QANON KIDNAPPER

From Will Sommer's 8-16-20 DAILY BEAST article entitled "QAnon Promotes Pedo-Ring Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Stealing Kids.":

QAnon conspiracy theorist Alpalus Slyman pushed his Honda Odyssey past 110 mph while his five children screamed in the back of the minivan and police officers from two states pursued him down the highway.

“Donald Trump, I need a miracle or something,” Slyman, a 29-year-old Boston man, said during his June 11 chase across Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in remarks captured on a livestream.

“QAnon, help me. QAnon, help me!”

It’s not clear what set off the police chase, but Slyman appears to have been convinced by QAnon theories that the government was out to kidnap his children. Inspired by videos he had watched online, Slyman warned his children during the chase that the police were coming to abduct them—or maybe just shoot them in a staged killing. In return, they begged him to pull over. His daughter even tried to grab the wheel of the minivan and drive it off the road after he accused her and his wife, who had dived out of the vehicle at the start of the chase, of being agents of the nefarious cabal that QAnon believers say controls the world.

“They want to make us crazy,” Slyman said, “but I’m not crazy. My wife and my daughter were a part of it.”

Desperate, Slyman’s daughter told her father she was working for the mythical cabal in a failed attempt to scare him into stopping the minivan. Then Slyman told his children, who ranged from 8 months to 13 years old, about the QAnon belief that a video of Hillary Clinton and aide Huma Abedin eating childrens’ brains was discovered on Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

Days earlier, Slyman had watched a video pushing exactly that claim on a YouTube channel operated by Timothy Charles Holmseth, a QAnon promoter who claims to work for a secretive government agency called the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force.

There is no Pentagon Pedophile Task Force. But there in the middle of a high-speed chase, Slyman spouted that baseless claim to his children anyway.

“Hillary’s demonic,” Slyman said. “I know about Hillary cutting open a 10-year-old. And Huma Abedin.”

New Hampshire police blew out Slyman’s tires, but he kept going. The chase only ended when Slyman crashed into a police cruiser, then drove his minivan into a tree. Slyman was arrested, and now faces three felony counts in New Hampshire. His five children were unharmed.

At first glance, Slyman appears to be just the latest loony loner allegedly driven to crime by QAnon—a list that already includes an armed man who blocked a bridge near the Hoover Dam with an armored truck in a terrorist incident and two alleged murderers.

But the video that Slyman viewed before his police chase came from a more specific, organized campaign.

In short, QAnon has upped its game. No longer content to promulgate nutjob conspiracy theories about famous politicians and government officials who kill and eat children, a group of QAnon believers are now actively encouraging parents estranged from their children to steal those children back from child protective services. And the campaign is alarmingly successful.

Click HERE to read the rest of Sommer's article. 

(And click HERE to read my recent five-part SALON series about QAnon.)