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      How the Republican Party Could Break

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow the Republican Party Could BreakAfter the Capitol Hill riot, the divide between reality and fantasy may become too wide to bridge.Opinion ColumnistJan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Stefani Reynolds/Getty ImagesFor a long time, people have predicted the crackup of American conservatism, the end of a Republican Party dominated by the conservative movement as one of the major powers in our politics. Demographic trends were supposed to permanently marginalize the right. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was supposed to signal conservatism’s eclipse. The rise of Donald Trump was supposed to shatter Republican politics the way that slavery once broke the Whigs.Conservatism survived all these prophecies, always clawing back to claim a share of power, maintaining unity and loyalty by offering a bulwark against liberal ambition even as its own agenda became more and more threadbare.So it would be a foolhardy prophet indeed who looked at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and assumed that this time, under this pressure, the conservative coalition will finally break apart, sending the Republican Party deep into the wilderness and reshaping American ideological debates along new lines.But breaking points do come, and the violent endgame of the Trump presidency has exposed a new divide in the conservative coalition — not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.At the same time, it has cast the key weakness of conservatism into even sharper relief: the growing distance between right-wing politics and almost every nonpolitical power center in America, from the media and culture industries to the old-line corporate suites to the communications empires of Silicon Valley.The Republican Party has succeeded in the past decade, despite its decadence and growing provincialism, by providing a harbor for voters who want to cast a vote, for all kinds of different reasons, against consolidated liberal power. And it has found new support in unexpected places: first the Obama-Trump voters of the Midwest in 2016, then the immigrant neighborhoods that trended rightward in 2020.But the implicit bargain of the Trump era required traditional Republicans — from upper-middle-class suburbanites to the elites of the Federalist Society — to live with a lot of craziness from their leader, and a lot of even crazier ideas from the very-online portions of his base, in return for denying Democrats the White House. And it’s not clear that this bargain can survive the irruption of all that crazy into the halls of the Capitol, and the QAnon-ification of the right that made the riot possible.Even before Jan. 6, the difficulty of balancing normal Republican politics with an insistence that Mike Pence could magically overturn a clear election outcome helped cost the party two Senate seats in Georgia. Even before the riot, finding post-Trump leaders who could bridge the internal divide, bringing along his base but also broadening the party, was going to be an extraordinary challenge.But the Republican Party that lost Georgia a week ago still looked competitive enough to count on holding, say, 47 Senate seats even in a tough election cycle. A week later, it seems the party could easily break harder, and fall further.Here’s how it could happen. First, the party’s non-Trumpist faction — embodied by senators like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, various purple- and blue-state governors and most of the remaining Acela corridor conservatives, from lawyers and judges to lobbyists and staffers — pushes for a full repudiation of Trump and all his works, extending beyond impeachment to encompass support for social-media bans, F.B.I. surveillance of the MAGA universe and more.At the same time, precisely those measures further radicalize portions of the party’s base, offering apparent proof that Trump was right — that the system isn’t merely consolidating against but actively persecuting them. With this sense of persecution in the background and the Trump family posturing as party leaders, the voter-fraud mythology becomes a litmus test in many congressional elections, and baroque conspiracy theories pervade primary campaigns.In this scenario, what remains of the center-right suburban vote and the G.O.P. establishment becomes at least as NeverTrump as Romney, if not the Lincoln Project; meanwhile, the core of Trump’s support becomes as paranoid as Q devotees. Maybe this leads to more empty acts of violence, further radicalizing the center right against the right, or maybe it just leads to Republican primaries producing a lot more candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to the point where a big chunk of the House G.O.P. occupies not just a different tactical reality from the party’s elite but a completely different universe.Either way, under these conditions that party could really collapse or really break. The collapse would happen if Trumpists with a dolchstoss narrative and a strong Q vibe start winning nominations for Senate seats and governorships in states that right now only lean Republican. A party made insane and radioactive by conspiracy theories