Donald Trump’s controversial choice of Kash Patel to lead the FBI has thrust QAnon and some of its wildest claims into the spotlight.
Powerful MAGA voices are hailing him as their No. 1 avenger to hunt down and decapitate the modern-day Hydra known as the “deep state,” a central villain of the conspiracy theory that gained momentum during Trump’s first term in office.
“The fight for Kash Patel is even greater than Kash Patel,” convicted Trump confidant Steve Bannon said Monday. “It’s not just about the second term and about President Trump getting his team.”
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Patel could serve to advance the Marvel-like conspiracy that a cabal of Satan-worshipping liberal pedophiles is secretly plotting to take over the world and destroy Trump. A one-time public defender and prosecutor, Patel has embraced such claims and used much of the conspiracy theory’s unhinged language.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee tasked with confirming Patel as the next FBI director, says it all starts with the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
On Monday, she reiterated her demand that the flight logs of the late financier’s jet, dubbed the Lolita Express, be released in a post in which she retweeted Elon Musk.
The conspiracist billionaire owner of X and SpaceX, who has been tapped by Trump to lead his Department of Government Efficiency, posted his agreement that files relating to Epstein—as well as the embattled music mogul Diddy—must be made public.
Their posts opened up the floodgates for a resurgence of baseless claims at the heart of the far-right political movement’s core: that a “deep state” of powerful government officials and Hollywood celebrities operates a global child sex trafficking ring—and only one man, Donald Trump, can stop them.
The fight for Patel’s Senate confirmation to take over, destroy and rebuild the Federal Bureau of Investigation—into a Museum of the Deep State, if Patel has his way—has a larger meaning, Bannon says.
“It’s about: What is our task and purpose,” he told followers Monday on his War Room podcast, speaking directly to conservatives who have demanded limited government.
“All you guys whined and b----ed and moaned for decades and decades and decades and didn’t do anything about taking down the Leviathan,” Bannon said, referring to a biblical sea serpent that has come to represent the bureaucratic deep state in MAGA circles.
“Well now you’ve got a bunch of warriors who are prepared to go to prison or prepared to even go bankrupt to do this,” he said. “And Kash Patel manifests that, he personifies that. That’s why this fight’s so important.”
Patel has been one of Trump’s fiercest supporters, starting with the “Russia hoax,” Trump’s term of denial for what U.S. intelligence agencies, including the FBI, have widely concluded was Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. (He even wrote a children’s book about “Russiagate.”)
Patel has also embraced Trump’s far-right supporters who espouse the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Republican senators have been cautious in their public statements so far about Patel. But Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota crossed a line with his stated support for current FBI Director Christopher Wray, who would have to be fired or resign in order for Patel (or anyone else) to take the job.
For his candor, Rounds earned a ferocious attack from the MAGA faithful.
Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who was quick to dismiss the nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to become Trump’s attorney general, said she wanted to review Patel’s record.
“I don’t know Kash Patel,” Collins told reporters, according to Politico. “I had heard his name, but I don’t know his background, and I’m going to have to do a lot of work before reaching a decision on him.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Vivan Salama said on CNN Monday that after she wrote that Patel’s nomination could backfire on Trump, she “literally had transition officials reaching out to me after it published saying, ‘Thank you for saying what we can’t say publicly.’”
Alex Kaplan, a researcher at the Media Matters watchdog group, has been posting old interviews that his organization unearthed of Patel speaking to QAnon-friendly shows.
In one interview in 2022, Patel said he would follow the lead of Q—who QAnon believers say is a whistleblower in the intelligence community who revealed the fantastical cabal of left-leaning elite powerbrokers.
“We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement,” Patel said in one interview, as Mother Jones reported. “And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.”
Former Trump national security adviser John Bolton compared Patel to Joseph Stalin’s notoriously ruthless secret police chief.
“Trump has nominated Kash Patel to be his Lavrentiy Beria,” Bolton told NBC News’s Meet The Press on Sunday. “Fortunately, the FBI is not the NKVD. The Senate should reject this nomination 100-0.”
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