“There is a violent anarchy for QAnon that is built into it,” said Mike Rothschild, the author of a book that examines and debunks some of the most prominent conspiracy theories.
How deep into the GOP infrastructure QAnon has penetrated is an open question. This is also how Trump’s departure from the presidency and the banning of most social networks will affect the extent of the conspiracy within the Republican Party.
“These things have always been part of the stock,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist in Washington. “Trump just increased the heat and brought it up.
The value of courting QAnon, as far as Republican leaders like Trump considered it, was in delivering votes from an unsatisfied and passionate support base. The risk of doing so was that they would get a seat at the table.
Now that they are there, it will be much more difficult to evict them.
“You can’t just keep QAnon’s followers away,” said Rothschild. “We have seen, certainly in the second round of Georgia, where these margins are narrow, you cannot irritate 1 or 2% of your constituents.”
A QAnon caucus
QAnon’s devotion will remain within the GOP long after Trump leaves office.
On the one hand, it is already in the party’s farm system. In the 2020 election, dozens of Republican candidates for local disputes across the country flirted with the conspiracy theory. Dozens more had adjacent views and continued with other Trump-inspired conspiracy theories, from protests against the alleged postal ballot fraud to the use of masks. Many of these candidates lost contests in Democratic-oriented districts, but others, like curious Q Dave Armstrong of the Wisconsin state assembly, won comfortably.
And now, some of those conspiring politicians have moved up to the major leagues in Washington.
“It’s as if Trump was looking for the most credulous members, found Freedom Caucus and decided that they weren’t even ready for work, so he prepared this mutant QAnon caucus,” said a GOP agent.
“Give them an opportunity before claiming what you believe they have done and what they will do,” McCarthy, the House’s most important Republican, told reporters. (The GOP agent described McCarthy as “playing with his feet” with non-QA politicians.)
There are many Republicans at the conference disturbed by the prominence of “fellow travelers” of these conspiracy theorists and the long-term impact this will have on the party.
“If the leadership does not hold certain members accountable, there will be a real problem,” a Republican House member told CNN this week.
Mia Love, a former Republican representative from Utah and a CNN contributor, said the failure to deal decisively with toxic members jeopardizes the unity of the Republican conference.
“Kevin, whom I adore, for whom I have a lot of respect, the only advice I can give him, if he wants to preserve the conference, he needs to deal with it,” said Love.
“It is not just because there are some voters who adhere to this theory and politicians do not back down. People in power embrace it,” said Seth Masket, professor of political science at the University of Denver. “It seems to be a road to success in the Republican Party.”
‘Everything has become about everything’
Trump’s centrality to the QAnon theory cannot be overstated, which is why it is an open question as to the movement’s staying power. While he was president, however, party leaders welcomed conspiracy theorists into the coalition.
Throughout the GOP, the emergence of candidates for QAnon was either gently condemned or tolerated. While House Republican leaders opposed Greene in Georgia’s competitive Republican primaries and condemned her offensive comments about blacks and Jewish donors to the Democratic Party, the Republican Campaign National Committee ended up spending thousands of dollars to support her election. . The NRCC also supported the campaign for Boebert’s general election, and both were supported by Trump.
Whether the conspiracy will survive in the coming years as a force in the party, depends in part on how long Trump remains on the scene. For years, the president has been a crucial actor in QAnon’s narrative, and experts say it is not certain how believers will regard him once he is no longer president.
Appearing on far-right online forums in mid-2017, QAnon presented himself as an outlet for Trump supporters looking for a unifying explanation for management setbacks or disappointments. By the time the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, QAnon had absorbed much of the theories and concerns of the far-right conspiracy, says Rothschild.
“With the pandemic, everything changed,” he told CNN. “It becomes Bill Gates, it becomes China, it becomes 5G. All these types of mushes together and it becomes impossible to separate.”
Once Trump began to get involved in his own false conspiracy theory about a “stolen election”, there was a ready and willing community of people online ready to absorb these lies and act on them. Republican allies and conservatives of the president, extending their false electoral allegations, gave more legitimacy to a movement of people who not only believed in a conspiracy – were preparing to fight it.
But the January 6 attack on the Capitol showed Republicans and the country the consequences of tolerating conspiracy theories without fully understanding them or justifying their threat of danger. For some, it was a warning that the contagion had spread and could not be contained.
But enough of an alert? The slippery character of “support” for QAnon means that politicians – even Greene and Boebert – maintain a plausible denial that they are not in line with the violent end of QAnon.
“As it appears in Congress, it is mainly in the form of ‘just asking questions’ or ‘giving a voice’ on behalf of the constituents,” said Donovan. “For those where this is a vocal constituency, there is little incentive to confront the people who are voting for you. So I suspect it will be laissez-faire in most cases until another instance where it raises its head and cannot be ignored. . “