by William Skink

The psychological operation known as Qanon continues to proliferate like a mind virus, and neither the believers, nor the ridiculers, seem to understand the purpose of this operation.

At The Intercept, Aida Chavez discusses the spread of Qanon among her friends and family on Facebook. These once “normal” people, she claims, are suddenly worried about powerful pedophiles abusing children for Satan. This is particularly infecting white women in Suburbia. From the link:

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, I noticed this alarming shift in my Facebook feed. Childhood friends and old high school acquaintances began plastering my timeline with posts referring to a satanic cabal of pedophile elites, including hysterical, unfounded claims about the proliferation of child sex trafficking and cultural or political efforts to “normalize” pedophilia. 

During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with in Colorado had gotten sucked into QAnon, the sprawling and baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that is deemed a domestic terror threat by the FBI. I remembered them as perfectly reasonable people: some liberal, some conservative, but all frozen in my memory as intellectually curious. Now, online and from a distance, I was watching them change. Young, white suburban women, in particular, were falling for a Q-adjacent movement, “Save the Children,” which raises false fears about child sex trafficking through fabricated stories, pastel infographics, and hashtag campaigns.

The framing of these introductory paragraphs exposes the function of the Qanon operation. Things that ACTUALLY EXIST in our world, like powerful predators who sexually abuse vulnerable people, sometimes minors, is reduced in the minds of people like Aida Chavez to unfounded hysteria. The alleged involvement of “Satan” helps insulate people like Chavez from taking any of this the least bit seriously.

This is all very similar to the “Satanic Panic” of the 80’s which, according to this Vox piece from 2016, is apparently STILL not over. Here is how Vox buries that story to make sure its readers don’t do something crazy, like investigate this stuff for themselves:

Most people, if they know of the Satanic Panic, know of it due to satanic ritual abuse, a rash of false allegations made against daycare centers in the ’80s. But there are lots of threads that contribute to Satanic Panic, and they can be seen running through a handful of recent social and cultural events: the wave of clown scares throughout the country; the new TV seriesbased on The Exorcist; the weekend release of Ouija 2: Origin of Evil; and the October 23 death of fire-and-brimstone evangelical tract writer Jack Chick. All of these events feel lifted straight from this darker era of American culture, when fear of demons and strangers practicing dark occult things seemed to lurk in the heart of every neighborhood.

How successful has Qanon been? One example, referenced in the first article, is the Netflix decision to show the film Cuties. According to Chavez, those CRAZY Qanon believers believe the CRAZY idea that there is some nefarious effort to normalize the sexual preference for minors.

HOW CAN THEY BELIEVE THIS?

Yes, somehow affluent white people in the suburbs have developed the CRAZY idea that some of our cultural luminaries may have a sexual predilection for minors. But did you know the creator of this soft porn for pedos is a black woman from Senegal? From the first link:

Parker is an affluent suburb in Douglas County, the richest county in the state and among the richest in the nation. The population is heavily conservative and predominantly white. In the time I lived there, Parker was about 93 percent white, though it has diversified a bit more in recent years, according to census data. The suburb’s member of Congress, Republican Rep. Ken Buck, is among the GOP lawmakers fueling Save the Children conspiracy theorists. He’s demanding that the Department of Justice investigate the Netflix film “Cuties,” which has faced intense backlash over claims that it sexualizes young girls. The film, a coming-of-age comedy-drama directed by French Senegalese filmmaker Maïmouna Doucouré, became an instant target for the pedophile-obsessed.

A target for the “pedophile obsessed”? Really?

Qanon has been a disturbing success for all sides. It’s followers appear ridiculous and mistakingly think it’s only Democrats involved in the sex trafficking that emanates from compromise operations like the one run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, while the mockers and ridiculers use Qanon to remain steadfastly incurious about ACTUAL EVIDENCE that warrants further investigation, like what exactly was Laura Silsby going to do with all those kids she was trying to kidnap from Haiti?