could keep on winning deep-red districts, but if its corporate support bailed, its remaining technocrats jumped ship and suburban professionals regarded it as the party of insurrection, it could easily become a consistent loser in 30 states or more.Alternatively, a party dominated by the Trump family at the grassroots level, with Greene-like figures as its foot soldiers, could become genuinely untenable as a home for centrist and non-Trumpist politicians. So after the renomination of Trump himself or the nomination of Don Jr. in 2024, a cluster of figures (senators like Romney and Susan Collins, blue-state governors like Maryland’s Larry Hogan) might simply jump ship to form an independent mini-party, leaving the G.O.P. as a 35 percent proposition, a heartland rump.None of this is a prediction. In American politics, reversion to the gridlocked mean has been a safe bet for many years — in which case you’d expect the MAGA extremes to return to their fantasy world, the threat of violence to ebb, Trump to fade without his Twitter feed and the combination of Biden-administration liberalism and Big Tech overreach to bring the right’s blocking coalition back together in time for 2022.But if Biden governs carefully, if Trump doesn’t go quietly, if MAGA fantasies become right-wing orthodoxies, then the stresses on the Republican Party and conservatism could become too great to bear.I woke up last Wednesday thinking that the G.O.P. had survived the Trump era, its power reduced but relatively stable, with some faint chance to redeem itself — by carefully shepherding it supporters back toward reality, while integrating elements of populism into the reality-based conservatism that our misgoverned country needs.A week later, that hope seems like as much of a fantasy as QAnon. Instead, it feels as if the Republican Party survived Trump’s presidency, but maybe not his disastrous and deadly leaving of it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Far-Right Protesters Stormed Germany’s Parliament. What Can America Learn?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyFar-Right Protesters Stormed Germany’s Parliament. What Can America Learn?It might be time to crack down, rather than reach out.Ms. Sauerbrey is a contributing Opinion writer who focuses on German politics and society.Jan. 8, 2021, 4:53 p.m. ETProtesters gathered in front of the the Reichstag in Berlin on Aug. 29. Credit…John Macdougall/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBERLIN — When the first pictures of rioters mounting the steps to the Capitol started to beam across the world on Wednesday, many Germans felt an unpleasant twinge of familiarity.On Aug. 29, during a demonstration in Berlin against government restrictions to rein in the spread of the coronavirus, several hundred protesters climbed over fences around the Reichstag, the seat of Germany’s national Parliament, and ran toward the entrance. They were met by a handful of police officers, who pushed the crowd back and secured the entrance.Things went differently at the American Capitol, of course. Still, even if the German protesters weren’t able to enter the building, the shock was similar: an assault on a democratically elected legislature. Some of the German protesters were far-right activists; several waved the “Reichsflagge,” the black, white and red flag of the German Empire, the colors of which were later adopted by the Nazis.In the days that followed, Germans asked themselves a series of questions: Was this “a storming of the Reichstag,” evoking dark memories of the building being set on fire in 1933, which led to the suspension of the Weimar Republic’s constitution? Was it a sign that our democracy was under threat? Or was this just a bunch of extremist rioters exploiting a blind spot in the police’s strategy?In a way, it feels inappropriate to compare what happened in Berlin in August to what happened in Washington on Wednesday. The crowd here was much smaller, it did not enter the building, and luckily, nobody was hurt, much less killed. The goals were different, too. American protesters wanted to overturn an election; Germany’s wanted to overturn a set of policies. And most importantly, while some far-right populist politicians backed the Berlin demonstrations, they did not have the support of the country’s leader.And yet, the similarities are too big to ignore — and I fear that they indicate the arrival of a new phenomenon that may be found in many other countries, too: the decoupling of protest from the real world.What connects the protesters on both sides of the Atlantic is a deep distrust in officials and a belief in conspiracy theories. In fact, many in both countries believe in the same conspiracy theories. The QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump will defend the world from a vast network of Satanists and pedophiles, is shockingly popular with many in Germany’s anti-lockdown movement, as it is with the president’s fiercest partisans at home.The woman who uttered the decisive call to storm the stairs to Reichstag claimed in her speech that President Trump was in Berlin and that the crowd needed to show that “we are fed up” and would “take over domestic authority here and now” and to “show Donald Trump that we want world peace.” She was referring to QAnon.The similarity that struck