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Democrats dismissed it as a fringe group of conspiracy-minded zealots. Moderate Republicans fretted over its potential to hurt their partys image, while more conservative lawmakers carefully sought to harness its grass-roots energy. Sympathetic media outlets covered its rallies, portraying it as an emerging strain of populist politics a protest movement born of frustration with a corrupt, unaccountable elite.

Then, to everyones surprise, its supporters started winning elections.

That is a description of the Tea Party movement, which emerged in 2009 from the right-wing fringes and proceeded to become a major, enduring force in American conservatism.

But it could just as easily be a description of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy movement that has emerged as a possible inheritor to the Tea Partys mantle as the most potent grass-roots force in right-wing politics.

This week, QAnon most likely got its first member of Congress: Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who won a primary runoff in a heavily Republican district on Tuesday. Ms. Greene has publicly supported QAnon, appearing on QAnon shows and espousing the movements unfounded belief that President Trump is on the verge of breaking up a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. Other QAnon-affiliated candidates have won primaries at the federal and state level, though few in districts as conservative as Ms. Greenes.

QAnon, which draws its beliefs from the cryptic message board posts of an anonymous writer claiming to have access to high-level government intelligence, lacks the leadership structure and the dark-money connections of the early Tea Party. It also lacks realistic goals or anything resembling a coherent policy agenda. Its followers are internet vigilantes gripped by paranoid and violent revenge fantasies, not lower-my-taxes conservatives or opponents of the Affordable Care Act.

But following Ms. Greenes primary win, some Washington insiders have begun to wonder if QAnons potential influence is being similarly underestimated. They worry that, just as the Tea Party gave cover to a racist birther movement that propelled conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama into the Republican mainstream, QAnons extreme views which have led some followers to commit serious crimes may prove difficult to contain.

Theyre delusional to dismiss it as a powerless fringe, said Steve Schmidt, a longtime G.O.P. strategist and campaign veteran who has become a Trump critic. The Republican Party is becoming the home to an amalgam of conspiracy theorists, fringe players, extremists and white nationalists that is out in the open in a startling way.

To be clear: QAnons ideas are far more extreme than the Tea Partys ever were. Tea Party supporters objected to Wall Street bailouts and the growing federal deficit; QAnon adherents believe that Hillary Clinton and George Soros are drinking the blood of innocent children. While Tea Party supporters generally sought to oust their political opponents at the ballot box, QAnon supporters cheer for top Democrats to be either imprisoned at Guantnamo Bay or rounded up and executed.

But there are more parallels than youd think, especially when it comes to how the political establishments of their times reacted to each groups rise.

When the Tea Party emerged in early 2009, many commentators mocked the idea that it could ever achieve political power, calling it a display of hysteria by frothing right-wingers. Michael R. Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York, characterized the Tea Party as a passing fad, comparing it to the burst of support for Ross Perots 1992 presidential campaign. Republican Party leaders took it more seriously, but they, too, seemed to think that they could harness its energy without indulging its more extreme elements.

Then, in January 2010, Scott Brown, a little-known Republican lawmaker from Massachusetts, won a Senate seat in a shock upset over his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, partly because of support from the Tea Party. And it became clear to members of both parties that they had been wrong to underestimate the Tea Partys potential.

Today, pundits tend to portray QAnon as an extreme but marginal movement a kind of John Birch Society for the 4chan age. And some polling has suggested that the movement remains broadly unpopular.

But QAnon followers have left the dark corners of the internet and established a large and growing presence on mainstream social media platforms. Twitter recently announced it was removing or limiting the visibility of more than 150,000 QAnon-related accounts, and NBC News reported this week that a Facebook internal investigation into QAnons presence on its platform found thousands of active QAnon groups and pages, with millions of followers among them.

Even after Ms. Greenes primary victory this week, few lawmakers have acknowledged QAnon directly. (One Republican lawmaker, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, called it a fabrication that has no place in Congress on Wednesday.) But its followers have routinely used social media to push extreme views including opposition to mask-wearing, false fears about child exploitation, and the Spygate conspiracy theory into conservative media. At least one Fox News commentator has spoken approvingly of the movement. And dozens of QAnon candidates are running as anti-establishment outsiders in Republican primaries this year, just as Tea Party candidates did in the 2010 midterm elections.

