QAnon conspiracy theories have seeped into Northwest politics
In a phone interview Tuesday, Krabach said she doesn’t believe many of the extreme theories promoted by QAnon followers, including the ones about Democratic satanists and child-eating pedophiles running the government.
She said she considers Q’s posts just a starting point for her to do her own research, “kind of like clues in a puzzle.”
Yet Krabach has also posted on Twitter about “the Great Awakening,” which often has a darker meaning. According to the authors of the West Point report, that term is one QAnon supporters use for “the reckoning Trump is thought to bring to what they see as the ‘Cabal’ that has infiltrated the U.S. government.”
Krabach said she interprets “the Great Awakening” differently, as people waking up to the realities of child-sex trafficking. She said she used a similar hashtag, “#NothingCanStopWhatIsComing,” to refer to Trump’s reelection, not to impending mass arrests of Trump’s political opponents or a military coup of the U.S. government.
Then there’s the case of state Rep. Jenny Graham, R-Spokane, who recently shared links to online conspiracy theory sites, one of which promoted theories tied to QAnon.
Graham told Inlander reporter Daniel Walters last month that she hadn’t been aware of the QAnon conspiracy theory at the time she shared those links.
This week, Graham made national headlines after leaving Walters a profanity-laden voicemail lambasting his coverage. Graham didn’t respond to an email from Crosscut seeking comment for this article.
State Rep. J.T. Wilcox, the Republican leader in the Washington state House of Representatives, said Graham takes issues of sex-trafficking very personally because of her family’s history. Graham’s sister, Debra “Debbie” Estes, ran away from home and was later murdered at 15 by Green River Killer Gary Ridgway. Graham told Crosscut earlier this year that Estes was forced to perform sex work as a means of survival before she was murdered.
“She wishes she wouldn’t have used that language,” Wilcox said of Graham, whom he spoke to about the incident earlier this week.
More broadly, Wilcox said QAnon is not something Republican legislators or most GOP candidates are embracing. He called some of the central tenets of the QAnon conspiracy theory, including that Democrats and celebrities are satanist child-traffickers, “not true at all.”
Wilcox said he is disturbed by the spread of misinformation he is seeing online recently, including people posting ideas lifted from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hateful propaganda pamphlet that formed the basis of Nazi ideology in the 20th century. Some experts have said QAnon is a rebranded version of that debunked anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
Neither Chase nor Krabach is a candidate that the House Republican Organizational Committee, the House Republicans’ campaign arm, recruited to run for office this year, Wilcox said.
Even so, Chase is likely to win election to the seat being vacated by Shea in the 4th Legislative District, Wilcox said.
Wilcox said he has never spoken to Chase — but if he wins election to the state House, he will be warned about the danger of spreading false information online.
