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Mother Jones illustration; Getty<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n ALI BRELAND<\/a><\/strong> JUNE 3, 2024<\/strong> (motherjones.com)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fight disinformation: Sign up<\/a> for the free Mother Jones Daily<\/em> newsletter and follow the news that matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can track<\/strong> QAnon\u2019s arc, like most things in America, through its relationship with corporate brands. Although the conspiracy movement emerged out of fringe imageboards in 2017, its first viral successes came on Facebook and YouTube, where its lore envisioning Donald Trump fighting an elite cabal of liberal pedophiles was honed and refined. When Covid came in 2020, QAnon ballooned under lockdowns, putting it in<\/em> the mainstream, but leaving it short of actually being mainstream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Call it the Wayfair era. In July 2020, followers of QAnon began spreading a particular pedophilic panic: the absurd notion that the online furniture retailer was selling children for sexual abuse via armoire orders. Non-Q masses took the bait: \u201cMentions of Wayfair and \u2018trafficking\u2019 have exploded on Facebook and Instagram over the past week,\u201d the Associated Press wrote at the time, noting that related TikTok hashtags \u201ctogether amassed nearly 4.5 million views.\u201d A national human trafficking hotline issued a press release<\/a> warning that a flood of calls about the conspiracy had distracted them from genuine work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While it was widely peddled, it was also widely derided. Surely, something so absurd could not keep going. And looking back on the uproar from two years later, Wayfair seemed like the death of Q. By late 2020, major Q adherents had been purged from the platforms. Its influencers and weird hoaxes almost never broke into broader consciousness, except to be debunked. Its galvanizing messiah, Trump, was on his way out of the White House. Q was no longer inspiring people to murder mob bosses<\/a>, kidnap their own children<\/a>, or show up heavily armed at the Hoover Dam<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But far from being the end, Wayfair was a sign of what the movement was turning into\u2014one confirmed in late November 2022, when the Balenciaga panic happened. The genesis point was a TikTok video posted by Brittany Venti, <\/strong>a right-wing provocateur and influencer with a history of aggravating culture war fights. While displaying pictures from a Balenciaga ad campaign showing small children with purses made to look like teddy bears wearing bondage straps, she complained that a \u201cworldwide, internationally known brand\u201d was \u201cadvertising their purses by having a child hold kink fetish gear.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n We are in an era of obsessive, odd, and sprawling fear of pedophilia\u2014one where QAnon\u2019s paranoid thinking is no longer bound to the political fringes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u201cTo me, it\u2019s about sexualizing children,\u201d Venti concluded in the video, which garnered millions of views. Popular YouTuber Shoe0nHead relayed the complaint on Twitter, adding the claim that the photo shoot had \u201cincluded a very purposely poorly hidden court document about \u2018virtual child porn.\u2019\u201d Her tweet took off, boosted by large right-wing accounts, including the notoriously transphobic <\/strong>LibsofTikTok. Together, these influencers\u2014none of whom maintain explicit links to the Q movement\u2014galvanized masses of people to throw up their arms in disgust. As right-wing influencers like Candace Owens and Andrew Tate seized on the Balenciaga panic and dolled it out to their audiences, it became one of the biggest stories on the internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For some, the conversation moved beyond the ads and into accusations that the campaign somehow captured a reality that children were being abused by Balenciaga. A Twitter user accused Balenciaga of \u201cgetting even sloppier about their underworld.\u201d \u201cPedophiles telling us they\u2019re Pedophiles RIGHT IN OUR FACES,\u201d another wrote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was Wayfair again, but bigger. And like Wayfair, it didn\u2019t make sense and wasn\u2019t true. Bondage may have been intractable from BDSM in the \u201970s, but it had long since been co-opted by other subcultures, like techno ravers, artists, high fashion, and anyone interested in cosplaying as subversive. <\/strong>The court documents hadn\u2019t appeared in the campaign alongside the children, but in a separate one featuring adult women. And of course, there was no child abuse. The photographer who did the shoot was well known for his not-at-all-lewd documentary work<\/a>, and his subjects were the kids of Balenciaga employees who were on set supervising.