me most, however, was how aimless and lost some of the rioters both in Berlin and Washington appeared to be once they had reached their target. At the Capitol, some trashed offices or sat in chairs that weren’t theirs. In Berlin, too, there was no plan beyond this spontaneous gesture of rage and disobedience. Many just pulled out their smartphones and started filming once they had reached the top of the stairs. Is this their revolution? A bunch of selfies?It seems like protesters on both sides of the Atlantic long for some sort of control, and want to assert their power over legislative headquarters that they see as representative of their oppression. But all they get in the end is a cheap social media surrogate. Their selfies may resonate in their digital spheres — and eventually spill back into the real world to create more disruption — but their material effect may be pretty limited.In that case, what can politicians do to deal with these extremists?So far, many politicians have tried to defang the far-right by placating its voters. Since the rise of the Alternative for Germany party in 2015, the mainstream consensus in Germany has been to stress that these voters should not be viewed as extremists, but as angry people, who can and should be won back. Many of them, particularly people in Eastern Germany where the AfD is much stronger than in the West, are seen angry about real grievances, like deindustrialization, job loss, and all the other cultural and economic traumas of Reunification. In some places, this has worked to peel off right-wing voters and bring them back to the mainstream.But the remaining fringe has only drifted further away. Right-wing leaders and conspiracy theorists have now redirected the anger at made-up causes largely decoupled from real world grievances: Many on the far-right in Germany believe that Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to create a “corona dictatorship” and that vaccines will be used to alter people’s genes. The American equivalent, of course, is that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump.This is a problem. Political compromise, and ultimately, reconciliation, starts with recognition. But real-world politics cannot follow those who become believers in their alternate realities. A different strategy is needed.German policymakers have started to realize this — and it’s only become clearer since the August protests. Germany’s secret service has decided to put sub-organizations of the AfD, which is increasingly radical, “under observation,” an administrative step that allows for the collection of personal data and the recruitment of informants within the party. Organizers of the coronavirus protest in August are becoming a focus, too. The minister of the interior banned several right-wing extremist associations in 2020.Of course, attempts to win voters back, to wrestle them from the grip of the cult, must never stop. But there are no policies and no recognition politics we could offer people who adhere to a cult. Instead, to protect our democracies, we must watch them, contain them, and take away their guns.Anna Sauerbrey, a contributing Opinion writer, is an editor and writer at the German daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Trump's Georgia Call Was Brought to You by Q

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWith One Presidential Phone Call, QAnon Shows Its PowerThe sprawling online conspiracy network is at the center of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.Opinion ColumnistJan. 6, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by Mike McQuade; photograph by Doug Mills/The New York TimesForgive me for failing, at first, to find much news in the news that President Trump had pressured officials in Georgia to overturn the election results. That he had been caught doing so on tape was even more dog-bites-man.Not many people remember this, but we once had a lengthy impeachment hearing centered on a corrupt Trump phone call. It’s only natural that he’d reprise his biggest hit — “Perfect Call Feat. Senate Toadies” — in his grand finale as president.Then I spent an hour listening to the full recording of Trump’s call, and my stomach sank. What got me was how thoroughly Trump’s arguments involved conspiracy theories hatched or spread by QAnon, the online cultlike thing that seems to be gaining a death grip on the American right.In that phone call, I heard a president who is somehow both rabbit and rabbit hole — as much a rabid consumer of online conspiracy propaganda as he is a producer of it. The plot to undo the 2020 election isn’t Trump’s alone — it is also the product of a sprawling online phenomenon whose goals, logic and methods are as unpredictable as the internet itself.Trump will soon step out of office, but that won’t diminish his standing with a conspiracy-media apparatus that has become so adept at transforming rumor into political reality. Through QAnon, the mendacity that has defined the Trump era will remain an enduring feature of right-wing politics, long after Trump slinks away.QAnon originated in 2017 as an exceptionally bizarre conspiracy theory, centered around the premise that the country is run by a cabal of pedophiles whom Trump is bringing down. It has since morphed into something even stranger. More than a single