QAnon conspiracy theorist makes bizarre speech about raw milk at Donald Trump rally

Republican candidate for US president (again) Donald Trump returned to the site where he survived an assassination attempt in July – Butler, in Pennsylvania – on Saturday (October 5) for his latest campaign rally which featured a bizarre appearance from Elon Musk and a speech from QAnon conspiracy theorist Scott Presler about protecting raw milk.

Yes, really.

Presler, a conservative activist from Virginia, organised several “stop the steal” rallies following the 2020 presidential election and was at the Capitol on January 6 – an insurrection he claimed was “the largest civil rights protest in American history”.

He’s previously worked for ACT for America and planned a number of ‘March Against Sharia’ during his time there.

The organisation is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “the largest anti-Muslim group” in the US, spreading “the hateful conspiracy theory that Muslims are infiltrating US institutions in order to impose Sharia law” and “[stoking an] irrational fear of Muslims”.

In 2021, the organisation Media Matters for America published analysis which found at least 54 posts from Presler on his Instagram account – between 2018 and 2019 – using the hashtag ‘QAnon’.

At least 29 used the hashtag ‘WWG1WGA’, which stands for ‘where we go one, we go all’ and is a slogan associated with the conspiracy theory – a baseless theory which claims there is a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles within America’s elite that are running a global child sex-trafficking ring and are at war with Donald Trump.

Yeah, it’s a lot.

So what’s all this about raw milk?

Well, rather than heed the US Food and Drug Administration’s well-researched warnings about the dangers of consuming raw milk over pasteurised milk – it notes that it can carry “dangerous germs such as salmonella, E. coli … and others that cause foodborne illness” – right-wing commentators have interpreted it as government overreach and a conspiracy.

Owen Shroyer, a host on the far-right platform InfoWars (owned by Alex Jones), said on his show back in April: “So now that more people are going to local farms and farmers’ markets and consuming raw milk, this angers the FDA. This angers Big Milk.

“They’ll just make raw milk illegal … They don’t want you consuming anything that doesn’t go through the FDA.”

And Presler himself platformed the conspiracy theory in Pennsylvania this week when he was invited up on stage by Lara Trump, who is married to Mr Trump’s son Eric.

He told the crowd: “To our beautiful Amish in Lancaster and across the state: we will protect your raw milk, your dairy, your farming, your school choice, your religious freedom … your ability to afford to have 10 beautiful children per family.”

The remarks have since seen Presler and his comments branded “weird”, “bizarre” and “kind of creepy”.

At this point, weird comments from Republicans are becoming a ‘dairy’ occurrence (sorry).

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