The similarities between QAnon and the Tea Party arent just historical. Some of the same activists are involved in both movements, and organizations like the Tea Party Patriots have provided fodder for QAnons social media campaigns, such as a recent viral video of doctors making false claims about Covid-19.

One notable difference is that while the Tea Party gained influence during a period when Republicans were out of power, QAnon is growing during the Trump administration, with the presidents tacit blessing. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump congratulated Ms. Greene on her primary win, calling her a future Republican star. (He made no mention of the video in which she called Mr. Trump's presidency a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out.)

Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, said that QAnon represented, in some ways, an extension of the Tea Partys skepticism of mainstream authorities.

The movement of conspiratorial thinking to the center of the Republican Party isnt totally new, Ms. Williamson said. But the centrality of that conspiratorial thinking was something striking about the Tea Party, and its something even more striking about QAnon.

One advantage QAnon has over earlier insurgent movements is improved technology. John Birch Society members had to resort to pamphleteering and newspaper ads, and the Tea Party which kicked off with a CNBC anchors televised rant relied heavily on the existing conservative media apparatus to spread its message.

But QAnon is native to the internet, and moves at the speed of social media. Since 2017, QAnon followers have built out an impressive media ecosystem encompassing Facebook groups, YouTube channels and Discord servers. These spaces serve both as sources of news and as virtual water coolers where followers socialize, trade new theories and memes, and strategize about growing their ranks.

The other big difference, of course, is whos in the Oval Office. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed QAnon, but he has conspicuously avoided denouncing it, and has shared dozens of posts from believers on his social media accounts.

Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, said that while QAnon would likely not take over the Republican Party as thoroughly as the Tea Party did in 2010, it could continue growing if top Republicans were unwilling or unable to contain it.

It wont naturally be flushed out of the system, he said. The Republican Party would have to take active steps to flush it out of the system. And that likely wont happen under President Donald Trump.

Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator and critic of Mr. Trump, was more skeptical about QAnons influence on the Republican Party. He pointed out that there had always been extreme outliers in both parties of Congress whose influence tended to be diluted by more moderate voices over time.

But that was in the pre-Trump era, he admitted. Who knew what QAnon might become, with a presidential stamp of approval?

Trumps embrace is what makes this different, and more worrisome, Mr. Kristol said. If Trump is the president, and hes embracing this, are we so confident that its not the future?

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Think QAnon Is on the Fringe? So Was the Tea Party - The New York Times

The Bostonians roundly abused the soldiers. One was informed the crowd intended to tar and feather him. They would afterward affix his head to the highest post in town. Others were pelted with stones and dirt and pieces of brick, dragged by the hair, punched in the face, struck with bludgeons. Or so they reported. The insults flew in both directions. They returned, according to a former judge, compliments for compliments, and every blow was answered by a bruise. Townspeople were abused and assaulted, women harassed. Bloodshed ensued, as might be expected between an armed force and a people who felt they had nothing to lose other than their self-esteem, their freedom and their future.

Already the British knew the drill: A bonfire would flare; a whistle would sound. And out of nowhere 400 or 500 youngsters would materialize. On the night of March 5, 1770, they pelted soldiers with ice and oyster shells, bricks and broken glass bottles. No one thought to dance naked in the street it was winter, in Boston but they could hardly have been more provocative. Damn you, fire, fire if you dare, they taunted. Damn them, where are they, knock them down, a soldier was heard to swear.

Ultimately someone pulled a trigger. Five townspeople lay dead. Blood stained the street. A Black American was the first victim. For the most part the soldiers would be acquitted of wrongdoing. They had acted in self-defense. More important, the scuffle turned not into the Boston Riot or the Boston Uprising, but the Boston Massacre.

Several years later, after long December days of town meetings, after endless speeches and equally protracted negotiations, over a thousand colonists headed, early on a damp evening, to Griffins Wharf. Three hundred and forty-two troublesome chests of East India tea sat aboard the ships on which they had sailed from England. Hatches were opened, holds entered, chests hoisted on deck. In a few hours, every leaf of tea steeped in Boston Harbor. By 9 p.m. the town was still. Boston had not known a quieter night for some time.

