AD: Welcome to Right Rising, a podcast from the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. I'm your host Augusta DellÕOmo. Today I'm joined by Ashley Mattheis, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She's here with us today to talk about the QAnon conspiracy and Momfluencers. Ashley, thanks for being here.

AM: Thanks for having me, Augusta. I'm really excited to chat about this. It's super interesting.

AD: I'm also very excited to have a fellow TarHeel on the podcast. So that's that's the best part of this for me. 

AM: Go Heels!

AD: So let's start with first with the QAnon conspiracy. And recently I've personally gotten a lot of questions about this, and there's starting to be a lot of discussion online and in mainstream media outlets about something called the QAnon conspiracy theory. Can you at the outset, tell us what this is, where it came from and how it intersects with the far right?

AM: Sure. So the QAnon on conspiracy is essentially an online conspiracy theory that is premised on a belief in a global cabal of elites, government officials, and celebrities that traffic children for sexual abuse and satanic ritual purposes. The conspiracy theory originally expanded on some earlier online conspiracy theories, notably Pizzagate, which posited the that references to ÒpizzaÓ are used by pedophiles and child sexual abusers to discuss their abuse of children. That narrative folded in democratic political operatives in the DNC after the DNC hacking of emails, which included a chain about a pizza party at Comet Ping Pong Pizza in Washington, DC. QAnon theories extended from this supposition Donald Trump as a savior, who would expose this cabal and bring about a reckoning for those involved. So kind of Q start to rise really in 2017 off of this Pizzagate, and some other conspiracy theories floating around on 4chan, and what would become 8chan. 

And since then, it's developed into what I would kind of call a meta-theory conspiracy with highly specific elements. And really interestingly, just in the last week, Gregory Stanton, recently outlined an near exact replication of one of the oldest and most successful Nazi conspiracy metanarratives, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He called it a ÒNazi Cult.Ó Exactly. And so QAnon adapted the Protocols metanarrative to the current sociopolitical situation. And the adaptations are really important because they're highly flexible, and allow for really broad participation across a range of concerns and entry points into the Q reality. So many people engaging with the theories may not be aware of the Nazi connections until they're very deeply embedded and engaged with Q itself. And necessarily, it introduced through kind of the deep anti-Semitism and other extremist beliefs engaged in the full reality of Q. That's one way to describe it. 

So for example, one of the big strands of Q that got added recently, in the last few months ,was called WayfairGate. And this was a theory that posited that children were being trafficked globally by this cabal through really expensive cabinetry sold by wayfair.com, which is not true, absolutely not true. But that kind of led the way to the cooptation of several online hashtags, ÒSave Our ChildrenÓ and ÒSave the Children,Ó which is really where this theory started to connect, in particular with a broad swath of moms online. So the cooptation of the hashtags offers like legitimacy to the conspiracy theory, because it connects to legitimate organizations worried about child trafficking. And it provides a purchase point for like women's engagement - taking care of children. So it's really interesting. 

And a primary vector of the way people are engaged to do this, and to get kind of connected to these far right deeper conspiracies is through the mantra of Òdo your own research.Ó So Q will make drops on a channel, on a platform, - really esoteric - like an image or a phrase or statement that you have to figure out. So as people go into do their own research, and figure out the meaning of these memes and kind of adapt it to the Q reality and, and, and their experience, right, they supply a lot of the reason it fits in, right from their own worldview. And that makes it really hard to disentangle once people have engage,  because they've committed so much of their own belief system to it. It's important, also, because this model of Q-dropping and then figuring out the puzzle, sort of works as a form of gamification, making participation really, in many ways problematic because people get a little bit addicted to going back and finding the answer to the puzzle. And it it's also very problematic because it has really high individual and social effects, multiple criminal incidents, including murders, abductions, attempted terrorist events have occurred from Q adherents. So it's it's a pretty startling thing that is now spreading from the US and more broadly across, particularly the UK and Europe.

