The GOP's Disney Obsession Might As Well Be QAnon

"Mainstream" Republicans have embraced The Storm, even if they won't come out and say it.

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During the run up to the 2020 election, it seemed outrageous to think there might be multiple QAnon believers running for Congress — to say nothing of the chance that they might actually get elected. Even after four years of Donald Trump, characters like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Paul Gosar were often treated as kooky outliers, whose wholehearted embrace of a nebulous conspiracy predicated on a cabal of satanic child murderers was but a shallow vein in the supposedly deeper mines of rich Conservative ideology.

Now, just two years later, the GOP has completed its wholesale embrace of QAnon, leaning into the narrative that only wise, patriotic, Republicans can opposed the array of child predators stationed in the highest echelons of American society. The QAnon saturation throughout the broader Republican party reached critical mass over the past two weeks, when GOP figures used “pedophile” as a straight-faced line of attack against everyone from Disney executives to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.

To any reasonable observer, that process looks absurd. In Florida, for instance, Disney’s belated opposition to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ deeply homophobic “don’t say gay” bill prompted a barrage of psychotic allegations that the company itself was complacent in communism, pedophelia, grooming, and the “chemical castration” of children for the purposes of sex trafficking. Here’s a GOP state senate candidate in Oklahoma — some 1,200 miles away from Orlando’s Magic Kingdom! — ranting about Mickey Mouse cranking an imaginary hog.