Eating babies. and i m like, i would just shame him. i mean, that s absolutely ridiculous. i would be like, you re a dumbass. this is not true. he would tell us such crazy things. hillary clinton had a sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. tom hanks and his wife were the head of a pedophile ring. your son believed in qanon, basically? yes, absolutely. a new conspiracy was seeping its way into right-wing social media and news outlets. qanon. qanon believed that basically all democrats are evil, satanic worshipping pedophiles and the only person who can stop all this evil and save the world is donald trump. qanon believers would seek out encoded messages on the internet, parse out numbers and words of trump s messages
People, claiming they re involved in a child slave sex ring. i mean this is straight out of the playbook that there is some secret cabal that s running a sex ring and then we have what happens here, which is threats potentially. yeah. we famously heard this before, not only generally from the qanon conspiracy theories but specifically with someone acting at washington, d.c., at a pizza parlor who thought there was a basement where a child sex trafficking or exploitation was occurring, and there wasn t even a basement in this place. i can hear some people on the far right saying, well, we can t possibly be responsible for the actions of people with mental health issues. my response to that, chris, is absolutely you can. it s exactly these unstable people, deranged people, who are the ones that are going to hear your calls and incitement and act out violently. so, yes, you should anticipate that a portion of our public is
Now it has been three days to digest what happened with paul pelosi. what are you seeing online now? yeah. if you go on the far right internet, donald trump jr. pages you will see a conspiracy theory that is completely wrong. it s completely backwards. the idea is that paul pelosi was in sort of a lover s quarrel with this man and it s based on a series of lies told over the internet. in the vacuum of information after friday, this is when reporters were trying to figure out who this guy was and what he did, the vacuum was filled with lies. and that took over the narrative on the far right. now it s center right. the donald trump internet. they are pushing this idea that he was in a sex ring.
Vulnerable people in society, they re not just to be opposed on political ground but on moral grounds just as basically not as sort of fully human. and the problem with this sort of process of demonizing the opposition is it dehumanizes them. and when you dehumanize the opposition it kind of creates more fertile soil for taking extreme actions which includes political violence as mason has explored in some of her recent scholarship. it was of course pizza gate, a guy walked into a restaurant and opened fire there in 2016 because he claimed he was fighting this democrat sex ring that was supposedly in the basement of this restaurant associated with hillary clinton. that then led to qanon. so is there any sense that this type of talk is just an appeal to q supporters? yeah, i think that greene s