AD: Thanks for that really great overview. Ashley. It is so hard to condense when you know, as someone who also works on the far right, when people ask me about Q, it's really hard to even know where to start. And one thing that you mentioned that I really want to, to reiterate is how much some of these - I don't want to use the phrase Òmore benign forms of QÓ -  because there's really not, but how they've co-opted the phrases like ÒSave the Children,Ó I that's what I started seeing on my social media was other friends that I knew that I would not say were members of the QAnon conspiracy, posting things about ÒSaving their ChildrenÓ or ÒSave the ChildrenÓ that they had picked up from other streams and didn't know where it was coming from. So that was my first inclination that something was going on and Q was starting to make its way out of what I had thought was a very small, marginalized conspiracy theory into you know, kind of showing up in the mainstream, especially in the middle of the pandemic. 

So thank you for pointing that out and for also mentioning how serious this is. Part of the problem with Q is even a lack of evidence is evidence, for them. And I wanted to talk a little bit about you mentioned the role of Momfluencers, and your research your your broader scholarly agenda looks at the role of Momfluencers, and you talk a lot about their relationship to extreme sociopolitical movements. How did you specifically become interested in their role in the QAnon conspiracy? And just what can you tell us about Momfluencers in general?

AD: So if you bear with me a minute, I'm going to kind of explain sort of the connections between my general research and my extremism research and how Q sort of acts as a nexus point in some ways for that right now. My broad research focuses on ways kind of gender logics and discourses are used online to reproduce dominant cultural structures such as race, class and sexual hierarchies. And in that my dissertation, which is called ÒFierce Mamas: New Paternalism, Social Surveillance, and the Politics of Solidarity,Ó I focus on normative ways that women use discourses about motherhood to enable their public and political speech online. So think about women who identify as ÒMama GrizzliesÓ or ÒSecurity Moms,Ó ÒAnti-vaxxer moms,Ó ÒEco-Moms,Ó ÒMomsRisingÓ and believe me, there's even more of them. But this kind of move to subjectivities through maternalism online, is what I study and how that works to reproduce certain kinds of structures. So it's a strategic practice, is what I argue, where women blend maternalism - the specialized role they have as mothers - with this kind of fierce imagery or kind of warriors fighting on behalf of their children. And that is what they use to provide a basis for their party to speak in public. 

Now, from that my extremist research focuses more on how gendered logics radicalize individuals into racial hate and far right forms of extremism, including the alt right, and male supremacist extremism in the Manosphere. Kind of maternalism broadly, is what connected these for me at first, so my paper on women's recruiting for the far and alt right is was kind of the first place I saw connections and how alt right women were using motherhood as a site for radicalization. But the QAnon phenomenon, along with another reason phenomenon, Tradwife culture online, really are starting to show how deeply embedded kind of materialist and concerns are for circulating these ideologies. 

So what I've seen in the last two or three years is that what I'm discussing in my dissertation is being leveraged in very particular ways in these more extreme frames. And with Q, there's actually a broad subset of mothers engaged with it on different scales, but the ones who are really embedded in it are referred to as the QAmoms. Right? I don't know that they refer to themselves that way but other people refer to them that way. And, and these are women drawn from these online normative cultures, right that I study. And the role of MomInfluences in those cultures is huge. So it makes sense that they would start to engage, and certainly things in their networks that are points of discussion or concern within the broader community. But they do connect very specifically to really far right, alt right, and kind of tradwife cultures, where like a return to feminine roles and domesticity are seen as like a true form of liberation for women. So there's a really kind of interesting set of levers that pull from what is going on in the normative sphere to circulate materials that are much more extreme. And that's why it's kind of really interested me. 

