When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) first ran for Congress in 2020, Democrats attacked the far-right MAGA Republican relentlessly for promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory. Regardless, Greene won that race and is now serving her third term.
QAnon, which started in 2017, claimed that an international cabal of child sex traffickers, satanists and cannibals had infiltrated the United States’ federal government and that President Donald Trump was put in the White House to fight them. In 2025, QAnon isn’t drawing as much attention as it was five or six years ago. But in an article published on July 31, The New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant argues that QAnon’s beliefs haven’t really gone away, but are now mainstream within the Trumpified Republican Party.
“Six years ago, shortly before Jeffrey Epstein died in his cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, news broke that the FBI had issued a bulletin warning of the potential threat posed by QAnon,” Grant explains. “At the time, QAnon was not widely understood. It appeared to be a complex jumble of conspiracy theories around which communities formed on social media, communities whose members believed they could help bring about the demise of a shadowy, powerful cabal controlling the world and, among other things, trafficking children for sex.”
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The MAGA movement is experiencing a great deal of infighting over the Epstein case. Trump and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi want MAGA to move on from Epstein, but other MAGA Republicans have very different ideas.
“As for whether MAGA’s anger at Trump means that QAnon is at last over — the conspiracy theories no longer sustainable in the face of a sex trafficking scandal involving its hero — I am not sure that it can be,” Grant writes. “Far from fading, it feels like QAnon is everywhere now.”
Christopher Wray, a traditional non-MAGA conservative, was heading the FBI when it issued its warning about QAnon. But the FBI is now headed by someone who aggressively promoted QAnon: MAGA conspiracy theorist Kash Patel.
“When the attempted insurrection on January 6, (2021) made it clear that QAnon was far from over,” Grant notes, “some hoped that that might be its demise, now that more people could see the violent, authoritarian reality of the movement. But far from disappearing, it went mainstream — straight into the Republican Party. In 2024, in fact, more than one-quarter of Republicans indicated some belief in QAnon.”
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Grant continues, “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…. 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.”
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Melissa Gira Grant’s full article for The New Republic is available at this link.