The GOP has gone off the rails.

 

I think we're all aware of the QAnon movement and the lies that have taken root for Trump voters.  Not all Trump voters, but a loud, scary minority of Trump voters. One might think that these conspiracy are too crazy to believe.  Sadly, the QAnon crowd can seemingly believe any otherwise BS without the slightest evidence to support that BS.

Just in case you think the QAnon movement is too small and crazy to take seriously, don't tell that to the FBI. The FBI has identified QAnon as a domestic terrorism threat, and President Trump has endorsed the movement.

So I've clipped some examples below for those who may still be skeptical about the danger QAnon poses to democracy.  Any nationwide group that refuses to recognize reality and instead believes the most incredible conspiracies is a destabilizing force.

From Rich Thau at Time magazine:

But by far the greatest delusions I heard came from voters on the right. More than a third of the Trump supporters I spoke with voiced some kind of conspiratorial thinking. “COVID could have been released by communist China to bring down our economy,” says John Poulos, loading groceries into his car outside Sendik’s grocery store in the Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa. “COVID was manufactured,” says Maureen Bloedorn, walking into a Dollar Tree in Kenosha. She did not vote for Trump in 2016 but plans to support him in November, in part because “he sent Obama a bill for all of his vacations he took on the American dime.” This idea was popularized by a fake news story that originated on a satirical website and went viral.

On a cigarette break outside their small business in Ozaukee County, Tina Arthur and Marcella Frank told me they plan to vote for Trump again because they are deeply alarmed by “the cabal.” They’ve heard “numerous reports” that the COVID-19 tents set up in New York and California were actually for children who had been rescued from underground sex-trafficking tunnels.

Arthur and Frank explained they’re not followers of QAnon. Frank says she spends most of her free time researching child sex trafficking, while Arthur adds that she often finds this information on the Russian-owned search engine Yandex. Frank’s eyes fill with tears as she describes what she’s found: children who are being raped and tortured so that “the cabal” can “extract their blood and drink it.” She says Trump has seized the blood on the black market as part of his fight against the cabal. “I think if Biden wins, the world is over, basically,” adds Arthur. “I would honestly try to leave the country. And if that wasn’t an option, I would probably take my children and sit in the garage and turn my car on and it would be over.”

Take QAnon seriously.  They're out to burn down democracy.