QAnon Isn't Helping Children. It's Hurting Them.

If you haven’t heard of QAnon, consider yourself lucky. But if you've spent much time on the Internet in 2020, which you probably have given the pandemic and being stuck inside your house, it's likely that you've come across it while scrolling through social media.

Why am I writing about QAnon here, you might wonder? For one, I've always found conspiracy theories fascinating. And two, I’ve written my fair share of articles on cases of missing and abused children. This also happens to be a subject on which the QAnon conspiracy theory is largely centered around.

QAnon reared its ugly head for the first time on Oct. 28, 2017, when an anonymous individual identifying themselves only as ‘Q’ posted on the forum 4chan (known as a safe space for incels, social pariahs and white supremacists) claiming to be a high-level government insider in the Trump Administration. ‘Q’ regularly dropped tidbits of intel on the forum (which he referred to as ‘crumbs’).

The first ‘crumb’ Q dropped for his 4chan groupies was that there was a Satanic cabal of pedophiles and cannibals lurking in the shadows, trafficking and eating children because they (the Satanic cabal) believe children have some sort of life-prolonging chemical in their blood. The cabal, according to Q, is made up of “elite liberals” who are part of the “deep state”. They include politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Hollywood celebrities such as Tom Hanks and Ellen DeGeneres, and wealthy philanthropists, including George Soros and Bill Gates.

Bizarre stories like this always have a hero. And in this case, it's President Donald Trump (yes, the same one who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by over 20 women). Supposedly Trump, viewed as an “outsider” due to his lack of political experience and portrayal as a “man of the people”, was chosen to “take down” the Satanic cabal and “save the children”. Because of this, the cabal are actively conspiring against him. Trump is not one to shy away from airing his grievances and complaining about how badly he is treated. This is something QAnon supporters empathize with, because they also feel they are constantly being wronged and that the aforementioned “elites” are out to get them and destroy their way of life.

While there are many different, equally off-the-wall components of QAnon, for example that John F. Kennedy Jr is still alive and a supporter of Trump, for the purposes of this article, I’ll be focusing on the child trafficking element.

I know, it sounds completely and utterly insane. But now, thanks to it’s unyielding social media presence, QAnon has successfully wormed its way from the depths of 4chan into mainstream society and politics. On Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, thousands upon thousands of QAnon adherents post images and statements in support of the conspiracy theory, alongside its motto, “Where We Go One, We Go All” (shortened to #WWG1WGA).

It would be foolish to ignore or dismiss the threat the QAnon presents. While the FBI have deemed it a domestic terrorist threat, many on the far-right have embraced it. Just a few weeks ago, a QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, won her Republican primary election for a congressional seat in the U.S. state of Georgia. Greene will almost certainly win the seat, and QAnon will have made its way into the halls of the United States Congress. It’s an unsettling thought, to say the least.

QAnon is, by most accounts, a modern age cult - I say modern age because it formed on the Internet and its presence still exists predominantly online. However, given its widespread nature, offline gatherings are becoming increasingly commonplace. While QAnon rallies first appeared in cities across the United States, they are beginning to pop up abroad, most recently in Berlin and London.

While I’m no expert or social psychologist, by knowing the basics and doing some reading, it’s not too hard to develop some reasonable conclusions as to what drives a person towards a cult. From what I gather, the greatest motivation is that people feel lost or isolated from mainstream society, but still yearn for a sense of community. They want someone (a savior or leader of sorts) to give them something to believe in and/or a "mission" of some kind. For QAnon supporters, ‘Q’/Donald Trump is their savior, and saving the children from the Satanic cabal is their mission. People who join cults are generally more susceptible to misinformation found online nowadays, not questioning it or doing any of their own research. A recent example of this is the heaps of misinformation regarding the coronavirus - I’m pretty sure that about 95% of QAnon followers don’t believe the virus actually exists and that powerful, well-educated, elite individuals are using it as a way of controlling the population to further their own agendas.

As mentioned previously, those who are most susceptible to conspiracy theories like QAnon feel aggrieved and resentful towards those they consider to be "elite" i.e. people who are more successful, wealthier and smarter than they are. By painting these people as the most depraved, reprehensible and evil individuals imaginable, QAnon followers feel better about their own lives.

QAnon is dangerous in obvious ways, in that supporters have carried out acts of violence in the name of ‘Q’ (and will likely continue to do so). The best known incident was in December 2016, when North Carolina resident Edgar Maddison Welch drove up to Washington D.C. and entered a popular pizza restaurant armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He fired the gun 3 times into the walls (thankfully, no one was hurt) and demanded to see the basement, where he was convinced that child sex slaves were being held. However, there was no basement in the restaurant. Welch was arrested peacefully, later telling police that he found out online about children being held as sex slaves in the basement of the restaurant, and that he wanted to take matters into his own hands and rescue them. While this incident is technically part of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, Pizzagate and QAnon have largely merged; many who believe in QAnon now were proponents of Pizzagate before QAnon came to be.

