One day in early July, marketing professional Melissa Rainn Lively went to her local target

store in Scottsdale, Arizona.

It wasn't a normal shopping trip.

In a profanity-laced Instagram post that went viral, she recorded herself trashing a rack

full of face masks.

This attack on the mask was quite a turnaround from Melissa.

Just five months earlier, at the beginning of the pandemic, Melissa said she bought a

supply of N95 masks and even a hazmat suit.

So how does she get from there to here, surrounded by a pile of masks on the ground, target

employees staring at her, and earning the nickname QAnon Karen?

Tom Tremayne Lee and this is Into America.

Today, while we all need to be paying attention to the dangerous conspiracy theory known as QAnon,

and how social media makes it all too easy to turn people like Melissa against masks and

send conspiracy theorists to Congress.

People can write this off as something very silly, but the fact of that is there is enormous

historical precedent for this sort of satanic panic.

This sort of thing happens very fast, so we have to be very careful.

Ben Collins is a reporter for NBC News.

He covers this information, extremism, and the internet.

He's been reporting on the QAnon conspiracy theory for years.

So Ben, what is QAnon?

QAnon is a wide-ranging set of beliefs, but basically it started like this.

...