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n The episode revealed that the paranoid thinking of QAnon hadn\u2019t disappeared, but that its logic was influencing people far beyond the reaches of the conspiracy theory. The Wayfair panic had been partially incepted and egged on by QAnon boosters. The Balenciaga panic was not. But their contentions were the same: Liberal elites were molesting kids and were brazen enough to leave clues in plain sight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Balenciaga panic can be seen as QAnon by other means\u2014a mainstreamed version that imagines threats to children lurking just about everywhere. The long history of moral panics has often centered on seeing attacks<\/a> to \u201cthe family\u201d as social progress reaches schools, libraries, and hospitals and challenges old moral foundations. To prove it, they say, one need only need to pay attention, and to stand by is to allow an attack on children. Think of the Christopher Rufo\u2013bolstered critical race theory panics, drag brunch panics, transgender panics, LGBTQ panics. They\u2019re all at least partially incubated in the same petri dish as Q: paranoid nightmares dreamt up during moments of a changing social order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It would be<\/strong> easy to cast all this aside as the horrific, confused ramblings of the stupid. But that ignores a central, uncomfortable fact: Many of us act like Q adherents now. While the movement itself has been thrown away, its styling is now dominant. We are in an era of obsessive, odd, and sprawling fear of pedophilia\u2014one where QAnon\u2019s paranoid thinking is no longer bound to the political fringes of middle-aged posters and boomers terminally lost in the cyber world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yes, many of those people thought that Balenciaga was advertising an actual role in a child sex cabal. But others did, too, as elements of the Balenciaga panic attained a level of mainstream acceptance that the Wayfair scandal never had. Cooper Kupp, the 2022 Super Bowl MVP and a generally apolitical wide receiver for the Los Angeles Rams, encouraged his Twitter followers to \u201cplease make yourself aware of the attack against our young ones,\u201d accusing Balenciaga of \u201cadvertis[ing] evil.\u201d Yashar Ali, a prominent left-leaning writer and journalist, called the campaign \u201cgross\u201d<\/a> and praised <\/a>an organization for revoking an award it had given to the Spanish fashion house. Kim Kardashian, who had never complained about any issues regarding child abuse or pedophilia over the years as she wore Balenciaga to high-profile events<\/a> and its fall 2022 runway show<\/a>, began hammering the brand. \u201cAs a mother of four,\u201d she wrote in a statement, \u201cI have been shaken by the disturbing images.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Caroline Busta is a writer and critic who, with her partner and pseudonymous fellow critic Lil Internet, runs New Models, an internet community, website, and podcast. They closely watched Balenciaga-gate ensnare their interests\u2014the intersection of fashion, the internet, politics, and media studies\u2014a moment Lil Internet said felt like a breaking point. \u201cIt was the first time I saw the far right pull off a troll campaign that actually just got all of mainstream media\u2014and even, like, progressives,\u201d he said during a joint interview with Busta. Venti\u2019s role kicking off the controversy, he added, \u201cshould be all the evidence anyone needed to question it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Balenciaga uproar was a clear marker of Q\u2019s successful diffusion, but it wasn\u2019t the only one. Around the same time, decades-old drag brunches and the over half-a-decade-old drag queen story hour were suddenly identified as loci of child sex crimes. Instances of hospitals that treat transgender children being inundated with threats, libraries closing, schools calling off events, cafes canceling drag brunches, and things as odd as butterfly sanctuaries having to close because of threats over human trafficking conspiracies<\/a> became commonplace. Such occurrences are now so regular <\/strong>that they barely register beyond the communities where they happen. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Or, as Travis View, a host of the QAnon Anonymous<\/em> podcast and an independent researcher of the conspiratorial right, puts it, \u201cThere is a sense in which QAnon won.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, Republicans who<\/strong> assiduously avoided QAnon during its initial runup now find it expedient not only to make overtures to it, but to pursue attacks and policies that jibe with its obsessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last June, after Trump had already taken to donning a QAnon lapel pin<\/a> and amplifying the conspiracy on social media<\/a>, the Conservative Political Action Committee\u2019s foundation launched the Center for Combating Human Trafficking. While competing for the GOP\u2019s 2024 nomination, Trump floated the death penalty for human traffickers and insinuated that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was a pervert<\/a> and possibly a pedophile<\/a>. During Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson\u2019s 2022 confirmation hearings, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) smeared<\/a> her