Women tied to the QAnon movement have recently achieved sizable electoral victories. Our UK Correspondent (Doctor) Annie Kelly (PhD) drops by to expand on her recent piece for the New York Times. We examine how the movement has made such inroads with online parenting communities and why mothers seem to be getting attracted to QAnon in droves.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 110 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Mothers for QAnon episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Annie Kelly, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Women are an expanding demographic of the QAnon movement, and they are being funneled into the conspiracy theory from a variety of new, soft fronts like Save the Children and broader COVID denial beliefs.
This week, our UK correspondent Annie Kelly is stepping in to bring us an episode about the mutation of QAnon into a more welcoming movement for women.
But before all that, QAnon News!
First off, I definitely want to recommend that you listen to the recent episode of Reply All called Country of Liars.
It features friends of the show Frederick Brennan, Mike Rothschild, and Dale Barron.
And the episode goes over the evidence that Jim Watkins, the owner of the 8Koon message board, has a close relationship with Q and has some degree of control over Q, which is very, very significant.
But to be clear, it's also different than the claim that Watkins is Q or that author of the Q drops.
But it is significant because if you want to point the finger at someone who's to blame for Q or who is mostly responsible for the spread of Q or the mainstream of Q, I mean, Jim Watkins is someone you definitely want to talk about.
How is he not at a black site tied to a chair in Belarus or something?
Because he's helping them!
Well, that's what I don't understand.
He's helping!
We, you know, the intelligence agencies have never been shy in taking care of people they consider threats.
Yeah.
This guy's running some sort of like bizarre stochastic terrorism empire from the fucking Philippines.
I mean, he walked right into their hands.
I mean, he went and testified, you know, from Congress.
The plot thickens.
This guy's gotta be easy to nick, you know?
The plot thickens, at the very least.
Like you said, you know, we don't have any proof yet, but we do have, you know, now the ability to see that whatever network is built to make Q happen, Jim is a part of it.
Absolutely, yeah.
For my next story, a QAnon-promoting Senate candidate wins primary in Delaware.
We have previously discussed Joe Ray Perkins, the QAnon-promoting Senate candidate from Oregon.
Well, it turns out another QAnon-promoting candidate won a Senate nomination.
Lauren Witski won the Republican primary election for Delaware's U.S.
Senate seat in a double-digit victory.
Oh, fuck!
Oh, no!
Well, it's still primary, but ouch.
Yeah.
But she defeated opponent James DiMartino, who is backed by the state Republican Party.
So the GOP establishment, they're trying to put forward these normal for the Republicans kind of candidates.
And the voters, they don't want them.
They want QAnon.
That's it.
My prediction is coming true, you guys.
The GOP is QAnon and the Democrats become the GOP.
Well, if you're like in a blue district, imagine the rage you have if you're a QAnon follower.
I mean, you're surrounded by people who should be executed already.
Whitsky was once photographed in a QAnon shirt and has tweeted the WhereWeGoOneWeGoAll hashtag.
Will Sommer at the Daily Beast reported that Whitsky is close with one-time QAnon promoter Dylan Wheeler, aka Education4Libs.
Oh boy.
Also, by the way- Not oh boy, our boy, Julian.
Yes, our boy, sorry, yes.
Annie, I'm seeing a pattern among electoral victories for QAnon believers.
It seems like they're all women.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a great step forward for women's rights, to be honest.
To think that like, yeah, a hundred or so years ago we didn't have the vote and now we're absolutely crushing it when it comes to winning Republican primaries with conspiracy theory bullshit.
It's a big win for us.
Whiskey is also open about the fact that she is a recovering opioid addict.
She also claims without evidence that her opioid addiction led her to being a drug runner for Mexican cartels.
So this is so worrying to me because there are only 35 Senate races in this upcoming election and two of them are going to have a QAnon follower challenging the incumbent.
For my next story, wellness influencers begin battling QAnon in their own community.
So this was reported by DJ Dickinson for Rolling Stone.
Some people in the online wellness community have started to notice that QAnon is being promoted by some of their colleagues.
For example, Sean Korn, a yoga instructor with over 100,000 Instagram followers, said this.
Colleagues would reach out to me and they'd talk about things like the Great Awakening, being in the Matrix, the red pill, the blue pill.
I'd be like...
What the fuck are you talking about?
I couldn't believe they were talking about it with all seriousness.
It occurred to me, am I being recruited by people I know and love?
You are.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you'll join them.
Don't worry.
The money's good.
QAnon is also about bending yourself in unnatural positions.
As a consequence, wellness influencers decided to speak out against QAnon.
Shannon Algeo, a yoga and meditation teacher in Los Angeles, was so shocked by the rise of QAnon in his community that he collaborated with other wellness influencers to make a joint statement.
That statement, which was posted on Instagram, says this in part.
QAnon does not represent the true values of the wellness community.
We care about your mental and emotional well-being, and we are here to say, quote, beware, stay in your body, use discernment, be skeptical of real motives behind QAnon, and most importantly, stay in connection with your friends and family.
Do not stay in connection with your body if it is filled with opioids.
Do not.