No one was hurt. No gun was fired. No property other than the tea was damaged. The perpetrators cleaned up after themselves. In the aftermath, the surgical strike was referred to plainly as the destruction of the tea. To the indignant Massachusetts governor, it constituted nothing less than a high handed riot.

He had a point: There is a difference between burning a draft card or toppling a statue and tossing someone elses goods overboard. This was an assault on property rather than on a symbol. Expertly choreographed, it qualified as a blatant act of vandalism. It was difficult to dress up, though John Adams would privately declare the dumping of the tea the grandest event since the dispute with Britain had begun. He thought it sublime.

To the occupiers it proved to be a particular mortification. The king demanded an immediate prosecution. It did not seem too much to ask: After all, thousands had watched the tea rain into the water, even if only several dozen men had actually boarded the ships. No one, however, seemed to have seen a thing. In all of Boston only one witness could be found and he refused to testify unless transported out of the colony.

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The Boston Tea Party Was More Than That. It Was a Riot. - The New York Times

The Tea Party Express just hopped on the Byron Donalds train.

The conservative group endorsed the Naples Republican days out from a hotly contested Republican primary in Floridas 19th Congressional District.

Byron Donalds is precisely the successful businessman and Tea Party leader we need in Washington fighting to drain the swamp and helping President [Donald] Trump advance his conservative agenda, said Tea Party Express Co-Founder Sal Russo.

Billed as the largest Tea Party PAC, organizers stressed a long history with Donalds.

We first met Byron when he spoke at our rally in 2014, and we were impressed by his commitment to Tea Party principles. He will be an effective and principled Congressman for Southwest Florida, Russo said.

Donalds later won election to the Florida Legislature in 2016 and was reelected in 2018. He decided this year to forgo a third term and run for the open Congressional seat.

Long tied to the conservative movement, many Florida leaders within the Tea Party Express network praised Donalds.

Ive gotten to know Byron through the Tea Party movement, which he joined in 2010, and through interaction at local Republican clubs, said Tea Party activist Michael Thompson. As a leader in East Lee County Republican circles, Ive had an opportunity to track Rep. Donalds voting record in the Florida Legislature and have no doubts that he is the proven conservative in this race. He was willing to take on leadership and stand for our Second Amendment Rights when it mattered most.

Thats a reference to Donalds vote against the Parkland bill, something hes used to set himself apart from Dane Eagle, the other state lawmaker in the race.

Republicans also took shots at liberal House members like New Yorks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in their endorsement.

Hes a dynamic speaker and a tough debater, said Tea Party supporter Andrew Sund. He will have AOC and the squad on their heels if they are foolish enough to even think about coming after him in debate. Byron is what the party needs right now.

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Tea Party Express gets on the Byron Donalds train - Florida Politics

Editors note: This is the 16th installment in a serialized history of Charleston to commemorate the citys 350th anniversary.

When the grand Exchange opened at the foot of Broad Street in 1771, locals saw great potential in Charles Towns new centerpiece.

The Palladian-style building was an architectural marvel, locals thought, perhaps even finer than Bostons Faneuil Hall. It would serve as custom house, meeting space, perhaps even a market. But by 1774 it was, at least in part, a tea warehouse.

Of course, the British had made it about tea.

After great outcry from the colonies, Parliament had repealed most of the Townshend Acts but didnt lift the tax on tea and basically gave the East India Company a monopoly on business in the colonies. The intent was to prove Britain had the authority to tax colonists, which was exactly what Christopher Gadsden had feared.

On Dec. 2, 1773, the London sailed into Charles Town harbor carrying a load of the controversial tea. Gadsden quickly dispatched his Liberty Boys into the streets, distributing leaflets that asked locals to attend an important meeting the next day at the Exchange.

If they allowed the tea to land, and the tax on it to be collected, it would set an unfortunate precedent and Gadsden wanted to get the sense of the people, as Walter Fraser Jr. wrote in Charleston! Charleston!

The planters, including Charles Pinckney, and the artisans, represented by Gadsden, favored a boycott on all British goods. But local merchants, including Miles Brewton, set up a local chamber of commerce to oppose the boycott. Profits were at stake. Charles Town was hopelessly divided.

The standoff continued throughout the month, but local attitudes shifted slightly after the incident in Boston. On Dec. 16, colonists there raided an East India ship, tossing more than 300 crates of tea into the citys harbor. Within two weeks, the captain of the London heard rumors that a Charles Town mob, inspired by Bostons tea party, was coming to burn his boat.

