In 1962, conservative journalist William F. Buckley flew to Florida to meet with Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. Buckley’s main purpose was to convince Goldwater to run for president with the Republican price in 1964. But he also sought to have the senator distance from the John Birch Society, which he had already indicated was in Favor of Goldwater.
And that bad news for the Republican Party, because the Birchers were, in Terms of Buckley, crazy. Its leader, a candy maker named Robert Welch, said more than one part of the U.S. government “controlled through the Communists.” More notoriously, Welch insisted that former President Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated agent and aware of the communist conspiracy.”
Like Goldwater, Buckley shared the strong anti-communism of the John Birch Society. But the Birchers’ claims were “so common sense” that they threatened to undermine the cause, Buckley wrote. “The underlying challenge is whether conservatives can continue to settle silently with a return to the reasons for the decline of the Republic and the Western world as a whole, which is not true.”
The Republican Party faces the same challenge this fall, but otherwise. It’s called QAnon, and it’s as true as the Birchers. She also imagines that the government is in the clutches of a conspiracy, this time hatched through a clique of Satan’s worshipping pedophiles. The plot is intended to be directed through prominent Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton, who eat the little ones (yes, you read it well) to extract from their blood a life-extending chemist.
A recent Guardian survey revealed more than 170 QAnon groups, pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram, with more than 4.5 million followers. This is the kind of magnitude that the John Birch Society may have dreamed of in the pre-predicted era. According to maximum estimates, it has recruited fewer than 100,000 members.
And while the Birchers dreamed of putting Barry Goldwater in the White House, QAnon already has his man: Donald Trump. In fact, he says, President Trump is the only guy who can prevent the conspiracy from devouring America (literally and figuratively) from within.
As far as we know, Trump loves QAnon. Although he has never directly addressed his conspiracy theories, Trump has retwored accounts that sell those theories more than two hundred times, according to research through Media Matters for America, a progressive surveillance group. A QAnon television show recently hosted the press release director of Trump’s re-election campaign, who also featured QAnon’s iconography in his ads, the Washington Post reported.
Trump and QAnon: Enough of QAnon’s tweets and ‘Liberate’, Mr. Trump. The coronavirus is deadly enough.
And at a briefing at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said QAnon fans “love me very much” and “love our country.” When a journalist pointed out that QAnon imagined him saving the world from a satanic cult of paedophiles and cannibals, the president replied, “Does that mean to be something bad? If I can help save the world from trouble, I’m willing to do that, I’m in a position to get ahead.”
Meanwhile, candidates for public jobs that do not have QA support are making significant strides in the Republican Party. The most striking example is Marjorie Taylor Greene, who last week won a circular of the Republican primary for a congressional seat in Georgia. Greene praised the “Q” character of QAnon, a mythical storyteller of facts within the government, as a “patriot” who is “very pro-Trump.” And Trump praised Greene after his victory, tweeting that she is “a genuine WINNER” and a “future Republican star.”
Is that what Republicans want in the long run? To borrow from Buckley, is the Republican Party willing to settle silently with QAnon’s lies?
The answer, for now, turns out to be yes. One of the few Republican politicians who denounced QAnon after Greene’s victory was Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger. He tweeted that QAnon was a “manufacturer” who “has no position in Congress.” This earned him a quick rebuke from Trump’s deputy director of communications for the campaign, Matt Wolking, who asked why Kinzinger did not denounce “Democratic-driven conspiracy theories,” such as former British spy Christopher Steele’s record on Trump.
Notice the intelligent evasion here, through which Wolking evades the question of QAnon’s veracity by converting the subject. Of course, top Republicans are fully aware that QAnon sells nonsense and lies. But they’re afraid to meet Donald Trump and believe QAnon can help them win in November.
QAnon Clues: I’m a former CIA analyst trained to detect news. That’s how you can do it, too.
The story of Barry Goldwater and the John Birch Society makes them think again. Pressed through Buckley, Goldwater published a letter rejecting The Views of Robert Welch. But he also insisted that Welch did not speak on behalf of “most members” of society, who contributed greatly to his 1964 campaign.
This boomerang took a position in Goldwater, which lost in one of the largest landslides in American history. He was called an “extremist” in his component because he refused to dissociate himself from the Birchers. Appeasing the hazelnut conspirators was not only cowardly and dishonest; it was also a bad policy. And some Republicans were beginning to understand it on Thursday. If Democrats take the Senate, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse told NBC News, “garbage like this will be a big component of why they won.” He added: “True leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.”
William F. Buckley understood the first time. If the GOP launches its award with QAnon, it will lose its credibility to decent voters. They know that our serious national disorders are explained through outlandish conspiracy theories. The only question is whether Republican leaders will have the courage to stand up and say it.
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s for “The Hour of Fans: A History of University Teaching in America,” which will be published in the fall through Johns Hopkins University Press.