conspiracy theory, QAnon is best regarded as a general-purpose conspiracy infrastructure, spreading lies across a range of subjects, from coronavirus denial to mask and vaccine skepticism and, now, to a grab bag of theories about election fraud.The conspiracy theories seem ridiculous, but the consequences are real.The movement’s acolytes take inspiration and guidance from the eponymous Q, an anonymous figure who has posted cryptic notes on the troll-infested internet forums 4Chan and 8Kun. But QAnon’s theories don’t come down fully formed from Q, nor from Trump; in a manner that resembles an online game, they are created collectively, giving the movement a flexible, almost religious quality.QAnon’s participatory thrill has alarmed misinformation researchers. Because every pronouncement from Q can spark endless “research” and commentary, new adherents are made to feel like they have a role in uncovering the deepest secrets about the world. “It is insufficient to be persuaded by the anti-vax or QAnon movements — those who’ve joined the movement feel an obligation to share the ‘truth’ with those who’ve yet to be enlightened,” the media scholar Ethan Zuckerman wrote in 2019. “Those who are most successful in converting others are rewarded with attention, a commodity that is easily convertible into other currencies.”In the Church of Q, Donald Trump is the one and only messiah. But the Georgia call shows how fully he participates in it, too.Travis View, a co-host of the excellent Q-tracking podcast “QAnon Anonymous,” told me that when Trump was rattling off his litany of false claims on the call, “he was sounding a lot like a thread on the Q research board, on which people spit out ideas, conspiracy theories and snippets, and people sort of build upon them.”View described a symbiotic relationship between Trump, QAnon message boards and pro-Trump news outlets like One America News and Newsmax. It’s a bit like jazz musicians improvising, each one punching up the other’s riff.“We’ve seen OAN and Newsmax basically regurgitate baseless conspiracy theories from QAnon world,” View said. The stories from pro-Trump outlets “get into Trump’s brain, and then he regurgitates them back, and of course because he’s regurgitating the conspiracy theories he heard on the internet, all the internet conspiracy theorists believe that their conspiracy theory is validated, because Trump repeated it.”On the call, Trump claimed that voting machines made by a company called Dominion Voting Systems were rigged to help Biden win. The theory has been debunked; it is also moot, because officials in Georgia confirmed Biden’s victory through a hand recount of paper ballots.The Dominion idea was one of several stolen-election theories that started on QAnon-friendly forums. Pro-Trump outlets then echoed the theory — as NBC News recently pointed out, Ron Watkins, the administrator of 8Kun, has been featured on One America News as a voting-systems expert, which he is not. When Trump inevitably tweeted out the OAN segment, the circle was complete: OAN had given its aggrieved audience “news” that confirmed its belief in the conspiracy. Trump promoted self-serving misinformation, and QAnon grew just a little bit more powerful.The atmosphere of fear and mistrust that has pervaded America’s response to the pandemic has been very good for QAnon, and now this dangerous movement holds real political power.In November, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon supporter, won a seat representing Georgia’s 14th District in the House of Representatives. Some Republican officials have attempted to downplay Greene’s political success and distance themselves from her ideas, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Greene becomes a G.O.P. star. On Monday, at Trump’s rally to support the two Republicans running in Georgia’s Senate runoffs, the crowd’s wildest cheers came when Greene took the stage. The audience sounded much more enthusiastic about Greene than about Kelly Loeffler, one of the actual Republican candidates.If the Republican Party has given up entirely on fighting QAnon’s influence, it might be because Q has grown too big to tame. Late last month, NPR and Ipsos published the disturbing results of a poll assessing QAnon’s hold on the nation. People who responded to the survey were asked whether it was true or false that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” QAnon’s central lie. Seventeen percent said “true,” and 37 percent more said they didn’t know. In other words, a majority of Americans think it is at least possible that QAnon’s nuttiest theory might be fact. A third of respondents also said that voter fraud had helped Biden win.This level of influence isn’t going to disappear at noon on Jan. 20. QAnon’s vast reach, and Trump’s deep hold on it, are here to stay.Office Hours With Farhad ManjooFarhad wants to chat with readers on the phone. If you’re interested in talking to a New York Times columnist about anything that’s on your mind, please fill out this form. Farhad will select a few readers to call.[embedded content]The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      QAnon and the 'Trump coup' have more in common than you might think | Dan Brooks