Local British officials locked the tea in the basement of the Exchange, and the threat of violence was averted. But the damage to British relations had been done, evident in the Royal Navys blockade of Boston Harbor.

By September 1774, five influential Charles Town residents John Rutledge, Edward Rutledge, Henry Middleton, Thomas Lynch and Gadsden had traveled to Philadelphia as the colonys representatives to the First Continental Congress. Before it was over, Middleton would be appointed its seond president.

The colonies were just as divided as Charles Town. Some wanted independence from Britain while others called for reconciliation. After two months of debate, the delegates agreed to a boycott of all British goods ... unless the king repealed the tax. He didnt.

The Congress also suggested each colony form its own militia, because war was no longer out of the question. The first battles, at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, followed just six months later.

Charles Town received news of the battles on May 8, 1775. Gadsdens Liberty Boys were ready to fight, but as Robert Rosen wrote in A Short History of Charleston, (m)ost of the merchants, planters, and substantial citizens of Charles Town were for strong measures short of war.

That seemed increasingly unlikely. By summers end, rumors in Charles Town held that Carolinas royal governor would arm loyalists to keep the colony in line. So that November, William Henry Drayton the Liberty Boys leader while Gadsden attended the Second Continental Congress scuttled several ships at the harbors mouth to keep the Royal Navy out.

As the crews worked, Draytons ship was fired on by two British warships lurking just offshore. They were, Fraser notes, the first shots of the Revolution in Carolina.

Fear of a pending British bombardment overwhelmed the city, and Charles Town spent months shoring up its defenses. Slaves, who comprised more than half of the citys population of 11,000-plus, did much of the work. Some of them were organized into a makeshift fire department, with orders to extinguish any fire sparked by a surprise attack.

Many residents chose to simply flee, and Charles Town was eerily quiet as the spring of 1776 dawned. Henry Laurens wrote to his son that, I am sitting in a House stripped of its furniture & in danger of being knocked down ... by Cannon Ball.

Laurens and Charles Town would wait several tense months for the coming attack.

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Hicks: A tea party, a continental congress and the beginning of a Revolution - Charleston Post Courier

QAnon demonstrators protest during a rally to reopen California. (Sandy Huffaker / AFP via Getty Images)

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Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican nominee for Georgias 14th congressional district, is a harbinger of her partys post-Trump future. Shes running in a strongly Republican district with an almost certain prospect of going to Congress. She disdains Black Lives Matter and argues that Muslims shouldnt be allowed to serve in government. Shes also an adherent of QAnon, the amorphous conspiracy theory that holds that Donald Trump is battling a secret cabal of Satanic cannibalistic pedophiles who control the Democratic Party, Hollywood, and the American government.Ad Policy

In a 2017 video, Greene said, Theres a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it. For his part, Trump returned Greenes regard. On August 12, the president tweeted, Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives upa real WINNER. Asked about QAnon on Friday, Trump avoided disavowing the conspiracy theory and reiterated his praise of Greene.

This tweet is in keeping with Trumps general approach of aligning himself with the QAnon movement but not explicitly affirming it. As The New York Times notes, Trump has not directly addressed QAnon, but he has conspicuously avoided denouncing it, and has shared dozens of posts from believers on his social media accounts.

A few Republicans, to their credit, have spoken out against Greene and QAnonbut they all are much less well-known than Trump. On the same day as Trumps warm words for Greene, Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted, Qanon is a fabrication, adding that there is no place in Congress for these conspiracies. Another Republican, Virginia Representative Denver Riggleman, tweeted, QAnon is the mental gonorrhea of conspiracy theories. Its disgusting and you want to get rid of it as fast as possible. MORE FROM Jeet Heer

But if QAnon is gonorrhea, more and more Republicans are getting infected, and party leaders are doing nothing to stop the spread. Kinzinger and Riggleman are lonely voices in their own party. As CNN reports, Top Republicans, including President Donald Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, are embracing their partys nominee for a House seat in Georgia, despite her history of racist and anti-Semitic remarks and promotion of the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory. Other Georgia Republicans, notably Senator Kelly Loeffler and Representative Doug Collins, have joined in welcoming Greenes primary victory.