as having a \u201cpattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook\u201d as a judge. Marjorie Taylor Greene\u2019s entire career trajectory from being an ostracized QAnon congresswoman to cementing a position as one of the most prominent right-wing politicians in the country is itself a demonstration of the mainline GOP coming to terms with the conspiracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cQAnon made space for more popular conspiracism on the right,\u201d says View, explaining that it gave an opportunity for people like Chaya Raichik, the woman behind LibsofTikTok, to present conspiracies more palatable to the mainstream. Take so-called \u201cgroomer narratives,\u201d View says, which \u201caren\u2019t quite as crazy as QAnon\u201d even though they are destructive and libelous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea that left-wing child sex predators are omnipresent in schools has obvious echoes with the idea that lefty elites are running a massive pedophile ring. And both have a kernel of truth: Wealthy liberals were in Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s orbit, and occasionally teachers are outed as predators. But neither has happened to the degree that Raichik et al. and QAnon allege\u2014nor do they happen along the rigid lines they imagine. Epstein\u2019s contacts spanned the political spectrum, and few are under suspicion of being involved in his abuse; and, of course, the majority of offending teachers are not gay or trans. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This paranoia has real effects: In 2023, legislators in 37 states introduced<\/a> 142 anti-trans bills\u2014a threefold increase from 2022. Every year since 2021 has set new records<\/a> in the number of books banned, with many titles being contested over perceived pro-LGBTQ stances. The authors are often baselessly accused<\/a> of being \u201cgroomers.\u201d It\u2019s a practice that jibes with how, as QAnon\u2019s ethos spread to other forms, people began to \u201cfind\u201d pedophiles in all sorts of places they verifiably weren\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It has <\/strong>even happened to me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Last July, I opened Twitter to see that I had nine notifications. I hadn\u2019t posted anything of consequence recently, but when I clicked through the alerts, I saw people calling me a pedophile and saying they wanted to do violent things to pedophiles. Someone using the handle 1776andBeyond (1777?) tweeted at me that \u201cthe only good pedophiles are dead ones.\u201d A guy named Simeon tweeted that I was \u201clegit pedo\u201d (as opposed to a fake one?). Someone had photoshopped me onto a figure kneeling in front of an SS officer with a Pepe face and a pistol pointed at the back of my head. Another person tagged me in a post with the words \u201cPEDOPHILES BELONG IN WOODCHIPPERS\u201d over the image of a stick figure being fed into a machine with pink mist<\/a> coming out. Similar emails came in from people who wanted to threaten me, but were too shy to do so in public. <\/p>\n\n\n\n After some clicking and scrolling, I found the inciting post: An account called End Wokeness that boasted 1.4 million followers had tweeted a screenshot of the headline on an article<\/a> I wrote in 2019 (\u201cWhy Are Right-Wing Conspiracies So Obsessed With Pedophilia<\/a>?\u201d), next to photo of a small child holding a rainbow flag, interacting with some men dressed in dog fetish wear, possibly at a pride event. I had entered a Stoppardian, play-within-a-play situation: In my work writing about the right hallucinating about there being pedophiles everywhere, I briefly became a right-wing pedophile hallucination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A smaller version happens to me every couple of months, as other accounts post mocking screenshots of the same story. As <\/strong>my repeated experience shows, at some point between the first Q drop on 4chan in 2017 and last summer, people, including many who didn\u2019t believe or endorse the QAnon movement\u2019s fantastic claims, had nonetheless become so primed to find pedophiles that anyone who came across their feed was potentially abusing children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n QAnon\u2019s spread was<\/strong> aided by its conjoining\u2014beneath hamfisted and lurid conspiracies\u2014of transphobia and the Q faithful\u2019s fear of losing their position in a changing social order. A key part of the QAnon eschatology is \u201cThe Storm,\u201d also known as \u201cThe Great Awakening\u201d\u2014a fantasized judgment day that ushers in mass arrests of liberal elites and a purge of their deep state minions, opening the path for a new golden age of conservative government that embraces the nuclear family and the return of classic, white, Christian family values. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2019, while reporting that essay about the right\u2019s obsessions with pedophilia<\/a>, I reached out to View, who had recently started his podcast observing the Q phenomenon. LibsofTikTok didn\u2019t yet exist, armed gunmen weren\u2019t showing up to drag brunches, and DeSantis, just elected governor, had yet to launch his harshest attacks on Florida\u2019s trans community. