, the QAnon community was deeply involved in spreading these false rumors, as they are with a lot of information.
But the police publication Law Enforcement Today also played a role.
Oh, yes.
Blessed they are.
They published an article titled, Sources.
Series of wildfires on the West Coast may be coordinated and planned attack.
Insane.
Mm-hmm.
We are really on the brink here.
We are.
People are losing their mind.
So that post went viral and fueled rumors about Antifa involvement.
But it was later changed to, quote, arson arrests made across the West Coast as fires rage on.
Yeah.
And then they also appended an editor's note.
But of course, by then it was too late.
These rumors were making people insane.
It was millions of shares on Facebook across different platforms and stuff.
So, yeah, I mean, it seems like the... One of the strategies for defending your community against fascism is setting it on fire, Travis.
Of course.
You want everyone to burn down, including your neighbors, your loved ones.
Well, you don't have one.
You have, like, an underground bunker and you're all, you know, equal they-thems, you know, and you don't have parents.
But if you did, you would want to set them on fire.
Set mom and dad on fire, of course.
I mean, this is such a fucked problem because like, like the worst things get during disasters during these sorts of times.
That's when accurate information is most crucial, like spreading false rumors is bad, you know, during normal times, but it's like even worse.
during when trying to manage a crisis.
And now, like, we have all of these public offices who are forced to push back against
nonsense because the stress of the chaos that we're living in is forcing people to push
baseless rumors or make up baseless rumors or just descend into this weird fantasy world
in which their political enemies are causing all of these these disasters.
Meanwhile, we could be saving, and this is a fact, 8.2 million American lives every year
if we just abolished gender reveal parties.
Yeah, that's true.
Satanic Panic Forever Whenever I explain QAnon to somebody for the very first time, a response I often get is, I just can't believe that someone would think that something so ludicrous is true.
And I agree, it is ludicrous.
But whenever they say that, I always think to myself, like, how have you managed to reach adulthood Well, being so optimistic about the human capacity for believing true things.
People just, they don't believe true things.
Like, normally.
They believe whatever makes them feel less lonely or less powerless or makes them feel less terrified of mortality.
Why would you limit yourself to stale facts when you could instead dine from the buffet of wild stories that are much, much more enticing?
Yum.
In fact, I would say that if you see someone spouting obvious batshit nonsense with a totally unearned sense of confidence and moral superiority, rest assured that is normal human behavior.
That's right.
It's what they do.
And if you expect any better of them, then really that's your fault for having unrealistic expectations.
I feel like we just started the lesson and you've already hit my fingers with a ruler.
I want to make sure that you need to have, it's important whenever dealing with people have high standards but low expectations.
Now on one level I get what it's like to be grabbed by an irrational worry over the well-being of children.
I have a 15 year old daughter whose phone I have turned into a surveillance and monitoring device to ensure that she is not kidnapped or groomed by some predator.
Now, like, I know you're running like a domestic prism.
I mean, yeah.
Yeah, of course.
My fucking house.
There's no no one to blow the whistle.
Who's the Edward Snowden?
The dog?
So, like, I know statistically, like me, I'm more likely to kidnap my daughter than like someone else.
But that still worry kind of like creeps up on me.
Where should be doing?
Who someone might be doing harm for because like it's just our instinctive concern about children.
It's not governed by math or reality.
It's just and that's just the way it will always be.
So with that in mind, I think it's important to remember that there's actually little about the QAnon community.
That's totally unprecedented.
People often compare the QAnon movement to the satanic panic of the 1980s.
Now, for those who aren't familiar, this was a nationwide moral panic that made worried parents convinced that Satanism and ritualistic child abuse was on the rise in America.
Parents, the media, law enforcement, and even some members of Congress were convinced that there was a satanic cult in every neighborhood just looking for an opportunity to snatch up their children to perform depraved rituals.
Researchers usually argue that this mass hysteria was caused by two factors.
First, the rise of the two-income household in the 80s meant that there was an increased demand for daycare services.
The anxiety of being separated from children more often than the previous generation meant that the parents were more open to paranoid stories of stranger danger.
Secondly, Christian fundamentalism was on the rise.
Evangelists like Jerry Falwell promoted a version of Christianity that depicted the forces of good and evil battling in our world.
This gave rise to Christian anti-occult crusaders who claimed that Dungeons and Dragons, or rock music, were introducing children to Satanism.
This was the era of the Chick tracks.
Yeah.
I love how they played records backwards to find satanic messages.
Yeah, it turns out if you play music backwards, it sounds pretty satanic.
It's not how you're supposed to do it.
For the purposes of this study, we will focus on the number 666 and its use in the Universal Product Code.
Most people don't realize that 80% of all toys on the market have a cultic influence and these are the most popular.
When these forces met, it worked people up into a frenzy and arguably did even more to damage people's lives than QAnon has.
It's true that people were baking rock songs.
Yeah.
For for cymbals.
No, they went out to the forest to try to find evidence of, you know, it's like their sticks were arranged in a certain way.
That was evidence of a satanic ritual.
Yeah.
Fear over preschools led to several closing.
In Chicago, a janitor at a child care center was accused of boiling and eating a baby.
That sounds like a bad choice of cooking.
Sounds like old-fashioned, like British cooking.
In North Carolina, children said that teachers had tried to feed them to sharks, I guess?
What do you mean?
So, not chop them up and feed them, like, in bits.
But, like, no, feed them whole.
And they didn't succeed?
No, no, no.
They escaped, I guess, the sharks.
Okay, thank God, wow.
You know what?
That sounds like a pretty fun cartoon to make.
Sometimes children said that they had been taken to graveyards to kill baby tigers or to dig up and stab corpses.
Why were there baby tigers in the graveyards?
I don't know.
They often talked about sacrificing animals.
This was a big part of the satanic panic.
But baby tigers?
I don't know.
Okay.
Before the panic subsided, approximately 190 people nationwide were charged with the ritual abuse of children, often in daycare settings.
83 were convicted, and many of those convictions were overturned.
For example, in 1985, a teacher's aide in Massachusetts named Bernard Barron was wrongfully convicted of multiple counts of rape and was given three life sentences.
