During Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) repeatedly and erroneously claimed that Jackson had been soft on those convicted of possessing child pornography. This baseless line of argumentation was not designed to spark debate over federal sentencing guidelines or to assess Jackson’s qualifications to serve on the Supreme Court. Rather, it seemed to be an attempt to smear Jackson, while courting a growing Republican constituency: adherents to QAnon, an extremist ideology based on a sprawling set of false claims that the FBI has deemed a domestic terrorism threat.