Also turn off Fox News before you get in touch with your body because you might just be feeling a buzz of rage.
Your body is actually not some sort of perfectly safe place from QAnon.
You're going to want to go ahead and turn the autoplay next off feature on YouTube.
Our hearts are breaking from the rampant misinformation that is dividing our community.
We are asking you to join us by sharing this message and take a stand against QAnon.
Well, we have best of luck to the wellness community as, you know, the QAnon spreads because, gotta say, once it gets in people's brains, it doesn't dislodge very easily.
Yeah, I've got a feeling that, like, I don't know, I feel really sad for these people because I just feel like this is not going to work at all.
Yeah, I just look forward to the first armed conflict in QAnon being the New Age Civil War, where yoga influencers battle other yoga influencers for whether QAnon is real.
Yeah, like warring over a rental space or a particular park where they like to bring their students.
This could potentially get ugly, but not before we get a couple funny social media videos of these yoga battles.
Multiple people were moaned down by devil sticks in downtown Portland.
Man, nobody has devil sticks anymore.
That's a lost art.
For my last story, Q tells QAnon followers to stop mentioning QAnon.
This was a recent Q drop I thought was really fascinating.
This is a very big turning point.
A very big turning point.
Agreed.
So this past month, social media companies have been especially aggressive in cracking down on QAnon on their platforms.
So in response, a recent QDrop instructed QAnon followers to be more sneaky in how they talk about the movement.
That QDrop said this.
Really, the QAnon community, they were already kind of avoiding QAnon language before.
Really the q9 community there were already kind of avoiding QA non language before they're using you know
17 instead of Q or they're spelling Q CUE QA non or you know, they're doing like the save the
children stuff, which is the soft front for QA non and And really, this is like a common, like, cult recruiting tactic, right?
I mean, like, Scientology, they don't lead with Xenu and stuff.
They lead with, you know, Dianetics, mental health, self-improvement, really sort of... Are you stressed?
They're becoming the secret society that they claim that they hate, basically.
The next Q drop was basically a repost of a user on the boards who said this.
I thought it was very interesting.
If somebody comes to accept a truth or swallow a red pill without knowing it was associated with Q, then they do so unpolluted by media bias, re-QAnon.
Bypass prejudice.
Makes sense.
So Q reposted that, and so we have now a kind of endorsed, like, explainer written by a follower.
Yeah.
Making it even clearer.
So yeah.
So what you do is you make people believe in adrenochrome without saying Q. I don't know this Q business, but this adrenochrome stuff is very real.
Save the children.
Save the children.
Hey, maybe you don't want to accept adrenochrome yet, but maybe you think that they do abuse the children and kidnap them.
But later down the line, we'll get you ready for that.
for adrenochrome.
Yeah, because if you say QAnon up front, your friends can be like, dude, that's so stupid,
man. The JFK Junior, come on. But if you just start with, well, but aren't you worried about
children? I mean, this is a real problem, human trafficking.
People are going to go, especially liberals who are more sympathetic, I think, than
the right causes like this.
It makes them go like, yeah, I can't really argue with that.
And before long, you're saying yes to a lot of QAnon principles without knowing that you've
signed up for the other part of it, which is...
Yeah, and I think the main also thing to remember with Q endorsing this kind of tactic of dissimulation
is that they are doing so very near to the election.
Now, Q has never existed during an election.
Q was created after the 2016 election, and so the most important phase in its entire history is the next few days until the election.
The point of this funnel is to get you to vote for Trump.
That's what's behind all of the adrenochrome and the cabal and this stuff.
Yeah.
So, we'll see, you know?
And I think it's interesting that there's, you know, a deployment of kind of, yeah, this new tactic.
Hello there, listeners.
You are back in the warm, maternal embrace of your British correspondent, Annie, here.
So, as some of you may have seen, I had a piece out for the New York Times recently about women and QAnon, called Mothers for QAnon.
The paper very graciously agreed to put in my bio my role in this podcast, meaning that the show where the boys once talked about having sex with aliens, or Jake's stories about Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew richly sacrificing babies under the Eiffel Tower, is immortalised forever in the paper of record.
You're welcome everyone!
That fucking ruled!
That ruled so hard.
That's the trick, is you can write any trash you want, you just have to find someone with a PhD and destroy their lives and careers.
Yeah, the most brilliant Trojan horse just fucking right through their doors.
Awesome.
Thank you for that, Annie.
That is going to be a lifetime goal for me.
You're welcome.
Unfortunately, the New York Times has a very strict word limit, and I didn't actually get to say a lot of what I wanted to say in that piece.
There's a really good editor there called Alicia, who basically turns my invective-fueled ramblings into a cogent and thoughtful argument.
You listeners have no such safety net.
So let's try and figure out the weird world of QAnon mums, or moms, as I guess some of you call them.
A couple of weeks back, when I attended the Save Our Children rally in London, I noted on the episode how surprised I was at the amount of women there.
I always thought women were more generally sensible than that, while men would be the ones wriggling around in the digital muck of this conspiracy like the worms that they are.
