What a difference a word makes

On Friday night just over a week ago I went to a Save Our Children meeting. Now, most people will read that and think I've been a civic-minded citizen, going along to a charity meeting. Save Our Children is a good thing, right? To which the answer is no, because Save OUR Children is not the same thing as the established charity “Save THE Children”.

Save the Children is a global charity that works to help children in need in over 100 countries, and has been operating for over 100 years. They work to protect vulnerable children from mistreatment, and offer them food, healthcare and education.

Save Our Children on the other hand is a local group in NZ who have existed for about 1 year, and is one of the results of people believing in the QAnon conspiracy.

As background to this, in the US, back before the last but one presidential election, a conspiracy theory became very popular with many who were anti-Clinton - Pizzagate. The basic idea of Pizzagate was that a popular pizza restaurant in Washington DC, frequented by Democrats, had a basement that was being used for trafficking in children. This story was expanded on over time to include an elaborate plot where children were abused in order to cause them to create a chemical called adrenochrome, which was then extracted from their blood and sold to rich people - the elites who are running the world.

When QAnon became popular in the States, they found that if they went out on the streets with QAnon signs, people would often ignore them or argue with them - but talking of saving children was much more likely to get a positive response. And so the QAnon conspiracy movement started to work under the banner of “Save the Children”.

In 2020 the real charity Save the Children put out a press release on the “use of its Name in Unaffiliated Campaigns”. Basically they distanced themselves from QAnon believers, pointing out that there are real charities who are focused on the real trafficking issues around the world (but not Save the Children), and that they own the trademark to the name “Save the Children”.

I'm guessing this is probably why our local QAnon believing group have chosen the name Save Our Children instead of Save The Children - although they also use the name Dark2Light online as well.

Like Counterspin's tour a few weeks ago, the Dark2Light group - mainly a woman called Carlene and her wife - have been touring New Zealand, giving talks and trying to drum up support for their cause. The event I attended on Friday was fairly small, with maybe 40 or 50 people in attendance - and I recognised a few familiar faces from the Counterspin event.

The venue was an old Catholic church building in Brooklyn, Wellington that appears to have been taken over by a church called The Light House. Signs around the room talked of Satanic Ritual Abuse, Organ Harvesting and WWG1WGA - a QAnon rallying call, which means Where We Go One, We Go All.

Carlene was the main speaker, and the first half of the evening was her telling her personal story. It started off fairly believable, with a tale about a family she looked after over the lockdown, and an abusive adult attached to that family. From there the story became larger and larger, with talk of corruption in the child welfare system, Police, government, etc.

Apparently Streets ice cream is a part of the conspiracy because of their heart shaped logo, the queen abducted 10 Canadian children in the 1960s, and a Dunedin company makes face cream out of baby foetuses (foetuses that are worth a million dollars each). Also, Prince Charles has a love child in the South island who is the product of a sex ritual, adrenochrome harvesting is a more pressing issue than Satanic Ritual Abuse, the Evergreen (actually the Evergiven, owned by the Evergreen shipping company) was deliberately stuck in the Suez canal to recover powdered adrenochrome, there is a baby farm in Taupo and Ukraine is responsible for most body part harvesting.

As is so often the case with groups like this (Scientology is a good example), there was already the beginning of a new vocabulary being used - as well as talk of adrenochrome, there was “innerstanding” instead of “understanding”.

For the second half of the evening, three people came to the front to tell their stories. This portion of the evening made me extremely concerned, as in at least one case it seemed likely there's a large component of mental health issues in the mix. But instead of these people getting the help they need, proper support from professionals, they're talking publicly about abuse. Some of it sounded real and devastating, but at least one testimonial was so extreme (and supposedly the victim witnessed it when they were two years old and has distinct memories of the events) that I have to assume it was not factual. The people giving their testimonies all seemed keen to connect their stories to what Carlene had spoken about earlier in the evening, and they added their own ideas, such as that under 3 Waters 1,200 million tonnes of water will be exported from New Zealand every day on shipping containers like the Evergiven.

(For reference, the Evergiven can carry 200,000 tonnes of cargo (including fuel, etc), so these water shipments would require 6,000 container ships of that size every day coming to NZ to fill up.)

There are issues around the world with how children are treated, including in our country - we have some fairly disappointing rates of child poverty and poor child health outcomes. But this movement is ignoring that reality. I get that these people think that they're helping, but they have focused on an imaginary issue fuelled by unproven conspiracy nonsense from the darkest recesses of the internet, where there's a global battle for people's votes and anything goes. This movement can only make things worse. I really hope people are able to see it for what it is - a sham front for a handful of pro-Trump religious conservatives in New Zealand.