Beware the Increasing Criminality of Q'Anon Supporters

A Q'Anon supporter is believed to have abducted her 6-year-old son in an incident marking the latest connection between pro-Trump conspiracies and quack “sovereign citizen” legal theories-- and even worse, providing further evidence of the increased criminal proclivities of the Q'Anon movement.

According to the Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake, Utah resident Emily Jolley is believed to have kidnapped her son Terran. Jolley does not have legal custody of her son, and took him during a once-a-month supervised visitation.  The whereabouts of Jolley and her son are unknown, and an Amber Alert issued for Terran is still active.  But this purpoted kidnapping goes beyond a mere custody dispute.  Instead, it’s the latest in a growing trend of QAnon supporters, who obsessed with child trafficking and fringe legal theories, are kidnapping or planning to kidnap their own children.

In August, The Daily Beast reported on a network of QAnon believers and bogus legal experts who focus on mothers who have lost custody of their children.  Convincing the women that their children have been funneled by Child Protective Services into the kind of sex-trafficking networks envisioned in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, they then tell the women to use ludicrous legal maneuvers borrowed from the anti-government “sovereign citizen” movement.

Sometimes, these custody fights turn criminal.  In one case, a QAnon believer in Kentucky allegedly kidnapped her twin daughters, and was later found hiding out with a group of anti-government "sovereign citizens".  In another, a Colorado mother whose son had been taken to a foster home allegedly plotted an armed raid on the home with QAnon believers, who then used a nationwide network to hide her when she became a fugitive.

Utah authorities believe Jolley has ties to the sovereign citizen movement, according to Detective Dan Moriarty, who is investigating Terran’s disappearance.  “The mom does really seem like she aligns with the sovereign citizen stuff,” Moriarty said.  Jolley’s Facebook page is filled with references to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that imagines that Donald Trump is in a shadowy war against a nefarious cabal of Satanist pedophile-cannibals in the Democratic Party and Hollywood.

In December, Jolley posted an article claiming that Child Protective Services abducts children and drains them of “adrenochrome”—a blood-like substance QAnon believers claim that “cabal” members drink to stay alive.  In April, she posted a movie poster-style meme that juxtaposed a picture of Donald Trump with the letter “Q,” with text claiming that Trump is poised to arrest members of a sinister cabal.

In May, she re-posted advice for people “in the Q movement” filled with sovereign citizen-style language that claimed Trump would soon lift all credit card and mortgage debt.  Jolley has also posted supposed evidence about “the mass arrests of pedophiles,” claimed there is a “giant human trafficking ring operating in Washington DC,” and posted various QAnon-related articles alleging that various prominent celebrities are sex criminals.

Jolley’s Facebook posts also echo other pro-QAnon parents who have abducted their children, with references to Child Protective Services’ supposed involvement in human trafficking.  LIke many other Q'Anon parents at the center of abduction cases, Jolley is also a member of the Facebook page for E-Clause, a supposed legal services group run by non-lawyers that offers bogus legal tactics similar to those deployed by the sovereign citizen movement.  Women accused of child abduction-related crimes in Kentucky and Colorado have also been connected to E-Clause.

Timothy Butler, Terran’s father, told a Utah TV station that he suspects Jolley is being harbored by a group of sovereign citizens.  In a Facebook livestream, Jolley’s twin sister, Erica Wanner, said Jolley became interested in sovereign citizen legal tactics as a way to regain custody of her son.  “That’s when she sought out that sovereignty group,” Wanner said.

The Utah investigation into the abduction also revealed that fake sovereign citizen legal theories played a role in the abduction. When police asked Jolley’s mother where her daughter had gone, the woman provided them with a bogus document from the “Supreme Court of the Utah Common Law Constitutional Court,” according to a local news report.

There’s no actual legal entity with that name, but sovereign citizens often use the phrase “common law” to prop up their own, fictitious legal systems, suggesting Jolley was trying to deploy “sovereign” legal theories to re-gain custody of her son.   Jolley’s mother was later arrested and charged with second-degree felony obstruction of justice over the kidnapping.

Detective Moriarty said police were still looking for clues about where Jolley and her son could be.  “People just are not talking, and it’s really just gone underground,” Moriarty said.

Child abductions aren’t the only crimes that have been connected to QAnon.  An armed man disappointed that several QAnon predictions failed to come true, shut down a bridge near the Hoover Dam with an armored truck in 2018.   Crimes associated with Q'Anon have now escalated to murder.  A QAnon believer named Anthony Comello believed that Gambino crime family underboos Frank Cali was a member of the "deep state" and attempted to perform a citizen’s arrest and deliver him to a nonexistent QAnon tribunal-- Comelo shot Cali ten times outside his house, killing him.

In April 2020, Q'Anon supporter Jessica Prim was arrested carrying several knives after live-streaming her attempt to "take out" presidential nominee Joe Biden.  Prim was arrested in New York City on a pier where she appeared to have been trying to get to the U.S. Navy Hospital Ship Comfort.

The FBI has now identified QAnon-driven extremists as a domestic terrorism threat.  In a 2019 intelligence bulletin, the FBI stated that Q'Anon conspiracy theories "very likely will emerge, spread, and evolve in the modern information marketplace, occasionally driving both groups and individual extremists to carry out criminal or violent acts."

Despite the crimes connected to QAnon, Donald Trump has praised QAnon believers as recently as August, calling them “people who love our country.”  According to an analysis conducted by Media Matters,  Trump has amplified QAnon messaging at least 216 times by re-tweeting or mentioning 129 QAnon-affiliated Twitter accounts, sometimes multiple times a day.