It also interested me how many women I spoke to that day who would mention their own children, or a sense of maternal duty that they felt to protect the innocent.
Take this one clip from an interview I did with three women that day.
So first off, what brings you guys here today?
I'm just really passionate about the children, children being the future, and yeah, of what I know about everything that's going on with children on so many different levels, it's just something that I could not come here and stand for.
I've got two children, one's 20, One's one and yeah I'm really passionate about at the moment I've got a little baby and I can see in his eyes that he's the future and nothing hurts me more than whatever is going on with these kids because it is when you fuck with the innocence of a child you fuck with the consciousness of the collective and the soul of the collective and
Yeah, we are love and light and we are infinite.
Infinite.
And this just diminishes and anything that's going on with children is the darkness and the darkness needs to go.
I asked her what she did later on and she said that she was a Reiki shaman and her friend was a yoga instructor and I think the other one was a crystal healer.
Wow.
So they were like, yeah, they were like heavily into the new age stuff.
There wasn't much of a Christian presence there in London that I could see.
Oh, that's very interesting.
I thought we as a civilization were kind of beyond the there's been talk thing.
You can find out what's going on instantaneously.
You have access to information right now on your phone.
And maybe it's the accent for me, but it took me back to almost this Crucible-esque era where it's like, there's been talk of witches in the town.
People are letting their broad, conspiratorial nature really fly.
QAnon's mutation into Save the Children kind of chimed with something I'd always found slightly weird about QAnon, which is that if you really, truly believed that satanic paedophiles were trafficking children en masse to torture them, wouldn't you want to do something about it rather than just hope that Trump's tidying it all up for you?
Now that QAnon's gone fully international, It seemed even less likely that trust the plan would be a fully satisfying answer to non-American followers who don't have any particular investment in a foreign president.
I wondered if, as the theory spread across the world and became necessarily less MAGA, it would attract more and more women who saw it less as the partisan cause and more as a broad tenet around the issue of child protection.
But I couldn't be sure if I was just distorting things from one single rally.
As you guys will know, British women are famed for their beauty and intelligence all over the world.
So perhaps this was just another unique, localised phenomenon to my specific country.
I had to be sure before I risked both my own and this podcast's fine reputation for a hunch.
So I started doing my research and learned that yes, it does seem to be a thing.
Also, Facebook is evil, but I'll get to that in a bit.
The first place I went to is where I recommend anyone goes to get reliable information.
YouTube.
I started looking up clips for Save Our Children rallies everywhere across the world to try and see who was involved and what they were saying.
So first there were the New Age Instagram influencers who reminded me a lot of some of the women I spoke to in London.
So just tell me why you're out here and what's this sage all about and tell me your thing.
I am here to bring awareness to child trafficking but also anchor in the freedom and manifest that.
So I come out and I pray and I sage as we bring this truth into reality so that people can wake up to what's been going on behind the scenes.
So when we gather like this, we're all collectively manifesting our energy.
We're all collectively manifesting what we want to see, the change in the world.
And all that takes is some awareness of what's been going on with these children.
And these children are parts of us.
That's why the sign says, we are water.
We are all water, and when we come together, we are one ocean, and the tides rise together, and that's why I'm staging, that's why I'm out here, and that's why all of these people are wearing blue, because we're remembering the ocean, we're remembering that we are one.
But it wasn't just hippie-dippie new-agey types this was attracting either.
Another person from a non-American country I found talking about this was the German Naomi Seist, who I first came across when she was collaborating with Generation Identity, a far-right anti-immigrant organisation, and here she is talking about the Wayfair scandal.
The reason that I'm approaching this topic now is that interestingly it is something that both the left and the right As useless as those terms are to differentiate between political philosophies anyway, seem to unite over.
We should all agree that child abuse is an immeasurably despicable crime.
And so this new incidence sparked the curiosity of many people to look into the entire dark maze of child trafficking that is connected to it.
I'm talking specifically about the Wayfair scandal.
I have no incentive to spread misinformation and if I wanted to grow my channel or my political impact then I would not touch any of these issues.
So I made sure to cut out as much of the evidence that has been debunked as possible.
And that is mainly why I have been waiting so long to make this video.
Lastly, I just want to say that I will not only focus on the Wayfair scandal, because it is just a tiny puzzle piece in a way bigger picture.
This person is 11 years old or something?
Who is this child?
So actually when I first came across her, yeah, she was kind of doing the anti-immigrant thing, and she was a teenager then.
She was kind of, you know, featuring on lots of alt-right channels being sort of like, you know, oh, this teen is saving Europe sort of stuff.
But she's actually, she's like 21 now, and she seems to have branched out from that onto QAnon, funnily enough.
Terrible.
I kind of just liked the sort of contrast between those two styles of QAnon belief.
Yeah, there's some real strong neo-Nazi vibes with this one.
It's also a scary new type of QAnon believer that presents or at least pretends that they're going to present the debunks up front.
Um, you know, a lot of the QAnon influencers are just kind of like, gung-ho, you know, yes and.
I think it's actually also very dangerous and insidious to have somebody that's going, well, here's what's definitely been debunked, but here's what hasn't been.
