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QAnon / Save the Children is just the latest iteration of the repeating phenomenon of political or crypto-political moral panics about grotesque conspiracies to traffick, abuse, and harm children.
The 80s satanic panic is often rightly adduced as a precursor but it goes right back through atrocity propaganda to the blood libel.
The starting point for understanding such conspiracy theories and moral panics is often taken to be a natural human concern for the welfare of children. This is mistaken.
The people who get into such things are not really concerned for the welfare of children, any more than anti-abortion campaigners are really concerned for the rights of foetuses.
Just as 'pro-lifers' tend to care little for unwanted or poor children, and support the incarceration and execution of young offenders, so QAnon campaigners for children know nothing about actually existing child abuse or trafficking, and...
...and tend to make efforts to tackle such things harder, either directly through opposing the measures required or indirectly through muddying the waters with their fantasies.
It has been much noted that Trump's connections to actual child abusers and traffickers, and the allegations against him in this respect, have been rationalised away by Trumpist Q people who imagine him combating the child abusers in the Deep State etc.
The real impetus for such beliefs is not concern for children but hatred of political enemies and scapegoats.
The abuse of children is assigned to the villainous other as an expression of their imagined inhumanity, and the permissability - if not necessity - of killing them.
