About this item
In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women died that day. They, like the millions of Americans who believe that a mysterious insider known as "Q" is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy, were members of "pastel QAnon," a subgroup of mostly middle-class educated women that answered the call to "save the children." With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of pastel QAnon should not surprise us: women have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. They track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi mama Instagram, fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence, and connect the dots for readers.
About the Author
Mia Mellissa Bloom is Professor of Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and the author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (NY: Columbia University Press 2005) and Living Together After Ethnic Killing edited with Roy Licklider (London: Routledge 2007) and Bombshell: Women and Terror (U Penn Press 2011) . She is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and has held research or teaching appointments at Princeton, Cornell, Harvard, and McGill Universities. Bloom has a PhD in political science from Columbia University, a Masters in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a Bachelors from McGill University in Russian and Middle East Studies.