Like, to pretend like they're giving kind of, it's kind of like an alternate, like, history version of us.
Like, you know, trying to look, give everything a fair shake and, you know, seeing what really, but wanting QAnon to be real.
It's just Travis View if he were hot.
Yeah, it's Travis.
It's Travis if he was kind of hoping, and it aligned with his worldview, that Q actually was real in doing it.
Yeah.
I still think you should honeypot people.
I'll try, I'll try.
Sex it up, baby.
I actually asked Travis if this influx of women was something he'd noticed, and he said to me that QAnon had actually had a lot of women, even in the early days, pointing to people like Lisa May Crowley, but that he thought the soft front of Save the Children helped a lot more get involved.
Yeah, sounds like something you would say.
Yeah.
Now, this really interested me, because despite my joke earlier, I don't actually think women are perfect beings of light and goodness.
What I've got used to finding in the far-right and anti-feminist communities I studied for my PhD was that there were usually a lot more women involved than it often looked like on first glance.
We do tend to think of racism or nationalism as somehow less effective on white women than men, when usually what we're actually seeing is the members of far-right movements who are more likely to either be in leadership roles or, more alarmingly, actually going out there and killing people for their beliefs, both of which do tend to be men.
But listeners of this show will probably already know that QAnon tends to be different here.
For one thing, many of our familiar favourites with political ambitions, like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jo Rae Perkins, are, obviously, women.
But the stories that Julian's reported on too really interested me.
So, like Cecilia Fulbright of Texas, the woman who allegedly chased strangers in her car under the impression they were paedophiles who had kidnapped children for human trafficking, Or Cynthia Apsock, who teamed up with several fellow QAnon believers to kidnap her own child from child services.
Now, I cannot stress enough that this amount of women getting involved in political acts of violence is genuinely unusual for a far-right movement.
And while it's hard to get exact numbers, it does point to a disproportionate amount of women involved.
I decided to talk to other extremism and radicalisation researchers I know to see what they thought.
One of them, Blythe Crawford, who is a fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, said this.
I've definitely noticed a lot of women showing support for the conspiracy.
In particular, a lot of women I've seen on more mainstream social media sites seem to be very concerned about the save the children aspect of the theory.
It's hard to say whether it's a localized or general trend, but I would say most of the women I've seen engaging with it online have been from the US or the UK.
I do think that there is something about the intense focus on harm being done to children and on the graphic nature of the images and videos associated with Q that is catered towards evoking shock And empathy, and it's possible that these are chiming with a lot of women in particular.
I would also say that in many, although by no means all cases, the women that I'm seeing on these more mainstream sites often don't engage with the conspiracy at its deepest level, and many might be very strongly advocating for saving the children, but don't mention Q, and don't seem to be aware of any deeper elements of the conspiracy.
So, anecdotally, it seems to me like this aspect of the theory is achieving a reach that previous narratives associated with Q might not have.
That final part really interested me, because it gelled with what I had seen some Save the Children advocates saying themselves.
Going back to that alt-right German woman, I was struck by how long she spent explaining that you didn't have to believe in QAnon to believe in Save the Children.
The premise on which I base my conviction that I have to report on this issue is that if all of it, or any of it is true, then it would be infinitely worse to stay silent about it.
And just because some of the claims about these issues are made by a certain movement that you might not consider credible, namely the QAnon movement, that shouldn't deter you from looking into the evidence anyway.
As of right now, I don't consider myself an active part of the QAnon movement, But I am on the side watching and evaluating for myself what I think is verifiable and what to me seems too far out there.
This video will be about child trafficking and systemic child abuse.
So what's going on?
I think there's two explanations which don't necessarily compete with one another so much as reinforce each other.
The first of these is the obvious one.
Women tend to be protective of children and similarly live with a much bigger fear of sexual assault and exploitation.
So even perfectly legitimate organisations that deal with actual sex trafficking rather than mad conspiracy stuff will attract a lot of female supporters.
By QAnon rebranding as Save the Children, lots of women with the best of intentions become essentially hoodwinked.
I do think there's something more to it though, because pretty much all far-right conspiracies make the same claim about protecting kids.
It's one of the easiest ways to market what are some pretty heinous ideas to make them palatable to the general public.
And if you were a far-right figure, you'd pretty much be mad not to use the child protection angle.
So, for example, conservatives in my country will often say they're protecting children from being brainwashed by making gender transition more difficult, because it's a scary prospect for parents.
Similarly, neo-Nazis will often use children as a symbol of the innocence and purity they want to protect.
It's why their 14-word slogan ends on protecting the future for white children.
If it were as simple as women want to protect kids and join anything that says it's protecting kids, we'd expect to see the same kind of female visibility in neo-Nazi networks, but we just don't.
So something else is going on, too.
I remembered an article in The Conversation by an academic called Audrey Courtey published in July 2020.
In it, she predicted that Twitter's social media bans of QAnon discussion wouldn't be effective.
A conclusion that I think has proven pretty much correct.
Social media bans are hard to maintain.
New code words and hashtags can be adopted, which artificial intelligence algorithms can't detect.
