The Republican Party Has Fully Embraced the QAnon Conspiracy Cult – An Absolute Bar To Holding Political Office (Updated)

Radley Balko writes at the Washington Post, QAnon goes mainstream:

There’s a common thread between attacks against Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson as being soft on child predators, the manufactured controversy on the right over whether teachers can mention homosexuality to students, and the anti-trans laws sweeping Republican-controlled state legislatures: We’re witnessing the mainstreaming of QAnon.

QAnon is the bananas conspiracy theory that claims a worldwide human-trafficking network — involving elites such as Tom Hanks and Bill Gates to people who shop at Wayfair — either sexually assaults children or murders them and extracts their glands, depending on which version of QAnon you believe, It’s all laughable, except it has become large enough that it has begun to infect everyday politics, with some of its adherents even winning elections. [At least a half-dozen, or more, in the Arizona Senate alone.]

Start with the attacks against Jackson. Nothing about Jackson’s record on sentencing people for possession of child pornography is unusual. Her view — that the laws laying out those sentences are too harsh — is shared by 70 percent of federal judges. The 2012 report she signed while serving on the U.S. Sentencing Commission — also stating that these sentences were too harsh — was unanimously supported by the commissioners, and including a member who the same Republicans approved for a federal judgeship.

Jackson was also attacked for criticizing sex offender registries and the indefinite detention — or indefinite civil commitment — of sex offenders after they’ve served their sentences. Some state registries and the restrictions that go with them have forced offenders to live under overpasses or in abandoned woods. It has made many unemployable, and has barred them from living even in homeless shelters, even as those same laws also require them to report a fixed address. Regardless of the seriousness of their crimes, these laws make rehabilitation all but impossible.

Studies have consistently shown that these restrictions have little effect on recidivism and do little to protect children. Yet Jackson was still cast as an advocate for pedophiles. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) declared her a threat to children. On social media, legal scholars and pundits who defended Jackson from these attacks were swarmed with replies calling them “groomers,” or demands that they themselves be investigated.

That slur — groomer — is also now wielded against critics of new laws in Florida and elsewhere that allow parents to sue teachers for, among other things, mentioning the mere existence of gay people to their students. The word is hurled both at trans people and those who defend them — not just by random Twitter users, but by mainstream conservatives.

Miami Herald: Gov. Ron “DeathSantis” spokeswoman links ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill to ‘groomers’ — and on our dime:

In an age when former President Donald Trump has set a low bar for political discourse on social media, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary stoops as low as her fingers can type — sometimes initiating the vitriol, other times taking the bait from her critics.

Christina Pushaw has insinuated on Twitter that opponents of the bill critics call “Don’t Say Gay” are grooming young children for sex (or are at least OK with that).

She’s also cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines. She’s peddled an antisemitic conspiracy theory, though she claimed she didn’t know that’s what it was. She couldn’t bring herself, or her boss, to condemn a neo-Nazi demonstration in Orlando. (“Do we even know if they are Nazis?” was the best she could come up with in a now-deleted post.)

At a recent Donald Trump rally, Rep. Marjorie “Q” Greene (R-Ga.) accused Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband of stalking girls’ bathrooms. [Gay men stalk girls?]

UPDATE: Marjorie “Q” Greene followed this up with accusing Republican senators of being “pro-pedophile” for voting to advance the nomination of Judge Jackson. The new red scare: The right leans into pedophilia accusations:

Upon learning that three moderate Republican senators — Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Susan Collins (Maine) and Mitt Romney (Utah) — would support the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) offered the most derogatory, simplistic disparagement she could muster.

“Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile,” Greene wrote on Twitter. “They just voted for #KBJ.”

This was incorrect in both the abstract and the specifics. To the second point, the Senate has not yet taken the vote to formally consent to Jackson’s nomination.

Nor is a vote in support of Jackson “pro-pedophile” in any rational sense.

[I]t’s not surprising that Greene endorsed this idea. Before being elected to Congress, she was active in promoting the extremist QAnon ideology, a centerpiece of which is based on false claims that there’s a cabal of powerful people who are engaged in abusing children. It has incited violence and criminal acts and radicalized its followers, and the FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat. QAnon was itself an evolution of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (which Greene also wrote about as potentially true), a more narrowly framed claim about leading Democrats abusing children.

