A while back, I wrote how about QAnon was toxic to Trump, and by extension the entire republican party. Several months ago, some religious leaders in our country declared QAnon to be a Gnostic Heresy, and thus fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. This was the opening of a schism in the evangelical community – how do you absorb a heresy that is sweeping away your followers like this and maintain your power? Because evangelical Christianity is essentially a political movement and an extension of the republican party, QAnon sweeps them both together.
You have to understand that QAnon is the recycled anti-semitic ravings that propelled the holocaust. Replace the word “democrat” or “liberal” with the word “jew” and that’s it. Because the story is about the rape and murder of children, it is extraordinarily seductive and effective and people can very easily fall under its spell. It is a powerful narrative that is hard to be against.
We saw during the election and the subsequent riot at the Capitol just how far a conspiracy theory can push people. Combine the conspiracy theory with the hitlerian technique of the Big Lie, and you can easily seduce enough of any given population to your own ends. Trump, in amplifying QAnon and mixing it up with his own baseless claims of election fraud, was able to harness it to his own ends. And his ends do not match those of anyone else, not the republicans, not the evangelicals – no one save for Trump himself.
As Trump is rallying his troops at CPAC, something very interesting happened: his followers paraded a Golden Trump through the lobby of the convention center. When you combine this with the infighting happening in the republican party, i.e. Liz Cheney vs Kevin McCarthy, you begin to see where this is all going – the end of the Reagan coalition of the religious right and the republicans. Trump delivered to the evangelicals many things that they wanted that previous republicans didn’t, and now they get to follow his Golden Idol around Florida.
Remember what happened to the Israelites after they built and worshipped the golden calf.