A Creepy QAnon Chant Rises at Trump’s Rally—and He Nods and Smiles

Donald Trump didn’t shy away from several Qanon chants that erupted throughout the last leg of his New Hampshire campaign on Monday.

During a quiet moment of the rally, attendees engaged in a bit of call-and-response with the GOP front-runner, shouting things at Trump for his reactions.

“Where we go one, we go all,” erupted the crowd in a QAnon chant that’s frequently abbreviated to WWG1WGA in online messaging boards like 4chan, where the cult began.

Trump then smiled and nodded, scanning his audience.

“Free the January 6-ers,” shouted one of the attendees.

“We will,” Trump responded, pointing back at her.

In the three years since Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in an attempt to thwart Congress’s certification of Joe Biden’s presidential win, the Justice Department has convicted hundreds of the rioters, including former police officers, active duty U.S. Marines, and many members of far-right extremist groups. QAnon supporters comprise a good chunk of those convictions, with the self-proclaimed QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, emerging as one of the central figures of the revolt.

Trump has held messiah-like status within QAnon’s conspiratorial circle for years thanks to their principal belief that, despite being named and photographed as an associate of sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and despite being found liable by a jury for sexually abusing Elle columnist E. Jean Carroll, Trump will rid the world of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run the government and media.

And Trump has readily welcomed the cockeyed adoration. In 2020, Trump offered the movement plausible deniability at an executive level—claiming that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its theories. Just two years later, Trump was regularly circulating bits of the conspiracy on TruthSocial, reposting images of himself wearing Q pins subtitled with the cult’s messaging, “A Storm is Coming,” referring to Trump’s final victory when QAnon supporters expect him to mass-execute his opponents.

Barbie was conspicuously absent from certain Oscar categories when the award nominations were announced Tuesday, and people are furious.

The record-setting film received a nomination for best picture, and Ryan Gosling is up for best actor in a supporting role for his admittedly iconic portrayal of Ken. But titular star Margot Robbie was nowhere to be seen in the list of best leading actress nominations, and director Greta Gerwig is not up for best director.

America Ferrera did receive a nomination for best actress in a supporting role. But still, the fact that a movie about the patriarchy does not acknowledge the leading women feels a little on the nose.

Meanwhile, Oppenheimer—the other half of the massive cultural phenomenon that was “Barbenheimer”—dominated the categories with a total of 13 nominations.

Never shy about sharing their opinions, users on X (formerly Twitter) let loose on the deep irony of Ken, but not Barbie, getting an Oscar nomination about the challenges of womanhood and the dangers of toxic masculinity.

Elon Musk, who has used social media to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, is now arguing that had social media existed at the time of the Holocaust, it could have prevented the tragedy.

Musk visited the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau on Monday, as part of an apparent apology tour for his blatant antisemitism. Later that day, he participated in a conference on antisemitism organized in Krakow by the European Jewish Association.

Musk admitted he had been “somewhat naive” about the dangers of antisemitism. But he revealed how little he actually cares by sitting down for an interview with Ben Shapiro, a far-right commentator and conspiracy theorist. The two men then insisted that social media could have prevented the Holocaust from happening.

To prove their argument, Musk showed fake tweets he created of people sharing photos of Nazi attacks on synagogues, supporting Jewish resistance fighters, and pushing back against Holocaust deniers. There was even a tweet from the “official” Auschwitz account claiming Jews there were “thriving”—only to have a community note debunk that claim.

This claim holds very little water, for many reasons. A major one, as journalist Aaron Gordon pointed out, was that Nazi Germany revoked Jews’ right to free movement long before the death camps were built. So all those tweets from people urging Jews to leave Germany would have been meaningless.

Another reason is that many civilians were well aware of what Nazis were doing, or at least aware that Jewish people were being removed and never seen again. And they were perfectly content to let it happen.

In fact, if the current state of X (formerly Twitter) is anything to go by, social media could have actually made the Holocaust happen faster.

Since Musk took over the social media platform, X has been rife with hate speech. Musk himself is a major source of disinformation and hate speech, particularly antisemitism. He has also let multiple neo-Nazis back onto X, after previous leadership banned them.

In November, Musk backed a vile antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish people are getting what they deserve because they harbor “diabolical hatred against whites.” That, combined with the revelation that X was placing ads next to pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi content, sent advertisers fleeing the platform in droves (again).

Musk said Monday that his November post was “literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done,” which is saying something if you look at his X feed. He claimed he hadn’t understood the dangers of anti-Jewish sentiment because “in the circles I move in, I see no antisemitism.”

He said that “two-thirds of my friends are Jewish,” which actually undercuts his previous claim. Surely at least one of those Jewish friends would have been able to tell Musk about antisemitism.

