Samara Duplessis
I've posted here before that QAnon hurts people and families. The mindless sadistic QAnon beast could not care less. People still fall for the lies and cruelty it stands for and revels in.
Hurting people, families and society is 100% legal free speech. Republicans in Congress and the courts will defend this evil to the end of the very last shred of human decency and even democracy.
The Washington Post writes on more mindless QAnon savagery and hate in an article, A QAnon con: How the viral Wayfair sex trafficking lie hurt real kids. Apparently variations of Pizzagate crackpottery (pedophile communist Democratic tyrants trafficking children for sex) are alive and well in minds gullible low-information Americans enough to still believe in QAnon:
An Internet mob wanted to rescue a 13-year-old girl. Instead, they terrified her, derailed real trafficking investigations and incited ‘save the children’ violence.
She [13 year old Samara Duplessis] scrolled to the next Instagram post, and the next, and the next, until her phone rang. Her dad’s name was on the screen.
“Something’s going on,” Kevin Duplessis told his daughter.
Within the last 20 minutes, more than a dozen people had called him, frantic about whether Samara was okay. Apparently, thousands of people on the Internet were talking about the same thing.
Samara’s name and face were going viral, along with the names and faces of half a dozen other children.
One tweet circulating her picture showed a screenshot of an old local news article that said Samara Duplessis was missing. The article was never updated when Samara was found safe.
Beside it was a screenshot of a pillow for sale on Wayfair, the online furniture superstore. It was called the “Duplessis” pillow. Its price: $9,999.
The person behind the post was seemingly arguing that because the pillow was marked at a ridiculous price, and because its name matched the last name of a child who appeared to be missing, Wayfair was involved in something sinister.
There were thousands of tweets making similar accusations about cabinets Wayfair was selling. The claims were on Facebook, too. And on Reddit, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Within 72 hours, the company was trending, with an estimated 1.2 million tweets about Wayfair and trafficking.
In the days to come, every aspect of these claims would be found to be false.
Human trafficking investigators at the Department of Homeland Security, who had to pause active investigations to sort out what was happening with Wayfair, would find no evidence to support any of the allegations. Wayfair’s staff, bombarded with threats, would realize how the pricing anomalies were happening. Anti-trafficking organizations, inundated with callers, would beg the public to stop sharing bogus stories that made their work harder.
The WaPo goes on to describe that social media companies didn't do much. The unfettered Wayfair QAnon conspiracy theory became one of the fastest-spreading disinformation campaigns on the Internet. People sucked in included concerned mothers, TikToking teenagers, racial justice advocates and people all over the political spectrum. QAnon lies and deceit are not just for conservatives. They're for all of us low info and gullible enough to believe it.
People spreading QAnon garbage didn’t know that they were spreading lies. QAnon’s intent was to to convince the public that President Donald Trump was saving the country from satanic Democratic pedophiles. The QAnon semi-human scum behind this was arguing that because the Wayfair pillow was marked at a ridiculous price and its name matched the last name of an apparently missing child, Wayfair was involved in something evil. That is real crackpottery.
One of Smamra’s friends sent her screenshots with her face on them. She didn’t know anything about algorithms and never heard of QAnon. She saw her face, name and the $9,999 pillow. Her feelings of personal safety faded away. “I started getting real bad anxiety. I started pacing around real heavy. When I get in my head, like real, real deep in my head, I start hyperventilating.” Then she got hives. “My body is just doing whatever it can just to get me to calm down.” Incoherent as it was, Samara’s mother had the feeling that there was a real bounty on her daughter’s head.
Other children were included in QAnon's filth and the damage to families its legal free speech caused real damage in the name of fascism:
One girl from Texas had run away for a few days in 2017, but like 92 percent of all children reported missing, was recovered. Now 19, she posted a TikTok to show everyone she was just fine. Her mother, Katrina Waggoner Phillips, was not. The moment she saw her daughter’s missing poster being shared again as a supposed Wayfair sex trafficking victim, it felt like a mostly healed wound had been ripped open.
“I just started shaking all over,” Phillips recalled. “Everything was bringing back the memories of when that poster was made, when she had run away.”
Cameron Dziedzic, a 16-year-old boy from Maryland, tried to ignore how many people were sharing a picture from when he had gone to stay with friends for a few weeks without telling his family. He’d since been placed into foster care and was working toward joining the military.
Hundreds of thousands of people wanted to help these children when they believed they were victims of sex trafficking. When it turned out that they were victims of a viral hoax, the kids and their families were left to face the wreckage alone.
Collateral damage from QAnon's filth included derailing ongoing investigations across the country while the QAnon lie took precedence. At Homeland Security, the QAnon lie affected all 30 Human Trafficking field offices. An official said that the wasted time “could be spent trying to identify victims, and doing the stuff that investigators need to do” to get a prosecution and conviction.
QAnon operates to help the fascist, treasonous Republican Party and its fascist, treasonous ex-president. That makes both partly responsible for the damage that it causes. It also makes both arguably criminal organizations, if not domestic terrorists.
Questions:
1. Is it reasonable to see QAnon as cruel, vicious and fascist, maybe sadist sociopath, or is that over the top bleeding heart liberal snowflakery?
2. Is it reasonable to see people who fall for QAnon lies and conspiracy crackpottery as gullible and low-information, or is the internet too complex for people who fall for crap like this to be considered significantly culpable?
3. Waddabout the Republican Party -- is it mostly silent or mostly quietly supporting the beast?[1]
Footnote:
1. Some republicans have condemned QAnon, but it is like the ex-president tenth-heartedly telling people to worry about COVID.
Headlines:
17 Republicans decline to condemn QAnon as the House votes to reject its conspiracy theories
QAnon goes to Washington: two supporters win seats in Congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom are Republicans)
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