Pastels and Pedophiles

Two extremist radicalization experts take us down the QAnon rabbit hole to expose how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless women and show a way back to sanity. In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women died that day. They, like the millions of Americans who believe that a mysterious insider known as Q is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy, were members of pastel QAnon, a subgroup of mostly middle-class educated women that answered the call to save the children. With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of pastel QAnon should not surprise us: women have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. They track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi mama Instagram, fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence, and connect the dots for readers. Pastels and Pedophiles shows how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe-appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines. Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole back into the light.