After hundreds of flaws were discovered in that trial, Barron was granted a new trial in 2006, which resulted in him being exonerated and freed.
That is 21 years.
Wow.
21 years in prison because of a insane moral panic.
I want to go over some of the parallels that I personally notice between the, I guess, classic satanic panic and the one we're kind of going through right now with QAnon and other stuff.
Let's start with the fact that back then, like now, there were actually marches from people who protested child abuse because of their own confused understanding of the issue.
In the 80s, demonstrations were inspired by probably the most famous story to come out of the Satanic Panic era, the McMartin Preschool case.
In 1983, the director of that preschool, Peggy McMartin Bucky, and her son Raymond, were accused of hundreds of instances of child sex abuse.
Those allegations included creating child porn, Engaging in Satanic Rituals and Animal Abuse.
The allegations first arose after a mother of a McMartin student named Judy Johnson claimed that a McMartin teacher sodomized her son.
Now, there are lots of reasons to doubt the credibility of her claims.
For example, Johnson first started to suspect her son was abused after he started to have painful bowel movements.
And it seems like there are lots of possible explanations for that besides, you know, She also made a number of other bizarre claims, such as that the people at the daycare had sex with animals, and that the accused teacher flew in the air.
Oh, there we go.
He's a flying sodomizer!
Yep, terrible.
Terrible type of wizard, the flying sodomizer.
Now, Johnson herself was at one point hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia.
The accused teacher was questioned but never prosecuted due to lack of evidence.
Sir, please.
Fly before us.
Show us.
Now, the matter might have ended there, but the police officers investigating the case made the very stupid decision to send out a form letter to parents of 200 McMartin Preschool students.
Oh, God.
It's bad.
Yes, yes, yes.
A call to, a call to, uh, for submissions.
We have a zine we're putting together!
It is.
So that form letter said this.
Records indicate that your child has been or is currently a student at the preschool.
We are asking your assistance in this continuing investigation.
Please question your child to see if he or she has been a witness to any crime or if he or she has been a victim.
Our investigation indicates that possible criminal acts include oral sex, fondling of genitals, buttock or chest area, and sodomy, possibly committed under the pretense of taking the child's temperature.
Also, photos may have been taken of children without their clothing.
Any information from your child regarding having ever observed Ray Bucky to leave a classroom alone with a child during any nap period or if they have ever observed Ray Bucky tie up a child is important.
Wait.
What?
This is like you're just feeding them the story.
Exactly.
This is a well-thought-out Stephen King novel.
This is like, yeah, it's like they're feeding them details.
It's not even like, oh, hey, we're investigating criminal activity, so ask your children.
No, it's like, oh, here are some examples.
Here are some things that your child might say back to you.
On a scale of 5 to 10, how many times did this man, Bucky, sodomize you?
I know, I mean, God.
Like if I received this letter I'd be freaked the fuck out losing my mind. What the fuck is this letter?
So this naturally made the parents extremely concerned A social worker named Key McFarlane was brought in to interrogate 400 students.
This is such a bad snowball now.
McFarlane operated under the theory that children wouldn't disclose abuse they had endured without special techniques designed to encourage that disclosure.
My God.
In practice, this basically meant badgering the children until they provided the answers that the interviewer wants to hear.
So this was, yeah, the way this snowballs.
A single person making bizarre claims, and then the police sending the form letter, and then this person who basically has this technique of basically... How the interviews worked is that they taught the child that no is not an answer I want to hear.
I don't want to hear no, there was abuse.
I want you to keep talking, keep talking, keep talking.
I'll leave you alone when you start telling me You know that there was abuse happening.
I'll be very happy as the adult who's like speaking to you.
It was a really fucked sort of thing that she did.
There's a really good movie with Mads Mikkelsen in it called The Hunt about this happening in a in a small Scandinavian village.
And it's just an incredibly made movie.
I recommend it.
In the end, hundreds of children made coerced allegations.
Peggy and Raymond Bucky were tried in the longest and costliest trial in American history.
Yes, and it was during the Super Bowl at halftime.
Peggy was acquitted on all counts.
Ray was acquitted on most of the charges.
The jury deadlocked on the others.
His retrial resulted in a second hung jury, at which point the state declined to pursue the matter any further.
Now, after the matter was finally put to rest in the courts, many residents of Manhattan Beach were not happy.
Of course.
In fact, they staged a We Believe the Children march.
Oh, God.
In protest.
Here's how the LA Times reported on that march in 1990.
Several hundred residents, some pushing strollers and carrying signs and bumper stickers declaring, we believe the children, marched through the streets of downtown Manhattan Beach Saturday evening to protest the not guilty verdicts 10 days ago in the McMartin preschool case.
Organizers said they planned the Children's Rights protest soon after a Superior Court jury ended the six-year-old case by clearing Ray Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, of 52 child molestation charges.
Quote, The crime that occurred inside the courtroom was almost equal to the crime that occurred outside the courtroom, Tim Wheeler, the father of two former McMartin pupils, told about 500 cheering supporters at a rally after the mile-long march.
Man, eat your heart out, QAnon.
I know, right?
Let's build up the numbers!
I know.
They can only do like 200 or so.
Joggers and bicyclists on the Strand and patrons of the crowded cafes along Manhattan Beach Boulevard shouted encouragement to the marchers.
The dozens of children in the group tied pink and yellow ribbons on fire hydrants, street signs, and car door handles along the route.
Cristina O'Rourke of Redondo Beach said that even though she does not have children, she attended the march because she is tired of young people being mishandled by the courts.
Quote, when I heard this verdict, I could hardly breathe, O'Rourke said.
This march is not aimed at putting this case behind us.
We're ensuring that it doesn't happen again.
Sure.
Another big parallel I noticed between QAnon and the satanic panic is the mainstream media failing to properly report on what's really going on.
Both then and now, the media worked to validate the hysteria rather than treat it with the kind of skepticism that deserved.
Most recently, local news outlets generally did a terrible job covering the nationwide Save the Children rallies that took place in over 100 cities nationwide last month.
Like we discussed on last week's episode, these rallies were the brainchild of a QAnon promoter named Scotty the Kid.
