CAN MASKS SPREAD CONSPIRACIES? INSIDE THE WORLD OF QANON MERCH
The merch is the message.
Dewey Saunders for Inverse
EMMA BETUEL
2 HOURS AGO
SHANE PETTY SEES HIMSELF AS A SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR.
So when 2020’s defining garment became the face mask, it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up.
The mask market is projected to reach about $9 billion by 2021. In such a competitive marketplace, Petty’s products had to appeal to an audience. Like any good marketer, he looked for a niche. He settled on a sizeable demographic: The people who don't want to wear a facemask at all.
“We've realized there's a certain portion … that is simply anti-mask. They only wear them because they have to, but that doesn't mean that they won't buy one to push their opinion,” Petty tells Inverse.
His business is called “My Patriot Facemasks.” He sells masks featuring the Punisher logo and the gun rights slogan “molon labe” (Greek for: “come and take them”). One mask features a Q and a white rabbit poking through the hole — a literal invitation to follow the would-be wearer down the rabbit hole.
This is a logo associated with the conspiracy group QAnon.
With that design, he joined dozens of sellers on Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Etsy who have realized that conspiracy communities are also untapped e-commerce markets with money to spend. QAnon, with its growing power and reach, is chief among them.
The core conspiracy pushed by Q, the group’s anonymous leader (or leaders), is that the government is run by Devil-worshipping pedophiles, many of them prominent Democrats. President Donald Trump was sent by top military leaders to dismantle the system from within, according to QAnon canon.
The QAnon movement has attracted other conspiracy theorists, from 9-11 Truthers, to Plandemic adherents and #Pizzagate acolytes. Along with other fringe conspiracy theories, it was labeled a growing domestic terror threat by the FBI.
Petty's online tore isn’t explicitly pro-Q, and neither is Petty. He calls himself a “watcher,” rather than a participant, in QAnon. To him, the Q mask is a “symbol of the people that are patriots.” But he’s not about to wear a Q T-shirt or put a bumper sticker on his car.
He sees Q acolytes as no more than a potential market – one of many “passionate niches,” he says. He put the mask up for sale on his website, and, like any good businessman, he also advertised his masks on social media. In late August, a post went up on the store’s Facebook page with some classic QAnon hashtags — including “#wwg1wga,” short for “where we go one we go all” — and a few others for good measure, like “#Trump2020.”
“When I saw [QAnon] out there I thought, let's just throw that out there and see if people were interested in buying it,” he says.
The Q mask wasn’t an immediate success, but it was among the top three sellers on his website – the top two were a Trump-themed Punisher mask and a Punisher themed molon labe mask. Every now and then, sales of the Q mask will spike to about 10 or 15 in a five-day period, Petty says. The cost of testing the market was low, and the payoff good enough to keep it up, he adds. For Petty, it is just a side-hustle, anyway. But for others it appears to matter more.
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https://www.inverse.com/culture/qanon-masks