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"QAnon’s infiltration of the Republican Party has proceeded with frightening steadiness over the last couple years, its growing foothold marked by the arrival of conspiratorial politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to Business Insider, Ron Watkins, widely believed to be one of the authors of the Q posts that started the movement, is one of nearly 60 Q sympathizers running for Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. ...The latest exemplar of the GOP’s descent into anything-goes nuttery is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas...she has traveled far down the QAnon rabbit hole.
Thomas’s willingness to embrace even the most wild-eyed, Big Lie–fueled theories only affirms what we already know about some of her political peers....These include lawmakers and aspiring presidential candidates in the Senate. Earlier this month, Missouri senator Josh Hawley presented a long Twitter thread charging that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook” — a blaring Klaxon for QAnon adherents obsessed with child endangerment. He later repeated his criticisms on the first day of Jackson’s confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court, prompting a White House spokesman to assert that Hawley was engaging in a “QAnon-signaling smear.” Hawley’s remarks were later echoed by South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who, in addition to chiding Jackson for representing detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, told Jackson, “Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited.” To cap it off, one of the Republican witnesses for the hearing was Alessandra Serano, an executive at Operation Underground Railroad, a well-funded anti-sex-trafficking organization whose vigilantism and weak relationship with reality resemble that of QAnon adherents.
The signs of the Republican slide toward full epistemic crack-up are all around us. One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the “why do you want to hurt children?”–type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers “grooming” children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child-exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."
Link
While a horrifying development, did anyone who watched the ascent of Trump in this shell of party not see this coming?
Thomas’s willingness to embrace even the most wild-eyed, Big Lie–fueled theories only affirms what we already know about some of her political peers....These include lawmakers and aspiring presidential candidates in the Senate. Earlier this month, Missouri senator Josh Hawley presented a long Twitter thread charging that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook” — a blaring Klaxon for QAnon adherents obsessed with child endangerment. He later repeated his criticisms on the first day of Jackson’s confirmation hearing to the Supreme Court, prompting a White House spokesman to assert that Hawley was engaging in a “QAnon-signaling smear.” Hawley’s remarks were later echoed by South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who, in addition to chiding Jackson for representing detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, told Jackson, “Every judge who does what you are doing is making it easier for the children to be exploited.” To cap it off, one of the Republican witnesses for the hearing was Alessandra Serano, an executive at Operation Underground Railroad, a well-funded anti-sex-trafficking organization whose vigilantism and weak relationship with reality resemble that of QAnon adherents.
The signs of the Republican slide toward full epistemic crack-up are all around us. One can see it everywhere lately, not only in the “why do you want to hurt children?”–type questions hurled by Republican senators at Jackson, but also in the revanchist anti-LGBTQ laws being introduced in Texas and Florida and in fearful talk of teachers “grooming” children on Fox News. The ginned-up moral panic, centered around the child-exploitation themes that helped give life to QAnon, is now a regular part of Republican political rhetoric."
Link
While a horrifying development, did anyone who watched the ascent of Trump in this shell of party not see this coming?