'Pastel QAnon,' where pro-Trump conspiracy theories meet New Age spirituality
In March, as the coronavirus pandemic was forcing much of the U.S. into lockdown, Seane Corn, a prominent yoga instructor and social justice activist started to receive messages from friends and fellow teachers about the rapidly spreading virus that, she says, “just felt paranoid.”
“What they were trying to help get me to understand was … not to trust the government, that there was this deep-state conspiracy related to COVID where, via Bill Gates, they’re going to be microchipping us through the use of mandated vaccines,” Corn told Yahoo News. They used terms like “great awakening” and “red pill.”
“If you just dug a little deeper, it was like all roads led to QAnon,” said Corn, referring to the cult-like network that promotes the delusion that President Trump is secretly working to dismantle an international child sex trafficking ring run by a cabal of satanic global elites.
Corn was witnessing the start of what Marc-André Argentino, a PhD candidate studying technology and extremist propaganda at Concordia University in Canada, has dubbed “Pastel QAnon,” which uses softer language and aesthetically pleasing imagery to spread the group’s paranoid worldview in the typically apolitical online world of yoga devotees, wellness and nutrition coaches and “mommy bloggers.”
Some were drawn in by QAnon’s adoption of anti-vaccination rhetoric, echoing a common New Age trope. Others believed that in spreading QAnon posts they were helping to fight sexual trafficking of children. Their participation both spread the conspiracies to new audiences, Argentino wrote, and helped the growing network of believers get around Facebook’s efforts to crack down on QAnon content. In a recent Twitter thread, Argentino highlighted several examples of the types of posts that he says are representative of this trend.
The appeal of Q-inspired beliefs to her friends and colleagues was a mystery to Corn, who describes herself as politically liberal. But a predisposition to reject mainstream political and scientific thought is a prerequisite to accepting the Q mindset. Yoga is a form of exercise, but also involves varying degrees of spiritual practice, with elements of mysticism that — not unlike the segments of evangelical Christianity that have embraced the prophecies of Q — resists the sort of fact checking that might undermine the core Q myth.
One example of an influencer who appears to have embraced Pastel QAnon is Rose Henges, a Christian mom blogger and “holistic living” advocate who sells a variety of herbal supplements and skin care products online. Back in April, BuzzFeed noted that Henges, who’d previously posted about her opposition to vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry, had begun sharing QAnon conspiracy theories with her then-substantial audience of 73,000 Instagram followers. One such post from that period includes a photograph that appears to show Henges, armed with a large yellow Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”), posing maskless with her family at a “Re-open Florida” protest. At the bottom of the caption, Henges included the hashtag #WWG1WA, an abbreviation for the QAnon slogan “Where We Go One We Go All.” (The hashtag has since been blocked by Instagram, though the post remains visible in Henges’s feed.)
Not everyone is as willing to acknowledge the connection between QAnon (or Trump), and the misinformed claims about masks, vaccines and child trafficking that they eagerly share online. For some, that is likely a deliberate choice to distance themselves from other adherents of this extremist movement, who’ve been increasingly linked to acts of real-world violence and harassment, while also avoiding having their content blocked from mainstream platforms.
In May, Corn said she started receiving links to “Plandemic,” a 26-minute video filled with inaccuracies and false claims about the coronavirus that quickly went viral on social media, attracting millions of views before Facebook and YouTube scrambled to remove it from their sites. Among the film’s since-debunked claims include unsubstantiated assertions about the dangers of masks, part of its general premise that the coronavirus pandemic, and attempts to control it, are all part of a sinister plot by public health officials.
“That was my first big red flag,” Corn said of “Plandemic.” But it wasn’t until later this summer, as a new QAnon-based narrative was beginning to take hold within her community, this time in the form of inflated statistics and misinformed claims about child sex trafficking, that she felt compelled to speak out.
more
https://www.yahoo.com/news/pastel-q-anon-where-pro-trump-conspiracy-theories-meet-new-age-spirituality-222152937.html