And the people who attended these rallies were overwhelmingly Pizzagate and QAnon believers.
And these were QAnon rallies, and if you're reporting on them, I think that's worth mentioning at least once, you know?
Well, some local news outlets, they did the right thing and talked about their QAnon roots.
Most of these news outlets and these reports, they dropped the ball.
For example, here's how the news station KVUE in Austin, Texas reported on the QAnon rally there.
The organizer of today's march says she plans to organize another one in September.
She decided to make these marches happen now because she believes more people are paying attention on a larger scale due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement.
So there was, you see in that report, an obvious Q sign, not mentioned once during the report.
Interesting.
Back in the satanic panic days of the 80s, it wasn't just local media doing more harm than good.
National media also pitched in to help.
For example, in 1985, the ABC News investigative program 2020 aired an episode called The Devil Worshippers.
Throughout history, Satan has taken on many different shapes and disguises.
He's widely considered by conventional religions as the embodiment of evil, on a mission to tempt man to sin and destroy God's kingdom.
Today, we have found Satan is alive and thriving, or at least plenty of people believe he is.
His followers are extremely secretive, but found in all walks of life.
I mean, this is insane.
It is.
It's like a promo clip for fucking Satan.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
ABC did a great job hyping up Satan for the paranoid parrots.
Yeah, and that pivot, too.
He's everywhere.
Or some people believe.
Of course, back then, daytime talk shows also promoted wild stories of satanic cults.
In one episode of Oprah Winfrey's show, she invited on a woman named Lauren Stratford, who claimed that she was part of a satanic cult.
Stratford, in her book, Satan's Underground, purported to tell the true story of her upbringing as a baby breeder.
And these babies were supposedly used for sacrifices.
My next guest was used also in Worshipping the Devil, participated in human sacrifice rituals, rituals and cannibalism.
She says her family has been involved in rituals for generations.
She is currently in extensive therapy, suffers from multiple personality disorder, meaning she's blocked out many of the terrifying and painful memories of her childhood.
It's gonna break my mind.
I got something worse.
How about the fact that Lauren Stratford was not her real name.
I got something worse. How about the fact that Lauren Stratford was not her real name.
Her real name was Laurel Rose Wilson and in fact all of her claims were bullshit.
A hundred percent.
Her publisher subsequently withdrew all of her books after this was discovered.
Wilson then changed her pseudonym to Laura Grabowski and began falsely claiming that she was a Holocaust survivor.
Damn.
My girl is resourceful.
I gotta say, I don't think that Oprah deserves to be She falsely called a sex trafficker just because she fueled this moral panic, but I don't know, something worth considering.
Karma?
Now flash forward to today, so perhaps you have heard of Oprah Winfrey's protege, Dr. Phil McGraw.
Yeah, fuck that guy.
On Dr. Phil's show just last week, he invited on a woman named Sherry, who believes that her daughter was killed by a cult in order to extract endrenochrome.
My investigation has revealed that this is all linked to a ritual.
I believe somebody in an occult was drugging my daughter Jessie for a year before she went missing.
I believe that she was killed June 20th, 2016 because it was a full moon and a summer solstice at the same time and then the next day was Lilith.
Lilith is a holiday that the occult does celebrate and it requires a human sacrifice.
Just showing demon horns with like fire behind it while she says that.
Oh, yes.
Smart, Dr. Phil.
Yeah, it's like totally exploiting this woman's grief and the poor way that she's handling it with her wild stories of satanic cults.
And there is a responsible way to cover this sort of thing.
Yeah.
No, I mean, Dr. Phil and Oprah Winfrey are succubi that feed on the trauma of others.
They are essentially trauma pornographers.
Now, in the segment, like, Dr. Phil does push back on her claims, I guess, a little bit more than Oprah did.
But honestly, he didn't push back very effectively.
I mean, when talking to her about her claims about adrenochrome, he just sort of repeats things he apparently heard from the town sheriff about Sherry's claims.
Now, the police captain also told us that we have never had a case involving the drug adrenochrome.
We've never even heard of it until Dr. Phil Producers brought it to our attention.
Now, the gang presence in Wenatchee is currently active, but a very low boil, and they say there is no cult presence in Wenatchee area whatsoever.
So essentially calling the police to ask if QAnon is real.
Yeah.
Fantastic.
That's great work.
Amazing, Dr. Phil.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so fucking lazy.
I mean, I can't imagine the budget they must have for this goddamn show.
And like their research consisted of a phone call.
Can you imagine if just above the set, one of those incredible Incredibly heavy lights just kind of was detached by a thread of fate and then it was dangling for a moment.
The audience gasps.
Dr. Phil continues to talk and talk.
And then it's a more say no more.
Say no more.
I've got I've got the rest.
You've set it up.
I can see the rest in my mind's eye.
Like a kinder egg punched by a child, his skull.
Inside, there's beautiful gifts that come out little toys.
Another parallel is a pilled police officers, you know, problem then and now.
Remember a few weeks ago on the show, we discussed about the prevalence of QAnon believing cops.
I mean, officers have been spotted pushing QAnon in the states of Washington, California, Florida and Illinois.
Honestly, it's weirds me out that this problem hasn't gotten more attention because it's fucked that they're Q non-believing police officers.
Q cops are just a smaller natural outgrowth of them already believing in replacement theory.
Yeah.
I mean, the Ku Klux Klan is essentially a conspiracy theory organization, and they had a nice overlap with the cops.
And sure enough, cops in the 80s were also totally pilled on dumb stories about Satanists performing child abuse rituals.
Actually, now that I think about it, at the same time, a lot of these people were worried their husbands would be going to fucking Ku Klux Klan meetings, dressing in fucking robes and calling each other Purple Dragon and shit.
Being part of a real secret society that had devious evil plans for the country.
Plans to sacrifice people, if possible.
For example, in February of 1985, an FBI agent held a four-day seminar titled Day Care Center and Satanic Cult Sexual Exploitation of Children.
That just sounds like you're running the exploitation.
It's very badly worded.
It sounds like a how-to.
It was attended by police officers, lawyers, social workers, and academics from across the country.
One pamphlet told investigators to look for signs of cultic abuse, including the presence of candles and jewelry.
