Mixed Media – The Mother Of Conspiracies

How QAnon found a home in parenting groups

- By Kiera Butler

WHEN KRISTEN ALDEN moved to Thousand Oaks, California, two years ago, she joined the local moms’ Facebook group, Moms of Conejo Valley. She figured it’d be a good place to find out about activities for her 7-year-old, and she looked forward to unloading some old clothes, books, and toys to younger kids in the neighborhood. Every once in a while, someone would post something that Alden, an attorney, disagreed with—in particular, she began to notice that a few moms had a habit of sharing anti-vaccine memes. But it was infrequent enough that she just rolled her eyes and ignored it.

When the pandemic began, the tone of the posts suddenly changed. The anti-vax moms became louder, and there seemed to be more of them. They began posting rants about how mask mandates and social distancing rules were “tyrannical” and violated Americans’ civil liberties. Some of them claimed that the coronavirus vaccine would contain tracking microchips made by Bill Gates, a notion popularized by a viral video called Pandemic, released in early May on YouTube.

Alden recalls that when dozens of members of the group posted the video, she and a few others politely noted in the comments that Plandemic’s wild claims—for example, that the virus was created in a lab and that it’s “activated” by masks— had been thoroughly debunked by a range of medical professionals and fact-checking sites like Snopes. It had “absolutely no effect whatsoever,” she says, “because they would just come back with, ‘Well, they’re, they’re all in on it. Snopes is owned by George Soros,’” the liberal philanthropist and conspiracy theory target.