The Paranoid Style of Motherhood
Child abuse conspiracy theories are rife at present, but they predate QAnon, and they even go much further back than the conspiracizing that gave rise to QAnon.
The Great Flower Panic of 2021 began when an Ohio man gave his girlfriend an excessive amount of roses while proposing to her. His new fiancée decided to share her wealth, so she went with her sister and daughter to a Walmart parking lot and started leaving flowers on people’s cars. When WBNS-TV ran a story about this good-hearted gesture, the daughter described what they expected: “People are going to come out and think it’s awesome.”
But “that didn’t happen,” she added. Instead the roses were spotted by shoppers who had heard the urban legend that human traffickers deploy such items to distract their victims before kidnapping them. Soon the sheriff’s office was posting a warning on Facebook about “what appear to be” two “males” who were “looking into vehicles and placing a single red rose under the windshield wipers of those vehicles.” The warning added that “there have been several Facebook posts of similar instances that have happened in Ohio regarding Human Trafficking related techniques.” Mothers beware!
Once it became clear what actually had happened, the story went national. Several commentators blamed the overheated reaction on QAnon, a subculture whose members believe that Washington and Hollywood are controlled by Satanic pedophiles who try to obtain eternal youth by ingesting kids’ blood. The reporter Ben Collins, for example—at that point covering the disinformation beat for NBC—tweeted that this was a “QAnon moral panic.”
Such reactions got the chain of influence exactly backwards. QAnon didn’t pave the way for stories like the Ohio Walmart panic; stories like the Ohio Walmart panic had paved the way for QAnon. Dubious rumors of kidnapping-and-trafficking plots had been going viral on social media years before QAnon existed, sometimes with a boost from local news reports.