For example, many QAnon believers have tried to operate unnoticed on Twitter by using the number 17 to reference Q, the 17th letter of the alphabet.
Or by writing C-U-E-anon instead of Q-anon.
Human moderators may be needed to identify such circumvention attempts.
And it's hard to say how much human resource Twitter is willing or able to devote to moderating this content.
I will say to Twitter, I will say to Twitter, I volunteer.
I volunteer for free.
Give me the job of delivering the ban hammer to Q-anon accounts invading their bans.
I will pay you to do that.
Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.
Listen, listen.
You could look really awesome right now by creating real human jobs and hire people that are desperately in need of work.
They can work from fucking home they can do this.
They can troll Twitter and they can figure out these people that are skirting these bands.
You guys could be heroes.
No, I think that both of your mental illness flaring up this intensely while you're discussing this idea tells me it would be a terrible path for you personally and the podcast.
I would be awful I would like I would like tease them I would like dang they'd be like little flies in my hands I would crush anything.
Travis is trembling.
You would talk to them before you'd say I found you by the way.
I found you.
Trembling with joy at the thought of it.
I'll bat you today or tomorrow at my whim.
Incredible.
I found you boy.
Dear Jordan, I've given you 24 hours to pack your things.
You're going to be bad boy.
You're going to be banned.
It might not be today, might not be tomorrow, but it'll be soon.
That's the thing with Travis is I think he has a form of sadism where he would just set up like a Caligula style house and like he would monitor them all as they're forced to go through like the 120 days of Sodom.
I just imagine him with the giant command center from the first Batman Christian Bale movie.
Yeah, we're definitely in the same genres here.
I'm talking about Salo and you're... It's just a thousand cell phones taped together, basically, monitoring every cell phone.
Every single one of them.
Oh, there's Jo-Em eating human feces from a dominatrix.
In essence, Corti said, if you really want to stop QAnon spreading on social media, rather than just look like you're stopping it, you need to have the manpower, which is expensive, or runs the risk of Travis just going totally mad with power, one of the two.
It could be completely free as long as, yeah, you're willing to have a new Dr. Robotnik.
As long as you don't care about the forest animals.
Because what I saw in his face, not good.
I wondered if this was part of the reason QAnon was evolving so rapidly over the pandemic, so I emailed Korty.
We actually had a really funny interview experience where she was in Australia and I was in the UK, but she'd just come back from France and was in a solitary two-week quarantine that they're doing over there.
So when I initially tried to call her at what I thought was 4pm her time, it actually turned out to be 1am the next day.
She was an absolute champ though, and answered all my questions brilliantly.
Here's what she said.
What makes QAnon unique to other conspiracy theory movements is that it's constantly evolving, and it concentrates on things that are happening on a daily basis.
While most conspiracy theories are about things that have happened in the past, like JFK or 9-11, QAnon is constantly churning out new theories or adapting its meta-narratives to current events.
By continuously attaching itself to issues that are happening and have a mainstream appeal, QAnon is able to grow and maintain its relevance in spite of counteractions.
By subsuming other issues like anti-vaccination and child protection, the QAnon movement has been able to appeal to more people.
These are people that might not be ardent QAnon supporters, but are beginning to warm to some of QAnon's ideas.
The Save the Children rallies are a perfect example of this strategy.
While some marchers may think the rallies are about broader issues of child abuse and sex trafficking, they are actually a tacit way for QAnon to get more people involved and sympathetic to their cause.
QAnon's newly found mainstream appeal further complicates attempts to crack down on content.
For example, Trump-endorsed Republican QAnon supporter Marjorie Greene is assured a place in U.S.
Congress.
So this puts social media companies between a rock and a hard place, because censoring all QAnon content would mean censoring a political candidate.
Reassuringly, not only would genuinely meaningful crackdowns on QAnon be too labour-intensive, it's like you said Julian, they've also come way too late.
This is something to bear in mind when it comes to Facebook and Instagram, who only announced measures against QAnon in mid-August, pretty much later than everyone else.
And this is where I think the real answer for women's pronounced visibility in the QAnon movement comes from.
If I'm honest, I never really use Facebook anymore, but I can't delete it because it's basically my last line of contact for so many people, and I imagine it's the same for lots of us.
But we probably should be looking more at Facebook, because if we're concerned with radicalisation, that's where a lot of it seems to be happening that we don't notice.
So I've signed up to pretty much every UK conspiracy group I could find, including Save the Children, Covid Skeptic Communities and Anti-Vax Communities, the posts of which are majority female users across the board.
I've been monitoring these groups for a while now, and two things have struck me.
One is that there's not really much of a distinction between the users themselves and the hard borders of what they do and don't believe.
Like, people on the more anti-lockdown groups will quite casually drop in QAnon stuff about child trafficking and Satanism, and it seems like most users are familiar with it.
The other thing is just how clearly unmoderated the whole thing is.
Browsing some of these groups, I would say the closest internet browsing experience I've had is HM.
In my local Covid-sceptic group, a woman posted a video which I've seen do the rounds on neo-Nazi websites which claims to be a Jewish rabbi describing to a radio show host how they kidnap and kill Christian children on Passover and sell the bodies to McDonald's.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, that's a combination of two.