Um, I would say, Q and the kind of Q Mom framing works in particular has been so successful because it's massive, because it repackages a particular ideal of women's liberal, democratic subjectivity, women's proper civic role. A scholar named Lori Merish, describes this in the late 1700s and early 1800s as Òsentimental materialism,Ó where women become democratic subjects by engaging in creating good domestic environments, rearing civically engaged, proper citizens and they do this through their practices of kind of consumption, right? How do you build a good home? How do you rear your children well? How do you do all those things? 

And that's the proper civic role for women in the United States. It's very old. But that is leveraged into the things that I'm studying right now, but just done in a way that meets the current market. So it's the MomInfluencer market in general, right mom influencers, who are literally selling domesticity, literally selling! Right, making a good home, our perfect site where women civic engagement through something like maternalism and sentimentality, right, their care for their children, which then becomes posed as a care for all children. It's just a perfect storm of how that those logics work together, so super interesting.
AD; No, I think that that's fascinating, Ashley, and you know, when you were talking, I just kept thinking of the phrase, Òweaponize motherhoodÓ, right that these women are wielding, as you said, these platforms that they've really built around an image of what maternalism should look like, you know. You see all of these, it kind of ends up in my, you know, the discovery feed on Instagram, where it's just these replications of a particular aesthetic, a particular kind of woman that you should aspire to be. And all of that is then leveraged, as you said, in these online extremist cultures and I think that's really fascinating. And it also gets at this idea of how these online communities reproduce, that kind of fits into my next question of how do these MomIinfluencers see themselves fitting into these extreme sociopolitical movements? And what I mean by that is, a lot of times when we talk about extremists, they particularly you know, they end up on far right YouTube or something, and then they kind of follow that track. Is that the same sort of process for Momfluencers? Like what is the kind of what, what kind of ideology are these women working with before they end up in QAnon? Or are they coming out of there from their own MomInfluencer networks, or were they already, you know, part of the far right networks in other spaces?

AM: So I would say that there's a spectrum, a very broad spectrum there. And I'm sure you could absolutely find people on the far right, influencer networks who are moms who talk about Q, like, that would not surprise me in the least. But what we're talking about with kind of the broad uptake we're seeing with the ÒSave Our ChildrenÓ and ÒSave the ChildrenÓ hashtags are our more mainstream Momfluencers, who have been around for a while, sharing this material. So of those women, right, some don't see themselves as part of a political movement at all, right? They demure on politics almost entirely and focus on the maternal protective aspects and wanting to know the truth so that they can care for their children. 

Some are more explicitly political and engaged with other kind of ongoing conspiracy movements, another place this crosses my dissertation. So because of the pandemic, anti-vaccine rhetoric, which had been growing since 2016, starts to get folded in to some of the Q theories, right, the anti-masking protests have a lot of anti-vaxxer and anti-vaccine moms at them. And these start to circulate around each other because Q is very good at pulling in other strands, right, that makes it more effective, essentially, if you have multiple avenues of government conspiracy that can lead back to the same place. So many of the women engaged in sharing this may or may not know anything about the kind of deeper far right networks when they get into it, I'm sure some do. And you can see in some of the different influencers, some have stayed more mainstream and are sharing Q stuff, but some have like completely pivoted, and their feeds have gone and feeds and the companies they work with have changed entirely into 2A, sorry, Second Amendment concern, focus things and other kind of highly right wing and far right concerns. So you can see people reacting along a different spectrum, which is very useful for followings because people can engage with it at different levels initially, right until they feel the need to develop further. And I don't say that in a good way. But it's, it's a productive thing for engagement, from the perspective of the conspiracy theory itself.

AD: No, I think that makes a lot of sense, especially when you think about how people end up in the QAnon conspiracy, most of the time, they don't, as you would say, like dive into the most extreme, they slowly become more engrossed, that makes a lot of sense.

