The QAnon Dog Whistle at the SCOTUS Confirmation Hearings

The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson have been marked by bizarre lines of questioning from Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Maybe none was weirder and more surprising than an attack by Josh Hawley, who planted the idea that Jackson is abnormally sympathetic toward consumers of child pornography. He presented his case in a long Twitter thread on March 16, five days before the hearings began, pointing to a handful of sentencing decisions in which she didn’t recommend the maximum possible penalty for those kinds of crimes.

Hawley’s claims about Jackson’s leniency are , though they have since gained some traction. During yesterday’s hearing, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Jackson that she and other judges were “making it easier for the children to be exploited.” The White House this line of inquiry an “embarrassing, QAnon-signaling smear”—but things were about to get even more explicitly QAnon-related. For today’s slate of witnesses, Senate Republicans called , the chief legal officer of international operations for the anti-child-trafficking nonprofit Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), an organization that is at this point for flirting with QAnon, despite any connection.