Conspiracy theories aren’t dangerous when they get things wrong: they’re dangerous when they get things right.  

QAnon—the online game of interdimensional chess in which Donald Trump does covert battle with a hyper-powerful cabal of monied pedophiles—is factually false in almost every particular. Justin Bieber is not sending a coded message about being sex trafficked because he touched his hat on Instagram. Donald Trump was not reinstated as president on August 13. And Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor does not have children locked up in its basement awaiting molestation by Hillary Clinton, for the simple reason that it does not have a basement. 

But there are still people out there who believe, and this, according to CNN’s Oliver Darcy, has helped “to mainline the notion…that elites are sexual deviants seeking to exploit kids.” So the real threat of the Q mythos is its portrayal of American high society as a corrupt network of deranged predators. This is a problem, because it’s basically true. 

This week, the journalist Christopher Rufo obtained an explosive set of videos in which major executives at Disney outline a “not-so-secret gay agenda” for the future of children’s programming. “I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually: one transgender child, and one pansexual child” says corporate president Karey Burke, tearfully expressing her hope that Disney will soon feature many more LGBTQIA characters than actually exist in real life.  

This grotesquerie is unfolding before us because Florida’s legislature, with the support of Governor Ron DeSantis, made it illegal to teach public school students about alternative sexualities in kindergarten through third grade. The hue and cry which issued from opponents of this bill was in itself a kind of unmasking. “In order to build relationships you talk about your home life,” said Florida Kindergarten teacher Cory Bernaert: “I don’t want to have to hide that my partner and I went paddleboarding this weekend.” 

I can imagine that chatting about home and family might be part of a normal day in Kindergarten. But what I cannot imagine is that it is impossible to educate small children without telling them about your love life and outlining prospects for theirs. The really damning thing about the reaction to Florida’s bill is not that some teachers think it’s appropriate to mention their after-school activities in class. It’s that LGBT maximalists think it’s mandatory for all children to know about and endorse every possible variety of sexual pursuit, parental attitudes notwithstanding. 

This entitlement to other people’s kids is what convinces Disney executives that they not only can but must trans children’s psyches everywhere. Their aspiration is not simply that a small minority of adults should be able to make private choices in peace. It is that no person, anywhere, should be allowed to harbor reservations about any other person’s sexual habits, however unusual. So children must imagine and long for a world which is more gender-fluid even than the one we currently occupy. Hence the urgency of piping colorful fantasies of a sexualized future into television sets around the country. 

It all starts to sound very quickly like grooming on a mass scale, glossed over with a sinister veneer of tolerance and fun. In other words, a hyper-powerful cabal of monied predators. 

People who fall for Q sense that they are being purposefully denied crucial information by power brokers who deem them unworthy of making informed choices about the most important aspects of their lives. They are exactly right about that. But until recently, they had no power to rectify the situation, no way of exposing the truth. It would be enough to drive anyone mad. So they made up a false story to express their true sense of what was going on. 

Now it turns out that children are in fact being catechized into a monstrous doctrine of confusion and self-mutilation. When parents resist, they are both patronized and villainized. If Q really is a problem, it’s because wealthy groomers really are coming for your kids. But we don’t need conspiracy theories to tell that story anymore. The groomers are telling it themselves. 

What comes next is easy to foresee: defenders of Disney will portray the vast majority of reasonable people as QAnon conspiracists just for noticing the outrageous words that the gender goblins are saying. But of course, the talking heads who are paid to run this kind of interference aren’t real enemies of Q: they created Q, by lying ceaselessly in defense of an evil regime. But when the ringleaders of that regime say what they really believe, people don’t like it very much—and not just conspiracy theorists, either.