QAnon Believer Who Threatened Congresswoman Thought He Was Saving the World
Michael David Fox of New Mexico thought the congresswoman was secretly transgender and threatened to shoot her.
by Evan Urquhart
Michael David Fox of La Cruces, New Mexico told agents he was saving the world when he phoned in a threat to kill a sitting congresswoman, according to news reports based on court documents. The threat included accusations that the congresswoman, who has not been identified, was herself transgender. Fox further explained to FBI agents who questioned him about the threats that he figured out she was trans based on his forensic analysis of her skull measurements.
screenshot from Fox5 San Diego
Fox further identified himself as a member of the “Q movement,” often called QAnon, and said that he and other believers wanted to save the world from trans people who are “running governments, kingdoms and corporations.” That’s right, trans people run the world and only QAnon believers can stop us, presumably through making violent threats over the phone to members of congress, or though actual real world violence.
The QAnon conspiracy theory, if you’ve somehow missed it, claims the world is secretly controlled by pedophile Satan worshippers, and only President Donald Trump can fight it. QAnon is also notorious for folding other conspiracy theories into its framework, something that has apparently happened with transvestigation, a conspiracy theory that all or most prominent people are secretly transgender. This dovetails well with the addled worldview of QAnon believers there is no independent existence of trans people outside of the schemes of the deep state pedophiles who secretly run the world and are using transgender identity to control the minds of young people. Making all these secret Satinist child abusers trans as well is a small step further, and no less insane than all the rest of the QAnon nonsense.
The conspiratorial thinking of QAnon has long since blended into the mainstream of Republican politics, and the belief that trans existence is inherently (though nebulously) connected to child sexual abuse has been helped to fuel unprecedented legislative attacks on the constitutional rights of the LGBTQ+ community. These attacks include repeated attempts to ban drag performances, as well as bans on evidence-based treatment for minors with gender dysphoria.
Inevitably, this insane rhetoric, which seeks to erase any distinction between trans people living their lives in peace and the horrific sexual abuse of children, also leads to violence. How could it do otherwise? These threatsagainst a congresswoman by a QAnon believer are just one small example of how the Republican party’s embrace of this conspiracy and its believers is fueling an extremism problem on the right that is only getting more and more dire.