That's the McDonald's feeds human meat, but also blood libel.
That is incredible.
Forget the matzo bread.
We got McDonald's burgers now.
It took literally a second of ghouling the host's name to see that he was obviously a neo-Nazi
and the entire interview was a hoax.
But not a single person on that group did.
They all believed it.
I felt like I was going crazy watching all of these perfectly normal-looking mums in this Facebook group just happily swallowing Nazi propaganda whole.
And Facebook did nothing, that post is still up.
I started seeing what other groups these women are posting in, and found myself in huge, like I'm talking hundreds of thousands of members huge Facebook groups, nearly all centred around mothering and parenting.
And there was so much cute stuff being posted.
Some of it was obvious, but a lot of it was made to look pretty ordinary.
There was something going around called the Lol Doll Challenge, which centres around a brand of toy which supposedly you dip in water and it changes colours.
It sounds really cute.
But just take a look at some of these videos, which I want to stress are being posted everywhere in parenting groups.
Okay, okay, I think we're live.
Okay, listen.
So...
We all have seen little conspiracy theory things and videos that people post that maybe a lot of people don't believe because we don't know the people.
I just seen a video on LOL dolls and when you soak them in ice cold water and the lingerie outfit that this little girl came out in I'm gonna do it myself, since my daughter has a ton of them, and we're gonna find out if it's really real.
Okay, here we go.
Little girl.
Nothing on her.
Okay.
Here we go.
You guys.
Oh my god.
Are you serious?
Like, you guys see this, right?
This is not fake.
Okay?
So the implication is that these these dolls, they have bodies that sort of change color in certain parts when dipped in water.
And she's saying that when dipped in ice cold water, you have basically a child that looks like it looks like it's in lingerie.
So it seems like the gimmick is that you dip them in water and they change colors and stuff.
And it's cute.
But, like, recently it's become, like, this challenge.
I think the first one I saw was an Australian woman doing it.
She's, like, ranting at the camera, sort of saying, you know, some of them are normal and they just turn blue or whatever, but some of them have lingerie or sexual outfits on.
And then, yeah, watch the second video, because she goes really red-pilled on that one.
Okay, so I saw a video on Facebook.
And I thought I'd give it a try.
Everybody's been talking about Pizzagate, child trafficking, and all this.
And they say that if you take an LOL doll who is completely naked, as you can see, there's nothing on her.
She's completely naked.
And if you put her in ice cold water, either lingerie or symbols will appear.
So I'm going to try this with my daughters and see what happens.
Oh, look at her arm.
Oh!
There's a pizza!
This is fucking gross.
Okay, here's another one.
She has some leggings on the bottom, which is weird anyways, but let's see what happens.
Ew!
Y'all, this is fucking gross.
Don't let your kids play with LOLs!
Now, to be perfectly honest, I do find it a little bit wrong that little kids are playing with dolls wearing outfits that look slightly like soft porn, but I also want to be clear that this is a complaint that feminists have been making for literal decades.
It's not any different to some of the Barbies or Bratz dolls my sister and I played with, and I don't think it's a conspiracy to brainwash your kids by the cabal.
It's just kids doing what kids do, trying to emulate adults, and receiving some pretty sexualised messages from the entirety of society about what women are.
This is incredibly ordinary, basic bitch-level feminist theory.
And I wish there was some kind of way I could transmit that to some of these women, who I think are right to be upset, but getting completely misled about the reasons behind it.
You should be upset by these companies essentially exploiting your kids to sell this shit.
But there's no slavery, no demonic anything at the end.
And by being like, it's actually helping spread satanic rumors.
And it's like, is it?
It's still a fucking pizza.
We have to still like, I don't know.
How much ground are we going to cede to these people?
Everything?
That's it, huh?
You know me, it's too late already.
I think, you know.
You can't enjoy pizza already?
Just, just, look, I mean, exercise your preference, I guess.
It's really all you have.
Jesus Christ.
So anyway, back to my article.
QAnon followers responded predictably well to the piece.
Whenever I publish anything, I always remember just a little bit too late that there's another Annie Kelly who writes for The Guardian about incredibly important issues like sweatshops and actual sex trafficking.
And poor woman, she always gets it in the neck on Twitter from confused far-right users who think she's me.
Oh man, there's only actually, there's only, there can only be one.
So anyway, here's some of my favorite reviews swirling around the Twittersphere right now.
Charles the Hammer Martel says, the mother from hell and conspiracy theory factory calling those who expose their fellow traveler Luciferians globalists creators of conspiracy theories is called psychological projection.
Wow.
Certainly a pile of words.
Radix Varum writes, WTF is a conspiracy theory researcher.
Is this someone paid to stalk, harass, and police other Americans' thoughts and political opinions?
I wish.
The internet whole monitors, trying to destroy freedom of speech and association.
They don't speak truth to power.
The losers attack moms.
You know what?
Hall monitor's a pretty funny dig.
He is.
You know, I hate this whole thing where they say, like, oh, you're just a hall monitor, you're attacking my free speech.
