 | | Broken glass at the entrance of the Capitol Rotunda in January.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
|
As hopes fade for a bipartisan inquiry into the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, it's increasingly clear that the Republican base remains in thrall to the web of untruths spun by former President Donald Trump — and perhaps even more outlandish lies, beyond those of Trump's making. |
A federal judge warned in an opinion yesterday that Trump's insistence on the "big lie" — that the November election was stolen from him — still posed a serious threat. Presiding over the case of a man accused of storming Congress on Jan. 6, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington wrote: "The steady drumbeat that inspired defendant to take up arms has not faded away. Six months later, the canard that the election was stolen is being repeated daily on major news outlets and from the corridors of power in state and federal government, not to mention in the near-daily fulminations of the former president." |
But it's not just the notion that the election was stolen that has caught on with the former president's supporters. QAnon, an outlandish and ever-evolving conspiracy theory spread by some of Trump's most ardent followers, has significant traction with a segment of the public — particularly Republicans and Americans who consume news from far-right sources. |
Those are the findings of a poll released today by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core, which found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters. The same share said it was true that "American patriots may have to resort to violence" to depose the pedophiles and restore the country's rightful order. |
And fully 20 percent of respondents said that they thought a biblical-scale storm would soon sweep away these evil elites and "restore the rightful leaders." |
"These are words I never thought I would write into a poll question, or have the need to, but here we are," Robby Jones, the founder of P.R.R.I., said in an interview. |
The teams behind the poll determined that 14 percent of Americans fall into the category of "QAnon believers," composed of those who agreed with the statements in all three questions. Among Republicans only, that rises to roughly one in four. (Twelve percent of independents and 7 percent of Democrats were categorized as QAnon believers.) |
But the analysts went a level further: They created a category labeled "QAnon doubters" to include respondents who had said they "mostly disagreed" with the outlandish statements, but didn't reject them outright. Another 55 percent of Republicans fell into this more ambivalent category. |
Which means that just one in five Republicans fully rejected the premises of the QAnon conspiracy theory. For Democrats, 58 percent were flat-out QAnon rejecters. |
Jones said he was struck by the prevalence of QAnon's adherents. Overlaying the share of poll respondents who expressed belief in its core principles over the country's total population, "that's more than 30 million people," he said. |
"Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants," he added. "So it lines up there with a major religious group." |
He also noted the correlation between belief in QAnon's fictions and the conviction that armed conflict would be necessary. "It's one thing to say that most Americans laugh off these outlandish beliefs, but when you take into consideration that these beliefs are linked to a kind of apocalyptic thinking and violence, then it becomes something quite different," he said. |
The Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core found a strong correlation between where people gets their news and how much they believe in QAnon's ideas. Among those who said they most trusted far-right news outlets, such as One America News Network and Newsmax, two in five qualified as full-on QAnon believers. Fully 48 percent of these news consumers said they expected a storm to wipe away the elites soon. |
That puts these news consumers far out of alignment with the rest of the country — even fans of the conservative-leaning Fox News. Among respondents who preferred Fox News above other sources, 18 percent were QAnon believers. |
Trump himself has avoided saying much about QAnon, but when he was pressed to denounce the theory while in office he refused. At a news conference last year, he seemed to indicate that he was pleased by QAnon followers' fondness for him. "I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate," he said, adding that "the movement" was "gaining in popularity." |
While QAnon followers continue to be a minority among Republicans, some of the party's most visible figures — and most successful fund-raisers — have publicly flirted with the conspiracy theory. |
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is currently on a speaking tour with Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, expressed support for QAnon before she was elected; she has since publicly walked that back. Greene raised upward of $3 million in the first quarter of this year, an uncommonly huge sum, especially for a freshman lawmaker in a nonelection year. |
The P.R.R.I./IFYC poll was conducted in March, among 5,625 respondents to Ipsos's probability-based Knowledge Panel. It was analyzed this spring and released today. |
Those who expressed belief in QAnon's premises were also far more likely than others to say they believe in other conspiracy theories, the poll found. Four in 10 said they thought that "the Covid-19 vaccine contains a surveillance microchip that is the sign of the beast in biblical prophecy." |
With Roe v. Wade under threat, Biden's silence on abortion rights worries liberals. |
State legislatures have introduced more than 500 restrictions on abortion over the past four months, a huge increase from previous years. The Supreme Court plans to take up a case that could weaken or even overturn the constitutional right to abortion enshrined nearly a half-century ago in Roe v. Wade. |
And as reproductive rights advocates sound alarms about what they see as an existential threat to abortion rights, many worry that the leader they helped elect is not meeting the moment. |
Despite the urgency felt by much of his party, President Biden has said little about abortion publicly while in office. In fact, he hasn't said the word itself — an avoidance so noticeable that one advocacy group has created a website tracking his reluctance, DidBidenSayAbortionYet.org. |
Many activists fear that Biden's personal discomfort with the issue is keeping him from leading the Democratic Party into a more offensive position on abortion rights, both through more aggressive policymaking and leveraging the agenda-setting power of the presidency. |
"What we really need is for President Biden to be a bold and transformational leader on abortion right now, but we haven't seen that yet," said Gretchen Borchelt, vice president for reproductive rights and health at the National Women's Law Center. "It's a different world from when he was vice president, and so far we haven't felt that recognition of urgency from this administration." |
Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, has been just as circumspect in her public appearances. When asked about topics like new state laws restricting abortion and the looming court case, she has relied on euphemisms like "women's fundamental rights" and "the right to choose." A White House statement in January on the 48th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision promised to defend "reproductive health." |
After Biden signed executive orders expanding abortion access and overturning restrictions on the use of taxpayer dollars for clinics that refer or counsel patients to terminate pregnancies, he took a victory lap for protecting "women's health access" and returning to the policies that existed before former President Donald Trump took office. |
"If you're unable to say the word, you're also going to have trouble making sure that the people who are most impacted get the care and the protections that we need," said Renee Bracey Sherman, an abortion rights advocate who started the website monitoring Biden's reticence. "To me that's not a champion. That is not someone who is really even trying to show up for people who need abortions." |
'Sway': Is Jake Tapper for sale? |
On today's episode, Kara Swisher spoke with Jake Tapper, the CNN anchor. They discussed how big tech might shape the future of broadcast journalism, his experience covering the Trump administration and its aftermath, whether CNN is a boys' club, and how the real Washington is stranger than the fiction he writes. |
| Were you forwarded this newsletter? Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox. |
| Is there anything you think we're missing? Anything you want to see more of? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. |
|
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home