Maïmouna Doucouré’s film Cuties will be released on Netflix in September in the US. The initial poster Netflix used showed girls in “sexy” dance costumes. The poster has since been deleted, but thousands are still calling for the film’s cancellation.

While many film critics have expressed bafflement and dismay at this conservative outrage over Cuties, certain bad-faith readings of the film and the campaign of harassment directed toward Doucouré tracks with the increased platforming of QAnon-aligned conspiracy theories in right-wing media. The main conspiracy that QAnon pushes is that there is a global cabal of pedophiles and child sex traffickers controlling world governments and mainstream media, that the Democrats are complicit, and that Donald Trump is a Decker-style savior figure attempting to bring it down. It’s an evolution/devolution of the conspiracy theory that led to Pizzagate, when Edgar Welch shot up Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Pizza in 2016 because he believed Hillary Clinton was operating a child sex-trafficking ring out of its basement.