Yeah, that's pagan.
One handout listed 400 supposed occult organizations, and it seemed pretty easy to get on the list.
It included a collective of feminist astrologers in Minnesota.
So you'd have to wait to 2020 for them to go Q. I mean, fair enough.
In 1994, a police officer and pastor named Gordon L. Coulter hosted an instructional video called The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults.
Maybe you think your community is immune to these satanic crimes.
Well, it's not.
The next victim might show up tomorrow on the beat.
It could be in your community, or it could be in a major city, or a small rural area.
Could be a member of your family.
Could be someone you know.
I challenge you to investigate each crime just a little bit deeper.
Let's stop this heinous crime that's going on in the name of the devil.
Wow.
Very, yeah, very calm.
Love the music.
Very joyful.
And he talks about this.
Fortunately, this video was produced in the tail end of the Satanic Panic, so it didn't catch on very much in the law enforcement community.
Fucking losers.
Well, what about the fact that now we have members of Congress getting in on the mass hysteria?
I mean, we have, for example, QAnon promoter Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to be in Congress next year.
And of course, we have current members of Congress that are pushing a soft version of QAnon.
And we already have three state legislators, apparently, who are QAnon promoters.
So it's rife with the people who make the laws, which is bad.
Well, turns out there's also precedent for that.
In 1985, Senator Jesse Helms introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill which was designed to deny tax-exempt status to satanic cults.
Like Protestantism.
So here's what that amendment said.
No funds appropriated under this act shall be used to grant, maintain, or allow tax exemption to any cult, organization, or other group that has a purpose or that has any interest in the promoting of Satanism or witchcraft, Provided that for the purposes of this section, Satanism is defined as the worship of Satan or the powers of evil, and Witchcraft is defined as the use of powers derived from evil spirits, the use of sorcery, or the use of supernatural powers with malicious intent.
So you believe these people have these powers?
Yeah, that's right.
How does that jive with Christianity to believe these people can have their own belief system where they get amazing power?
No, the Bible includes stories of evil sorcerers.
Apparently, if you make fireballs with your hand, you can't get tax-exempt status.
I've been reading too much Dragon Ball Z and not enough the Bible.
The best part of that is that that amendment was agreed to with a voice vote, and there is no record of debate or dissent over it.
However, of course, the obvious problem with the amendment is that the United States government can't make a law that discriminates based upon who they worship, even if it is the devil.
So the ACLU and some pagan groups got involved, and the amendment later died in a Senate committee and was subsequently never made into a law.
Confirms what they believe about the ACLU.
The furor over the McMartin preschool case also stimulated congressional hearings.
Key Mark Farley, remember the woman who coerced all those sorts of allegations from the children, said this to the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight.
I believe that we're dealing with a conspiracy, an organized operation of child predators designed to prevent detection.
The preschool in such a case serves as a ruse for a larger unthinkable network of crimes against children.
If such an operation involves child pornography or the selling of children, as is frequently alleged, it may have greater financial, legal, and community resources at its disposal than those attempting to expose it.
So, these totally made up allegations that I sort of like bullied children into giving me are just the tip of the iceberg.
That's right.
We're just getting started, ladies and gents.
That testimony was uncritically reported in the New York Times and elsewhere.
So, I mean, this is going to be like, you know, praying medic is going to give congressional testimony and like, you know, the Washington Post and New York Times will just repeat it without like, you know, giving it context.
Yeah.
So it could get much worse.
And it probably will.
I mean, we're just the beginning.
To be clear, I'm not saying that these are like totally perfect analogies.
Obviously, social media is a big difference in the way these things spread.
And also, I think a major important difference is the way that the Republican Party and Trump are promoting it.
And since, you know, QAnon is just gearing up, it's impossible to tell whether this mass hysteria will eventually fade like the satanic panic did.
Fade or just go into a cycle of dormancy preparing for the next wave?
It never fades.
It can only be dormant.
It's just locked underneath our feet.
It's her feet.
You always have it.
It just flares up sometimes.
Exactly.
But probably the most clear parallel between QAnon and the satanic panic is that the people who buy into this nonsense Love not actually understanding the issue, the claim that they're passionate about.
Instead of dealing with the real facts around child abuse, they make up statistics and stories that sound right to them.
And today, this kind of misunderstanding is causing real world harm.
Jessalyn Cook of the Huffington Post recently reported that QAnon conspiracy theories about child abuse are making it harder for nonprofits to help real victims.
For example, when the Wayfair conspiracy theory was popular, people flooded the human trafficking hotline with bogus tips.
Karen Benjamin, the chief communication officer for the Polaris Project, which runs the hotline,
was quoted as saying this.
Handling these redundant reports was extremely time-consuming and meant that other people
reporting new actionable information or seeking emergency assistance or other services were
forced to wait longer than was acceptable.
One employee at an international child welfare agency even complained that pushing back on
QAnon comes with its own costs.
What we've seen is that QAnon is a force to be reckoned with.
For organizations that do choose to speak out about it, it's going to require a lot of resources to deal with the fallout, especially dealing with trolls.
Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, said this.
You're not going to protect your kids from trafficking by listening to what QAnon says, because that's not the way child sex trafficking works at all.
So this is something we see again.
They say they care about the problem, but they're making it worse because they don't even understand the problem in the first place.
Of course.
That's why we're going to try to get to the truth of the matter with our guest today.
I'm joined by Michael Hobbs.
He's a journalist for The Huffington Post and a host of the podcast You're Wrong About.
Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
Big fan.
So I'm really excited to talk to you today because you do really fantastic work dispelling myths around child sex trafficking.
You've been talking to prosecutors and other experts who directly deal with this topic.
You've been diving into the research.
And QAnon, they have just been an engine for misinformation about this.
So hoping you can help dispel some myths for us.
Yes.
So let's start by defining our terms.
How exactly does law enforcement define child sex trafficking?
The central problem with human trafficking and what brings us all of these conspiracy theories and what makes it so easy to twist this issue into whatever you want it to be Is the vast gulf between the legal definition of the term human trafficking and the societal definition of the term.
What people think when they hear human trafficking.
