QAnon Is Winning – By Kaitlyn Tiffany (The Atlantic) / Nov 7 2020
Conspiracy thinking in America had a huge night on Tuesday.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who has repeatedly expressed belief in the QAnon conspiracy theory, was elected to the House of Representatives Tuesday night. Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado who has said that she hopes QAnon is real because “it only means America is getting stronger and better,” won her contest too. Come January, almost a million and a half Americans will be represented in Congress by people who support a community bent on proving that President Donald Trump is waging a holy war against a high-powered cabal of child traffickers and blood-drinking Satanists that includes prominent Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities. This worldview is vehemently anti-media, anti-science, and—despite its claims of patriotism—antidemocratic, because it often calls for Trump to lead a military coup against the “deep state,” and to execute political enemies and “child-killers.” The FBI has deemed QAnon a domestic-terrorism threat. Trump refused to denounce it throughout his reelection campaign.
Earlier this year—before Greene’s and Boebert’s victories; before baseless theories about child trafficking spread across the internet, possibly permanently damaging the standing of a furniture company that has never been found guilty of wrongdoing; before QAnon led rallies in dozens of cities—it might have been easy to imagine that the end of Trump’s presidency would spell the end of QAnon. But QAnon is bigger than Trump, and with a robust conspiracy theory, there’s never a crisp end. In a worldview dominated by the belief that Democratic elites have rigged the system, a Biden victory wouldn’t be a repudiation—it would be further evidence of a scandal. And the longer, closer, and more drawn-out vote-counting is, the more baroque the theories can become.
Throughout Election Day, Q, the anonymous forum poster whose cryptic messages are the basis for the conspiracy theory, was notably silent, and the community’s narrative was muddy and fluid. First the deep state was going to shut down the internet for 10 days so that nobody would know how mightily Trump had trounced Biden; then it was going to do the same thing, but so that nobody could talk about how brazenly the election had been stolen from him. As misinformation about the state of the election in Pennsylvania swirled online, QAnon supporters suggested that Trump was focusing “the world[’s] eyes” there because it is a deep-state “stronghold.” On Instagram, QAnon-adjacent lifestyle influencers were anxious and praying for the president, but celebrating the return of a major QAnon Instagram figure known as Little Miss Patriot, who has been banned several times and continues to make new accounts that quickly rack up thousands of followers. Known for rendering conspiracy theories in colorful fonts over pretty pastel backgrounds, she was back under a new name, asking fans to tag her if they were wearing Little Miss Patriot merch. (After an inquiry from The Atlantic, Instagram deleted the account.)
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