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Against that backdrop, Q felt confined to its conspiratorial fringe. View explained that there was \u201ca great deal of anxiety\u201d in the QAnon community about LGBTQ rights and trans rights in particular. \u201cThey\u2019re concerned generally on the sort of accep\u00adtance of trans people and the over-sexualization of children,\u201d View said, explaining that the movement hadn\u2019t quite figured out how to integrate the issue into its attacks on liberal elites and its fantastic claims about underground pedophile rings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We also discussed the QAnon economic vision. \u201cOne thing they often talk about after \u2018The Storm\u2019 is that they imagine that the economy will be restored so that a single income can support a family again,\u201d View told me. \u201cThey imagine traditional gender roles and norms will be upheld and how children are raised will return to what used to be.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was one of the first times we spoke, and neither of us understood just how far QAnon would go, or that its adherents would eventually help establish a messy new grammar with conjunctions that, in a time of economic and cultural anxiety, combined all of these things: a cabal of liberal elites running a child trafficking ring. This same group of people was also pushing a \u201cgay agenda\u201d and \u201cgender ideology\u201d that elevated trans people, who were \u201cgrooming\u201d children, with the verb\u2019s meaning flipping as convenient between literal pedophilic grooming and indoctrinating kids to be trans, or to simply be okay with people who are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Public figures who embrace the traditional atomic family\u2014<\/strong>like DeSantis, Raichik, and Rufo\u2014smoothed out the grammar that Q established into more palatable versions, as people wholly unconnected to QAnon used this echoing rhetoric. Serial plagiarist<\/a> Benny Johnson likes to call President Joe Biden a groomer<\/a>. Fox News\u2019 Laura Ingraham has claimed public schools are sites of grooming. Republican lawmakers introduced anti-grooming legislation<\/a>. Roger Stone recently accused<\/a> 2024 GOP Senate candidate Larry Hogan, Maryland\u2019s former governor, of having a \u201crecord of involvement with pedophiles.\u201d This language now extends beyond politics. When rapper Kendrick Lamar puts out diss tracks accusing his rival Drake of being a pedophile, he makes the connection explicit: \u201cI\u2019m lookin\u2019 to shoot through any pervert that lives, keep the family safe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n QAnon\u2019s clearest precedent<\/strong> was the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, another set of lurid beliefs about child endangerment that surfaced amid a changing social order in response to perceived threats to the nuclear family. Four decades ago, it happened at preschools\u2014a tool aiding women transition away from homemaking and into the workforce\u2014as caregivers were accused of waging demonic abuse against children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, QAnon exists in a vastly more complex media ecosystem and seems to be addressing a wider, more amorphous set of concerns. But its rough function is the same: The family order is again seen as being threatened, this time by attacks on gender norms. Q gives people a way to feel they are protecting the traditional atomic family. By devouring fresh posts from QAnon influencers, donning Q gear, or spreading word online about the impending arrest of the cabal, Q faithful felt like they were doing everything they could to support the welfare of children and usher in a new era of conservative family values that would put them in charge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The primacy of family in contemporary American reactionary politics made this sentiment appealing to non-Q-pilled conservatives, once the weirdest, most absurd parts were pushed into the background. The family is often assumed to be self-evident\u2014especially on the US right\u2014as the ideal social formation of a proper Christian nation. Instead of being bound together by a government helping us all, the belief goes, we are better served by little kin units tending to their own. The roots of the idea lie much further back than Margaret Thatcher, but a line she said in 1987 makes the point: \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n She and Ronald Reagan spent their tenures as heads of state pursuing policies linked to this credo, but their belief in the family didn\u2019t only stem from Christian religiosity. They understood that an atomized society with weak ties beyond the family is better for business. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As the UK\u2019s prime minister, Thatcher stoked interclass hostilities by pushing private homeownership. As historian Melinda Cooper explained in her 2017 book, Family Values<\/em>, by owning a home, swaths of the British white working class had a stake of capital instead of being at odds with it\u2014a nest egg that would \u201cwould teach the working class the value of inherited wealth and wean them off public services.