In a Facebook video, Elizabeth Bangert, the endorsed Republican candidate for Minnesota Senate District 19, is horrified no state politician has joined her outrage about Wayfair furniture's child sex trafficking.
Never mind copy like BBC specialist disinformation reporter Marianna Spring's Wayfair: The false conspiracy about a furniture firm and child trafficking:
Expensive furniture sold by the US-based company Wayfair is at the centre of a bizarre conspiracy theory involving allegations of child trafficking, which has been spreading online.
The unfounded claims first appeared on 14 June in the US but have become a global trend since.
Wayfair has said "there is of course no truth to these claims".
The claims originated in the QAnon community - many of whom believe in a far-right conspiracy theory that there's a secret plot by a supposed "deep state" against President Trump and his supporters.
A well-known activist tweeted about the high price of storage cabinets being sold by online retailer, Wayfair.
The user pointed out that the cabinets were "all listed with girls' names," prompting followers to allege that the pieces of furniture actually had children hidden in them as part of a supposed child trafficking ring.
The initial tweet gained little traction until discussion about it was reignited on a Reddit discussion group called "r/conspiracy" almost a month later on 9 July.
By that point, QAnon followers were making supposed links between the fact that some expensive pieces of Wayfair furniture are named after girls, and actual cases of missing children in the US with the same names.
Some of these children are no longer missing and one woman, who was mentioned when a cabinet with her first name was linked to her alleged disappearance as a teenager, did a Facebook live refuting the claims.
She said she never went missing in the first place. . . .
Read the rest at the BBC. On Tuesday in the New Republic, Melissa Gira Grant writes in The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism:
With Republican candidates and Trump embracing the strange, child trafficking–fixated movement, it can no longer be dismissed as merely a conspiracy theory.
The online furniture seller Wayfair is not engaged in child sex trafficking. The high prices of some of its industrial-grade cabinets do not mean that they conceal children. And yet these absurd, evidence-free claims circulated so widely online that on Monday, Reuters published an extensive fact-check to disprove them, and Wayfair temporarily removed some products from its site to add more details to their descriptions. The wild allegations of a massive child sex abuse ring hidden in public can be directly traced to QAnon, sometimes called the “Great Awakening,” which was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory birthed from toxic message boards but is now closer to a genuine movement.
At this stage in its lifespan, QAnon can take an obscure post alleging absurd crimes to a social media trend, heard and shared by many people who have never heard of the movement. QAnon can no longer be shrugged off as a phenomenon confined to the internet, not with dozens of Republican congressional candidates embracing at least some of QAnon’s themes and President Trump attempting to marshal its power to help keep him in the White House. As the host of one streaming QAnon program put it to Trump campaign official Erin Perrine when she went on his show in October 2019, many QAnon adherents view themselves as the campaign’s “soldiers on the ground.”
The Wayfair meme was perfect for QAnon, driven as the movement is by people who believe they possess secret knowledge about how “elites” are buying, selling, abusing, and even devouring children. If you believe that, it’s not much of a leap to imagine the child trafficking is taking place inside an overpriced armoire. The danger escalates with the next logical leap: If that’s what the powerful are doing, what wouldn’t be justified in challenging them? QAnon has inspired its adherents to plot kidnapping “raids,” stage a standoff with an armored vehicle at the Hoover Dam, and attempt a citizen’s arrest that ended with a killing. The FBI’s Phoenix field office issued a memo last year about QAnon posing a potential domestic terrorist threat. None of this has kept QAnon isolated on the fringes; in fact, the group is now becoming a force in what passes for the mainstream of American politics.
The shared beliefs and attendant rituals of QAnon are core to the president’s base. The journalist Jeff Sharlet traveled to many Trump rallies over the course of months for a story in Vanity Fair and found “dozens of Trump supporters who believe that the Democratic establishment primarily serves as a cover for child sex trafficking.” Some of these Trump supporters, he writes, were familiar with QAnon’s ideology and worldview, “but most were not. It was, they told me, simply known.” Sharlet reads Q as a form of American gnosticism, “the gospel of Trump,” and like the Christian gnostic gospels, it represents “a form of secret knowledge reserved for the faithful, a ‘truth’ you must have the eyes to see in order to believe.” The “truth” of what QAnon adherents believe isn’t the point: It’s that they belong to the sect to whom “the truth” has been revealed. . . .
Check out the rest of the article. In Tuesday's New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Jennifer Steinberg reported The QAnon Candidates Are Here. Trump Has Paved Their Way.
In Mankato, that candidate is Elizabeth Bangert, who is outraged that no other politician in the state is standing up to Wayfair. Won't someone think of the children?
There's a video of her anger, of course:
And a couple of other campaign Facebook posts:
Riots? COVID-19? All distractions from the truth of globalists stealing children. In her eyes.
There's one saving grace to this rising tide of cray-cray: she's not campaigning on the public dime. Not even her supporters' nickels. Earlier this month, we reported Mankato Republican says she's not taking any contributions for her state senate campaign.
Somehow, we suspect this isn't a seat that's going to flip from DFL to GOP control.
Related posts:
Mankato Republican says 'the Devil' is attacking her campaign [City Pages]
Minnesota Citizen Lobbyist Elizabeth Bangert announces bid for Senate District 19.
Photo: Bangert at the Minnesota Capitol. Via Mankato Free Press.
Minnesota Citizen Lobbyist Elizabeth Bangert announces bid for Senate District 19.
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