AM: And I would say the networks of Momfluencers, here, it's one has to have an understanding of how vast the online communities focus on mothering and parenting are to get a real feel for what this is. So colloquially referred to as the Mamasphere, right? There are hundreds of thousands - I would argue millions - of individual pages, large blogs, social media, platform sites, pages, things like that, I mean, to the point where there's a whole genre in the community of influencers that do nothing but aggregate content so their users can find the best parenting content from the community. Right? They make money off of aggregating other content, that's how vast it is. And so within that context, right, top influencers will have two million followers, but middling influencers will have in the tens of thousands, and even kind of baseline influencers, right, people who are not actually making money from companies yet, will have thousands. 

So these are massive networks that are all interconnected and they're not just connected via kind of parenting, that's a that's a prime angle. But as my research on my dissertation shows, they're connected to topics, right? So ecology, anti-vaccine, second amendment, homeland security, LGBT issues, the MamaDragons focus on that, right, so so they do also then out link to wider communities who may not even be in that part of the Mamasphere. And they've taken up the same model, right of influencer marketing, a 360 degree branding. So they have multiple platforms you can access them on so you can get them on your phone, you can get them on your computer at home, you can, you know, engage with them in a variety of ways. And they're funded, the large ones are funded, by major corporations. So it's a really, it's very disturbing that this connection is so broad and deep, because it is a vast swath of the public that is potentially engaged through these networks.

AD: Thanks for that, Ashley. And, you know, when you're thinking about it, you know, I was just sitting listening to the numbers that you're describing. I mean, on the one hand, I'm aware, I'm an Instagram user, I'm a Twitter user, I see how big of a following some of these women have. But then, you know, I totally didn't think about the secondary and tertiary effects right not just the the top level influencers, but what's happening with people with thousands of followers, that's still so many people that they're trying to reach with with these kinds of ads and cultural materials, really. I wanted to ask really briefly, before I asked you a question about the mainstreaming effective this, what kind of platforms are we talking about? I'm specifically thinking about Instagram, is that kind of what sphere you're operating in? Are there other platforms that they're using?

AM: Instagram has definitely become the most central social platform for moms online. The way Instagram works and the images and the sharing of images, and the sharing of kind of aspirational aesthetics is highly popular. So it's definitely the biggest site. A lot of kind of mom bloggers still have ongoing sites and will use social media to connect back to their longer blog pieces and things where they write about products or write about it life experiences. So you can click an Instagram posts and end up in a blog, right? Essentially, or follow through to a blog.

Facebook groups are still also deeply connected, remembering that Instagram is owned by Facebook and connected to Facebook. So that kind of cross-platforming matters as well, because that's a way that someone maybe from a mom network ends up sharing with someone from their broader family and you get other people connected in, right. So yeah, the platforms and the interconnection is, is a big deal, though Instagram is really the central place right now.

AD: That makes that makes a lot of sense. I wanted to go to this idea that I actually spoke with Julia DeCook, who's head of the Gender Research Unit at CARR, we were talking about incels, but I think the question that we were wrestling with really applies to Momfluencers here. One of the things that Julia and I discussed was that it's almost impossible to really separate out the extremist forms of sexism and anti-women violence that you see from incels, from mainstream cultures of sexism, especially in the United States context. So are there connections between more mainstream or normative expressions of what you would call Òfierce motheringÓ to far right ideas of fierce mothering?

AM: So that's really interesting, and I completely agree on the incel front as well. I would say it's really important to kind of note over the history of the Mamasphere, the history of women engaging in this and the development of the practices I talked about, that the majority of Momfluencers and mommy bloggers, right, women online, predominately identified as white, college-educated, and middle class. The ones who are pushing this and really making money, not all the engagements. It's not all of them certainly, it's not entirely that, but there's a very strong strand of kind of white, college-educated, middle class, women engaged in, in these movements, which is also the same demographic that is much touted around the 2016 election of women for conservative voting. And it is a demographic section, that certainly conservative political operatives really work to engage in every political cycle in this country. So yes, there are definitely connections. And I think that that kind of extremist women influencers and that genre, like utilize things from an enormous fear around gender, to circulate stuff. 

