Ok, this is even more nuts than I realized. The infiltration of Q into the mainstream is getting scary. How many people can be dumb enough to buy into this lunacy? (Don’t answer that — we know about 40% of the population thinks Donald Trump is a good president, so …)
Outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, Kayleigh McEnany raised a microphone to a mega-fan and asked what it felt like to be acknowledged by President Trump at his February rally in Sin City.
At the time a spokeswoman for Trump’s reelection campaign, McEnany nodded as the supporter said the shout-out was most meaningful because of the words on the shirt he was wearing, which he read aloud: “Where we go one, we go all,” the motto of QAnon conspiracy theorists who believe Trump is battling a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex.
McEnany, who has since become the White House press secretary, continued, asking the supporter, “If you could say one thing to the president, what would you say?”
“Who is Q?” he replied, inquiring about the mysterious online figure behind the baseless theory. McEnany smiled and said, “Okay, well, I will pass all of this along.”AD
The little-noticed exchange — captured in a video posted to YouTube — illustrates how Trump and his campaign have courted and legitimized QAnon adherents.
The viral online movement, which took root on Internet message boards in the fall of 2017 with posts from a self-proclaimed government insider identified as “Q,” has triggered violent acts and occasional criminal cases. Its effects were catalogued last yearin an FBI intelligence bulletin listing QAnon among the “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories” that “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”
As the worldview took shape online,its followersflocked to Trump rallies with QAnon apparel and placards. Recently,as the election hasdrawn closer,actions by the president and his associates have brought them more directly into the fold.
The Trump campaign’s director of press communications, for example, went on a QAnon program and urged listeners to “sign up and attend a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative training.” QAnon iconography has appeared in official campaign advertisementstargeting battleground states. And the White House’s director of social media and deputy chief of staff for communications, Dan Scavino, has gone from endorsing praise from QAnon accounts to posting their memes himself.
The president has repeatedly elevated its digital foot soldiers, sharing their tweets more than a dozen times on Fourth of July alone. His middle son, Eric, who is 36 and a campaign surrogate, recently posted, and then deleted, an image drumming up support for his father’s Tulsa rally that included a giant “Q” and the text, “Where we go one, we go all.”AD
The apparent convergence of Trump’s inner circle with an ever-widening cohort of QAnon believers is alarming to scholars of extremism and digital communications, some of whom characterize the theory’s adherents as a cult. What most troubles analysts, however, is not that McEnany and others responsible for carrying out Trump’s agenda are amplifying QAnon, which has permeated right-wing politics and inspired a cadre of congressional candidates who could soon bring the philosophy to Capitol Hill. Even more worrisome, these observers say, is that the president’s messaging is increasingly indistinguishable from some key elements of the conspiracy theory.
The erroneous ideas defining QAnon — that Trump is a messianic figure fighting the so-called deep state, that he alone can be trusted, that his opponents include both Democrats and Republicans complicit in years of wrongdoing and that his rivals are not just misguided but criminal and illegitimate — represent core tenets of the president’s reelection campaign, especially as his poll numbers slump.
Meanwhile, the salvation envisioned by QAnon believers, including military takeover and mass arrests of Democrats, rhymes with the president’s vow to use the armed forces to “dominate.” They back his endorsement of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that has not been proved to prevent coronavirus infection, and cast skeptics, including Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, as a deep-state plant.AD
“We’re seeing the Trump campaign tack closely to an almost explicitly QAnon narrative,” said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I don’t expect to hear the president talking about pedophilia or Satanism, but I expect to hear almost everything else.”