>>10542593
kek
Q team knows about this "petri dish" called QAnon
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/qanon-coronavirus/
How the Coronavirus Spread QAnon
Right-wing conspiracies and the pandemic created a petri dish for the child-trafficking hoax.
ALI BRELAND
SINDUJA RANGARAJAN
For indispensable reporting on the coronavirus crisis, the election, and more, subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter.
Jaylnn Schroeder, an Instagram influencer with 50,000 subscribers, seems like any one of the thousands of people who have grown an audience on the platform by presenting a curated glimpse of their life. With a bio of “Sharing my Passions + Purpose” that notes “I believe in love + light + 🍟,” she mostly posts photos of family, friends, and outfits.
But at the beginning of March, around two weeks before the coronavirus lockdowns started in the United States, Katie Simon, one of her followers, noticed an unusual post from Schroeder. “Randomly one day she popped up in my feed, talking about a spiritual awakening,” Simon said on the phone. “She was being vague and saying how she felt like shining light on this was her calling and she felt the need to use her voice and platform.”
Data shows a spike in QAnon searches after lockdowns started. Interest has yet to return to pre-COVID levels.
Curious, Simon dug deeper. In Schroeder’s Instagram Highlights, which are Instagram stories selected by posters to stay up longer than the normal 24 hours, Simon found a set of messages titled “Theory.”
In the posts, Simon said, Schroeder “started going off on how Tom Hanks was a pedophile, and how he’s not actually quarantined, he’s under house arrest.” The posts discussed rampant child trafficking, and told followers that a “Great Awakening” was coming, using a QAnon community term describing the supposed impending mass arrests of elites liberal pedophiles. She also posted a link to an over two and a half-hour YouTube video about the “secret cabal” running the world.
Aghast and bemused, Simon posted screenshots of Schroeder’s hoaxes to her own Instagram story in early March, showing off its absurdity. Her followers starting responding, saying they too had seen more and more such theories start popping up on the pages of other influencers. The conversations kicked into high gear just a week or so after the lockdowns aimed at stopping the spread of coronavirus had started in the U.S.
Others noticed the trend. Azadeh Ghafari, a licensed psychotherapist who runs the.wellness.therapist Instagram account, observed that the alternative medicine, wellness, and pseudoscience communities she follows on the app were starting to share the same types of QAnon and fringe-right conspiracies. Accounts offered stories about elite cabals keeping children in tunnels underneath New York City, and how the coronavirus was either a part of a plot to save them, or a coverup to harm even more children.
“It’s unlike what I’ve looked at before. You would assume these hippies are progressives,” she recently told Mother Jones. “There is this faction of ultra-conservative, some Christian, mixed in with anti-vaxxers, mixed in with health and lifestyle folks.”