Comet Pizzeria where Edgar Maddison Welch thought that kidnapped children were being held as sex slaves (source: Wikipedia)

QAnon is also damaging in more subtle ways. On the surface, “saving the children” seems like a goal that could only be considered positive. What could possibly go wrong? Many things, unfortunately. There are several ways in which QAnon followers have hijacked the anti-child-trafficking cause, as a result doing more harm than good.

For one, QAnon pushes the concept of ‘stranger danger’ being a far bigger issue than it really is. Stranger danger did not become something that the public seriously worried about until the 70s and 80s. Some notable cases which really brought stranger danger to the forefront of the conversation include that of Etan Patz, who disappeared in Manhattan in 1979, Jacob Wetterling, who disappeared in St Joseph, MN in 1989 and Polly Klaas, who disappeared in Petaluma, CA in 1993. These children all had several characteristics which made the public pay attention to what happened to them. They were all from loving, white, middle class families. The amount of media coverage given to their disappearances misrepresented the threat of stranger danger to white, middle class families across the United States. Parents watching the nightly news began seeing their own kids staring back at them. If it happened to those kids, it could happen to anyone, they thought. They worried that it could be their family next. As a result, they became more protective of their children and suspicious of strangers/outsiders.

When children are abused or go missing, the reality is that in the vast majority of cases, it is a family member or family friend who is responsible. The QAnon theory, that most are being abducted and sold into sex trafficking by pedophiles and cannibals, is simply not true. QAnon followers have also came out with a highly misleading figure that they cite regularly online and put on signs that they take to rallies: 800,000 children go missing each year. At face value, this does sound high. But any person with a remotely inquiring mind would question this number. But QAnon followers have a way of ignoring information that undermines their narrative. In reality, while the FBI did report that in 1999, 800,000 children went missing, they also reported that 99% of them were located safely (just a small fact QAnon leaves out). The number of missing children has decreased each year - in 2019, there were 421,394 NCIC entries for missing children.

In 2019, the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC) assisted law enforcement and the families in 29,000 missing children cases. They went on to release the following statistics: of the 29,000 missing children, 91% of them were classified as endangered runaways, 4% had been abducted by a family member and less than 1% had been abducted by a non-family member. Of the 91% runaways, about 1 in 6 were deemed to be likely victims of sex-trafficking.

If anything, QAnon has done a disservice to missing and abused children, by directing attention away from those who are more likely to have hurt them (i.e. someone in their household or a family friend) onto those who are far less likely to have anything to do with it (i.e. satanic strangers running sex-trafficking rings). As a result, resources go towards initiatives that do very little to actually help children escape abuse and far more to criminalize the sorts of people QAnon followers are resentful towards.

As I mentioned earlier on, QAnon has spread across the Internet and is regularly popping up offline, in the form of protests and rallies organized using the hashtag #SaveTheChildren or #SaveOurChildren. Do the protests and rallies actually do anything to help missing and trafficked children? No. They are a way of getting media attention and an attempt to entice people who believe they are actually trying to raise awareness for a genuinely good cause. In fact, they are undermining the mission of real organizations, like Save the Children, whose mission it is to protect vulnerable children. In this way, they are further damaging those they claim they are helping.

“Think about children and how vulnerable they are. The issue really tugs at the hearts of anybody. But they’re linking it to their conspiracy theories, which are crazy and very dangerous,” said Daryl Johnson, a former terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security, to the Kansas City Star in relation to a Save Our Children protest that took place on Aug. 29 in Kansas City.

QAnon fits perfectly into Donald Trump’s narrative - it has zero basis in reality and allows him to be the victim. While Trump has not specifically said he supports QAnon, he has endorsed congressional candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene. When asked about QAnon during a press conference, Trump said:

“I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate. I have heard it is gaining in popularity . . . I’ve heard these are people who love our country.”

It’s a classic way in which Trump endorses something without specifically coming out and saying he endorses it - he has done this time and time again throughout his presidency.

Donald Trump does not care about children - if he did care, he would not have pushed through the family separation policy of ripping children away from their parents at the United States - Mexico border as a means of deterring immigration into the U.S. Of course, those children are not white. It would be fair to say that given Trump’s campaign and presidency has been fueled by racism, validating racist views of white Americans towards immigrants, supporters of QAnon likely support the family separation policy (or maybe they just don’t care). There is plenty of QAnon themed “art” (if you can call it that), floating around on the Internet featuring a valiant Trump rescuing children from a menacing looking Hillary Clinton (see above). The children Trump is “saving” in the images I’ve come across are always white. When QAnon supporters say “save the children”, it would be more honest for them to say, “save the white children”.

The bottom line is, Trump will go along with anything that helps him politically, even if it means propping up a truly deranged conspiracy theory which politicizes abused and trafficked children. Because with Trump, there really is no bottom.

Now that QAnon has cemented in American politics and society in general, there is no chance that it will ever truly disappear. But by expelling the person who gives it oxygen, in other words, voting Donald Trump out in November, QAnon will fade as he fades. There is no doubt QAnon followers will put up a fight, but once Donald Trump is a thing of the past, QAnon will be also. All I can say is that hopefully, it will disappear back to the rock under which it belongs.