QAnon is still a thing, according to this Slate article.
Honestly, these days, QAnon has really just blended into the mainstream. I wouldn’t even think of it as a specific movement, or as just people who identify as QAnon followers. It’s a broader populace that subscribes to these views, even without using the label. The QAnon fixation on pedophilia and child trafficking is a serious and very real issue: We’ve seen it distorted and weaponized into something where calling someone a pedophile has become a go-to political attack for some of our elected leaders.
And with the election around the corner, and especially with all the unprecedented events that have occurred in the past month, disinformation is just blowing up, out of control. Q may be gone for now. And while QAnon, officially, as a movement, has gone underground, the damage is done. We see it every single day. I mean, even just on Twitter last night, I opened the app, and one of the main curated stories by the platform was about how Biden was on his deathbed. There was one suggesting that he had been cloned, or Kamala had killed him. It’s no wonder this stuff has become so widely embraced. It’s so normalized…
The data that exists suggests millions, even tens of millions, of people believe that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. You can only imagine how many kids have heard this stuff at home—especially over the pandemic, when we were all locked down inside and kids were home all the time. We don’t have a good figure of how many children believe in conspiracy theories, so it’s hard to grasp the scope of this. But BuzzFeed News put out a survey a few years ago asking teachers how often they were hearing conspiracy theories in the classroom. And the response was really devastating—just teachers from all over the country saying they were overwhelmed by the stuff they were hearing at school.
I don’t move in any circles where I would be exposed to this stuff, so it is surprising to me to hear this. Saying Biden is dead is not like saying Dick Cheney is a robot – which is obviously true because how else could the dude still be around?