So when most people hear human trafficking, they think of Liam Neeson.
They think of his daughter being kidnapped by like Armenians and they're going to put her in a shipping container and she's going to be in this like shady international network that's being sent around the world.
That is a straightforward moral panic.
That is an urban legend.
That form of trafficking of children being kidnapped, sold into these vast international networks, that is fake.
It's a conspiracy theory all the way down.
The problem is the legal definition of trafficking.
And when you hear about, you know, there's been this many confirmed human trafficking cases or there's been this many prosecutions of human trafficking this year, the legal definition encompasses things like forced marriages in South Asia.
It encompasses anyone who is doing any work of any kind to pay off a debt.
So if a woman from Kenya moves to the United States and she has to borrow money to pay off her plane ticket, and she does that with her nannying job, that is under the law human trafficking.
And when it comes to children, human trafficking covers anyone who trades a sex act for anything of value.
So, a pimp is not required, recruitment is not required, coercion is not required.
If you are a homeless teenager and it is cold and raining and you're desperate and you agree to have sex with somebody so that you can sleep at his home, that is human trafficking.
Technically, he is your trafficker.
Legally speaking, that is an act of human trafficking.
So we have this vast array of legal acts that are happening, none of which are good.
But all of those get boiled down into this pop culture Liam Neeson understanding of the term, and they're just not the same.
I mean, so it sounds like, you know, the problem is, is that like when I guess when law enforcement tracks this stuff, their definition is like so incredibly broad, like that it can it can encompass like lots and lots of things that are bad to varying degrees.
But it's like when people hear sex trafficking, they just they go exactly to like the worst case, most dramatic scenario.
Yes.
I mean, I should say, I have spoken to the kind of the two major human trafficking organizations in the United States that are perpetuating a lot of these sort of stranger danger myths of human trafficking.
Neither one of them can provide me with a single example of a child being trafficked by a stranger on an airplane.
This is something that we do not have a single confirmed case of.
And yet we have posters in every single airport being like, oh, look for look for children with these signs.
Make sure you call this hotline number.
They're in every single rest stop in America.
And we don't have examples of this form of trafficking actually taking place.
Isn't this something that John McCain's wife Yes!
So she saw a child and an adult in an airport and called security on them.
So this stuff was already in the making, man.
The Republicans were ready.
Yes.
She literally saw an interracial family and she thought that it was trafficking and she called the cops.
And then, even more disturbing, the way that we found out about this is that the next day she was on a local radio show talking about how she rescued someone from being trafficked.
Even though all she did was call the cops, they confirmed it was just an interracial family, and everyone moved on with their lives.
And yet in her head, she has rescued a trafficking victim.
Right.
This is the problem with this is it's all this sort of like shadows and sort of a friend of a friend of an uncle of a brother.
And then you get these wild stories that nobody can confirm.
I mean, it's like, you know, flash your high beams at a gang member initiation and you get killed.
It's exactly like the fucking email forwards that we got in the 1990s.
What about the missing children?
I keep hearing like QAnon people talk about the epidemic of missing children.
So I assume that every time a child is missing, it means that they are basically on a, you know, on a plane to the to the cabal or something.
That's very fortunately not the case.
So this is, it's hard to get, it's easy to get wrapped up in all this conspiracy stuff, but it is in fact extremely good news that this is not happening in large numbers.
And if it was, there would be many, many other signs of it than like, whatever, you found zip ties on your car in the Whole Foods parking lot, right?
So the thing to keep in mind about every single statistic regarding missing children, and there's a lot of different ones that go around, is that these are not the number of children who disappear.
These are not the number of children who quote-unquote go missing.
These are the number of reports of missing children in a year.
So one of the numbers that goes around a lot is 800,000 children.
800,000 children disappear every year.
That's more than 1% of all children in the country, by the way.
So just on its face, we should be skeptical of these large numbers.
Secondly, this particular number comes from a 2001 report from 1999 that the author of the report has now disavowed it and has instructed people not to use it.
So that's with that specific number.
But the biggest problem with these large numbers in general is that more than 99% of missing kids come home.
They come home within days.
They come home within hours.
More than half of reports of missing children are custody disputes.
It's like Dad takes the kids for the weekend.
Sunday night rolls around.
He hasn't brought the kids back.
Mom freaks out.
Mom calls the cops.
It takes him a couple more days to bring the kids back.
She has to threaten him.
It's a really ugly situation.
Eventually the kids get brought back to her.
That happens extremely frequently in America as part of custody disputes.
It's really sad and it's really awful, but it's just something that happens quite a bit.
They're called custodial kidnappings.
It's very common in America.
Another really common thing is kids who run away.
There's a lot of kids who live in abusive homes.
There's a lot of kids who are queer or trans and their parents are rejecting them.
There's a lot of kids in foster care facilities who end up running away because they're awful.
And so, these are things that happen most of the time.
The cops are called and the cops find the kids and the cops return them to the abusive situations.
Like, we do not have a good system for dealing with runaways.
We don't have a social safety net.
To help kids in these situations.
So in some ways they're highlighting like a real issue but they're completely missing the real issue and they're fast forwarding to this fake shipping containers Liam Neeson version of the issue.
In actual real cases, such as Epstein's, we actually had a lot of victims coming forward, and we had a lot of the families of those victims coming forward, and we had authorities not doing anything.
Right.
Right?
So at the same time, it's this conspiracy theory, but it's also, it's profoundly deferential to power in some ways, right?
It's questioning some forms of power, but it's also saying, oh, we should trust law enforcement, right?
As long as we come forward, everything is going to be fine.
And what we've had in so many of these cases, like R. Kelly is another one, Bill Cosby is another one, I mean, we've had people serially treating women terribly, and over and over again we've had people come forward, we've had people express concerns, and nothing happens.
Because oftentimes they are blinded by the power that is making them not trust their gut, or the authorities don't give a shit because it's a wealthy and powerful and connected person.
I mean, most of the actual prosecutions of human trafficking Are people who have bought the services of a sex worker without realizing that she's underage, or maybe he does realize that she's underage and doesn't care, or it's somebody who is a manager, sort of what is colloquially known as a pimp, who is actually managing a number of sex workers.