So one of my kind of focuses is how gender is really useful for normalizing things that we wouldn't tolerate and kind of everyday speech. So anti-Semitism, racism, right, gender is something, and kind of misogyny and anti-feminism, are really prevalent in our everyday life and embedded into a lot of things. And so they're, they're really acceptable in our culture. And that impacts kind of the online Mamasphere environments as well. I mean, there's a very strong movement, this is where kind of hashtag tradwife culture comes in. There's a very strong anti-feminist return to traditional feminine roles movement within online mom cultures, as well as a progressive one. So those things are things that far right women online, do leverage. And kind of the way it ends up appearing, is that they adapt what I would call a post-feminist sensibility, right? I believe that we don't need feminism anymore, because we're all equal now. And that is kind of prevalent in our society, has been for a while, according to Angela McRobbie. And they turn it into this virulent kind of anti-feminist, right, framework and directive about women's proper role as in society as a mechanism of returning society to its former glory. Right, and because gender in their mind is biologically or divinely imperative, right, that women trying to be equal just like black folk trying to be equal or other people of color trying to be equal that destabilizing society. That's what the problem is. It's not any other issue. It's not economics. It's really this battle over getting back to the right hierarchy, which starts with gender and race.

Or at least that's where I see the interconnections. And so in the mainstream, I would argue that a lot of fierce mothering circulates, what I've called an unmarked, white, feminine epistemology, like white ways of knowing the world, white ways of understanding mothering, white ways of doing mothering, as a universal, right. So it participates in that kind of way from my perspective,
if that makes sense? 

AD: No, that makes complete sense, Ashley, and I think that tracks with a lot of what we talk about at CARR that there's mutually reinforcing discourses around whiteness, gender, that the far right is, in many ways, just a more extreme form of preexisting patterns that we already see that existed in discourse that most of us are part of. So with the time that we have left, because we've been talking a little bit about how people end up in this QAnon conspiracy, many times not quite realizing what they're getting themselves into, how can we as consumers and observers separate out perhaps more benign examples of wanting to draw attention to issues of child and human trafficking to, you know, versus far right conspiracy theories?

AM: So this is a super important question and really important today given that I just saw flagged material online, stating that Q leaders and people prominent in QAnon, are now suggesting that all Q references and QAnon tagging should be removed from their posts to prevent de-platforming and content removal. So it's going to become even dicier as to what things are directly tied to Q if they do go through with that maneuver. Since it's not centralized, it's hard to say how that'll play out, but just that the fact that they've made the calls and apparently have been discussing it for probably about a year, according to the materials I was looking at, means that it's it's going to become more hidden. So it's going to be more complex. 

Most directly I'm going to answer in reference to these Momfluencers networks, because that's what I've spent the most time with and those mechanisms work a little differently than some of the other areas. A primary kind of mechanism of circulation, as we've been talking about a little bit of memes and images and stories and information about Q, is neutralized through the way moms share material. Right. So it's given kind of common aesthetic frames, which you had mentioned pastels, neutral colors, ÒCrate and BarrelÓ or ÒPottery BarnÓ sensibility, insertion among other really normative content. And those work as background context for sharing messaging, and makes those messages seem like an extension of kind of normal concerns. And so it makes them easier to kind of hide a little bit. I would have said before that hashtags and slogans, right, so a primary slogan is ÒWhere we go one, we go all,Ó shorthanded as WWG1WGA, allow posts to fly under the radar, so people who are in the movement, get it and people who aren't yet don't. But if maybe they're on the fence or interested, they can search the hashtag, search the reference, and find out more information. So letting people know like, these hashtags are dangerous, or this slogan or this phrasing is a potential problem, might be one framework, think about.

