QAnon Cheers Republican Attacks on Jackson.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
QAnon Cheers Republican Attacks on Jackson. Democrats See a Signal.
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T he online world of adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory sprang into action almost as soon as Senator Josh Hawley tweeted his alarm: that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, had handed down sentences below the minimum recommended in federal guidelines for possessing images of child sexual abuse.
“An apologist for child molesters,” the QAnon supporter Zak Paine declared in a video the next day, on March 17, asserting without evidence that Democrats were repeatedly “elevating pedophiles and people who can change the laws surrounding punishment” for pedophiles.
By Wednesday, as Judge Jackson appeared for the third day before the Senate Judiciary Committee, claims that she was lenient toward people charged with possessing the illegal imagery had emerged as a recurring theme in her questioning by Republicans.
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“Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, picking up the line of attack.
Never mind that those sentences did not come up at Judge Jackson’s confirmation hearing last year to a federal appeals court, that other judicial nominees have faced no questions about similar sentencing decisions, or that a former federal prosecutor called the allegations “ meritless to the point of demagoguery ” in the conservative National Review.
The line of attack has set off a new debate over the Republican Party’s stance toward QAnon. A White House spokesman this week accused Mr. Hawley of pandering to the conspiracy theory’s believers among his party’s rank and file, calling his comments an “embarrassing QAnon-signaling smear.” Conservatives, in return, blasted the Biden administration for invoking the specter of QAnon for its own political agenda, to fire up the Democratic base without addressing the questions.
“Conspiracy theorists did not travel back in time to make the nominee write her law review note about whether certain criminals are punished too harshly or make Judge Jackson hand out such lenient sentences,” a spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, wrote in an email.
“Left Invokes QAnon After Josh Hawley Exposes Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Soft Record on Child Sex Offenders,” declared a headline on the right-wing website Breitbart that was widely shared this week in QAnon circles.
A spokesman for Senator Hawley declined to comment on his motivations.
Although few QAnon followers appeared to take notice of Judge Jackson’s sentencing record before Senator Hawley’s tweets, her judicial career had touched the roots of the conspiracy theory: an earlier internet myth known as Pizzagate .
That debunked theory held that Satan-worshiping Democrats were trafficking children out of the basement of a Washington restaurant, and in 2017 a believer armed with an assault rifle stormed in and fired his weapon. Judge Jackson, as a district court judge, sentenced him to four years in prison, saying his actions “left psychological wreckage.”
The QAnon conspiracy theory was born a few months later when an anonymous writer — often signing as Q — elaborated on the discredited myth that a cabal of top Democrats was abusing children. Q purported to be a top official close to President Donald J. Trump and asserted that the president was waging a secret war against the cabal.
Slogans about protecting the children became catchphrases that QAnon adherents used to identify one another, and their bizarre fantasy — initially encouraged by far-right news outlets, then promoted by a ring of social media influencers — appeared to spread widely among Trump supporters. At least two Republican lawmakers elected in 2020 had made statements supportive of QAnon, and prosecutors say that many people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol subscribed to the theory.
Among those now echoing the Republican allegations about the judicial nominee, in fact, is Ron Watkins, a former website administrator who is widely believed to have played a major role in writing the anonymous Q posts. Mr. Watkins, who has denied any part in the Q messages, is running for the Republican nomination to an Arizona congressional seat, largely on the strength of his QAnon association; this week, he qualified for the ballot.
“Judge Jackson is a pedophile-enabler,” Mr. Watkins wrote Wednesday on social media. “Any senator who votes to confirm her nomination is also a pedophile-enabler.”
QAnon Telegram channels on Wednesday grew increasingly agitated. “She has committed unbelievable crimes against humanity with her judgeship,” one user wrote. “If she gets confirmed the victims remain victims & trapped in the misery bestowed on them,” said another. Some talked of violence.
Polls suggest that QAnon supporters have continued to make up a significant portion of the Republican base even after Mr. Trump’s departure from office contradicted Q’s predictions. One poll last October found that about 60 percent of Trump voters had heard of QAnon, and 3 out of 10 of those Republicans viewed it favorably.
Yet the same poll found that Democrats were far more likely to say they had heard a lot about QAnon and also overwhelmingly to reject it, and other polls , taken after the attack on the Capitol, indicated far more widespread condemnation. Democrats thus have much to gain politically from linking the name “QAnon” to Republicans questioning a Supreme Court nominee, the polls suggest, but individual Republicans might benefit by signaling to QAnon supporters without explicitly naming the movement.
“You wouldn’t talk about the extreme stuff, but you would talk about how people in elite power are enabling traffickers,” said Bond Benton, an associate professor at Montclair State University who has studied QAnon. “That is a secret handshake to the Q crowd.”
Other conservative commentators have noted that soft-on-crime or soft-on-sex-crime accusations against politicians or judges have long resonated widely with voters regardless of connection to QAnon, disputing the accusation that the Republican questions are any kind of covert signal.
