This past cycle saw a large number of QAnon adherents running for Congress. Two of them won—Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. But it seems that quite a few people ran for and won local office who still “trust the plan.” Time recently ran a profile of some of them, who have been elected as mayors, city council members, and school board members.
Well, the QNuts got another victory over the weekend. Vice reports that Tracy Diaz, one of the first people who promoted “Q,” was elected to the South Carolina Republican Party’s executive committee. Diaz, who will represent Horry County—home to Myrtle Beach and most of the Grand Strand—takes credit for breaking QAnon out of the 4chan fever swamp.
Diaz, according to her own recounting of events, was contacted by two of the moderators of the 4chan board where the anonymous leader of QAnon, known simply as Q, posted messages.
They contacted her, Diaz says, in order to help get QAnon more attention outside the world of 4chan, as well as to help boost their own followings.
“I do not typically do videos like this,” Diaz said in a video she uploaded to YouTube just six days after Q first posted in 2017. Citing Q’s “very specific and kind of eerie” messages, Diaz told her audience that she would be covering the 4chan posts, “just in case this stuff turns out to be legit because honestly it kind of seems legit.”
Diaz even claimed in one blog post that it was her idea to move QAnon off 4chan and start a Reddit thread dedicated to the conspiracy movement.
Diaz posted dozens of more videos, racking up over 8 million views as QAnon grew to become a massive conspiracy movement, trapping tens of millions of people and irrevocably damaging families across the U.S.
Diaz, who goes by the handle “tracybeanz,” figured very prominently in a 2018 NBC News investigation into how QAnon became a scourge. Diaz and two 4chan moderators created the Reddit thread “CBTS_Stream” (for “Calm Before The Storm Stream”) and tapped into a larger web of conspiracy peddlers. From there, it spread to Facebook. By this time, “Q” and his followers had moved to 8chan along with the other more deplorable elements from 4chan, and the new audience went there as well.
Diaz has over 133,000 subscribers on YouTube, a good number of whom joined in the wake of her promotion of QAnon. However, many of her QAnon-related videos have since been deleted—most likely after YouTube all but banned QAnon in October. Her Twitter account, which had as many as 534,900 followers, has been nuked altogether, per Raw Story—most likely as part of Twitter’s purge of QAnon accounts after the Capitol insurrection. And now, this woman holds a leadership post in the South Carolina GOP.
Diaz’s win was part of a larger Trumpification of the South Carolina GOP driven by pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood, himself a full-on QNut, who is mounting a bid to become state party chairman. Two other “MAGA candidates” were elected as chairman and vice chairman of the Horry County GOP. She was also endorsed by Michael Flynn.
We already knew that much of the GOP is still willing to bow down to Trump even though, by any reasonable definition, he engaged in outright seditious behavior for the better part of two months before the insurrection. But to have one of the people responsible for promoting one of the most pernicious conspiracy theories ever concocted in a leadership position, and to potentially have one of its most shameless followers become state party chairman? We should all be concerned. After all, it’s not good for democracy to have one of our major parties be a far-right party.
