For the last three years, the amorphous QAnon conspiracy movement has seeped into the fringes of President Donald Trump’s internet world, with supporters even popping up at the president’s rallies.
But QAnon adherents are now filtering into electoral politics.
According to Media Matters, a progressive watchdog group that monitors conservative media, there are 51 candidates running for Congress who have promoted the messages of “Q” — a mysterious internet figure who drops digital “crumbs” about a secret war Trump is waging against a cabal of pedophile political elites in Washington. And on Tuesday, seven of them emerged in congressional Republican primaries. One of them, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, is favored to eventually end up in Congress.
The loosely connected cohort that follows Q, known as QAnon, exists in a symbiotic relationship with the president, and sees Trump as an almost messianic figure. Q has prophesied an upcoming event dubbed “The Storm,” when Trump will reveal the mass arrest — and potentially even the mass execution — of the Washington figures responsible for everything from a worldwide child sex ring to murdering a Democratic National Committee staffer. Meanwhile, Trump has flirted right back, inviting one of QAnon’s top promoters to pose with him in the Oval Office, and retweeting over 130 tweets that directly reference QAnon-related claims.
Now the president is seeing a tangible political benefit from the relationship — the GOP candidates who reference QAnon are also those who cling most closely to Trump.
Source: Politico Check link for the entire article.
