QAnon Isn’t Dead. It Lives In the Heart of the Republican Party.

Take Kash Patel, whose name appeared in one of the original Q drops. In 2022, he was a regular on QAnon podcasts, defending their slogan “Where we go one, we go all.” He posted a photo on Truth Social claiming to be hanging out with Q, as part of an effort to get the QAnon community to move to the site. Trump, who owned most of Truth Social, selected Patel to run the FBI. During Attorney General Pam Bondi’s confirmation hearing in January, when she was asked about QAnon, she said, “I have heard of it, but I do not know what it is.” When asked whether Kash Patel, who has said he supported much of what QAnon supports, was suited to run the FBI, Bondi did not answer. She replied, “I look forward to hearing his testimony about QAnon in this committee.” Bondi, of course, was Trump’s second choice for the job, after Matt Gaetz, who was once himself under investigation for sex trafficking. The Congressional report that resulted found that Gaetz had paid a woman for sex, and that he had sex with a 17-year-old, but he was not charged; had he paid the 17-year-old, or coerced the adult woman, that would meet the statutory definition of sex trafficking (which the report misstated as requiring transportation for commercial sex over state lines).

In his own confirmation hearings, Patel attempted to disavow QAnon, stating that he “rejected outright QAnon baseless conspiracy theories or any other baseless conspiracy theories.” A blow to QAnon? Hardly, as Wired reported: QAnon posters praised him. According to Wired’s survey of posts at the time on Truth Social, Telegram, Gab, 4chan, TikTok, and X, QAnon supporters saw this not as a betrayal, but as a confirmation that their conspiracy theories were correct. “THERE IS NO QANON, SO KASH TOLD THE TRUTH!!,” a QAnon influencer on Telegram posted. This was another conspiracy theory they had been pushing, rewriting QAnon as something their enemies in the media had invented to smear the “real” truthtellers. Another poster replied, “He basically said they are not conspiracies but rather the truth, love it.” QAnon’s conspiracy theories were elastic enough, in other words, to accommodate Patel’s leading the FBI. His confirmation wasn’t a sign that he was joining the deep state; it meant that he was now positioned to bring about its demise. The same doubled-back quality inflects some of the QAnon responses to Trump’s attempts to wave off the Epstein story. Some have attempted to explain it away as yet another attempt to take down Trump, or as a psy-op, or similar. The more these heroes of QAnon deny the movement, in other words, the nearer the storm.

Far from serving as an indicator of QAnon’s waning influence, such comments, which imply powerful government officials’ distance from QAnon, should instead give us pause. In 2019, it was remarkable that anyone who believe in QAnon could be elected to Congress; by 2022, not only had Marjorie Taylor Greene done it, but more than 20 QAnon-friendly candidates were running. In 2019, when the FBI bulletin about the threat of QAnon was publicized, did anyone at the FBI think that threat extended to someone who might soon run their own agency? The fact that we even have to consider that question shows just how much rot and horror QAnon and its promoters have wreaked.