If you’re a woman ² in Generation X or among the older Millennials, ³ the refrain from the 1990s’ pop song, Breakfast at Tiffany’s is somewhere in the back of your consciousness. ⁴ Maybe from a late-night college party, which you’re glad wasn’t preserved on social media. Maybe from a high school road trip, as you rushed home to make curfew. Or perhaps from that new exercise class you took in your 20s, trying to work off the physical and emotional hangover of eating and acting like you were still sixteen.

Whatever its resonance, wherever it’s situated deep down in your memory, it’s a familiar refrain, albeit perhaps an unimportant one. But it feels comfortable, maybe a little titillating, and sticks with you. You know how the song goes, even if you don’t play it often.

That’s how QAnon starts. Not for everyone, but for many Q-A-Moms (with “Q-A-Mom” taken to mean all women involved with QAnon to any extent, regardless of whether they have children”). ⁵ In the noise of their digital lives, soothing and seemingly familiar refrains slip in, with a hint of intrigue and hope of deeper meaning. ⁶ Some turn it down. Some hum along then switch the channel. Others turn the volume all the way up and hit repeat. These women become our Q-A-Moms.

Women in the United States involved with QAnon pose a stealth yet significant threat to domestic security, with “domestic” referring both to households (as situated within local and state communities) and to the nation. This threat is underexplored by legal scholars. This essay takes what appears to be a first pass, among legal scholarship, at mapping the Q-A-Mom digital ecosystem ⁷ then identifying a framework and conceptualizing a legal solution space that can be applied more generally to understanding and combatting women engaged with digital domestic terrorist organizations in the U.S. ⁸ The key to understanding and fighting this threat is to stop seeing it primarily, or only, as a digital problem with no easy digital solutions, and start seeing its off-line causes and consequences and, hopefully, off-line solutions as equally important.

This essay proceeds in three parts. It provides (1) a high-level description of what QAnon is and who the Q-A-Moms are; (2) an analysis of how and why women join QAnon, importing the general “quest for personal significance” framework (characterized by “need[s], network, and narrative”) from researchers in psychology to legal scholarship for this specific query into Q-A-Moms; and (3) an initial thought challenge to building the solution space for combatting the threat Q-A-Moms pose. This approach takes the core of the Facebook Supreme Court model (creating new quasi-judicial and law enforcement structures within the private digital sector to address novel problems caused by social media) and creates a new social media rough equivalent of a diversion program within a local court system to address the real life harms that Q-A-Moms (and participants in other hate-based online conspiracy theory movements) are causing to themselves, their families, their communities, and our public health, public safety, and democratic institutions.