At this point, though, insinuations about Democrats embracing pedophilia or downplaying sex crimes victimizing children are not simply the political fringe making its way into the Capitol. Instead, “pedophile” or “groomer” — a term used to describe people who try to prepare children for abuse — has of late replaced “socialist” as a preferred, political, pejorative, long-standing potency of elevating fears about the safety of children has combined with specific political fights like the Jackson nomination and Florida’s new legislation limiting instruction about non-heterosexual relationships to spur a new rhetorical focus.

The red scare is now the kid scare.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did an excellent segment about this on his program Tuesday night.

UPDATE: Legal expert Elie Mystal as some thoughts about Marjorie “Q” Greene and the GQP’s QAnon Cult “Kid Scare” on The ReidOut with Joy Reid.

Balko continues:

[T]he right’s current obsession is particularly interesting given its own scandals — from Mark Foley to Dennis Hastert to Roy Moore, as well as those accused of covering up abuse such as Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Let’s not forget Marjorie “Q” Greene’s close friend, Rep.Matt Gaetz. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend testifies to grand jury in sex trafficking probe, reports say. “Rep. Matt Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend testified Wednesday before a federal grand jury in Orlando that is investigating allegations that Gaetz sex-trafficked a 17-year-old in 2017.”

You needn’t feel sympathy for actual offenders to understand the danger here. QAnon was the natural evolution of Pizzagate, another conspiracy claiming an elite network of politicians was exploiting children. That conspiracy culminated in an armed assault on a D.C. restaurant. Pizzagate’s main propagators then went on to ruin reputations by disingenuously accusing their political opponents of pedophilia, with help from politicians such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

Of course sexual abuse of children is real, and it inflicts devastating, lifelong damage. But it is our very disgust at these crimes that allows opportunists to seize them for unrelated political ends. The result isn’t just unfair attacks against politicians or judicial nominees. It often means ruined lives. Parents have been accused of abuse and even prosecuted for innocuous photos of their young children. Children have been convicted and labeled as sex offenders for texting one another sexual explicit images of themselves. In Virginia, one prosecutor even asked a court’s permission to photograph a minor boy’s erect penis to prove the boy had sent an explicit photo to an underage girl.

We can go back a bit further, too, to the ritual sex abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s, a bipartisan, nationwide frenzy that imprisoned dozens of innocent people for nonexistent crimes. Parents and grandparents were wrongly imprisoned for abusing their own sons and daughters. Babysitters and child-care professionals were falsely incarcerated for nightmarish abuse, based on fake memories adults had implanted in children, and all despite the complete absence of any physical evidence.

But however misguided those prosecutors may have been, it seems they honestly thought they were protecting children. What’s happening now is more sinister. It is doubtful many of the politicians pushing the “don’t say gay” and anti-trans bills truly believe, for example, that teachers who mention their same-sex spouses are grooming children for sexual exploitation, or that trans women transitioned so they can lurk about in women’s bathrooms. Hawley and Cruz are smart enough to know that Jackson’s decisions were well within the mainstream, or that studies have shown registries and civil commitment do little to protect children.

But they also know is that few crimes (understandably) inspire more anger and disgust than sexual abuse of children. They know a good percentage of their supporters have bought into at least some portion of the QAnon canon. And they’ve [cynically] concluded that linking their opponents to those crimes is an effective way to accumulate power and achieve unrelated political objectives — opposing a Biden Supreme Court nominee, for example.

Just as with the lies about the 2020 election, these politicians know QAnon is a dangerous delusion. But rather than confront it and risk alienating their own supporters, they have chosen to weaponize it. Instead of disabusing the true believers of their destructive mythology, they have chosen to enable them, and to smear anyone who gets in their way.

This must be an absolute bar to holding political office. Some of these Republican politicians are just batshit crazy. Others know that this QAnon conspiracy cult is playing with fire to appeal to the GQP crazy base, but they do not care. They are intentionally putting people’s lives at risk from the crazy adherents of the QAnon conspiracy cultists. Someone is going to get killed or seriously injured. And when that happens, every one of these Republican politicians will be culpabe as an accessory.