“There’s a violent anarchy in QAnon embedded in it,” said Mike Rothschild, author of a book that explores and unravels the most well-known conspiracy theories.
How deeply the infrastructure of the GOP QAnon has penetrated is an open question. So too how Trump’s departure from the presidency and the banning of most social media will affect the scope of conspiracy within the Republican Party.
“This stuff has always been part of the stew,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist in Washington. “Trump only increased the heat and brought it to the surface.
The value of QAnon’s courtship, to the extent that Republican leaders like Trump view it, was to provide votes from a disgruntled, passionate base of support. The risk of doing so was that they would sit at the table.
Now that they’re there, it’s going to be a lot harder to evict them.
“You can not just push away QAnon followers,” Rothschild said. “We have seen that in the run-up to Georgia, where these margins are thin, you can certainly not anger 1 or 2% of your constituents.”
A QAnon caucus
QAnon commitment will remain within the GOP long after Trump leaves office.
First, it is already in the party’s farm system. In the 2020 election, dozens of Republican candidates for local races across the country flirted with the conspiracy theory. Dozens of others have shared views and argued other Trump-inspired conspiracy theories, from railroads against the alleged fraud of ballot papers to wearing masks. Many of these candidates lost races in Democratic areas, but others, such as the Q-curious Dave Armstrong of the Wisconsin State Assembly, won comfortably.
And now some of these conspiracy theorists have moved up to the big leagues in Washington.
“It looks like Trump was looking for the most gullible members, found the Freedom Caucus and even decided they did not want the job, and he cooked up this mutated QAnon caucus,” said one GOP operator.
“Give them a chance before you claim what you believe they did, and what they’re going to do,” McCarthy, the House’s top republic, told reporters. (The GOP operator described McCarthy as ‘footing’ with QAnon-supporting politicians.)
There are many Republicans in the conference who are troubled by the notoriety of ‘fellow travelers’ of these conspiracy theorists and the long-term impact it will have on the party.
“If leadership does not hold certain members accountable, there will be a real problem,” one Republican House member told CNN this week.
Mia Love, a former Republican Rep. For Utah and a CNN contributor, said the GOP conference unit is not dangerous at dealing with toxic members.
“Kevin, for whom I like very much, for whom I have a lot of respect, the only advice I can give him, if he wants to preserve the conference, he has to deal with it,” Love said.
“It’s not just that there are some voters who are committed to this theory and that politicians are not pushing back. People in power accept it,” said Seth Masket, a professor of political science at the University of Denver. “It looks like it’s a path to success in the Republican Party.”
“Everything has become almost everything”
Trump’s centrality with respect to the QAnon theory cannot be overstated, so it is an open question about the motive power of the movement. As long as he was president, however, party leaders essentially welcomed conspiracy theorists in the coalition.
Across the IDP, the rise of QAnon candidates has been gently condemned or tolerated. While leaders of Republican House Greene opposed Georgia’s competitive GOP by-election and condemned insulting remarks about black people and Jewish donors to the Democratic Party, the National Republican Campaign Committee eventually spent thousands of dollars to support its election. The NRCC also supports Boebert’s general election campaign, and both were supported by Trump.
Whether the conspiracy will survive in the next few years as a force in the party depends in part on how much Trump stays on the scene. For years, the president has played an important role in telling QAnon, and experts say it is not certain how believers will calculate him if he is no longer president.
QAnon surfaced in far-right online forums in mid-2017, offering himself as an outlet for Trump supporters to seek a collaborative statement for setbacks or disappointments in government. By the time the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing, QAnon had incorporated many of the far-right conspiracy theories and concerns, Rothschild says.
“With the pandemic, everything became just about everything,” he told CNN. “It’s changing in Bill Gates, it’s changing in China, it’s changing in 5G. It’s all so together and it’s becoming impossible to separate.”
Once Trump started popping up in his own false conspiracy theorizing about a ‘stolen election’, there was a ready and willing community of people who were ready to take up the lies and respond to them. Republican and conservative allies of the president reinforcing his false election claims have given more legitimacy to a movement of people who not only believed in a conspiracy – they were ready 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 danger. For some, it was a wake-up call that the infection had spread and could not be curtailed.
But enough of a wake-up call? The smoothness of ‘support’ for QAnon means that politicians – even Greene and Boebert – maintain the credible denial that they are not in line with QAnon’s violent end.
“To the extent that it appears in Congress, it’s mostly in the form of ‘just ask questions’ or ‘vote’ on behalf of voters,” Donovan said. ‘For those where it’s a vocal constituency, there’s little incentive to confront the people who vote for you. I therefore suspect that in most cases it will be laissez-faire until it re-emerges and cannot be ignored. ‘