Musk then claimed that thanks to all his information-hoarding friends, he is “Jewish by association.”

“I’m aspirationally Jewish,” he said, which holds all the gravity of someone calling themself “Jew-ish.”

Donald Trump took the road less traveled on Monday, opting to use sounds and shapes rather than words to explain what he had in mind for America’s military.

During a campaign stop in Laconia, New Hampshire—the last rally before the state’s Republican primary—Trump announced that under his leadership, the country would copy and paste Israel’s Iron Dome defense system over our own national borders. That idea, by the way, has previously earned him ridicule even by the likes of Fox News.

“I will build an Iron Dome over our country, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield made in the USA,” Trump said. “We do it for other countries. We help other countries, we build, we don’t do it for ourselves.”

But then, things got weird as Trump tried once again to assert his “extremely stable genius” status.

“These are not muscle guys here, they’re muscle guys up here, right,” Trump said, gesturing to his arms and then his head.

“And they calmly walk to us, and ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.… They’ve only got 17 seconds to figure this whole thing out. Boom. OK. Missile launch. Woosh. Boom,” he added.

The stunning performance comes after the 77-year-old bragged that he “aced” a cognitive test that required him to correctly identify a giraffe, tiger, and whale. According to Trump, that means his “mind is stronger now than it was 25 years ago.” In reality, that test is meant to measure dementia or cognitive decline, and it has never included the combination of animals Trump keeps mentioning.

Trump’s cognitive decline has been in question recently after the GOP front-runner was spotted with mysterious red sores on his hands. Trump has also been making increasingly nonsense remarks during his campaign tangents—last week, the former president said he would stop banks from “debanking” Americans—and confusing major players in American politics. During another campaign speech, Trump switched up former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and his only rival in the GOP race, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, several times, blaming Haley for the events of January 6 while claiming she turned down extra security. (The House committee assigned to probe the attack found no evidence to support Trump’s claim, which he has previously leveled at Pelosi.)

“Don’t be surprised if you have someone that is 80 in office, their mental stability is going to continue to decline. That’s just human nature,” Haley said Sunday on Face the Nation. “I don’t know if he was confused, I don’t know what happened, but it’s enough to send us a warning sign.”

House Republicans are getting increasingly frustrated at their caucus’s inability to draft laws and enact change, with some very publicly complaining about their party’s lack of accomplishments.

“We have nothing. In my opinion, we have nothing to go out there and campaign on,” Arizona Representative Andy Biggs told Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo at the beginning of the year. “It’s embarrassing.”

“The Republican Party in the Congress majority has zero accomplishments,” Salcedo agreed.

That’s in part thanks to the party’s incredibly slim majority in the House, which can currently only afford two defections on any given vote, as well as a growing rift in the Republican Party that has split lawmakers between long-standing conservative ideals and Trumpian loyalism.

The 118th Congress has passed fewer than 30 bills thus far, a paltry showing compared to previous congresses, which have generally passed more than 300.

With just 10 months until Election Day, the lacking report card is beginning to hang heavy over many Republicans, who fear it may be a death knell for their political ambitions.

“If we keep extending the pain and creating more suffering, we will pay the price at the ballot box. But if we can get on with governance and get the best policy wins we can, then you can open-field this thing,” former Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry told reporters on Thursday. “But at this point, we are sucking wind because we can’t get past the main object in the road. Once we get past that main object, then it’s the president’s performance on the economy, it’s the president’s performance on national security.”

McHenry also said Johnson needs to get a grip on the fact that Republicans “control one-third of the negotiations” so “we’re going to not get 100 percent of the wins.”

Against all odds, several openings for Republican wins lie on the horizon. The spending deal between House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could secure big wins for spending cuts, while a Senate immigration deal could help Republicans tighten border security. Yet none of those are guaranteed for the divided caucus, which so far has effectively objected to any negotiations with Democrats.

The party has shown little interest in actually working on those openings, threatening to boot Johnson for negotiating with Democrats and opting instead to spend time nitpicking and ousting its House leadership and dragging on a meritless impeachment of President Joe Biden, which some party members have admitted has “no evidence.”

And other Republicans, instead of turning their attention to material policy change, are privately predicting Johnson’s end should the party lose its majority in the House this fall.

“I don’t think he’s safe right now,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene told Politico. “The only reason he’s speaker is because our conference is so desperate.”

Some conservatives saw the writing on the wall months ago. In November, Freedom Caucus member Representative Chip Roy blew a gasket, criticizing his party for continually failing to follow through on campaign promises, even when it had the majority in the House, Senate, and White House during Trump’s presidency.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy said. “One!”

“Talked a big game about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it. Ain’t no wall, and Mexico didn’t pay for it, and we didn’t pass any border security,” he added.