No, I'm just saying that what you're saying sucks.
Yeah, you're attacking his free speech by saying he shouldn't say that.
Yeah, and I'm not saying what you said sucks.
I'm not saying you shouldn't in a broad, you know, sense.
I'm saying that it's terrible and people should recognize for its terribleness.
This is clearly a facade.
He's running on this, but you know what he's going to do with the banhammer?
He already said it earlier.
That's true.
I pray I never get power.
But look, Travis might be stern, but he's fair.
If you come at him talking about child trafficking that happens in other countries, and what happens in the social media modeling world, and some stuff with real statistics and shit behind it, he will not ban you.
But if that's also that behind that there's a satanic cabal that's eating children and they have the food codes and all of this stuff, that's where you're gonna get the ban hammer.
It's pushing stuff that's not true and conflating it with real issues.
And the problem is that now we have the feedback loop with the pizza thing because there is now genuinely like people sharing kind of underage photos of people.
on Instagram and using the pizza emoji.
But we can no longer know whether that's because of the creation of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory or if that was happening at some point before and they decided to then stick that with the Podesta emails.
Avdotij Peres says, Now all women supporting Trump spit on you, NYT propaganda Pulitzer winner.
Wait, there's more.
Palladium says, once you've seen the photos of Barack Obama dressed up in Muslim garb holding an AK-47 shooting at the USA flag, it's so easy to spot deep state fake news.
So this is a mythical photo that Q has claimed exists of Obama holding an AK-47 that now some QAnon followers have now apparently claimed that they've seen?
I would like to see that.
Can they show me that?
There's also badly photoshopped versions of the photo as well.
Like other photos of, I think, when Obama visited a church or a mosque or something, and they've photoshopped an AK-47 into the background.
There are versions of this going around that are all completely bullshit.
And Radix Verum builds on that.
Coming from the pedophile apologists, Antifa apologists, and BLM rioting, looting and arson apologists, they now claim being against child sexual exploitation makes you QAnon.
Hashtag wake up America.
There you have it.
It also seems to have been sadly deleted, but I found one tweet saying that my position as UK correspondent on this podcast translated to Agent of the British Crown.
How so?
That was all he said first.
Okay.
That translates, yeah.
Which I'd like to take the opportunity to say is not true, but if any members of the royal family do happen to be listening to this, please get in touch.
My rates are very reasonable.
But to be honest, I expected crazy comments from the Q-Pilled, and having pissed off the alt-right once or twice before, they were actually pretty mild compared to what I'm used to.
What actually gets under my skin is all the responses from anti-Q people calling people who believe in this stuff insane, stupid, or poor.
I don't research or write about this stuff as a way to make us all feel superior for not believing in it.
In fact, my writing is completely worthless if it makes you feel that way, because one thing that's really crucial to emphasise is that you are not too smart to fall for this stuff.
Many people who fall for conspiracy theories are making somewhat rational decisions with the information given to them, or at least not any less rational than many of the conclusions we all jump to every day.
I cannot say that I think that the Covid-sceptic movement in this country, for example, would have had as huge an impact as it has, were it not for our government's confusing and constantly changing guidelines based on what's good for the economy rather than what's best for people.
The thing is though, I understand why Tories act that way, while lots of people don't, not because of any failure of intelligence, but because it's been deliberately obscured from them.
So yes, QAnon, like other conspiracy theories, does frequently prey on the mentally vulnerable, but at the same time it's not good enough to dismiss them as therefore not worthy of basic respect, or saying it's not worth it to try to understand their motive.
Agreed.
Another response I got a lot was, why does it matter?
And this I have a bit more time for, because yeah, women aren't any smarter or morally superior to men.
I mean, I obviously am, but that doesn't just go for all of us.
Who cares who believes in QAnon, isn't the important thing just to condemn it?
But I do think it matters, because I think QAnon is really incredibly dangerous.
It's in its most basic essence an ideology about increasingly brutal punishments for your ever-growing political enemies, which you justify for any reason you can.
It won't be powerful people like Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton, the elites, who ever really feel the sharp edge of QAnon.
It'll be ordinary people who look like easy targets, like with any other sex panic.
And I think we as a culture have a really skewed understanding of what fascism looks like, and we're not particularly good at spotting it unless it's the literal brown shirts, and sometimes not even then.
So QAnon marketing itself just as ordinary mothers concerned about child abuse doesn't make it less dangerous, it genuinely makes it more so.
I think the same thing.
The problem with these sort of these these sorts of things is that you kind of see how like the core QAnon is forming these tentacles that sort of reaching out to various other communities and sort of shape-shifting into a way that's a lot more appealing to those communities.
We talked about the top of the show.
We're talking about wellness influencers.
We're talking about moms, people who have genuine concerns about people's well-beings or their children.
And it's creating these really effective, customized, algorithm-designed pipelines into mainline QAnon.
I thought that the quote from one of the women that you spoke to about how most conspiracy theories are about something that's taken place in the past, you know, like JFK, and that QAnon is kind of this live, living thing that can adapt.
It's like a parasite.