But this is typically something that happens after people are sex workers.
And again, I don't want to minimize this.
These are all terrible things that are happening.
But the extent to which actual trafficking is real, it is a problem that is concentrated among poor people, people of color, otherwise vulnerable people, who are being exploited by someone who is manipulating the fact that they do not have other recourse to any other social services or support.
It's a targeted problem among particular populations that the same people squawking about QAnon stuff do not give a shit about, right?
If you really want to end this form of trafficking, end homelessness!
Like, having actual options for kids who are under 18 to go sleep in a shelter rather than sleeping on the streets, that would do way more to prevent trafficking than a million prosecutions.
So, again, you don't want to minimize this, and you don't want to take away anybody's individual experience, because there really are, like, some terrible experiences that people have, and this is a problem in the United States.
But the conspiracy theory version of it puts all of that under the law enforcement system, right?
They think that we can prosecute our way out of it.
They think that we can take the same approach that we took to the war on drugs, of just, oh, let's mass incarcerate our way out of this problem, rather than solving the underlying vulnerabilities, which are mostly homelessness and the foster care system.
It seems like the real version of this problem is less dramatic than the QAnon version, but it's also more depressing.
Because in the QAnon fantasy, the idea is there's going to be a solution.
It just involves raising awareness, or possibly arresting the right people, or exposing the right people for the evils that they have committed.
Once that happens, And one thing that I haven't heard anybody mention so far is Satan.
It's almost like it's completely fucking unrelated to that.
because the problem is so complex, it's going to have to be systemic, you know, providing support
systems for these vulnerable people. And one thing that I haven't heard anybody mention so far is
Satan. It's almost like it's completely fucking unrelated to that. The way that my podcast co-host
Sarah Marshall put it was that we have this desire for helplessness. We actually know what the
solutions to these problems are.
Like, we've known for decades that poor and abused and marginalized kids have a lot of problems and they need as much social support as possible.
They need safe places to sleep.
They need safe adults to go to where they can tell them about abuse and have something actually happen.
Like, they need accountability mechanisms.
We know all these things, but we haven't fixed them.
Like, how long have we known that the foster care system is completely broken?
For decades.
But it's something slow, it's something boring, and it's something that primarily benefits marginalized populations.
Like, these are populations that we don't want to think about very much.
You know, people who are poor, people whose parents are on drugs.
These are not people that we're interested in actually helping.
And so this is where we get this construction of the sort of white suburban teenager who's, like, kidnapped from her upstairs bedroom of her parents' home.
When, you know, the entire myth of trafficking depends on this idea of, like, it's happening everywhere, it could happen to anyone, it's all around us, and that really isn't true.
It's a problem of specifically vulnerable populations who we know what they need and we are not giving it to them.
So this is my central frustration in this, is that it's not that this is not a problem, it's not that it's completely made up.
It's that it's just much more boring and less exotic than they want it to be.
Are you saying that when I go onto Facebook, into my favorite Facebook group and share memes that I'm actually not helping?
You're actually, unfortunately not.
The impact font is not the only thing you need to know to solve a social problem.
It's right in the name, Impact.
I mean, I do think one of the most harmful myths of this is this idea that we constantly need to be raising awareness of human trafficking.
That this is something that goes around.
This is the same Coney 2012 bullshit that we've had for 15 years.
I used to work in development.
I worked in development for 11 years before I became a journalist.
There's actually a pretty limited number of issues on which awareness alone We'll actually do anything meaningful.
There's actually very specific legal changes that we need in America to solve the problem of commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Like, we know what we need to do about those things, and it's not awareness.
It's specific changes to law, and we're just not doing them because we're getting distracted by this Liam Neeson bullshit.
I want to keep talking about these numbers, these statistics that I keep hearing from QAnon people.
One of them is that one in four trafficking victims are children.
In fact, Representative Tulsi Gabbard recently pushed this number.
Christ's sake.
She straight up said it was child porn.
Yeah.
People are losing their fucking minds right now.
I know.
I just saw another congressperson.
There's multiple congresspeople now calling to get this cuties movie named Child Porn.
I had someone tell me, because I pointed out that, like, if you just frame Taxi Driver by just having Jodie Foster on the cover alone, that that would be, like, horrible, obviously, and so it's a framing issue with cuties, especially if you see the French cover of it, and it's like, it's an A24, like, indie film.
You can question whether or not you like what's in it, but that's what it is, essentially.
And they're calling it child pornography.
And I had a person say, well, you know, would it be OK if in a snuff movie you also became aware of how bad it is to kill people?
It's like, well, but Cuties is not a filmed exploitation of girls.
These are people on a fucking set.
This is fiction.
And this country will literally kill people over this shit eventually because they can't tell fucking fiction from nonfiction anymore.
And also, it sounds to me, as one of the many people weighing in on this who has not seen the movie, but it sounds like the movie is actually a critique of this.
Like, the movie itself is making the same point as all of the critics of it.
Like, it was extremely bad marketing.
I mean, the marketing posters were indefensible.
Netflix is so, so profoundly stupid.
Yeah, it was unbelievably stupid.
But also, it seems like the actual movie is not promoting child porn.
Like, it seems like the movie... Not even remotely.
I mean, I was telling people, go cancel Gaspard Noé or some shit, man.
His movies are all about exploitation and they feel almost like he might actually be exploiting his actors in some way.
Right.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't fucking stick.
It's about, you know, these conservative young woman of color from the person's experience, the director's experience.
And then she's caught in between these worlds of like, you know, this kind of conservative family past of hers and this new kind of exploitative like dance thing that she gets into with these other children.
And so, yeah, no, I wouldn't.
I mean, again, I'm not promoting this movie.
I don't even I don't care if it's a good movie or not.
I'm just saying we have to know the difference between exploiting children and filming a movie in which children are exploited.
I'm sorry, we have to make a difference at some point.
We're going to go back to fucking banning Dungeons and Dragons, aren't we?
We are going to ban rock and roll.
Horrifying!
They love it!
me about this panic. It seems like there were like worse things going on in America, like for example,
child beauty pageants, which are like common. They love it.