It's really complicated, because material that's shared by friends or personalities that we trust online has a highly persuasive effect on us. So Momfluencers have that type of legitimacy, what I would call ethos in rhetoric, and that legitimacy they have with audience members who have been following them. And it's built over time, and so those audience members are likely to give them the benefit of the doubt, at the very least, over wacky posts. So it can be difficult to deal with right, having to speak against the legitimacy of someone that someone listens to. So be cognizant, I would say of the fact that that exists, right, that these are trusted sources in some ways. 
Other influencers are openly talking about their conversion in certain ways online as a way to address it head on, and make it seem less abnormal ad that leverages the legitimacy aspect. So it can be important to find out where the person is getting their information from and why they think it should be something they pay attention to. Differentiation is complex and it depends on how becoming is into the conspiratorial mindset. As you sort of mentioned earlier, a conspiratorial thinking means that proof of the theory is proof, and no proof is also proof. Right? 

AD: So the essential paradox.

AM: Yeah. And so if you try to debunk it, right, the answer is C: they're just that good. Right? They've covered it up, and you can't find it. So once someone is kind of having that reaction, normal standard debunking processes and facts won't work for that. So I would say a focus on folks not folded in to the conspiracy theories, that depth yet, would be most open to facts, it's really important to like be suspect of all kinds of ÒSave the Children,Ó all of those hashtags right now need skepticism, until that's not a prime focus of Q anymore. And to question why, why doesn't this post talk about the fact that the majority of children trafficked are trafficked for labor, not sex. There is sex trafficking, but like why aren't there more details about what trafficking is? Why aren't there more details about the kind of everydayness of who typically moves children into trafficking? Right? Unfortunately, it tends to be family and acquaintances and people they know or peopleÉ

AD: Yeah, thatÕs right I was just going to say most of the images that one of the big things that I've seen Q influencing was that, and this is this is true that there, it is very difficult to take pornographic content of children down online. But how it gets there is usually, as you said, from family members that it's not a grand conspiracy, it's abuse and exploitation inside familial networks most often.

AM: Right, and so anything that talking about that, as a prime vector should be suspect. And the Q theories do not actually ever talk about right, the ÒTier ThreeÓ countries, what we call ÒTier ThreeÓ countries in this world, the worst offenders and allowing trafficking, there are 23 of them, most of them emanating from regions such as Eastern Europe and Russia, Central America, Southeast Asia. Um, so when you focus on like Hollywood and the Democratic National Committee, like, that's just, it's not where the trafficking is coming from. And so pointing out like, okay, well, that that may be good information, but like, why are they talking about these other things that we that are known facts, might help people who are fence sitters, or just briefly engaged, to kind of pull back a little bit. Those are the things I can think of, it's a really tricky wicket, in terms of not necessarily separating content, but separating content for folks who don't have a base of knowledge already.

AD: Yeah. And I and I think this is, you know, this is one of the really tough challenges is you're trying to explain to people why focusing on, in quotes, ÒSaving ChildrenÓ is problematic, right? Like that is a tough thing once you when someone has already started going down this path, it's hard to explain the context of why this is a problem to someone. So Ashley, thank you very much for taking your time to be here with us and work through some of these really challenging issues. Where can our listeners read more from you, or hear more from you?

AM: Um, well first thank you for having me it's it's been really interesting to be able to start thinking through this kind of deeper connection to my dissertation work and what's going on here. I am a CARR fellow also in the Gender Unit, so I have some blogs posts up on CARR. I have a ResearchGate account if you're an academic on ResearchGate, where you can find many of my materials. My primary paper on kind of this general topic, ÒShield Maidens: White, (Alt) Maternalism and Women Recruiting for the Far/Alt-Right can be found in the open access journal, Journal for De-Radicalization online. And, you know, other materials are in Fair Observer and Open Democracy that are linked with CARR. And I have a fellowship with the IRMS so little bit everywhere.

AD: Awesome. Well, actually, it sounds like you've got your your brain in many pods to completely butcher that phrase. But thank you again for for taking the time from all the work that you're doing to talk to us today, and this has been another episode of Right Rising. We'll see you next time.