GOP Senators Tip Hat to QAnon
Donald Moynihan reports for The Washington Post that QAnon catchphrases were all over the recent hearings for the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson. Q may have been wrong about the 2020 election, but that has not stopped its power.
One of Q's central tenets is a "child sex trafficking ring run by a global cabal of Democratic politicians, financial, media and Hollywood elites, medical establishment professionals, and the satanic pedophile Hillary Clinton." Of course, it's difficult to shoehorn that into a hearing on the nominee of a new Supreme Court justice. But, as Moynihan points out, conservatives did not have to. As mentioned before, Sen. Josh Hawley set the table by tweeting out baseless and just plain wrong claims about Judge Jackson being soft on sex offenders. Instead of calling out these bogus claims, conservative senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton latched on to the idea that Judge Jackson and Democrats are soft on pedophiles.
A new YouGov poll published March 30 could explain why these senators would pander to untrue conspiracy theories. Almost half, 49%, of Republicans believe, “Top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.”
Smearing political opponents may help a party win in the short term, but these tactics have disastrous effects. "The QAnonification of our political discourse has real consequences. It instills fear and can ruin lives and reputations. It serves to erode trust in our public institutions." When grave allegations like calling someone a "pedophile" or "groomer" become nothing more than cheap political slurs, real children abused by real pedophiles go unnoticed. All so we can chase after folks whose only crime is that they do not vote or think how we do.
I am beginning to think that QAnon is less a disease and more a symptom of our collective inability to admit that people with whom we hold deep disagreements can still be moral. Those who vote or think differently from us can still have good intentions. We need more politicians like Mitt Romney. Romney has announced he will confirm Judge Jackson because he believes she "more than meets the standard for excellence and integrity" required of a Supreme Court justice. We need more politicians, judges, and officials who meet standards of excellence and integrity and who can recognize those standards in anyone, even if they're of a different party.
4 More Things
1) Matthew Yglesias, reporting for Bloomberg, covers a new study by political scientists David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale. Broockman and Kalla paid Fox News viewers to switch to CNN for one month. "The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues." One issue this group changed their minds on was the reliability of Fox News itself. While it may be difficult, the study shows hope for an end to partisanship.
2) Continuing the subject of elections and conspiracies, Elena Schneider reports for Politico that election conspiracy theories have upended Green Bay's non-partisan city council races. According to Schneider, "the trouble primarily revolves around the city accepting private funding from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a nonprofit backed in large part by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to help run their November 2020 elections." But Wisconsin still has Republican legislators investigating the 2020 election, and now these city council races have been swept up in "The Big Lie." Showing that, like QAnon, these conspiracies are likely not going away anytime soon.
3) Propublica and PBS have a new documentary about the origins of the Stolen Election Myth. The documentary relies on thousands of previously unseen private emails, photos, voicemails, and texts to tell the story of a group that met on a plantation in South Carolina to gather and synthesize what they claimed was evidence of election fraud. "This group, which included Michael Flynn, the retired three-star Army general and former national security adviser to Trump, and Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, became a key originator of the since-discredited idea that foreign communist governments had hacked voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems."
4) And speaking of needing more politicians like Mitt Romney, Tim Alberta has a fascinating profile of former Congressman Will Hurd in The Atlantic. Hurd, according to Alberta, is proposing a "wholesale reorientation of our politics—away from the dopamine-inducing cultural conflicts of the day, and toward the generational trials that will shape American life in the 21st century." And he hopes to accomplish all this from behind the Resolute Desk. It seems unlikely that Hurd could win the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election, but stranger things have happened. Whatever his future holds, Hurd is undoubtedly someone to watch.