The Real Harm of QAnon

The Republican Party will soon be the party of QAnon and Trumpism. Unfortunately, neither of these phenomena are going away anytime soon, as shown by the terrorist attack on the capitol complex in DC.

Americans as a group are prone to believing conspiracy theories with no basis in reality. In fact, millions of Americans lack basic critical thinking skills. QAnon is exhibit A of this.

What Is QAnon?

QAnon is the conspiracy theory that there exists a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles who run a child sex trafficking ring, kidnaping children to extract their life force in order to extend their lives. This cabal is made up of Hollywood elites, Democratic politicians and their allies, and the Deep State.

Furthermore, according to QAnon, the US military secretly recruited Trump to run for president to take down this cabal. He has covertly been fighting this evil organization for decades. His tweets are not destructive outbursts on social media but coded messages for his followers to interpret. Trump’s apparently reckless decisions with deadly serious consequences were carefully planned moves to destroy this organization. Furthermore, Trump and Robert Mueller are surreptitiously working together.

The source of everything is someone known only as “Q,” a supposedly high-ranking government official who is waging war on this evil cabal alongside a focused, disciplined, and heroic President Trump. He posts anonymously on Reddit forums with supposed clues about what is going to happen next. What is always being predicted is something called “the Storm,” which is when Trump will conduct a mass arrest of this evil cabal and send them all to Guantanamo Bay.

QAnon resembles a badly written spy thriller more than a credible theory of any kind.

This conspiracy theory falls apart upon even the most basic questioning. Where are the kids coming from? How are they transported from point A to point B? Who are these kids?

But What Harm Could this Conspiracy Theory Do?

Besides QAnon having absolutely no basis in reality (the Storm was predicted several times and never materialized), this conspiracy theory has already done serious damage.

It has inspired real-life violence, not to mention that it has radicalized many people into becoming possible terrorists and incapable of dealing with reality. Several elected members of Congress either directly believe this garbage or peddle it to help their political careers.

Trafficking in conspiracy theories and fake news makes it that much harder to deal with real-world problems and turns up an already dangerously high political temperature.

Two dead police officers are part of the result.

QAnon has also made the very serious problem of child sex trafficking much harder for people who are working to stop this section of the modern-day slave trade. Suffice to say, most actual human trafficking does not look like film Taken.

Real-life child sex trafficking is worse than the fantasies of QAnon.

In reality, instead of an elite cabal, all you need to profit from this monstrosity is an insufficient safety net that allows too many children to fall through, a population of children too few people care about, a depraved “customer” base with disposable income, no moral compass, good people skills, and decent organizational capabilities. That’s it.

The biggest victims of QAnon are children trapped inside the hell of being raped for someone else’s benefit.

QAnon encourages needless violence and distracts from the all too many real-life, banal tragedies in the world.