Republicans in Oregon this week nominated a Senate candidate with a deep history of promoting and vowing support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, providing the fringe movement its largest electoral platform yet... ... insurance agent Jo Rae Perkins, who bested three other candidates in the primary... expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, which casts President Donald Trump as a crusader against a web of deep state conspiracies and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has deemed a potential domestic terror threat...“I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. And together, we can save our republic,” Perkins said in a video posted on Tuesday, while holding up a sign with a popular QAnon slogan on it.
The QAnon conspiracy theory, which has spread debunked and baseless ideas like John F. Kennedy Jr. faking his own death and returning last July 4th, started in late 2017 after an anonymous post surfaced on the online message board 4chan with someone claiming to have access to top-secret government information.
Since then the random and anonymous posts have ignited followers to pore over each line and word looking for strands and clues into the wild alleged conspiracies.
“People who believe are believing things that are not true and don’t have evidence to back them up. That leaves them in a place where they’re holding a lot of beliefs that are disconnected from our shared reality,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political-science professor at the University of Miami whose research focuses on fringe beliefs.
"And further than that, they hold a set of beliefs that scapegoat particular people for all the world’s evils and accuse them of engaging in horrific crimes. And when you put that together, those are the sorts of things that can motivate people to act and we have seen some isolated incidents where people committed violence based on this considered conspiracy theory,” Uscinski said.
(T rump) has promoted and encouraged QAnon followers since taking office by regularly re-sharing their tweets to his nearly 80 million followers to the celebration of believers in the conspiracy theory.
(T rump) has also invited them to the White House as part of a “social media summit” and has taken a photo with a follower in the Oval Office when right-wing conspiracy theorist and QAnon-believer Michael Lebron visited back in 2018.
…prior to her election win on Tuesday, Perkins regularly tweeted promoting the conspiracy theory, sometimes welcoming converts to the “QArmy” and as early as January this year she shared posts claiming to have proof of “coordination between Q and President Trump.”
What’s anyone going to do about?
Well, hopefully the voters in that part of Oregon will vote for Perkin’s opponent in the general election.