QAnon was half right

As Andrew Tate flees Romania for Florida, it's clear that there is an elite global cabal of pedophiles and criminals running the world. It's just not the Democrats.

Notorious misogynist influencer Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan—who are under investigation for rape (including of a minor), human trafficking, and money laundering in Romania—were freed from house arrest today and allowed to flee the country after reported pressure from the Trump administration. As of me typing this post, their private jet was aimed at Florida, where I assume they’ll land directly on the lawn of Mar-a-Lago and be greeted with a ticker-tape parade, or one of those human tunnels parents make after their kids win a soccer game.

Tate, as you may recall, is an avid Trump supporter who celebrated on election day by gloating about the fact that a fellow rapist is once again in charge of making laws about women’s bodies.

The optics of this administration had already been pretty explicit, but I’ll run through them again briefly: Trump has been accused by more than 20 women of rape and sexual harassment, been found civilly liable for rape by a jury, and bragged on tape about grabbing women by the pussy. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paid off his rape accuser, and his own mother said he abuses women. Health Secretary RFK Jr.’s young nanny accused him of groping her, and his cousin Caroline publicly called him a predator. Matt Gaetz had to remove himself from consideration for AG because he paid a teenager for sex. And shadow president Elon Musk—who once baselessly called a British man who rescued 12 Thai boys from a cave a “pedo”—was accused of exposing himself to a SpaceX flight attendant and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. (He also reportedly keeps offering his sperm to women who don’t want it while ignoring the 12 children he already has.)

And aside from destroying the federal government and crashing the economy, the primary mission of our rapey cabinet—literally the best cabinet Musk has ever seen, he said while presiding over a meeting of it yesterday despite having no official position in it—appears to be to purge the nation of trans people and immigrants. Because trans people, Republicans insist, are all perverts who assault women in bathrooms and “groom” young kids to be sexual just by existing, and immigrants, Trump falsely claims, are “rap[ing] women at levels never seen before.”

Here’s just a sampling of how this propaganda has played out in the past week:

• Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is purging all LGBTQ people from the NSA using the pretext of what right-wing sociopath Chris Rufo mischaracterized as an explicit “sex chat,” which was actually just an employee resource group for queer staffers

• The United States is denying visas to athletes around the world who “are deemed to misrepresent their birth sex” on their applications, which may essentially just ban all trans people from seeking visas

• The sex panic continues at libraries across the South, where one Louisiana parish forced librarians to pull 30,000 YA books off the shelves and read through them all for “sexually inappropriate content”

• A new PEN America analysis found that the books that are being banned under the pretense of protecting children overwhelmingly feature LGBTQ people/characters or people/characters of color rather than any kind of sexually explicit material

• Trump surrounded himself with young girls to sign a bill that will allow for the genital inspections of student athletes to make sure they are the right biological sex, calling the order an attempt to “reclaim our culture and our laws” from trans people

Folks, I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but the call is coming from inside the house. The threat to our kids is the deadly measles outbreak in Texas that already killed one of them this week because men like RFK Jr. have been sowing doubt about life-saving vaccines, and the fact that we probably won’t have flu shots next year because he just canceled the FDA meeting about it. The threat to our kids is lionizing men like Andrew Tate who are building an army of lonely, angry boys that scream “your body, my choice” at girls in middle school. The threat to our kids is removing environmental regulations that keep our air and water clean and defunding disaster relief efforts that respond to hurricanes and wildfires.

We all have an aunt or uncle who probably sits on Facebook too much and got sucked into QAnon conspiracy theories around 2017-18. Q insisted that the world was being run by an elite global cabal of pedophilic criminals and rapists, and that Donald Trump had been sent to stop them. It was really hard for me to believe, even then, that anyone with a single brain cell could take seriously the idea that Trump—Jeffrey Epstein’s good buddy—was the guy who was supposed to save the world from rape and pedophilia and that ring of Democratic criminals. But as the Tate brothers land safely in Florida while we deport actual babies from U.S. soil for being the wrong ethnicity, I do wonder if the people who got sucked into that cult are capable of any kind of self-reflection, ever. Because the irony is so thick that this point that we’re all collectively choking on it.