MAGA = QAnon = Trump’s GOP
Earlier this week the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump asked, “What ever happened to QAnon?”
QAnon, if you recall, is the far-right conspiracy theory that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles controls the world, and that former President Donald Trump is the only person who can defeat it, once he’s dispensed with his golf, grifting, and pussy-grabbing responsibilities.
It did not take Mr. Bump long to get an answer!
A South Carolina man arrested after barreling his car through the FBI’s front gate in Atlanta on Monday has a long history of far-right posts on social media — and he even wrote “I love you” to Donald Trump, according to new research.
Ah, love. A timeless emotion we can all relate to! But seriously, what the fuck.
Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that researches online extremism, said the suspect in the attack espoused conspiracies about the 2020 election and other QAnon-adjacent beliefs.
Meanwhile, a little further south, “DJ Don” was spinning wax at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for Kari Lake’s Arizona Senate campaign fundraiser, which featured the conspiratorial stylings of the QAnon Queen herself, Roseanne Barr, who on the video in the link below seems to be going for a Bette Davis Whatever Happened to Baby Jane vibe, but with less warmth:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1775881678910583009
In the video, Roseanne implores college students to drop out. Why? Because “they don’t teach you nothing good.” (Talk about undermining your message, amirite?)
Oh, and also because “it isn’t nothing (again with the poor grammar!) but a bunch of devil-worshipping, baby blood-drinking, Democrat donors.”
And the college cafeterias? They serve free-range baby organs! Talk about woke.
Roseanne wasn’t merely “riffing” on the video (though she’s undoubtedly perfectly capable of doing so, as long as the subject is how everyone is a sheep and the Democrats are evil). She literally was ticking off bullet points from the QAnon handbook, which is built around an imaginary dystopian world evolving from a bunch of posts in 2017 and beyond by some shit-stirring douchebag on 4chan, an Internet gathering spot for incels and other angry losers.
The anonymous shit-stirrer, known as “Q,” built a following by “dropping” vague posts on 4chan along with other, highly detailed posts that predicted political events and invariably were incorrect. But the inaccuracies of Q’s predictions pale in comparison to the delusional core beliefs of the QAnon faithful. Here they are, literally, in a nutshell:
QAnon consists of a number of deeply convoluted conspiracy theories and elevates theories ranging from Satanic blood rituals to the faked death of John F. Kennedy Jr., all tenuously centered around the belief that the world is controlled by a global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. This kitchen sink approach is a major reason why QAnon has gained such a substantial following in its relatively short life; since its 2017 inception, the movement has become a “big tent” conspiracy capable of accommodating and encompassing all sorts of theories and global events.
A survey from two years ago showed that 25% of Republicans are QAnon believers (versus 14% of independents and 9% of child blood-drinking Democrats), while the percentage of Americans who completely reject QAnon conspiracy theories fell to 34% in October 2021 from 40% seven months prior.
I haven’t seen any newer data, but the fact that the number of Americans who recognize the insanity of QAnon theories was declining is pretty depressing. Just re-read that indented paragraph again, the one about the blood rituals and Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run the world. One third of Americans think there just may be something to all of that. And most of them are Republicans.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that a fixture of Trump’s rallies is his droning litany of doom, delivered over QAnon theme music.
So there you have it. The QAnon virus is alive and well, hiding in plain sight, and its new host is Donald Trump and his Republican party. I’d be surprised if Trump doesn’t have “Q” on his list of vice presidential candidates to audition this spring and summer, along with Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, and that robot zombie from the 1950s who taught him his dance moves.
I’ll leave you with some unfiltered MAGA. This is what we’re dealing with, folks.
(From Project Orange: Saving Democracy From the Trump-MAGA Cult)