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the US, Cooper notes, advocates for the privatization of Social Security \u201cexplicitly sold these instruments as vehicles of familial wealth accumulation.\u201d These capital-aligned forces argued that Social Security pushed individuals toward the state and away from free markets\u2014unlike stock market wealth, which they saw as \u201cinheritable and would therefore serve to strengthen rather than undermine the bonds of family dependence.\u201d By turning nuclear families into portfolios of housing equity and stocks, the right hoped to lock in votes favoring markets over the state. (Investors and money managers also expected to profit from their new, unsophisticated competition.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n Thatcher\u2019s claim that there are only \u201cmen and women\u201d is not an accident. Restrictive gender roles were, and still are, necessary to the world she envisioned. \u201cThe single biggest off-the-books investment that keeps stripped-down neoliberal economics working is free female labor,\u201d historian Bethany Moreton told me. <\/strong>American women average over four hours a day of unpaid labor; some estimates put the annual value of this work at $1.5 trillion. If those hours were reduced or paid out, there would be massive cultural and financial repercussions. Men\u2019s lives would be upended, as things stopped happening and they either faced the consequences or had to pick up the slack. Such changes would rewrite what it means to be a good wife and caring mother or, more fundamentally, popular visions of being a woman. Many people naturally will go to great lengths to not have to reimagine the fundamental basis of their lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got a huge resource at stake: the continued ability to pass off gender as natural,\u201d explained Moreton, a Dartmouth College professor and the author of Perverse Incentives: Economics as Culture War<\/em>, a forthcoming book. Her point is that debates over gender binaries are also material claims and not just cultural ones. When people on the right declare increased acceptance of trans and nonbinary people as evidence of moral decay and the fall of the West, it is bigotry, but it is also because ending strict gender norms would demolish society as they conceive it. \u201cThey\u2019re not shitting you when they say the world would come to an end, because their world<\/em> would come to an end,\u201d Moreton said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Calling LGBTQ teachers <\/strong>\u201cgroomers\u201d strikes a nerve, and claiming that trans indoctrination or critical race theory is getting in the way of learning important subjects like math and science strikes another at a moment of ever-increasing inequality, and as class struggle plays out on the field of college acceptances. If trans vitriol leveled at high school athletics hit in a broader way than the original bathroom-ban bills did, it may be because a kind of person would go crazy over the idea (however unlikely) of a woman losing an athletic slot at an elite college or a sports scholarship to a man they thought was indoctrinated into being a trans woman. To the white reactionary, it is the destruction of gender binarism, the sanctity of sports, and the myth of meritocracy all at once. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fighting acceptance of trans people offers the potential to turn the clock back on traditional gender values and retreat toward the traditional nuclear family-based society that the right values\u2014and that values them\u2014and the free female labor that came with it. And it provides a field of argument where conservatives don\u2019t have to baldly argue a system that operates on women\u2019s unpaid labor should persist for the benefit of men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While DeSantis, Rufo, and the like railed against elites they detested, the elites that they do like stand to benefit from socioeconomically isolated families and strained social ties of weakened labor power. If QAnon might have looked like a movement toward some bizarre future, it and the mainstream version that came after are, in truth, attempts to return to the past.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Contributed by Gwyllm Llwydd)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Source: https:\/\/www.motherjones.com\/politics\/2024\/06\/how-q-became-everything-big-feature-wayfair-balenciaga\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mother Jones illustration; Getty The conspiracy group\u2019s goal was to convince people the world is run by pedophiles, and, well, mission accomplished. ALI BRELAND JUNE 3, 2024 (motherjones.com) Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. You can track QAnon\u2019s arc, like most things in America,… Continue reading \n
The conspiracy group\u2019s goal was to convince people the world is run by pedophiles, and, well, mission accomplished.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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