The response of the GOP to Greene echoes the way the party handled Trump in 2016. At first there was some trepidation about Trump, with a few voices denouncing what he was doing to the party. But eventually, Republicans made their peace with Trump when they realized that they had to support him as their standard-bearer or suffer humiliating defeat as a divided party.

The future of the Republican Party very well may be Marjorie Taylor Greene, argues Dan Pfeiffer, former Obama adviser. Greene is one of eleven QAnon supporting Republican congressional nominees on the ballot this fall.Current Issue

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The conservative writer Bill Kristol, although a critic of the Republican Party under Trump, disagrees with this assessment. According to The New York Times, Kristol is skeptical about QAnons influence on the Republican Party. He pointed out that there had always been extreme outliers in both parties of Congress whose influence tended to be diluted by more moderate voices over time.

But even Kristol acknowledged that Trumps embrace could give QAnon a greater reach. If Trump is the president, and hes embracing this, are we so confident that its not the future? Kristol wondered.

QAnon is a byproduct of the Trump era and is likely to be part of his lasting legacy, long outliving his presidency. QAnon is best understood as a myth that helps Trump supporters reconcile themselves to his manifest flaws as a man and political leader. Trump thrives on negative partisanship, which requires that he be seen as preferable to his rivals. Given numerous reports of his sexual predations and corruption, the only way he can be acceptable is if his foes have committed the worst crimes imaginable. The embryonic version of QAnon was Pizzagate, which painted Hillary Clinton as a leader of a child sex ring.

The current version of QAnon took off on social media in 2017 when Trump was enmeshed in the Russiagate investigation. The conspiracy theory emerged on 4chan, a message board that facilitates anonymous posting. Q claimed to be a high-level insider with Q security clearance who had information that the entire Mueller investigation was a false flag operation used by Trump to hide his war against powerful pedophiles. Again, it served a narrative function: Building on the Pizzagate story line, it portrayed Trump as a heroic battler against a deep state conspiracy, thus helping to wave away evidence of actual corruption. Its no accident that prominent Russiagate figures like former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Trump crony Roger Stone have embraced QAnon.

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The current upsurge of QAnon is a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As NBC news reports, While QAnon bubbled on the fringes of the internet for years, researchers and experts say it has emerged in recent months as a sort of centralized hub for conspiracy and alternative health communities. According to an internal document reported by NBC News this week, Facebook now has more than 1,000 of these QAnon groups, totaling millions of members.

The report goes on to note that social media users who started off in wellness communities, religious groups and new-age groups on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram during the pandemic were then introduced to extremist groups like QAnon, aided by shared beliefs about energy, healing or Godand often by recommendation algorithms.

QAnon has been resilient because its a myth that serves to explain Trumps failures and wretched personal behavior. QAnon has helped recast a sexual predator as a covert fighter against pedophilia and an incompetent response to Covid-19 as a heroic battle against a pro-mask conspiracy.

If we understand QAnon as a conciliatory myth that evolves to excuse the horrific truth about Trump and Trumpism, then it is likely to have a long life after he is defeated. Itll become a Lost Cause myth about how a great man was felled by a sinister conspiracy. Donald Trump Jr. has already shared an Instagram post suggesting that Joe Biden is a pedophile. The presidents son explained the post by saying he was only joking around.

QAnon is not a nonviolent movement. As Media Matters reports:

The QAnon conspiracy theory has been tied to multiple violent incidents and threats of violence, including a man accused of murdering his brother with a sword, a man accused of murdering an alleged crime boss, a man who reportedly threatened to kill YouTube employees, an armed man who blocked the Hoover Dam with an armored vehicle, and even a man who threatened to assassinate Trump, among numerous other incidents.

If Trump loses and QAnon evolves into a narrative about how a conspiracy of pedophiles won, then itll become even more violent than it already is.

QAnon is sometimes treated as if it were analogous to the Tea Party movement or the John Birch Society, a right-wing faction within the GOP coalition. But in fact it is much more violence-prone than those groups. Its closer in spirit to terrorist organizations like the KKK, which had ties to political elites but also instigated extrajudicial violence.

Trump could leave the White House in January of next year, but QAnon will be with us for a long time to come.

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QAnon Is the Future of the Republican Party - The Nation