Qanon hitpiece from rightwingwatch.org -
Oregon Congressional Candidate Places Electoral Hopes on QAnon
Jo Rae Perkins is already counting on being called crazy for believing in the QAnon conspiracy theory, but it’s a risk she says she is willing to take while she campaigns for a third time to represent Oregon’s 4th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives.
“It’s a very, highly calculated risk that I’m taking. Most people play it a lot safer than I do,” Perkins said in a phone interview with Right Wing Watch Friday. “It’s either pure genius or pure insanity. It’s one of the two. The voters are going to have to be the ones that make that decision,” Perkins added.
QAnon is a conspiracy theory that alleges President Donald Trump is working in secret to destroy a network of corrupt government officials and satanic child sex traffickers that include elite Democratic politicians, business leaders, and Hollywood figures. Supporters of the conspiracy theory get their updates from cryptic messages posted on anonymous forums by “Q,” who many QAnon followers believe is a high-ranking government official. Qanon followers believe that decoding the messages will reveal information about the Trump administration’s undisclosed plans.
Despite QAnon believers’ assertions that the person or people writing the mysterious “Q” messages online are connected to the Trump administration, the White House has refused to explicitly denounce the conspiracy theory and its followers. Instead, Trump’s Twitter account routinely retweets QAnon fans, doing so more than 20 times one day in late December.
While Trump was busy retweeting QAnon followers over the holidays, Perkins was sharing her own slew of pro-QAnon posts and defenses of the conspiracy theory. On Dec. 21, Perkins copied and pasted to her publicly viewable Facebook page a post authored by “Q.” After a person thanked her for sharing the post, she replied: “I wonder how many other Congressional Candidates have the intestinal fortitude to share #QPosts?”
Perkins’ interest and belief in QAnon is hardly new, even if her defense of the conspiracy theory in her campaign messaging is. Perkins told Right Wing Watch that she first encountered QAnon in November 2017 when she saw some comment the letter “Q” on a video she was watching. After watching the video, Perkins saw a Facebook friend’s post asking people to speak about Q. On the night of Nov. 19, 2017, Perkins said she sent a message to her friend on Facebook about Q, and though she was initially skeptical of QAnon, she says she was eventually convinced “that there’s more legitimacy than not” to the conspiracy theory.
Now, Perkins says she watches and has occasionally interacted online with pro-Q content creators online and has shared that content on the verified Twitter account associated with her campaign. On Dec. 30, Perkins tweeted a video from QAnon content creator Dave Hayes, known as the “Praying Medic,” and asked: “Did I strike a nerve? For those who state Q is conspiracy, rhetorical question for you; what if you are wrong? If I am wrong, than the mathematical improbability of coincidences failed! We’ve been fed many lies for years, are YOU too afraid to look behind the curtain. I’m not!” A Twitter user asked Perkins in a reply to her tweet whether she had personally done the math to support her claim about “mathematical improbability,” to which she replied that she had not.
The next day, Perkins agreed with a user that even if “Q” wasn’t really an administration official, that the phenomon was still good because it forced people to look at the world from a different point of view. “For too long, many of us suspected something was askew – Now we know it is unfortunately true. We have 3 to thank, God, President Trump and Q!” Perkins wrote.
Yahoo News reported in August that the FBI believes that the conspiracy theory may be a source of domestic extremist attacks, and that the threat would likely increase during the 2020 elections. Despite this, Perkins said she did not believe it was irresponsible to share QAnon material while pursuing public office.
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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/oregon-congressional-candidate-places-electoral-hopes-on-qanon/