A QANON CANDIDATE WILL PROBABLY QUALIFY FOR THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES IN 2024

This just happened:

GOP Rep. Scott Tipton lost his re-nomination bid in Colorado's Third Congressional District in a stunning upset in the state's June 30 primaries, Decision Desk HQ projects.

Tipton was defeated in the Republican primary by first-time political candidate Lauren Boebert.

Boebert is a business owner and staunch gun rights advocate who manages a gun-themed restaurant called Shooters Grill aptly located in the Western Colorado city of Rifle where the servers are known for openly carrying weapons, Colorado Public Radio reported.

Yes, but the incumbent has an A rating from the NRA Political Victory Fund, which endorsed him.

She ... challeng[ed] Tipton from the right and argu[ed] that he isn't conservative enough or sufficiently supportive of President Donald Trump.

But Trump also endorsed Tipton.

What else?

Boebert is also sympathetic to the QAnon conspiracy theory ... with CPR reporting that she said she hopes the basis of the QAnon movement "is real" on a "Q-friendly web show."

After a QAnon backer won Oregon's Republican Senate primary and another backer won a GOP runoff for a congressional seat in Georgia, a scholar of conspiracism told The Washington Post that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the wins.

“Two is not a trend,” said Joseph Uscinski at the University of Miami, who has written a book about why people believe in conspiracy theories.

Well, now it's three.

He said there is probably more we can take away from the roughly 50 QAnon supporters who are running for Congress this year. Their campaigns suggest adherents of a fringe theory feel emboldened to come out of the shadows under Trump.

QAnon believers tend to support other conspiracy theories about government, experts said. And Trump has tacitly breathed life into these ideas. The central theme around QAnon fits his argument that he’s an outsider being dragged down by (mostly Democratic) lawmakers who feel threatened by him and the change he brings to governing.

The implication is that QAnon might go away, or at least cease to be politically influential, if Trump loses. But if Trump is defeated in November, won't that just prove to the Q crowd that Trump has been "dragged down by (mostly Democratic) lawmakers who feel threatened by him and the change he brings to governing"?

The election of serial shoulder-rubber Joe Biden will inflame QAnon, which is obsessed with real and imagined sexual predation. The likely development of a COVID-19 vaccine during the next presidential term, possibly with the help of Bill Gates (who knew Jeffrey Epstein!), will also make the QAnoners' heads explode.

Also, there's nothing in the right-wing info-sphere that pushes back against conspiratorialism. So in all likelihood, QAnon will continue to thrive.

(It's possible that QAnon thrives because the Republican Party no longer has much of an issue agenda. Democrats have proposals on a wide range of issues -- health care, policing, inequality, the climate, you name it. During the presidential primaries, Elizabeth Warren sometimes seemed to generate six new policy proposals before breakfast. But apart from the usual -- low taxes, guns, fighting abortion, repressing non-whites -- what do Republicans want to do? What does Trump want to do in a second term? Say what you will about the absurd notion of swooping down on all the Democrats and non-conservative celebrities in America and arresting them for pedophilia, at least it's an agenda.)

By 2024, I'm certain there'll be a QAnon believer in the Republican presidential field -- and even though the field will undoubtedly be full of feral extremists (Cotton, Hawley, Gaetz, possibly Crenshaw, maybe Don Jr.), I think the QAnoner will connect with his or her fellow believers and surprise the savvy insiders with solid poll numbers. The party establishment will scramble to keep this person out of the debates, but that may not be possible.

You made this bed, GOP. Now lie in it.