Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America

by Will Sommer

Save the Children’s origins began earlier that summer, when Facebook started deleting some QAnon content. To avoid the ban, believers organized around a hashtag used by Save the Children Fund, a child welfare charity founded in 1919. By operating under Save the Children’s name, they figured, they could dodge Facebook’s rules. But “Save the Children” came to encompass more than just a way to hide from Facebook’s moderators. Instead, it became a rallying cry for a social media–centric trend that embraced QAnon’s tenets about widespread Satanist abuse of children but had nothing to do with the Q drops or orthodox QAnon. Save the Children played on old QAnon tropes, but it arrived at a time of especially high interest in child sex-trafficking. The suspicious 2019 jailhouse death of wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, officially a suicide by hanging, prompted new public interest in the idea of powerful elites abusing children. That created an opening for a kind of QAnon that reached beyond its usual base of Trump supporters.