Mike Cargile, for instance. Cargile tried his hand in 2020 in California’s 35th Congressional District (and again in 2022), and won the endorsement of the California Republican Party until his QAnon affiliation became public knowledge– his anti-Black Facebook rants and memes, complete with the n-word, didn’t help either. Of course, Cargile didn’t just target Black people; he also suggested that Muslim members of Congress are working with terrorists, stated that “2 illegal aliens having an anchor baby does not produce an American” and suggested that LGBTQ people are leading to the end of days.
And Cargile’s QAnon association is not just some multiple-degrees-of-separation-like accusation; Cargile even has the QAnon slogan “Where We Go One We Go All” (WWG1WWA – we’re still not sure how QAnonites square their slogan with accusing other people of being sheeple) in his Twitter biography (together with #Oathkeeper), and his campaign was largely based on his pronouncement that“The United States is being run by a satanic cabal of human traffickers and pedophile predators, working in conjunction other world leaders, to establish a one world order. I will do everything within my power to oppose this.” Cargile didn’t“have a doubt that QAnon exists,” although he admitted that “what or who it is exactly, no one seems to be sure.” And although“[t]here’s some fringe elements I don’t agree with,” he emphasized that“a lot of it I agree with” and that he found the evidence – whatever he may mean by ‘evidence’ – compelling.
Indeed, Cargile is the full conspiracy package. He has claimed that the coronavirus is a “scamdemic” and “NOTHING compared to the diseases and plagues headed this way via the rats and the homeless” (not that he offered much of a political plan to help combat homelessness), and he praised Judy Mikovits’sderangedconspiracy flickPlandemic as “EXACTLY why I'm in this race!”
And Cargile was not the only 2020 QAnon candidate in California. Omar Navarro, for instance, who ran in the primary for the 43rd Congressional District, was proud of his QAnon allegiance: “My relationship with this movement [QAnon] is to expose the dark human trafficking agenda in Hollywood and D.C.”There were also at least:
- Jamie Byers in CA-04, who unsuccessfully ran again in 2022 with WWG1WWA as one of his slogans
- Erin Cruz in CA-36, who retweeted QAnon “info”,and who, though she later acknowledged that the information from “Q” is “not 100 percent accurate”, nevertheless described it as a “data source”
-
Ignacio
Cruz in CA-19, profiled here
- Billy Earley in CA-44, who ran on the WWG1WWA slogan and repeatedly posted QAnon videos; “mind-boggling” said Earley of their contents. Indeed.
- Rhonda Furin in CA-45
- Alison Hayden in CA-15, a special education teacher who considers QAnon “another news outlet”; she has frequently shared its various conspiracies on social media. “It’s digital soldiers amalgamating information – you wouldn’t otherwise know about various topics that are swirling the internet with a conservative viewpoint that supports the President,” said Hayden.
- Patrice Kimbler in CA-36, a hardcore antivaccine activist who seems to support any antivaccine conspiracy theory involving the COVID-19 vaccines she can come across
- Buzz Patterson in CA-07, who has univocally declared his support for QAnon (but also, of course, denied it
- Nikka Piterman in CA-15 and CA-13, profiled here, who said that he doesn’t disavow QAnon “in any way” and that the “idea that there are groups of God-hating pedophiles isn’t far-fetched at all,” a sentiment that ought to lead you to question what he himself might be involved in.
- DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero in CA-12, who will receive her own entry, don’t worry.
- Joanne Wright in CA-34, who actually at least initially received the California Republican Party endorsement, even while the background photo on her Twitter account featured a picture of Trump pulling up a curtain to show a “Q”. Wright also tweeted numerous QAnon videos and pushed various Seth Rich and COVID-19 conspiracy theories
Diagnosis: Utter failures at reason, thought, decency and humanity is no insurmountable barrier for political success; that’s hardly a novel insight, but the degree of deranged kookery that people like Cargile (almost) get away with is still stunning.