Baseless OAN attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson echoes QAnon conspiracy theory
Written by Zachary Pleat
Research contributions from Jasmine Geonzon & Gideon Taaffe
Published
Following Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) Twitter rant yesterday against Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a segment on OAN took his unfounded and misleading attacks against her record in a more deranged direction. The host and her guest falsely accused Jackson of being “kind” to pedophiles, echoing the long-running QAnon conspiracy theory accusing liberal elites of engaging in pedophilia.
During the March 17 segment on OAN’s Tipping Point, host Kara McKinney outlined the conspiratorial accusations against Jackson before RedState editor Brandon Morse immediately dove into QAnon-like commentary about what he described as “the pedophilia problem that is currently happening in the left”:
Citation From the March 17, 2022, edition of One America News' Tipping Point
KARA MCKINNEY (HOST): Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri made a deep dive into the judicial record of Team Biden's Supreme Court nominee. Yesterday, he tweeted his findings. Quote, “I've been researching the record of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, reading her opinions, articles, interviews and speeches. I've noticed an alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson's treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children,” end quote. In 17 follow-up tweets, Hawley documented a pattern of light sentencing for child porn offenders, often against federal sentencing guidelines. For instance, Hawley pointed out, in the case of United States v. Stewart, the criminal possessed thousands of images of child porn and sought to travel across state lines to abuse a 9-year-old girl. The guidelines called for a sentence of eight to 10 years. Judge Jackson sentenced the criminal to less than five years. Joining us now to discuss is the deputy managing editor of RedState and host of RedState LIVE!, Brandon Morse. Thanks for being here tonight, Brandon.
BRANDON MORSE (DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR, REDSTATE): Hey, thanks for having me.
MCKINNEY: Great. So, do you think that this is another story that will be totally ignored by the corporate media?
MORSE: Oh, absolutely. They have been doing their absolute best to try to eliminate any substantial talk about the pedophilia problem that is currently in the left and especially the radical left. They have been trying to make this almost a normal thing for some time. And if they come down hard on it, then it’ll reinforce the idea to society that pedophilia is a bad thing. And it is a very bad thing. It should be come down on hard. But they're not.
And I'm afraid that the reason that they're not doing this is because there's probably more pedophiles, or at least people who are friendly to pedophiles out there, than we might think in positions of power, especially on the left. You know, you had a ton of people suddenly go into hiding or shut up, you know, once Jeffrey Epstein was back in the spotlight for this. And it's scary to think that you have a lot of these leftists, these Democrats, politicians, activists, media figures who have been caught, or who have been trying to ease the pain of any of these pedophiles who are to be -- who should be suffering for their crimes. You see this a lot, lately.
And it's scary to think that this new judge that's come up here is one of these people who is going to be very kind to them. It’s scary to think. And you have to wonder why Joe Biden or any of the Democrats, whoever his handlers are, are wanting to put her in charge. She’s clearly got a very scary history when it comes to pedophilia, or at least handling people who are pedophiles. It's one more drop in the bucket when it comes to dealing with the left and their problem with pedophilia.
Morse’s rant about pedophilia echoes the QAnon conspiracy theory, whose adherents believe former President Donald Trump was (or still is) secretly working to take down the purported “deep state,” a supposed cabal of high-ranking officials who they claim are operating satanic pedophile rings. This conspiracy theory is now deeply rooted inside the Republican Party, and the FBI has labeled it a potential domestic terror threat. It has persisted past Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat and the central anonymous figure of “Q” refraining from any new posts. Most recently, multiple QAnon supporters cheered on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fantasizing that Russian dictator Vladimir Putin will wipe out the imagined “cabal” of pedophiles.
And, following Hawley’s attack on Jackson, some QAnon supporters have promoted it and, like Morse, claimed Jackson “has got a soft spot for pedophiles.”
As farcical as these claims are, they’re also easily disproved. In one of the cases Hawley mentioned, United States v. Sears, Jackson denied compassionate release during the COVID-19 pandemic to a man convicted of possessing child pornography. Also, in United States v. Charles Hillie, Jackson denied a man’s attempt to dismiss federal child pornography charges.
New York University law professor Rachel Barkow called these attacks on Jackson “ridiculous,” and White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded that “in the vast majority of cases involving child sex crimes the sentences Judge Jackson imposed were consistent with or above what the government or U.S. Probation recommended.”