More GOP Candidates Are Embracing QAnon, And Supporters Don't Seem To Care
Lauren Witzke is a onetime believer in QAnon whose political beliefs have been forged in the virulent online world of white nationalists. On Tuesday, she earned another moniker: Republican candidate for Senate.
QAnon is a false conspiracy theory from the fringes of the internet which imagines that President Donald Trump is battling a cabal of Satan-worshipping, pedophiliac Democrats and celebrities who run a global sex trafficking operation and secretly control the world. Its believers’ rantings are often coupled with Islamophobia, white nationalism, anti-Semitism, violent threats and claims that the COVID-19 pandemic is a hoax. Some have turned violent, and the FBI has said QAnon poses a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Witzke, who tried to distance herself from QAnon over the course of her race, is the second believer in the QAnon conspiracy to win a Republican nomination for the Senate.
Like the other adherent, Jo Rae Perkins of Oregon, who won a three-way Republican primary to challenge Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Witzke is not expected to win in a deep-blue state.
Still, her capture of the nomination — by more than 13 percentage points over an opponent the GOP endorsed — underscores that Republican voters are comfortable elevating believers in a hateful conspiracy theory to higher office.
Increasingly, so is the party.
At least 24 candidates for Congress who support the QAnon conspiracy theory will appear on the general election ballot in November; 22 of them are Republicans. Few are poised to win. But they nevertheless have support, or are encountering no resistance, from a growing roster of powerful people within the Republican Party.
QAnon believer Marjorie Taylor Greene is all but certain to win a seat in Congress, having handily won a Republican primary in deep-red northwest Georgia in August. (She may also run unopposed; her Democratic opponent dropped out of the race last week). In a 2017 video, Greene embraced the conspiracy...
