On a Saturday morning in August, a few hundred people gathered at a convention center in Hot Springs, Ark., paying between $145 and $475 to hear from a cast of far-right speakers. They included a body builder-turned-pundit who carries a tomahawk and promotes an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and a pro-Trump preacher who has warned of threats posed by technologically sophisticated demon mermaids.
Strangest of all: The gathering was a celebration of George magazine, the Clinton-era concoction of politics and celebrity culture co-founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., which stopped publishing after his death in 1999. Improbably, George is back, with the same logo and the same catchy slogan: “Not just politics as usual.” This time, though, a QAnon conspiracy theorist and passionate Trump fan is its editor in chief.
It is, indeed, not politics as usual. While the old George sought to mix political insights with covers featuring superstars like Robert DeNiro and Barbra Streisand, the new George has published fawning profiles of people like Scott McKay and Amanda Grace, the pundit and preacher who spoke in Hot Springs.
It is a reanimation story bizarre enough for a zombie movie, made possible by the fact that the original George trademark lapsed, only to be secured by a little-known conservative lawyer named Thomas D. Foster.
But much like the original George, which published from 1995 to 2001, the new version holds a revealing mirror up to the era it was made for. The revived magazine, which debuted in late 2022, is circulating at a moment when mainstream conservatism and the conspiratorial far-right fringe are particularly entwined.
Former President Donald J. Trump has boosted hundreds of QAnon-related messages and accounts online since leaving office in 2021; in August, Mr. Trump promoted a flurry of social media posts that incorporated QAnon slogans. In recent weeks, as two deadly hurricanes hit the Southeast, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican ally of Mr. Trump from Georgia, has been asserting that an unidentified “they” can control the weather. And officials in areas damaged by Hurricanes Helene and Milton are concerned that a barrage of other misinformation is hampering the recovery effort.
At its core, the QAnon movement embraces the baseless conspiracy theory that a global cabal of Satanist pedophiles controls the news media and politics. An offshoot theory — one that has helped fuel interest in the new George — holds that Mr. Kennedy is still alive, and is waiting to join forces with Mr. Trump to vanquish the cabal.
The idea has sent some conspiracy theorists to online auction sites to buy hard copies of the original George, which they apparently believe may contain portentous hidden signs.
In a brief phone interview, Mr. Foster, who is based in San Diego and is listed on the magazine’s masthead as legal adviser, was asked if he thought Mr. Kennedy still walked among us.
“I really don’t know,” he replied.
Alumni of the original George are, predictably, horrified by its reincarnation. “It’s like taking a Chanel logo and slapping it on, I don’t know, toilet paper or something,” said Matt Berman, the magazine’s founding creative director.
The new George’s most significant brush with something approaching the mainstream came last year when it scored an extended interview with Mr. Kennedy’s cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate who spreads his own conspiracy theories, and who recently dropped out of the race and endorsed Mr. Trump.
“I know John would really like this,” Mr. Kennedy told his interviewer, apparently referring to George’s second life.
Mr. Kennedy is the rare bona fide household name to be interviewed by the new George, which publishes online and puts out a limited number of physical magazines. Many of the contributors and their subjects are lesser-known right-wing personalities striving to make a name for themselves, and a living, somewhere below the star-making heights of Fox News.
Taken together, they demonstrate the new ways in which celebrity is manufactured in the democratized age of the online influencer, cross-promoting one another via social media posts, podcasts and video streaming sites. At times, some have managed to enter the inner circles of the Trump-era Republican Party.
In July, Ms. Grace, the promulgator of the demon mermaid theory, live-streamed an interview and prayer session with Mr. Trump’s son Eric Trump and his, wife Lara Trump, the co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
Eric Trump prayed for the restoration of his father to the presidency, and for the strength to “rid evilness from this world.”
It is difficult to measure the impact of the new George, though there are numbers that hint at the reach of the broader ecosystem it is part of. The YouTube channel for Ms. Grace’s Ark of Grace Ministries, which streamed the interview with the Trumps, has 242,000 followers. Gene Ho, George’s editor in chief, has about the same number of followers on TikTok. Mr. McKay’s page on the video platform Rumble has a following of 225,000.
Claire Wardle, an associate professor of communication at Cornell, says that it would be unwise to underestimate their impact.
“You think these people don’t have influence because they don’t in comparison to Tom Cruise, but for people in their community, they’re deeply influential,” said Ms. Wardle, a specialist in the spread of misinformation. “They might have what looks like a relatively small following. But in a niche space that they’re in, they’re an absolute God.”
The event in Hot Springs was closed to outside media, but video snippets have surfaced online. Serving as emcee was Mr. Ho, a sprightly, fast-talking man with long raven hair who says he served as the “former campaign photographer” for Mr. Trump in his 2016 presidential race. In 2021, he ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Myrtle Beach, S.C.
In 2019, Mr. Ho spoke at a QAnon event in front of the Washington Monument, where he referred to the theory that the cabal secretly running the country is harvesting adrenochrome, a substance made in the human body, from children.
One video from the Hot Springs gathering shows a man named Andre Popa, a QAnon proponent and life coach who contributes to the new George, giving a motivational talk in which he repeatedly asked the crowd, “Who’s a badass?”
“I’m a badass,” they responded.
Mr. Popa also alluded to the conspiracy theory that President Biden has been replaced by a clone.
Mr. Ho, the editor, did not respond to a request for an interview. But Mr. Foster, the lawyer, said that he was a longtime fan of John F. Kennedy Jr., and of his effort to make space for conservatives as well as liberals in the original George.
“I always was a fan of the magazine and the principles he was looking for,” Mr. Foster said, “to bring people together who have different views.”
The magazine has indeed published articles reflecting a range of views. Some have promoted QAnon and discussed the conspiracy theory in great depth. Others have been critical of it. One recent article suggested that the Covid-19 virus could have been “a ploy to undo Trump’s successes.”
Mr. Ho has written in George that Mr. Kennedy may have used secret codes on the cover of the original magazine to transmit messages about corrupt schemes “both from the past and into the future.”
But much of the content is innocuous, in a Reader’s Digest sort of way, with poems about baseball and the Statue of Liberty, and disquisitions on evangelical Christianity. The long feature story on Ms. Grace mostly focuses on her faith, without mentioning her conspiracy theories that the Department of Veterans Affairs is injecting patients with drugs to make them suicidal, or that the promotion of trans rights in Weimar Germany “allowed the path for Hitler.”
The article on Mr. McKay does not mention his antisemitic theories, but it describes him as a man seeking “to make our country better than it has ever been.”
In November 2021, the idea that JFK Jr. may still be alive drew hundreds of conspiracy theorists into the streets in Dallas, where they had expected him to reappear. He did not. But in Hot Springs, a number of the attendees of the George event continued to hold out hope.
Interviewed outside of the conference, Dan Schutte, 63, an attendee from Michigan, said that he believed Mr. Kennedy had been hiding out in a witness protection program.
Mr. Schutte said that “over time,” Mr. Kennedy would return, and use the new George magazine to expose the deep-state cabal.
“There’s enough evidence out there,” he said, “if you do enough research.”
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