On Tuesday, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal QAnon supporter who has posted racist videos and threatened to hunt down antifa, won the Republican runoff in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, all but securing her eventual Congressional seat in a district that has historically run red.
Her victory is the starkest, but by no means only, illustration of how the quasi-religious followers of a convoluted conspiracy theory sparked by a 4chan poster named “Q” are set to further infiltrate national politics.
Greene, who owns a construction business and franchised a CrossFit studio in her native state, is a newcomer to national politics, and had been labeled by her more traditionally conservative opponent as “a circus act” more fit to run a YouTube channel than a Congressional seat. And Greene’s public profile has been well-calibrated to appeal to people who spend long hours chasing down “clues” about the imaginary deep state conspiracy and “decoding” President Trump’s tweets: In Facebook videos posted in 2017 and 2019 uncovered by politico, Greene said Black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party,” called George Soros a Nazi, and said Muslim legislators were part of an “Islamic invasion of our government.”
More recently, in a YouTube video this summer, Green called the, again, completely fictional high-level government employee “Q” a “patriot” and said “there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.”
Additionally, a June campaign video shows her sending a “message” to “antifa terrorists”:
There are by some counts as many as a dozen political candidates running for office who have expressed approval of QAnon’s belief system. In June Lauren Boebert, a gun-rights activist who spoke on a radio show about Q’s potential to be “really great for our country,” won a primary against a five-term Republican incumbent in Colorado.
On Wednesday, President Trump congratulated Greene on her win with a tweet.
It bears repeating that QAnon is a zealous, complex system of beliefs based on “decoding” secret messages to support the delusion that Donald Trump ran for president in order to stop a Satanic sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton, “elites,” Democrats, and also George Soros. Last year, a book written by a dozen anonymous QAnon adherents claiming Democrats drink children’s blood became one of the top-selling books on Amazon. The FBI has labeled QAnon a potential domestic terrorism threat.
Greene’s platforms, as per her website, include “stop socialism” and “build the wall.”