https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/qanon-women-why.html

It Makes Perfect Sense That QAnon Took Off With Women This Summer

By LILI LOOFBOUROW

The QAnon conspiracy theory isn’t just spreading. It’s evolving. Over the past few months, we’ve learned that women are becoming the primary drivers of a cult that started where most conspiracy theories do—on seedy hypermasculine spaces like 4chan or /pol/ or the febrile brain of Alex Jones—and are making a story about a satanic “cabal,” with Donald Trump as the savior, seem pretty, palatable, and an obviously good thing. Who doesn’t want to protect children and restore order? People who might not ordinarily be amenable to this kind of thing are flocking to it during this distressing period when we’re all spending more time inside and online because of the disaster-laden state of the country. QAnon offers the comfort of an answer, above all else, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the conspiracy theory is popping up on Peloton forums, circulating among Instagram influencers, and gaining traction with anti-vaxxers, yoga communities, and new moms.

The makeover has not diluted the cult’s virulence. “The deep state is evil and Satanic,” one ’gram reads in a font as soothing and bland as a skin care ad. In a thread on “Pastel Qanon,” researcher Marc-André Argentino suggests that women on Instagram are sugarcoating the dark stuff with the soothing graphic design we’re used to associating with the platform. The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany reports that Q stuff flourishes on Instagram “with little visible pushback from the influencers’ communities or from the platform that hosts them.” The result is a kind of aesthetic context collapse. What’s more, there’s a winking vagueness to the way QAnon stuff circulates (much of it never mentioning Q explicitly). Nutty theories about Tom Hanks harvesting the fear of children don’t always appear outright; they materialize via elaborate “finally speaking out” videos in which influencers announce that they never talk about stuff like this, and most of their content will continue to be “normal,” but they have to speak “from their heart.” These videos rarely go into specifics; they tend to reference a documentary (that they’ll share with you over DM) or encourage the viewer to really prepare their self-care regimen before they go poking around into these dark truths and finally get “woke” in an entirely different sense. (“The reason we are ‘woke’ is because I became a mother and we saw a documentary that we’ve never been able to unsee,” one influencer says.)