United States | News & Politics

Well yeah, the QAnon people are crazy, I don't think anyone that matters disputes that. I'm confident that most "followers" do it as a sort of meme, like the majority of flat earthers (we even got a flat earth poster for our office and tried to convince others to join).

Why should anyone seriously address it? It's a meme that got out of control, and fighting it just makes you seem out of touch.

And no, I'm not saying RFK is representative of the Democratic Party (I guess we'll see how the votes come out), just that he's a very public figure getting a fairly large amount of media attention while pushing ideas that could be considered a conspiracy theory. Pushing the narrative that the polio vaccine causes polio today is just ridiculous, yet a relatively large chunk of people on both sides of the aisle buy it (I have at least one anti-vax neighbor, and I'm pretty sure there are many more in my very conservative area). It doesn't mean the Democratic Party opposes vaccines, but the Democratic Party also hasn't gone on a campaign to oust him. The Democratic Party not bothering with RFK Jr. is similar to the GOP not bothering with QAnon, it's just not worth their time and would distract from other things the party is trying to achieve.

My point is that just because a party has weird fringe groups working under their brand and they don't actively oust them doesn't mean they agree or support them, it's most likely not worth their time and is a massive distraction from other goals. So I'm not surprised major political parties don't go on a crusade to oust every weird fringe group from their fold. The problem isn't with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but that we have a two party system at all. If there were multiple major parties, each party would need to be more careful if its image so it doesn't lose its base, but when there are only two options, it doesn't matter as much.

So if you hate stupid fringe groups like QAnon or anti-vaxxers, you should campaign for election reform to end FPTP and promote third parties. I'm registered to a third party to hopefully boost their numbers (but I rarely actually vote for them), and even my little party has weird fringe groups. If we get more parties with actual seats in Congress, I think we'll see a bit more pushback against these fringe groups, who will then need to form a small, obscure party and we'll get a better idea of their actual numbers.