Republican Janae Shamp previously said it was ‘goofy’ to link her committee to QAnon. || Photo by Gage Skidmore (modified) | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
JEROD MACDONALD-EVOY
Arizona Mirror
A Republican state senator who denied that a COVID conspiracy hearing she spearheaded last week that was marketed with a QAnon acronym had anything to do with the dangerous conspiracy theory had, in fact, posted lots of QAnon content on social media — including the very acronym used by the committee.
A report Tuesday by Media Matters for America showed that Arizona Sen. Janae Shamp has peddled QAnon online for years. Shamp last week co-chaired the Arizona Legislature’s Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee, which held two days of hearings featuring a series of COVID conspiracy theories.
The ostensible experts who spoke at the hearing had deep connections to the QAnon world and spread misinformation about COVID vaccines, the pandemic response and more.
The committee had previously faced criticism for its name, which has been promoted in acronym form by the QAnon-friendly political nonprofit The America Project. The acronym, NCSWIC, is also a commonly used acronym in the QAnon world for the phrase “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming,” alluding to predictions of arrests of members of the “Deep State.”
Although the official name of the panel spells the word “southwestern” correctly, the committee’s outside boosters intentionally divided the word into “south western” in order to use the acronym in their promotion.
Shamp said that there was no connection between the name of the committee and QAnon, and she called it a “goofy accusation” on Twitter.
