‘These people are insane.’ Rallies, online posts promote fringe conspiracy fantasy ‘Q’
The next 11 weeks will be very messy.
A presidential campaign season stranger than any online video drama begins this week, fittingly with a livestreamed Democratic National Convention.
Pandemic fears are being twisted into partisan fodder. Texas Republican Chairman Allen West of Garland actually declared Friday that issuing COVID-19 orders is “letting Democrats and their accomplices in the national press drive the narrative.”
And the U.S. Postal Service wrote Texas warning that mail-in ballots may not get back “in time to be counted.”
Out on the fringe of a fringy campaign, a little-known online conspiracy fantasy about President Donald Trump overthrowing a satanic global ring of celebrity child molesters is now showing up here politically at weekly “#SaveOurChildren” anti-trafficking rallies.
The rallies promote the pro-Trump QAnon alternate-reality fairytale, “Q.”
“These people are insane,” said Vanessa Bouché, a TCU associate professor of political science and a 10-year investigator and researcher on child trafficking and human trafficking.
“... Is child trafficking of minors an issue? Yes,” she said. “But is it being perpetrated by an underground Democratic conspiracy? No — not even remotely.”
Some of the picketers also accuse local juvenile court judges, state child welfare agencies or law officers of hiding and trafficking children.
You know — the “deep state.”
An Aug. 8 rally at the Tarrant County Courthouse included children and families carrying signs reading “Pizzagate is real,” a reference to a 2016 conspiracy fantasy involving then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Other signs referred to Hollywood as “Pedowood.”
As the election nears, researchers for the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point say the number of “Q” Facebook groups has doubled and the number of members has multiplied eight-fold.
They list crimes elsewhere already provoked by QAnon fantasies and label it as a potential terrorist threat.
The participants get in the way of legitimate efforts to end child trafficking.
A few days ago, a Connecticut charity named Save the Children was blocked briefly from using its own trademarked name because of QAnon misuse.
Last week, The New York Times quoted Lori Cohen, executive director of New York-based ECPAT-USA (formerly End Child Prostitution and Trafficking).
“It’s easier to focus on public figures,” Cohen was quoted, “than to think about the reality that trafficking is happening in our midst, among people we know, to children we know.”
Using global child trafficking as a premise to spread political conspiracies supporting Trump, or swap Facebook or NextDoor gossip is “caring for the wrong reason,” said Bouché, a board member of Addison-based Traffick911.
If you love children and want to end child trafficking, then don’t use them for your own selfish political stunts.
Traffickers come from all income levels, political parties, ages and races.
Victims under 10 are predominantly Black girls being trafficked by a family member for money, Bouché said.
So child trafficking is about poverty. substance abuse and racial inequities.
Not politics.
The QAnon silliness over celebrities is “extremely hurtful” to anti-child trafficking efforts, Bouché said.
She called it a “political ploy” aimed at suburban women voters.
“It’s based in fear,” Bouché said.
“If [Trump] can get them to fear that their kid is at risk of being trafficked and Democrats are behind it, that’s to his advantage.”
The QAnon for Trump rallies are only the beginning of what promises to be an ugly campaign season.
Last week, QAnon participant Marjorie Taylor Greene won the Republican nomination for a congressional seat in Georgia,
Trump tweeted that Greene is “strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!”
That is not the word for QAnon.
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 12:00 AM.