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      I have a friend who’s the stepmother to a young boy and this boy’s birth mother has gotten deeply into QAnon. How deep? She recently told him that the world is flat, and anyone who tells him otherwise is a paedophile. She is determined to take him out of school in order to shield him from cannibals, satanists and Democrats. Every time my friend updates me on the project of raising a child in joint custody with this person, I experience a kind of vertigo. How would you even do it?Now imagine that, instead of raising a child, you and this person had to set emissions standards and develop a sustainable healthcare system. This is not far from the condition of US democracy in 2020: two centre-right corporate parties, one socially progressive and the other socially reactionary; a left divided between the internet and the academy; and an indeterminate number of maniacs.The maniacs are QAnon. It’s complicated, but QAnon is essentially an online conspiracy theory based on interpreting the gnomic posts of an unidentified person (or group of people) known as Q, who purports to be a high-ranking official in the US government. Q’s message to the faithful is that this government is secretly controlled by a cabal of satanic paedophiles whom Donald Trump will one day round up and execute, in a mass cleansing called the Storm.This Storm is not going to happen, of course. If it ever does, I will freely admit that I was wrong from whatever gibbet I am on while Facebook groups remake society – but it will also never be cancelled, because anticipating this Storm is what makes QAnon a compelling fantasy. It’s impossible to know how many people actually believe in QAnon as an accurate description of how the world works, relative to how many just enjoy talking about it as a kind of online game. For both groups, though, the appeal is world building. Q is a collaborative work of speculative fiction that replaces this world with one that it both more exciting and more legible. The essence of that world is the Storm: the fantasy that those who disagree with your politics are not just wrong but evil, in a way that justifies finally smashing them.In this central fantasy, QAnon resembles another form of fantasy politics from 2020 – one that gained traction not among the desperate underclass of disenfranchised internet addicts, but among the broad professional centre of US politics. I am referring to the speculation that President Trump would refuse to leave office if he lost the election.People seem to have politely forgotten this theory, but in September and October, it was trafficked by several of the most respectable news and commentary outlets in the US. The Washington Post published an article by the co-founder of the Transition Integrity Project that gamed out scenarios in which “players”, including former Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, took on the roles of factions determined to install their candidate by any means necessary. In October, the New Yorker published a piece headlined “What can you do if Trump stages a coup?” These grandes dames of political analysis were joined by less impressive imitators in what became, during the months before the election, a micro-genre of news speculation.The coup scenario has not come to pass, unless you count the series of unsuccessful lawsuits Trump’s campaign has filed in an attempt to overturn various state election results – which I do not. The president’s motives remain inscrutable, but if you are going to risk it all on a bid to overthrow US democracy, you do not put Rudolph Giuliani in charge.The Trump coup theory attracted a more sophisticated audience than QAnon, and from an epistemological standpoint it was far stronger. I would never say the two scenarios were similar in their premises or their reasoning. But they had one thing in common: they were both animated by the fantasy of being done with democracy. The Storm and the Trump coup both imagined worlds in which their audiences would have to stop trying to win over their political opponents.If we understand fantasy not as worlds we want to come to pass but rather worlds that offer outlets for feelings we have to repress in this one, the popularity of QAnon and the Trump coup scenarios makes sense. They are symptomatic of a democracy that has become frustrated with democratic means. Like QAnon, a Trump putsch held out the possibility of a righteous cleansing of Republican extremists that would reduce the hard problems of representative governance to the comparatively simple logistics of civil war. Civil war is bad, obviously, but it rewards the winners with one-party rule. Both QAnon and the Trump coup were dark fantasies that came with the same happy ending: a situation in which decent Americans no longer had to argue with the ignorant and evil, because we were finally justified in simply overpowering them. That we cannot do so under ordinary conditions is what makes US democracy such a pain in the ass.At this point, the possibility of a coup seems consigned to the realm of past fantasy, fading as we move on from the zeitgeist that made it compelling. I don’t know what will happen to QAnon once Trump leaves office. Probably, my friend’s stepson’s mother will keep coming up with reasons why the various antagonists in her life are evil. The hard work of democracy will return to bringing people like her back in. It would probably be easier to round them up. A lot of things would be easier, if more of us were monsters. More

