Susan Collins Finally Commits (To QAnon Candidates)

Today, the Mainer reports that Senator Susan Collins has tossed money to two QAnon candidates in her home county of Aroostook County—an odd choice for a politician desperately concerned with refurbishing her bipartisan credentials just a few weeks before a tight race.

Last month Collins’s personal political action committee Dirigo PAC donated $400 each to the Kevin Bushey and Brian Redmond, both military veterans and state legislative candidates challenging incumbent Democrats, according to the publication. Redmond’s now-deleted Twitter account has been linked to QAnon hashtags and slogans. Here’s what he had to say to the Mainer about his beliefs, which is worth quoting in full:

… Redmond said he discovered QAnon in the comments section of Zero Hedge, a far-right, libertarian economics blog notorious for spreading conspiracies. “I was hooked right off the bat,” said Redmond, who now considers himself an investigative journalist. “It was an opportunity to wrestle back control of our government from subvertists and treasonists. … As a veteran, I was called to arms.”

“What I understand about the QAnon program is that the military is going to need to intervene eventually,” Redmond said. Asked what he meant by “military intervention,” he explained: “Nazis never lost World War II. [Nazism] was dissolved, they were consumed into the U.S.A., and the rich, cultist, Satanist families continued to utilize this Nazi force.

“The end of World War III will end with Donald Trump,” he continued. “It’s already happening with the crushing of ISIS. There will be another Nuremberg trial, some of these icons of American industry and business will be held accountable at Gitmo [the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba].”

Kevin Bushey, the other QAnon acolyte supported by Collins’s PAC, has a long history of speaking publicly about his beliefs as a leader of a “QAnon Church” called Omega Kingdom Ministries. In a recorded interview in May, Bushey spoke to the Mainer about “his anti-mask protests, the Illuminati, his work as a QAnon analyst, and his ability to walk on glass,” telling the publication a shadowy class including bankers, Freemasons, Catholics, and Jews “have worked very diligently to support the idea we should be in continuous war or having ways, because they like to finance both sides of the equation. They’re the producers, the manufacturers, and they control the money supplies.”

The Mainer story, which goes into more detail about the Aroostook County candidates, is certainly worth reading in full. Meanwhile, Susan Collins, who did not respond to the Mainer’s request for comment, has been vehemently denying that she has abandoned her bipartisan approach to fall in line with a more radical Republican party, telling Emily Witt of the New Yorker she condemned all the “unfortunate lies that have been so prevalent on television for the past two years.”