Vice President Pence tweeted a photo of himself today posing with a Broward Sheriff’s Office SWAT team that included one cop in a #QAnon conspiracy-theory patch.
#QAnon is the batshit-insane, 4Chan-based conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump is secretly fighting a war with Special Counsel Robert Mueller to capture a secret, elite pedophile ring that includes prominent celebrities and Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
The theory originates from a group of online con-artists, according to one NBC News investigation.
In one of the initially-tweeted photos, an officer is seen prominently wearing a patch that appears to be associated with QAnon.
A troubling photo showing an armed BSO SWAT officer hanging out with Vice President Mike Pence.
The tweet was later deleted and Pence tweeted another version hours later that did not include the original image showing the officer with the patch.
The man’s nametag in the photograph identifies him as BSO Sgt. Matt Patten.
A spokesperson for BSO, Veda Coleman-Wright, confirmed that the department did not know that Patten was wearing the patch when meeting the Vice President.
“The patch is not authorized by BSO,” she said. “This matter will be addressed immediately.”
Earlier this year, a team of investigative reporters at NBC News tracked the first few QAnon posts back to a small group of three online theorists who all but certainly took anonymous “joke” posts on 4Chan and amplified them into a full-fledged conspiracy.
Some of these theorists appear to have accidentally filmed themselves logging into anonymous “Q” accounts that, according to the conspiracy, were supposed to be controlled by secret government operatives.
There’s also a frightening link between QAnon, online conspiracies, and violence: A believer in Pizzagate, a similarly insane theory alleging that high-level Democrats were raping children in a D.C. pizza shop, resulted in one man storming into D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and firing bullets into the floor to expose the allegedly secret child-trafficking tunnels that Pizzagate believers claimed were underneath.
No tunnels exist.
In September, Reddit banned a stream of QAnon-related threads because conspiracy believers kept posting violent threats inside the Subreddits.
Users repeatedly threatened to murder Hillary Clinton.