Yeah, they wish they make which they make, you know, series about and they think it's a fun quirky
thing. And it also was a fucking predatory ground for Donald Trump to fucking go and walk
into rooms full of girls without their Like he would do that to these Miss America beauty pageants and stuff.
So that shit is like straight up set up for exploitation.
There's not even a question.
That is actually what's happening in those pageants.
Like a billion times worse than what people are freaking out about now.
I should also say, the thing that really stuck out to me about Tulsi Gabbard's tweet and other tweets about this that I've seen is the statistic of one in four victims of trafficking are children.
And I think it's a really good example of this huge difference between the legal definition and the societal understandings.
So that number comes from the International Labor Organization.
That is a study of all human trafficking, right?
So this is the entire legal definition that encompasses forced marriage, which is mostly in South Asia, forced labor, and commercial sexual exploitation.
So it's actually true that according to those statistics, one in four victims of trafficking broadly are children, but the vast majority of the trafficking that the International Labor Organization is identifying is actually forced labor.
And that is a huge problem in the world, especially for people like undocumented migrants, people who can be threatened to be deported by ICE if they complain about their working conditions.
This is something that is all over the place in America.
Go to restaurants, go to any farm.
You can find people who are working under conditions of debt bondage and do not have
access to their passports or they will lose their visa status if they quit their job.
So they're basically tied to their job if they don't want to get deported.
And again, it's like we're using this broad definition of something, all of which is bad.
Like it's really bad that farmworkers are working under conditions that amount to forced
labor.
But the people that are saying, oh, you know, you know, one in four victims of children
and it's linked to this child porn stuff.
It's like, what are they doing about the forced labor?
Like, again, we know exactly where it's happening.
We know how it's happening.
We know exactly what we need to do to solve that problem.
We need to reform the immigration system.
But what has the trafficking panic contributed to that?
QAnon would basically be like, if we kick out all of these migrant workers, then there wouldn't be any exploitation anymore.
And also, we should kill all pedophiles.
Those are their actual answers.
You're right.
I'm being unfair.
They do have actual policy positions.
One thing I also would like to clear you on, like the exact nature of the relationship between traffickers and their victims.
So again, by myself, sort of reading through QAnon memes, it's my understanding that it's a simple transaction in which the abuser purchases the child, like someone might buy a slave and the antebellum self.
The trafficker, they might browse cabinets on Wayfair.com, they pick what they like best.
Yeah, they pick the name.
They pick the name, they put their credit card, maybe they have PayPal, and then the delivery of the victim just comes straight to their door, right?
7 to 10 business days.
Depends which service, because I've had some issues with some of these private companies.
FedEx is not as good as delivering children as UPS.
You need to have child prime.
That means the child comes the next day.
What can you even say?
It's like, it's so outlandishly fake.
It's, you know, there's no, there's just no evidence of this ever happening.
There's actually a study that looked at every single human trafficking case that was prosecuted by the federal authorities between 2000 and 2015.
And it did a typology of every single case.
And one of the categories was international cartel, right?
So the criminals had links overseas.
Do you know how many cases were linked to international cartels between 2000 and 2015?
Was it zero?
Zero!
It was literally zero.
There's no evidence of this.
I mean, when you find quote-unquote networks of human traffickers, what that often is is it's four or five sex workers who are all working together and like two of them are like 19 and 20 and two of them are like 17 and 18.
And if one sex worker is underage, all of the others can be charged with conspiracy to commit human trafficking, because that's how our human trafficking laws work.
So what oftentimes happens when law enforcement does these quote-unquote human trafficking stings, they don't actually know beforehand that there's any human trafficking going on.
They'll just go out and they'll arrest like 20 sex workers in the sort of sex worker neighborhood that every city has, And then it'll turn out that one or two of them is underage.
And then all of a sudden, bingo, the cops can say, oh, we just busted up a human trafficking ring.
And it's like, either those sex workers might not have known each other.
If they did know each other, it was more like, well, you know, she's broke.
She's addicted to drugs.
I'm helping her, like, not get murdered doing this line of work.
And that can be prosecuted as a quote unquote facilitator of human
trafficking.
So a lot of the actual arrests that we're seeing for human trafficking are not what the
public understands as traffickers.
Right. And I had a question about the Project Underground Railroad, which is a kind of pro
Trump guy running it.
It's been around for a few years now, and he has kind of given a head nod to Wayfair, where he was like, oh, we've got that under control kind of thing.
Don't worry about it.
You know, not denying its factual basis, basically.
And this is a guy that also, yeah, was appointed by Trump to a board recently dealing with this stuff.
So, I mean, what's your take?
Because I've seen QAnon people straight up say, oh, we're fans, like, we think it's great.
You need to contact them.
They're the people to hit up if you want to save the kid from Trump.
Oh yeah, I mean, on their website they say, I think it's like 4,130 rescues, like this is how many sex workers they've rescued throughout their operations.
And like so many other sort of conservative law and order type organizations that work on this issue, the best way to debunk what they're doing is to ask, and then what?
Right?
It's not clear what happens after these people are rescued.
This is actually one of the big problems with the whole sex trafficking myth is this idea that people can be rescued from sex work or rescued from their trafficker and then everything is okay.
If you're talking about somebody underage who's homeless and who's maybe doing what's called survival sex, like exactly what it sounds like, they're having sex to survive, they're doing it for a place to stay or for drugs or not to get beat up or whatever, great, you've rescued them from their trafficker, awesome.
Are they not homeless anymore?
Are they not addicted to drugs anymore?
Is there a place for them to sleep tonight?
It's these very elemental questions that people are not asking of organizations like this.
What happens the next day after you rescue them?
And he also, I mean, the head of it is a Mormon who has said in Latter-day Saint publication that he was called to do this by God.
Great.
Good sign.
Great sign.
I've actually interviewed people that run organizations like this that a lot of the quote-unquote rescue sort of sanctuaries or victim rehabilitation centers for trafficking victims a lot of these are actually run by Christian organizations so a lot of the trafficking victims help NGOs are there it's like a building it's located in a remote area they take trafficking victims out there they'll often take away their cell phones they'll take away their internet access, they won't let them leave the grounds,
they'll have, you know, day-long programs of education and group therapy and oftentimes religious
instruction that the people have to sign up for to continue staying there. And oftentimes they'll
sort of sign up for an entire year and they effectively can't leave for an entire year
and they don't have contact with the outside world for that entire year or they can sort of earn
contact with the outside world like like an hour of internet access if they behave well.