Others on the right have also accused Democrats of employing their own dog whistles — notably when Amy Coney Barrett, a practicing Catholic and now a Supreme Court justice, was nominated to an appeals court. Many conservatives have said that they heard a covert appeal to anti-Catholic or anti-religious bigotry when Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, told the judge that “ the dogma lives loudly within you .”
Jim Manley, a former top aide to the Senate Democratic leadership who helped wage a half-dozen battles over Supreme Court confirmations, said that party elders often understand the Senate math makes confirmation highly likely and prefer to get it over quickly, without mudslinging that could alienate moderate voters — in this case, by evoking QAnon.
“But I learned the hard way that there are always some in the caucus — especially those who may be thinking about running for president — who are going to want to throw some red meat to the base,” Mr. Manley said. “They just can’t help themselves.”
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Q iand Q People are all coocoo for cocoapuffs...
Of course they cheered. The feel threatened by any black woman who refuses to sit at the back of the bus.
I guess if Q Anon is against you, you must be doing something right.
Consider the source, mental retreads.
Quseful idiots.
The Democratic Senators should ask Judge Brown what the sentencing guidelines would have been for former Republican Speaker of the House and right wing conservative Dennis Hastert for molesting children and then trying to bribe them to keep them quiet about the abuse. Let's have that discussion for an hour or so on live TV, talk about all the graphic ways the former Republican leader molested children and what the proper sentence should have been. Or perhaps they should just go down the long list of both accused and/or convicted Republican sexual predators instead of spending their time complaining that a judge didn't throw the book at every sexual predator/pedophile case she heard and actually took each case by case and applied the law.
But Qanon isn't interested in conservative pedophiles because that's where their roots are and who makes up their base of conspiracy nut job enablers.
I've always suspected that the Q thing is a deliberate cover for 'the real international young thing sex ring' enjoyed by the elite super rich.
The death of Epstein under Barr is too convenient. Was he just another grocery clerk?
This article, the Q thing and all of that, I would normally assume that Putin is smiling. However, I doubt Putin is smiling much now and his greatest fear is getting the 'due' he's deserved for decades.
I also would not be surprised that in the near future the Q folk will depart when another 'Hale Bop' arrives to swiftly whisk them away.
Her record of leniency toward child pornographers and those in possession of child pornography should disqualify her alone. Of course there are those liberals who are just fine with pedophiles, child molester and child pornographers and don't believe those should not be criminal acts.
Sentencing guidelines, look it up. She wasn't soft on it, she was following the guidelines.
Federal sentencing guidelines for child pornography is 5-20 years for first time violators not the three months she was imposing
Was that for internet porn or actual pictures? See, there is a big difference when it comes the the law. The two are not the same. When the cases you are talking about came up, the law was based on individual pictures, not digital media. Huge difference, please Arky, go look it up.
What is the "HUGE" difference you talk about. In Jackson's mind and I guess your's this somehow makes them less of a pedophiles.
I did and it does not make any difference. Kiddie porn is kiddie porn no matter how you get yours
This is only an issue of concern for the delicate sensibilities of Republicans today because they’ve got nothing else to latch on to with this unimpeachable nominee. Apparently it was no concern whatsoever when Graham voted to confirm her as a federal appeals court judge. Now it’s a melodramatic stomp out of the hearing in a tizzy level of concern.
This is only if concern of democrats because they got shot down in their efforts to pack the courts by adding justices and because liberals are still in the minority on the court.
they got shot down in their efforts to pack the courts by adding justices
ROFL. What effort, and shot down how and by whom?
1) I REALLY hope you're not implying anything by saying, "yours".
2) It doesn't make a difference now because the laws have changed, back then, it DID make a difference.
Not implying anything. It was an editorial yours. I am not a liberal. I don't make accusations without adequate proof.
Personally, as the father of two daughters, if it were up to me pedophilia in any form would warrant the death sentence. But I accept that society has to write laws that do define the difference between a person caught with a single inappropriate smart phone photo of a 14 year old and the person caught with multiple pics of pre-pubescent children or someone with hundreds or thousands of gigs of hard core child porn.
Is there some magic number of photos or gigs or whatever that should determine the punishment? Is it one, six, sixty, six hundred, six thousand? Or is it as former Justice Potter Stewart said to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that". That would imply it should be determined by our courts and judges on a case by case basis and not Monday morning quarterbacked by partisan dip shits who are merely trying to smear a judge simply because their opponents nominated them.
And while my sentiment towards pedophiles may be a bit harsh in some peoples opinion seeing as I'd want them put to death or at best sentenced to life in prison, I do understand that even pedophiles were often themselves victims of sexual abuse and thus accept that our society, through our justice system, can express empathy and humanity even when punishing such vile unacceptable behavior.
But back to the point, does anyone really believe the Republican Senators whining about this actually give a fuck about the handful of pedophile cases they claim Judge Brown was too lenient in? Really? I watched them and while they got very animated, it was clear it was all for show. This was one of the thinnest lines of attack I've ever seen and is clearly pure retaliation coming from the party of right wing 'conservictims' constantly whining about how wronged they have been just so they can justify their scorched earth partisan politics, their representatives bad/immoral/unethical behavior and their bitter hatred of liberals.