I keep thinking of the examples before. To consider just one: In 1843, William Miller led a church congregation in preparing for Christ’s return, which would happen before the spring of 1844. When this didn’t happen, the date was recalculated to October 22, 1844. After Christ again failed to return, the prophecies were adjusted to more abstract notions of “returning”.
After every failure, the membership grew.
Today, we call them the Seventh Day Adventists.
Asking “Will being wrong change the group’s mind?” seems like the wrong question. People will consider the movement attractive or not, and for many it has very little to do with whether it’s wrong or not. I’m working through my reading backlog on marketing and cult psychology to wrap my head around what’s the right question…
I do not believe that anything that you hope for in your heart of hearts is wrong. We all fantasize/hope for things in the privacy of our own minds; there’s nothing wrong with that. For example, I sometimes hope for ::Message Redacted by Thought Police:: and so forth.
I’m certainly not suggesting they’ll just move on en masse. Rather, the storm is one of the big emotional/psychological draws of this conspiracy. Keeping people involved is going to be a lot harder when the promise of imminent success is dropped. Most followers will likely move to an adjacent conspiracy, or hold onto some attenuated form of Qanon. Without a specific endgame shared by the conspiracy in general, the movement will fragment, with some still holding out hope for the storm, others drifting into generic new world order bs, some turning on Trump, some not, etc.
[Looks left and right, then leans in, while smirking, winking and tapping a finger against the side of the nose] “Well, actually, the coup happened; but it is a five dimension coup. The sheeple can’t see it, but we are in control now; an invisible hand steering the fate of the world. See? Eh? Eh?”
Years ago I read a book about doomsday cults. I can’t remember the title
The Real History of the End of the World by Sharan Newman perhaps? It is a pretty good read but it certainly won’t improve your opinion of the intelligence of the average humanoid.
The hilarious part about the March 4 thing is that the Trump hotel in DC has jacked-up their rates for that period, in anticipation of fleecing a few more true-believers who might be coming to town for the “inauguration”.
I read the word “Qnuts” with the letters in a different order, and for a moment, was surprised BoingBoing would use such a word, even in an adulterated form. Not that I would have objected much, given the people involved.
Same spectrum, different points on it. With the full support of the President, in a big group, they killed a few people. With less direct institutional support, in small numbers, some of those other groups have represented a larger number of murders and beatings. Picture a large number of distraught unstable people going from largely forum based participation in something like Q to active involvement in groups like Attomwaffen. Q is bad, but worse is lurking and waiting to pick up the disappointed.
