QAnon Is . . . Somewhere Between “Concerning” and “Hair on Fire”

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This is a quick follow-up to my post about QAnon a couple of days ago. I was wondering how popular QAnon really was, and came up with two polls: one said it had 3 percent support and the other said it had 9 percent support. That’s a huge difference.

Now there’s a third poll, and it puts the number at . . . 7 percent.

If you average these polls you come up with about 6 percent. That makes it more than the typical 3 percent you can get for just about anything in the United States, but less than the 9 percent that would indicate a scary level of support. This is, let’s say, concerning but not yet much more than that.

And a quick note: even if the correct number is 3 percent, that represents 8-10 million followers. So whenever you hear about a QAnon forum having “millions” of fans or something similar, ignore it. It’s meaningless. In a country the size of the United States, a few million just isn’t that many.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

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