Take a conspiracy spouting President of the United States who believes that Democrats, some republicans, bureaucrats, the media and the medical establishment are working together to undermine his presidency, and connect him with a bunch of conspiracy theorists who think that government Deep State operators were running a pedophilia ring out of a Georgetown pizza shop and the leader of Germany is the granddaughter of Hitler.
What could possibly go wrong?
Since the days of his campaign, Trump has welcomed the support of the followers of QAnon, a group loosely connected to one another by an overarching belief that virtually everyone and everything is working to undermine the freedoms and liberties of Americans, detailed in a report by the Washington Post.
QAnon symbols, slogans and placards have been rampant at Trump rallies from the start of his last presidential campaign in 2015. Even his then comms director (and now White House Press Secretary) Kayleigh McEnany has spotlighted Q followers in campaign interviews.
On the Fourth of July, Trump retweeted more than a dozen different QAnon conspiracy theories, and his conspiracy theories about Dr. Anthony Fauci working against the Trump campaign have been picked up as gospel by Q followers, who believe Trump is the only person who can take down the Deep State.
“We’re seeing the Trump campaign tack closely to an almost explicitly QAnon narrative,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Post. “I don’t expect to hear the president talking about pedophilia or Satanism, but I expect to hear almost everything else.”
The republican support for QAnon, and QAnon’s support for republican candidates goes beyond the Executive branch. Many candidates for state and local offices spout QAnon theories, drawing crowds to rallies and upvotes on social media.
Platforms such as Twitter and YouTube, citing their terms of service, have tagged posts spouting QAnon theories, drawing ire from Trump and others. Thousands of accounts affiliated with QAnon followers have also been deactivated.