Remember QAnon? The conspiracy theory, popular among President Donald Trump's supporters for years, held that a furtive network of satanic pedophiles had infiltrated political institutions, the press, and other echelons of power and influence. According to Q lore, Trump was working to expose and punish these cretins—who included Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats—and to end the child suffering, sex trafficking, and hormone harvesting that these horrible globalists were engaging in.
QAnon—itself preceded by the perhaps even more zany Pizzagate conspiracy—was too out there for mainstream Republicans to explicitly endorse. But neither would they explicitly condemn the theory or its believers, and they often seemed happy to play along with the narrative, touting Trump's alleged crackdown on child sex trafficking.
Republicans took a lot of flak for this, but of course, Democrats had been stoking sex trafficking panic for their own gain, too. QAnon didn't start in a vacuum; it followed two decades of mainstream media and politicians, both left and right, using the flimsiest evidence and most distorted data to falsely claim that America was in the midst of a sex trafficking epidemic.
