On July 7, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and frequent Fox News contributor, published a tweet that contained startling but inaccurately sourced statistics about the alleged growth of human trafficking arrests under the Trump administration. It stated there were 1,952 human trafficking arrests through all of 2016, but in the first half of 2018 authorities had already made an astounding 5,987 human trafficking arrests. Kirk’s tweet falsely claimed these figures came from the Justice Department. Kirk deleted the tweet shortly after the true source of its figures was revealed: the notorious imageboard 8chan, home of the QAnon conspiracy “researchers” of the /qresearch/ board. The board’s “research,” which consisted of sloppily compiling information from nationwide news reports about human trafficking and child pornography arrests and charges, seeks to support a core belief of the QAnon conspiracy theory — that Trump is secretly battling a corrupt deep state and an evil cabal of pedophile Satan-worshiping elites. QAnon believers think if they can show that more human traffickers are being arrested, it will support the baseless notion that Trump is finally putting an end to long-protected trafficking rings used by these elites.
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josh buermann
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