QAnon: Now in the GOP mainstream
With “racist conspiracy monger” Marjorie Taylor Greene headed to Congress, “Republicans are becoming the QAnon party,” said Max Boot in WashingtonPost.com. Greene won a House primary race last week in a deep-red Georgia district—making her a general election shoo-in— despite being an avowed follower of QAnon, an online “cult” that believes President Trump leads a secret effort to expose and imprison a network of “deep state” child sex traffickers. She’s spoken of a “global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles” and calls Q, a supposed U.S. intelligence official who posts anonymous clues on far-right message boards, a “patriot.” More than 50 congressional candidates promoted QAnon this year, including Jo Rae Perkins, Oregon’s GOP Senate nominee. After Greene’s victory, Trump called her “a future Republican star” and “a real WINNER!”
Most political parties have “an outlandish fringe that marinates in paranoia,” said Rich Lowry in Politico.com. The spread of QAnon, however, “shows that the Trump-era GOP has weakened antibodies against kookery.” Q appeals to Trump supporters in particular because it promotes “a radical distrust of traditional sources of information.” Trump and his sons retweet QAnon accounts, and his former national security adviser Michael Flynn is a pledged member. Greene’s nuttiness goes beyond Q, said Jeremy Beaman in WashingtonExaminer.com. She’s an Islamophobe who insists Barack Obama is a Muslim, traffics in anti-Semitic tropes, and claims no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. “Ultimately, Trump avoids disavowing QAnon fanatics” for the same reason liberals tolerate the anarchists attacking Portland and other cities: “They want the votes.”
QAnon’s growth is alarming, said Justin Ling in ForeignPolicy.com. It uses Christian-themed messaging to plant dangerous, sometimes violent delusions with its followers. Many people are complaining that the conspiracy “is destroying their personal relationships,” with husbands, wives, and even mothers spending hours a day online indulging their Q obsession. We’ve reached a “QAnon tipping point,” said Charlie Warzel in NYTimes. com. A leaked internal Facebook study found there are more than 3 million members of QAnon groups. In April, a knife-wielding Q follower was arrested while driving to “take out” Joe Biden. With Greene going to Congress, a niche online conspiracy theory has fully “metastasized” into “a legitimate threat to safety and even democracy.”