President Donald Trump failed to denounce the far-right conspiracy movement QAnon during his NBC town hall event on Thursday night.
After the president was asked once again to clearly denounce white supremacy, Today host Savannah Guthrie followed up with a question about QAnon, a pro-Trump group that believes that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring involving Hollywood celebrities and Democratic politicians that are plotting against the president. In 2019, QAnon was designated as a potential source of domestic terrorism by the FBI and this year has been banned by major social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“Can you disavow QAnon in its entirety?” Guthrie asked the president.
“I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia,” Trump replied, deflecting the question and asking why his rival Joe Biden had not been asked to disavow the anarchist movement Antifa.
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Guthrie continued to press the president, explaining what QAnon was, “They believe it is a Satanic cult run by the Deep State.” Guthrie added that Republican Sen. Ben Sasse had called QAnon “crazy.”
Trump continued to demure replying, “I just don’t know about QAnon.” There followed a back and forth between Guthrie and Trump on what was known and not known about QAnon, with Guthrie pushing the president saying, “You do know.”
Deflecting once more, Trump replied that all he knew was that QAnon was “against pedophilia” adding, “I agree with that.”
In June 2020, Twitter banned thousands of QAnon related accounts and pledged to tweak its algorithm to downplay QAnon related tweets and hashtags. Earlier this month, Facebook announced a sweeping ban of all QAnon groups, accounts and content on their platform and its subsidiary Instagram. Google’s YouTube followed this week by pledging to change its video recommendations to reduce viewership to QAnon content by 80 percent.
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