Kind of problematic and like a little bit like trafficking to me.
Like you're literally confining somebody to this space.
You're forcing them to go through all of these motions that may not actually be all that good for them, right?
And yet that is not trafficking because we're saving them, right?
We're doing it for their own good.
And so again, I don't know how much he's involved in this, but a lot of the sort of rescue industrial complex follows this model of like, let's put them in a home.
Let's do all of this religious instruction.
Let's turn them into this idea of like the perfect victim.
And then of course, after the year is over, we just put them out into the streets.
We just put them out.
You know, it's not clear they're providing any ongoing support after this.
So again, Just like rescuing somebody from being a homeless sex worker, there's nothing for them after that, right?
There's nothing, you know, it's the lack of housing options, it's the lack of food stamps, it's the lack of all these other supports that are causing this problem because none of it is addressing the underlying issue.
Why aren't there posters in airports saying, you know, here are the signs of domestic abuse, here are the signs that a kid is being abused by her parents, here are the signs that a partner is being abused by her boyfriend, these are the signs, here's the number to call.
It's actually interesting to me that we don't have those because we know that domestic abuse is actually relatively prevalent in our society, like that's pretty well established.
And yet, I don't know if it feels like an imposition to be sort of looking into other people's families and we're only interested in like the stranger danger version of this, but it is very odd to me.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's just it's just there are people more generally concerned about, you know, outsider threats.
They want to believe that, you know, the, you know, individual families, I guess, nuclear families are like, you know, are fine.
And they're the only big problems are something that comes from outside of them, from some sort of malicious force.
For The Huffington Post, you recently reported on how the federal government has been touting their missing children rescue operations.
Yes.
The press release for one of these read, U.S.
Marshals Find 39 Missing Children in Georgia During Operation Not Forgotten.
So these press releases and subsequently the news reports, there were a little light on details.
So I imagine that this operation involved like a daring midnight raid in which officers bust down the door of a double-wide trailer and discover that there are like dozens of six-year-olds chained together.
So is that like roughly what happened?
I looked into this.
This thing, this drove me nuts.
It went around.
First, it's like they did a big trafficking bust and they found 39 kids, and then somehow that morphed into they pulled 39 kids out of a trailer in Georgia, like a double-wide trailer with these kids.
You imagine kids, like, you know, chained to radiators in these horrible squalid conditions.
And I kept waiting for other journalists to debunk it.
I was like, well, this is obviously bullshit and, like, somebody's gonna get to this, right?
And then, like, a day goes by, another couple days go by, and these very credulous stories come out on, like, NBC and CBS and The New York Times.
Just like Trafficking Raid in Georgia, Trafficking Raid in Georgia.
And then it took me like two emails to email these authorities.
And I was like, hey, can you just provide me with some details on what the actual operation was?
And 39 kids were not rescued.
There was no trailer.
The operation took place across two weeks.
There was no Raid at all because it was like 39 completely separate incidents.
It was across 15 counties in Georgia and six additional states, right?
So we're not even talking like the same people doing this.
And the vast majority of the kids, surprise twist, were foster care kids.
They were runaways from foster care.
And it's like, yeah, this is just a tragic situation of like kids who are maybe in abuse situations.
Maybe they have mental health situations.
A lot of them ran away Fleeing a terrible situation and the cops found them and potentially gave them back to their shitty abusive situations.
Of the 39, six were transferred to a trafficking victim rehabilitation center, one of these Christian organizations outside of Atlanta.
This was not this sort of rescuing kids from a basement type of operations.
It was literally just looking for missing kids and the vast majority of the kids turned out to be either runaways or kidnapped by one of their non-custodial parents.
But it does show that they're willing now to do these.
It's basically a version of those cop photos where they'll put all the drugs and weapons on the table to show you what they captured.
They were so close to just putting the kids on that table.
Oh, yeah.
And just being like, look.
And it's like, that's it.
It's a it's a photo op, right?
That's how you put together 39 separate cases.
You stitch it all together and then you pretend there's a raid.
The wording of the press release was very careful because they said nine suspects arrested on charges including sex trafficking.
So that could mean all nine of them were arrested on sex trafficking charges, or as the case actually is, only one of them was arrested for sex trafficking, right?
So all of the rest are arrested for existing warrants.
One guy was a felon and he had a firearm and he shouldn't have.
Two of them were custodial interference, meaning the parent kidnapped the child.
It's like mostly low-level stuff or existing warrants.
And then one of them is arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking.
We still don't know what the situation was.
But that's somehow a sex trafficking raid.
There's one person charged with sex trafficking.
We have 39 kids.
I gotta say, yeah, this whole thing, it sounds like it requires a lot of, you know, nuanced understanding to actually help vulnerable people.
And I gotta say, I'm not too interested in that.
I like the Liam Neeson story a lot better.
It's so cool.
Yeah.
That's fascinating and, you know, kind of weird and a little depressing stuff.
It's a bummer, dude.
Where could someone go to learn more about your work?
We have two episodes on human trafficking that goes much more into the forced labor stuff and also into the history.
It's a really, it's like an old, like, racist term.
It basically comes out of white slavery.
Like, surprise, surprise, it has racist roots.
So they can check that out on You're Wrong About.
Just Google that.
That's wherever podcasts are.
And then you can also look at my work at the Huffington Post.
I've written quite a few articles on this for HuffPost now.
So you can just Google to that too.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
Well, CNN wants you to believe.
There's nothing to see here.
Children suffering so deeply at the hands of these sick fucks who worship Satan freely picture surface their bad luck.
Tick tock.
Tick tock.
And where is RBG?
Rumors say she's got a double.
Some say she's packed on ice and she'll die when Demerits wanna.
Cause they really are that evil.
They eat you for adrenochrome.
They monitor your breathing and invade you.
They're running out of time and we're winning in this fight.