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      He Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Great ReadHe Pretended to Be Trump’s Family. Then Trump Fell for It.For months, a 21-year-old Trump supporter impersonated Trump family members on Twitter, spreading conspiracy theories, asking for money and eventually drawing the attention of the president.Credit…Raphaelle MacaronBy More

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      Is the internet breaking our grasp on reality? The 11 November Guardian Weekly

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      One of the many worrying aspects of 2020 has been a rise in online conspiracy theories, with supporters of some of the wildest – such as QAnon – even rising to elected office. Others have documented losing their loved ones down the conspiracy rabbit hole. In the first of a new Guardian series on how big tech has thrived during the pandemic, Alex Hern investigates why people are losing their grip on reality online and what Facebook, and others, are doing to stem the flow.The spread of online disinformation may even be influencing the man still sitting in the Oval Office in his refusal to concede. More than two weeks after election day in the US, Donald Trump has continued to proclaim his “victory” on social media and to delay the transition to the incoming Biden administration. As Simon Tisdall writes, this mess doesn’t just have implications for Americans but is giving cover to enemies of democracy elsewhere to play out their worst impulses while Trump causes a distraction. Also in the US, we look at what a mixed performance in the elections means for the Democrats – can Joe Biden keep his own party united, let alone a whole nation? We also look at the five intrinsic flaws that are causing democracy in the US to wobble.Britain is about to enter an absolutely vital few weeks when it comes to finalising post-Brexit trade terms – not to mention its Covid response. So it’s perhaps not surprising that last week No 10 was preoccupied by a toxic war between staff that culminated in the dramatic departure of Boris Johnson’s top aide, Dominic Cummings, and the PM finding himself back in Covid self-isolation … We look back at a wild week. What does it mean for the future of the government?Get the magazine delivered to your home More

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      US elects first trans state senator and first black gay congressman

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      A deeply polarised US electorate has given the country its first transgender state senator and its first black gay congressman – but also its first lawmaker to have openly supported the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory.
      All four members of the progressive “Squad” of Democratic congresswomen of colour – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – have been comfortably re-elected, and Sarah McBride’s victory in Delaware has made her the highest-ranking trans official in the US.
      “I hope tonight shows an LGBTQ kid that our democracy is big enough for them, too,” McBride, 30, who easily defeated the Republican Steve Washington to represent Delaware’s first state senate district, tweeted after the election was called.
      McBride, a former spokesperson for the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, was a trainee in the White House during the Obama administration and became the first trans person to speak at a major political convention when she addressed Democrats in Philadelphia in 2016.
      “For Sarah to shatter a lavender ceiling in such a polarising year is a powerful reminder that voters are increasingly rejecting the politics of bigotry in favour of candidates who stand for fairness and equality,” said Annise Parker of the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which trains and supports out candidates.
      In Vermont, Taylor Small, 26, has become the state’s first openly transgender legislator after winning 41% of the vote to make it to the House of Representatives, making her the fifth “out” trans state legislator in the US. More

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      QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene rails against Nancy Pelosi in election victory speech – video

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene has become the first supporter of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory to win a US House seat after AP declared her the winner in Georgia’s 14th congressional district. The future congresswoman has previously voiced support for QAnon, a baseless conspiracy theory rooted in antisemitic tropes whose followers believe Donald Trump is secretly fighting against a cabal of Democratic politicians, billionaires and celebrities engaged in child trafficking. In a video shared on social media, Taylor Greene promised to stand up to Nancy Pelosi, declaring that the country was never meant to be a socialist nation
      QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene wins seat in US House
      US election 2020 live updates: follow the latest news, results and reaction More