QAnon is fake. Here’s the real conspiracy that should worry California Republicans

Now that we know that the California Republican Party has endorsed three apparent QAnon adherents as their nominees for Congress, I am prepared to spill the beans on the Biggest Conspiracy Ever.

QAnon, or “Q”, is a … what? … an ideology, I guess, like a kind of Poli-Scientology. In fact, it’s very likely that a QAnon follower named Marjorie Taylor Greene will be elected in Georgia’s deep (state) red 14th Congressional District.

That should scare you. A lot.

QAnon is based on the premise that a secret government operative, “Q,” is spreading covert messages about the so-called Deep State, which allegedly operates pedophilia-centric pizza parlors with ties to Hillary Clinton. Oh, and John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in 1999, is the secret president-in-waiting of the United States.

Scamalot, if you will.

The roots of QAnon are just another sad example of woo-woo nutbag ideology in the United States. The historian Richard Hofstadter, author of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” details this strain of thought going back to the Populist and Progressive Era of the 1890s, carrying through to the Red Scare and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s witch hunt. Today, it seeds vast acreage of the Trump GOP’s grassy knoll.

For his part, President Trump, a world-class paranoid himself, happily “accidentally” tweets out QAnon bilge while his oh-so-above-it-all handmaidens like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, blandly denounce QAnon.

Last time I checked, McCarthy is what’s left of being an actual Republican, though the definition might change if the party keeps endorsing QAnon candidates.

California is the postwar cradle of what once was a powerful, serious national party. For decades, it produced Republican heavyweights like President Richard Nixon, President Ronald Reagan and Gov. Earl Warren. In fact, a California Republican has been a nominee for president or vice president on the national ticket eight times since 1948.

Now, there are very few California Republicans. The ones remaining are either inclined to objective denial of reality or worse, enablers of same.

Consider the fact that Anti-Vaxxer/Islamophobe Tim Donnelly, a former assemblyman from Twin Peaks, came within four points of defeating 2014 GOP gubernatorial nominee Neel Kashkari, an eminently sane, smart guy who left the state after his defeat to become president of the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis.

Six years later, California has no statewide GOP elected officials.

The real conspiracy isn’t QAnon (after all, John F. Kennedy Jr. was a Democrat, last I heard). The real conspiracy here is that the California Republican Party has boarded a careening UFO with Bigfoot and Elvis as co-pilots.

Here’s what’s really sad: One of my friends has a son who worked at that very same pizza parlor in Washington that a QAnon tinfoil-hatter was about to go shoot up for no reason. What if that shooting had happened, California GOP? Blood on your hands? Naw. Nothing to see here. Just keep on enabling.

“Let me be very clear,” McCarthy told Fox News on Aug. 21, after Georgia GOP primary voters selected Greene, ”There is no place for QAnon in the Republican Party.”

Gee. I guess there is in the California Republican Party, however.

Yeah. It’s truly sad. Pathetic, really.

But, can you trust me? After all, I usually work in a building at 21st and … Q.

Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

This story was originally published October 2, 2020 at 5:00 AM.