USA TODAY International Edition
QAnon may be fatal for Trump and GOP
The group is as nuts as the John Birch Society
In 1962, conservative journalist William F. Buckley flew to Florida to meet with Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. His main goal was to persuade Goldwater to run for president on the Republican ticket in 1964. But he also wanted the senator to distance himself from the John Birch Society, which had already indicated support for Goldwater.
And that was bad news for the GOP, because the Birchers were — in Buckley’s term — nuts. Their leader, a candy manufacturer named Robert Welch, charged that over half of the American government was “communist- controlled.” Most notoriously, Welch insisted that former President Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy.”
Like Goldwater, Buckley shared the strong anti- communism of the John Birch Society. But the Birchers’ claims were “so far removed from common sense” that they threatened to undermine the cause, Buckley wrote. “The underlying problem is whether conservatives can continue to acquiesce quietly in a rendition of the causes of the decline of the Republic and the entire Western world ( that) is false.”
The same problem faces the Republican Party this fall, but in a different form. It’s called QAnon, and it’s as removed from reality as the Birchers were. It, too, imagines that the government is in the grips of a conspiracy, this time hatched by a cabal of Satan- worshiping pedophiles. The plot is supposedly led by prominent Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who eat little children ( you read that right) to extract a life- extending chemical from their blood.
Serious inroads
The Guardian newspaper recently found more than 170 QAnon groups, pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram, with over 4.5 million followers. The John Birch Society could only dream of that kind of breadth back in the predigital era. By most estimates, it enlisted fewer than 100,000 members.
And whereas the Birchers fantasized about putting Goldwater in the White House, QAnon already has its man there: Donald Trump. Indeed, it claims, Trump is the only man who can stop the conspiracy eating America ( literally and figuratively) from the inside.
And Trump appears to love QAnon back. He has never addressed its conspiratorial theories directly, but he has retweeted accounts promoting those theories at least 185 times, according to the progressive Media Matters for America. The Washington Post reports that a QAnon TV program recently hosted the communications director for Trump’s campaign, which has also featured QAnon iconography in its ads.
And at a White House briefing Wednesday, Trump said QAnon followers “like me very much” and “love our country.” When a reporter said QAnon imagines him saving the world from a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals, Trump replied, “Is that supposed to be a bad thing? If I can help save the world from problems I’m willing to do it, I’m willing to put myself out there.”
Meanwhile, QAnon- backed candidates for public office are making serious inroads in the GOP. The most prominent is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a Republican primary runoff election last week for a House seat in Georgia. Greene has praised QAnon’s “Q” figure — a mythical truth teller within the government — as a “patriot” who is “very pro- Trump.” Trump tweeted after Greene’s victory that she was “a real WINNER” and “future Republican star.”
Artful dodges
Is that the future Republicans want? The answer for now seems to be yes. One of the few Republicans to denounce QAnon after Greene’s win, Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, tweeted that QAnon was a “fabrication” that should have “no place in Congress.” This earned him a quick rebuke from the Trump campaign’s deputy director of communications, Matt Wolking, who asked why Kinzinger wasn’t denouncing “conspiracy theories pushed by Democrats” like former British spy Christopher Steele’s dossier on Trump.
Note the artful dodge here, whereby Wolking evades the question of QAnon’s veracity by changing the subject. Of course, most Republicans are aware that QAnon peddles absurdities and falsehoods. But they’re afraid to cross Donald Trump, and they think QAnon can help them win in November.
The story of Goldwater and the John Birch Society should make them think again. Pressed by Buckley, Goldwater issued a letter rejecting Welch’s views. But he insisted Welch did not speak for “most members” of the society, who donated heavily to his 1964 campaign.
That boomeranged on Goldwater, who lost in one of the biggest landslides in U. S. history. He was tagged an “extremist” in part because he refused to dissociate from the Birchers. Appeasing nutty conspirators wasn’t just cowardly and dishonest; it was bad politics.
Buckley got it right the first time. If the GOP throws in its lot with QAnon, it will lose credibility with decent- minded voters. They know that our grave national problems can’t be explained away by outlandish conspiracy theories. The only question is whether Republican leaders will have the courage to stand up and say so.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. His new book, “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America,” is due Oct. 27.