It, like, can adapt to what the news is and shape where the energy is.
And so, you know, I think it glommed on... I think it glomming on to the child trafficking stuff just happened naturally because it saw that that was what was resonating so much with the people.
I think you can no longer really call QAnon a conspiracy theory.
It's something else altogether entirely now.
I mean, it evolves in the present tense, certainly.
I think it's increasingly getting better at sicking its followers on new populations, which is what distinguishes it from something based on the past, where you can kind of identify and attack an enemy quite quickly, actually, as a movement, whether it's online or offline, I think.
And it costs nothing.
Well, because there's no one behind it.
That's the worst part, right?
It is like a kind of natural ripening of people's minds under our current structure.
Yeah, it's a hive mind, and the ideas that are catchy and sticky all get absorbed into the main story.
Like the Wayfair thing.
One person, Amazing Polly, came up with this idea, and then weeks later it kind of blossomed and then took over.
to the point that it's causing disruptions for the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
Yeah, and very few people would discuss the QAnon origin of that.
Yeah.
Like the actual just saying, well, it was an actual QAnon influencer,
someone who was decoding QDrops all the time.
She then seeded the Wayfair conspiracy theory.
You rarely hear that.
You just go, yeah, that Wayfair conspiracy theory that just kind of took off.
And it's like, the truth is also those influencers are part of the rot.
You know, they often aren't like deciding to do this out of pure malice.
Like, I think Amazing Polly really believes what the fuck she's saying.
The other crazy thing about a living conspiracy like this is that it has that MLM element, right?
You can get as much out of it as you put in, which is very popular right now, just as a way of providing for yourself, as we've seen influencers rise on social media over the last couple of years.
You can make a career out of it if you put a lot into it.
It's also a new sector.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people are leaving wellness or yoga when maybe that wasn't deeply what they wanted.
They just wanted attention.
They just wanted to have a career as someone that is looked at and that can speak and people will gather and listen to some extent.
And so those people very often are like, well, this is fresh new ground.
It's like the Wild West.
There's not that many people doing it.
You can easily rise to the top if you're young or good looking or coherent.
And you can install your own little pay structure where the attention actually starts funding you.
So it's quite an attractive, I think, basically like white space, as they would say in fucking marketing.
Yeah, that's it.
And I just like kept on thinking about just like how many opportunities it gives people for like just new content, you know, like all of this new and exciting dramatic stuff.
So like, you can get involved with like, you know, the dolls thing, for instance, just Everybody's posting new dolls video and everyone wants to have like, you know, the most shocking discovery with their kids dolls and stuff like that.
And it's just like naturally attention grabbing content, right?
It's like, you know, kind of like, you know, children and sexualized kind of outfits and stuff.
It's, you know, so kind of taboo and like scary.
And like, it's just kind of infinite for that when you think about like, you know, how Much kind of children's content there is out there.
Like, you know, we've seen it happen before with like Disney movies and stuff like that.
Like you can just always just like kind of find new things.
I think this is a reference to this.
I think this is a reference to that.
And it will just keep on getting views.
Do you know?
Yeah, if you want followers, but you're not necessarily a great writer or your imagination, you know, you can't actually really create Yeah.
original stuff, the syllabus is online. You can go and pick from
hundreds of topics that have already been quote-unquote well-researched and it's easy.
It's easy to grab. You don't have to verify anything.
It's so... It's memes. It's pre-made.
It's pre-made. It's ready to go and it gets you followers.
It works.
It's a miracle pill.
All you gotta do is take one of your kids' favorite shows, find all the triangles and swirls in it, screenshot them, post them on Facebook, all of a sudden now you're an anti-pedo investigator.
And you're a sleuth.
Yes, Sarah Sleuth, you're doing something.
You're a part of something.
Just because you're an adult that is playing with children's toys in a bucket of ice while your children go untended in the background doesn't mean you've failed because you got 20,000 likes.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Please go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
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Listener until next week.
May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy.
It's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
If your family is against you, if your family's not waking up, it's okay.
There's gonna come a time where, you know, it's like the collective consciousness is raising.
The Schumann resonance, look into that.
The heartbeat of the earth is raising on a frequency where if you're not waking up, you're gonna get sick.
You're gonna get sick and we see it.
What do you think is exposing all this?
Donald Trump.
Yep, Donald Trump.
Let me tell you, a couple months ago, if you told me that I would be supporting what Donald Trump is doing, I would have told you you're crazy.
But if you do enough research, you're going to wake up regardless.
And if you haven't woken up yet, you haven't done enough research.
Who are you voting for?
Donald Trump?
They're protesting against pedophilia and what's going on in Hollywood, all over the world.
I'm all up for that.
I don't think anyone is against this, so yeah, I'm all up for it.
And I truly believe, you know, my packs are not all there yet, but I do believe that it's like the elite Jewish, there's some other people too, but I believe they are controlling the, you know, the pedophilia going on all over the world.
What do you think is exposing all this?
What did I think, what?
What do you think is making this exposed now?
There's a lot of forces on the internet, like QAnon, some other friends of mine that I met during protests, they're telling me all about it.
