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Tumbleweeds blew through the House chambers today, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved a major vote to Wednesday night, so that lawmakers could skip town a day early. |
That's because law enforcement officials had sounded the alarm that the Capitol might find itself under attack again, after today's date, March 4, recently became a fixation among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory. |
When President Donald Trump left office in January, rather than staging a military coup, as many QAnon supporters had hoped he would, some adopted a hypothesis that Jan. 20 wasn't the real Inauguration Day anyway — that it was, in fact, March 4, which really did serve as the presidential swearing-in date until the 1930s. That, they said, was when Trump would wrest back power from President Biden. |
Of course, this — like QAnon's fundamental beliefs that Democrats and coastal elites are involved in an international pedophilia ring, and that Trump is a God-sent savior who will rid the world of them — wasn't actually true. |
So as the date drew nearer, something ironic happened: Many of the online influencers who tend to drive the conversation around QAnon started throwing cold water on the March 4 idea, though it had been theirs in the first place. |
"In the lead-up, all these influencers realized all these false prophecies are going to look bad and might hurt their profit," Mia Bloom, the co-author of the forthcoming book "Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon," said in an interview. |
Bloom, who is also a communications professor at Georgia State University, said that since December, when the original person (or people) who had been anonymously posting online under the name "Q" stopped writing publicly, a growing aristocracy of writers had sprung up to create paid content, using platforms like Patreon or PayPal to monetize their ever-evolving torrent of conspiracy narratives. |
"They were the ones that floated March 4," she said. "They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: 'No, no, no, it's a false flag. It's not QAnon that's going to do anything on March 4. It's a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.'" |
After the attacks of Jan. 6, commentators on the far right papered over the violence at the Capitol by saying that it had been a ploy, cooked up by left-wing activists and anarchists in antifa (itself an ideology, by the way, more than a real organization). And the lies have stuck: A poll last month from USA Today and Suffolk University found that nearly three-fifths of all Trump voters believed the Jan. 6 riot had been "mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters." |
This time around, seeing that it might not be wise to bring a group of fervid supporters to Washington for the arrival of a leader who doesn't show up, QAnon influencers have gotten out in front of the problem — making a similar set of claims about antifa, but ahead of time. |
For Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this is just one more sign of how malleable — and potentially long-lasting — the QAnon conspiracy theory appears to be. |
"What's really worrisome about QAnon is that it's basically a choose-your-own-adventure," she said. "It allows people to co-create a conspiracy that gives them a strong sense of positive community and belonging, in a world that's very isolated." |
"And it's a community in which there's an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, 'Yes, and' — not, 'No, but,'" Kleinfeld said. "If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability." |
Even as its original creator has seemingly stepped aside, QAnon's supporters have become embedded within a range of far-right communities. That, Kleinfeld explained, is also making it stronger. |
"A number of entities fuel QAnon," she said. "There's the moms' anti-pedophilia groups, there's the men-protecting-their-families groups, there's the anti-vaxxers, the evangelicals. But they're amplified by the officials who benefit from them. And the Republican Party has had a number of operatives that have benefited and therefore amplified Q." |
Biden's interior secretary pick, Deb Haaland, is now headed toward confirmation. |
By Glenn Thrush and Coral Davenport |
A Senate committee on Thursday approved Deb Haaland to be the next secretary of the interior, with the support of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a key Republican from an oil-producing state, virtually ensuring her confirmation by the Senate later this month. |
Haaland will be leading an agency that oversees the nation's more than 500 million acres of public land, and will make history as the first Native American to head a cabinet department. |
Murkowski joined another center-right Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, in backing Haaland, a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico who has throughout her career expressed her intention to crack down on the use of fossil fuels. |
Murkowski said she weighed the importance of the oil and gas industry to her state's economy — and Haaland's "historic nomination" for Alaska's Natives, who make up 18 percent of the state's population. |
"I have really struggled with this one," Murkowski said just before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee voted, 11 to 9, to greenlight her confirmation. |
While some oil and gas organizations have lobbied against Haaland, a large and well-organized group of Native, progressive and environmental activists have also pushed to send the message to lawmakers that a vote against Haaland in the Senate might translate to a loss of Native American votes. |
Murkowski said that before reaching her decision, she met with Haaland twice, each time for over an hour. |
Haaland was likely to be approved, even without Republican support, although the Biden administration lobbied hard behind the scenes to ensure that Murkowski and Collins were on board. Last week, Senator Joe Manchin III, a conservative Democrat from coal-producing West Virginia, signaled his support for Haaland, ensuring she would be confirmed if no other Democrats defected at the last minute. |
That Haaland's nomination is now on a gliding path comes as a relief to White House officials who have spent much of the past two weeks fruitlessly trying to salvage the nomination of Neera Tanden as budget director. |
During a contentious confirmation hearing last month, Republicans questioned Haaland's long-held opposition to most drilling on federal property. Murkowski expressed concern specifically about an executive order signed by Biden on his first day in office that placed a temporary moratorium on oil and gas leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. |
Her constituents in Alaska, Murkowski said, were "looking at this and saying, 'Wait a minute, why is this administration out to get us?'" |
Haaland, who kept her answers short, reassured Murkowski that she planned to work closely with her on regulatory issues. |
Most of Biden's early nominees have been confirmed without much fuss. But many Senate Republicans have announced they will oppose Haaland, along with Xavier Becerra, the president's pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, on policy grounds. |
On Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee deadlocked over Becerra's nomination in a 14-to-14 party line vote, a split that allows Senate Democrats to bring the nomination to the floor, where it will almost certainly be approved with Vice President Kamala Harris casting a tiebreaking vote. |
This piece comes from our live briefing, where you can find more updates on the news in Washington today. |
'Sway': Stacey Abrams on American idealism and American betrayal |
In today's episode of "Sway," Kara Swisher spoke with Stacey Abrams, the political organizer and former candidate for governor of Georgia. |
They discussed Abrams's fight to protect access to voting rights, especially for Black Americans; the work currently being done by Republicans to reduce voting access; and how she is working to avoid messianic leadership in the organizations she builds. They also look backward, digging into how she turned Georgia blue. You can listen here. |
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