QAnon is Hurting Children (Redux)
Most conspiracy theories are stupid. Some are dangerous. Among the worst conspiracy theories are those that actually confuse and distract from legitimate criminal conspiracies.
The QAnon conspiracy theory community is a heap of diseased horseshit built and consumed by the mentally ill. That is not to say that everyone within that community is a bad or stupid person, and those two things are not necessarily synonymous.
The idea that Trump is working in secret to expose and destroy a cabal of pedophilic satanists is in the top five stupidest things anyone has ever believed. Let’s take it apart step by ste
Satanists are mostly imaginary, in the way that the uninformed and panicky believe them to be. The Church of Satan is a small organization whose beliefs may include devil worship and black magic, but whose principles are mostly a cross-section of libertarianism and hedonism. The Satanic Temple is, despite its satanic trappings, essentially a civil rights activism collective, its focus being on religious freedom; the satan stuff is largely to troll religious bigots. Then there are smatterings of small communities and individuals who just dig the satan shit and think it’s cool. There’s no history, no evidence, of any of these “satanists” doing the despicable things they’ve been accused of, namely sexual abuse and torture and murder of children. If there was a national or global child trafficking cabal, there’s no basis to assume it’s run by satanists. In fact, based on real child sex cabals that have been uncovered, the conspirators are more likely to be Christian. The Catholic church has raped thousands of times as many children as satanists. Also, I hear they hold rituals where they drink blood and eat human flesh.
If such a cabal did exist, the person to expose it and fight it would not be Donald Trump. Trump doesn’t fight sex predators, he is one. Trump is the friend and ally of rapists, and is one himself. The biggest expose of a major child sex trafficking conspiracy was that of Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was a despicable piece of shit, with a lot of rich and powerful piece-of-shit friends. Trump was one of them. He was good friends with a pedophile, and there’s reason to believe he is one himself. Trump “allegedly” raped a thirteen year old girl in 1994. There were probably many other such instances. Trump definitely has never busted a child sex ring, but he has likely participated in them. Trump is a rapist and, more than likely, a child rapist. The idea that he would be a champion or savior of trafficked and abused children is perverse and completely absurd.
Further addressing the absurdity of the delusion that Trump is a savior who shuts down child trafficking rings and rescues children: Trump is directly responsible for kidnapping, imprisoning, and trafficking children. The children that Trump has separated from their parents and locked in cages have since been victims of sexual abuse. Under the Trump administration, children have been separated from their parents. They have, in plain terms, been abducted or kidnapped. The children have been imprisoned, locked in cages. They have been transported across state borders. Thousands of children have reported being sexually assaulted, with allegations ranging from groping to rape. Every aspect of that fits the criteria of child trafficking.
There is a major child sex-trafficking ring in this country: it is run by ICE, CBP, and DHS, under the orders of the president of the United States. Not only is Trump a participant in child trafficking and sexual abuse, he is the leader of the criminal cabal, and doing so with the power of the federal government, at the taxpayers’ expense.
If the QAnon true believers care about the welfare of children and want to bust up child trafficking cabals, they can start by taking down Trump, kingpin of the largest child trafficking ring this country has seen since Black American slavery and the Indian Child Welfare Act, and they can raid the immigrant detention centers where children are being imprisoned and raped, and bring to justice all the federally employed or contracted perpetrators therein.
Many of those who follow the QAnon batshittery have ill intent. While maybe not a direct outgrowth of the “alt-right” movement, QAnon is inextricably linked with it. Those pulling the strings behind these conspiracies do not care about children, and they’re not patriots. They are far-right trolls who, for reasons of either ideology or amusement or a combination or both, invent and spread demonstrable lies. By cynically and despicably using the cover of working to save children, and act for the good of the nation, they’re terrifying and angering the gullible, reinforcing their ignorance and encouraging them towards violence. These people, within this conspiracy theory community, act with malicious and evil intent.
But many others are simply delusional.
There are acolytes of the QAnon lunacy that mean well. They hear stories about children being trafficked and abused and they feel compelled to help “save the children.” Never mind that the stories are nonsense and lack any evidence. While these people should be more discerning about what information they believe, less gullible and prone to believing in batshit sick lunatic fantasies, you can’t exactly fault them for wanting to help the imaginary children.
The problem (the biggest problem among many) is that in indulging and perpetuating a conspiracy theory about imaginary child sex trafficking, they are ignoring and distracting from the actual conspiracies and the real child trafficking victims.
Child sex trafficking is real. Child sexual abuse is real. Real crimes and the worst horrors are inflicted on children every day. But they probably aren’t being committed in pizza parlor basements or community daycare centers, nor are they likely being managed for unspecified purposes by a cabal of satanists or Jews or communists or celebrities or Democrats. Some child rapists and traffickers do check some of those boxes: just look at Trump and Epstein. But the people and groups these conspiracies target are done for illogical and often malicious reasons. There are actual predators acting freely, thanks to the noisy QAnon distraction. There are more plausible incidents of abuse being committed against children than that they are being sold and shipped by Wayfair. This current perverse fantasy crusade is a recycling of old tropes and baseless hysteria meant to serve a cynical ulterior purpose. Rather than inventing and spreading bullshit and rumors, or pestering law enforcement and the media with fake stories, these people, if they actually care about kids, should be doing actual work to help them.
When an actual victim of child sex trafficking fights for their own life and freedom, rather than waiting to be saved by a feckless rapist like Trump or the brainwashed conspiracy theorists who follow him, they are persecuted. Girls like Cyntoia Brown and Chrystul Kizer were victims of child sex trafficking. They were children who were abused and sexually exploited. We only know their names because they were arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for killing their abusers. No one saved them. Not some group of delusionals trading perverted fairytales on the internet, and certainly not the Deranged Turd. They saved themselves, and rather than being given support by the rightwingers who profess to care so much about children, about saving children, girls like them are called “child prostitutes” and “murderers,” if they’re given any attention at all.
Many child trafficking cases within this country don’t involve actual kidnapping, but rather children who are abandoned or forced by the actions of their parents to leave home. Perhaps their parents are physically and/or sexually abusive. Perhaps the children are queer and are aggressively or passively forced to leave an intolerant home. Whatever their reasons, teen runaways are among the most common child trafficking victims in the US. They weren’t kidnapped by imaginary satanists; much more likely, they fled the abuse and violence of their families, and ended up being abused and exploited by other adults.
If QAnon followers actually have it in them to care about and advocate for real children who’ve been the victims of real crimes, they can. They can donate to, or volunteer for, the real existing professional organizations that investigate real cases of child trafficking and sexual abuse. They can advocate for funding social welfare programs that protect at-risk kids. They can fight to shut down the child trafficking rings being run by our rapist president and his pedophilic cabal. They can volunteer their time and donate to the underfunded and under-resourced youth homeless shelters, where many abused minors end up, if not on the street or in the home and custody of an exploiter. There are myriad ways to help, all more effective than feeding and spreading sick paranoid delusions on social media.
There are real children who need help, and real predators who are being protected, however inadvertently, by these conspiracy theorists. Do something productive with your energy, and leave Tom Hanks the fuck alone.