It's always worse than you think

Donald Trump retweeted a video late Tuesday night that originated from an account called Deep State Exposed, a subscriber to a QAnon conspiracy theory, which tweeted that Transportation Security Administration officials are “perverts” capable of “mind control.”

[...]

[T]he video in question ― originally taken in 2017 and featuring a young boy being frisked at a TSA checkpoint ― made only two stops between Deep State Exposed and one of the biggest platforms in the world.

[...]

On Monday, Deep State Exposed resurfaced the video, tweeting, “Perverts at TSA busted detaining and fondling young boys!!!” The account — which is run by Jeremy Stone, a conspiracy theorist author, per the Post — followed up with a rant suggesting that the TSA is full of pedophiles.

[...]

That tweet was picked up by far-right celebrity and conspiracy theorist James Woods, regurgitated by comedian Larry the Cable Guy, and then retweeted by the president.

  HuffPo

So whose account do you think he follows?

followers believe, among a laundry list of other fantasies, that Trump is working alongside an anonymous high-ranking official (dubbed “Q”) to unearth a global cabal of elite pedophiles. Those beliefs drive them to do increasingly violent things.

One prominent QAnon account with 21,000 followers, Bards Of War, tweeted on Tuesday a list of prominent pols and investigators ― like former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch ― alongside a notice that they’d been “designated” as “capture or kill.” The owner of Bards Of War later said the account was hacked and deleted the tweets. But Bards Of War also reacted to Trump’s TSA tweet, writing, “buckle up. No one is safe.”

[...]

The Deep State Exposed account says Trump has retweeted it nine times, and the video that Trump parroted this week now has more than 3.6 million views.