‘Q’ THE TEA PARTY OF 2018?

Remember the tea party? Nine years ago, a grassroots movement of conservatives and others concerned about the economy and the big-government ideas being perpetrated by President Barack Obama sprang up across the country and helped Republicans take back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010.

Democrats and the left never quite got it. They couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t take to the president’s ideas and why the country should be concerned about the bloating national debt, and they belittled the rise of the frustrated millions.

President Trump, as has been illustrated here and elsewhere, similarly exasperated the left. Its adherents couldn’t grasp how everyone wasn’t ready to lap up what Hillary Clinton was spouting, how eight years of an administration left most of Middle America disheartened, and how a blustery businessman and reality television host could say controversial things and still be accepted.

Jump to 2018 and the latest creation to confound Democrats. It’s “Q ,” or QAnon, an unidentified person, movement or — perhaps — well-conceived prank that is ostensibly behind Trump and portends to have inside information about the federal government’s next moves, knowledge of what The Washington Times called “a worldwide criminal conspiracy involving special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation” and even a top-level security clearance.

“Q’s” identity, according to “Q ,” is known by fewer than 10 people in government.

Posts from “Q” first appeared on the website 4chan last October, and QAnon is the movement — such as it is — that has grown out of the popularity of those messages. QAnon. pub, for instance, has recently received about 7 million hits per month. Now, at Trump rallies and the president’s other public appearances, people wear “Q” T-shirts, carry “Q” supportive posters and sometimes heckle the media.

What “Q” adherents seem to have in common, like the president, is a distrust of traditional media and a belief in conspiracy theories. “Q ,” for instance, has predicted an arrest of Hillary Clinton and a roundup of anti-Trump liberals but also that Trump would order a “state of temporary military control” last fall.

Last week, a “Q” post asked, “How do you safeguard the integrity of our elections from domestic & foreign criminal actors? How do you utilize the Russia narrative to knock out decades old election corruption? Why are D’s opposed to cleaning up voter rolls? Why are D’s opposed to imposing VOTER ID LAWS to further safeguard our elections?”

Those are little different from questions many Americans are asking. But media outlets don’t have to go far to find people to knock down the posts or movement.

“It’s an incredibly dangerous movement when the president of the United States is part of an attempt to separate people from credible sources of information,” Chip Berlet, a Massachusetts-based author and researcher on political extremism and conspiracies, told The Washington Post. “You have a large number of people who accept this information from Q even though they don’t know if there’s a real person or people behind it.”

Trump has made no secret of his dislike of the national media, his well-founded belief in its bias and his inability to get a fair shake from its members.

Although none of “Q’s” aforementioned possibilities has happened, it’s the link of the president and “military control” or the president and an arrest of Clinton that make leftists crazy. They spread it, many believe it and another episode of “fake news” lives.

Trump supporters and even many non-supporters, on the other hand, have witnessed through the years the growth of the “shadow government” or “deep state,” the labyrinthian government agencies whose employees seem to be unanswerable to any presidential administration (but especially to conservative administrations) and whose powers seem to exceed those of a president.

The existence of such only increases the concern about what a president might do with the help of such agencies, or, perhaps scarier, what a group of agencies might have the capability to do without help from a president.

Trump, meanwhile, hasn’t commented on the movement, but White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders oddly answered a question last week about whether the president “encouraged” its support by saying he would not be supportive of “any group that would incite violence against another individual and certainly doesn’t support groups that would promote that type of behavior.”

In that, the White House may have learned from last year’s Charlottesville, Va., incident where a presidential remark left him painted as a racist when he accurately said there were bad actors on both sides of a violent incident surrounding a Unite the Right rally around the removal of a Confederate statue.

At this point, the “Q” movement appears to have little more cache than a “National Treasure” film. While national organizations and documents in the 2004 and 2007 movies existed, the existence of treasure maps and hidden conspiracies involving those organizations and documents did not.

Time will tell if “Q” has any real insight into the federal government, though we know the “deep state” has gotten too big and too powerful, but people shouldn’t put too much trust in unproven theories and predictions.

On the other hand, the more the left fears a secret pseudo-government source with inside information, the more unhinged it looks as we approach the November mid-terms.