EPISODE 57: Inside the Mind of Qanon with Special Guest Dr. Mia Bloom

Radicalized: Truth Survives, an investigative podcast on disinformation and radicalization with Heidi Cuda, Jim Stewartson, High Fidelity, and Sean Conner. Special Guest: Mia Bloom.

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Guest socials:

@miambloom on twitter

Bio:

Mia Bloom is the International Security Fellow at New America and a professor at Georgia State University. Bloom has conducted research in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia and speaks eight languages. She has authored several books and articles on violent extremism including Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (Columbia 2005), Living Together After Ethnic Killing (Routledge 2007) Bombshell: Women and Terror (UPenn Press 2011) and Small Arms: Children and Terror (Cornell 2019) and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon with Sophia Moskalenko (Stanford 2021). She is publishing Veiled Threats: Women and Jihad (in 2023). Bloom is a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has held appointments at Princeton, Cornell, Harvard and McGill Universities. She serves on the Anti-Radicalization advisory board of the Anti Defamation League, and the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UNCTED) and a member of advisory board of women without borders. She has a PhD in political science from Columbia university, a masters in Arab studies from Georgetown university and a double honors degree in Russian history and Islamic studies from McGill university in Montreal.

With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon's unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.

“Pastels and Pedophiles” connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe―appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q's mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.

Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon's corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light.