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.”
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.
Some of Henges’s earlier posts indicate that she’d already had an affinity for right-wing causes as well as conspiratorial thinking prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. One post from December 2019 shows Henges posing with a Glock handgun which, in the caption, she encouraged other mothers to “purchase for their families survival preparedness go-bag.” In another, dated March 1, she promotes unfounded conspiracy theories about the dangers of 5G wireless technology.
“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.
The statement quickly went viral, but Corn said the response to it “went in a direction that I had not anticipated.” It also shows how, through selective language and appropriation of seemingly legitimate causes, QAnon and related conspiracy theories have been able to evade recent efforts by social media platforms to crack down on Q-related content.
QAnon-related groups or accounts used social media algorithms to expose members of these susceptible audiences to more extreme conspiracy narratives. For example, Jankowicz said that someone who found themselves looking at posts on a Facebook group dedicated to “Medical Freedom” would immediately be recommended QAnon, anti-vaccination and white supremacist content.
Derek Beres is a longtime fitness instructor and writer who now co-hosts “Conspirituality,” a podcast that analyzes the cult-like dynamics of QAnon and its convergence with New Age thought.
Please vote blue and help end the evil clown show.
New age plus QAnon eh? You're trying to kill me on purpose now.
willsommer
That’s like saying “soft Naziism”. Won’t work.
Who knows what’s true but you can’t stop it and the knee jerk reaction of fear to them by leftist media indicates their could be parts of truth there
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