Editor’s Note: Reed Galen is an independent political strategist and co-founder of The Lincoln Project. You can follow him on Twitter @reedgalen. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN.
This week in Georgia, the followers of QAnon, a baseless “deep state” conspiracy, likely found their way into Washington’s halls of power. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a wealthy first-time candidate, won the Republican nomination for the state’s heavily GOP leaning 14th congressional district, nearly ensuring she’ll be headed to Capitol Hill next year.
Greene’s comments, past and current, on Democrats, Muslims, Jews and people of color range from uncomfortable to reprehensible. Given President Donald Trump’s role as the head of the Republican Party, it should come as no surprise that more down-ballot GOP candidates hew to this line of belief, behavior and speech.
During her victory speech this week, Greene described House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thusly: “She’s a hypocrite. She’s anti-American. And we’re going to kick that b*tch out of Congress.”
In Greene’s mind, and in the minds of millions of other QAnon believers, Pelosi is part of a Democrat-led deep state conspiracy that operates an international child sex trafficking ring funded by George Soros.
Read that again.
The Republican Party’s lineup this year features approximately 20 candidates across the country who claim support for QAnon. President Trump tweeted his support for Greene shortly after her victory. He has repeatedly pushed around QAnon-related Twitter handles and information. On a single night in December of last year, the President amplified almost 20 accounts on Twitter that have pushed QAnon conspiracy theories.
On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted that “QAnon is a fabrication…Could be Russian propaganda or a basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.” His attempt to retain some measure of sanity in Congress was immediately met with condemnation from Trump’s presidential campaign.
In a statement filled with further conspiracy theories stretching back to the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s spokesman attacked Kinzinger for propagating the Democrats’ own conspiracy theories.
Have a headache yet?
That’s the whole idea. The Trump-Fox News-OANN-Bannon-Limbaugh-QAnon circle of death is designed to do nothing less than confuse, dispirit and depress individual American voters. Given Donald Trump’s broad incapacity, his campaign can only win a low turnout, narrowly decided election.
Trump is not capable of formulating any of these theories himself, but he does serve as both the vessel and vehicle to spread them throughout the country and down into our communities. He instinctually understands that only chaos and confusion will allow him to remain in office. He knows that sewing confusion around his opponents’ motives and the legitimacy of the American electoral system is the only way he can win.
QAnon-type conspiracy and propaganda are not a new phenomenon. History is replete with movements that espouse fundamental non-truths to create a mythology that allows willing recipients to believe that darker forces are at work against them and the nation.
On Wednesday night, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro “predicted” that Joe Biden would not be on the Democratic ticket by Election Day. Why, Pirro left vague: Maybe he’s sick, maybe he’ll die, she intimated. The implication for the viewers, however, is that Sen. Kamala Harris will actually be elected president in November.
Pirro, like Trump, doesn’t seem intellectually capable of concocting this sewage on her own.
However, like Greene and Trump, Pirro is a willing participant in an effort to subvert the free and fair elections we as Americans have clearly taken for granted for too long.
There are dozens of groups and tens of millions of people working to ensure that come this fall we will save American democracy from these bad actors. It is only working together, as a united front, that we can make the unfinished ideals of the Founding Fathers and turn them into a more perfect union.
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In a story that is likely apocryphal, as he left Independence Hall, a woman asked Ben Franklin what the founders had given us. “A Republic, madam, if you can keep it.”
For the next 80 days, all of us must do our part to ensure we keep our Republic. We will fight back against the ugliness and the conspiracies, drive Donald Trump and his goons from office, and ensure that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can help put the country back on a path forward: not a Republican or Democratic direction, but a heading for all Americans.