I was a bit gleeful yesterday as I saw Q postings which were all over the place. Everything from “hold the line” to “Biden is Q” to “this is all part of the plan.” The woman crying was particularly good Schadenfreude given how the Trumpists mocked Hillary supporters who cried when they realized she lost. I do believe Q will splinter and fragment now, but the research on cults is exactly what @Shuck said. They will find any number of reasons to accept that it didn’t happen WITHOUT accepting that they were lied to. They will claim it’s all part of the plan, they got the dates wrong, that it’s really a metaphor for a spiritual battle being waged, etc, etc. Anything but admit they were duped and this beautiful theory that gave them so much hope and purpose was all a giant lie.
More dangerous is that they are in a fragile state of mind as they work to accept the new reality, which opens them up to being recruited by even worse actors, like the white supremacists and Nazi’s, who are apparently targeting Q boards as we speak hoping to drum up a new corp of supporters.
We haven’t heard the end of Q. They may lose some power and influence. But they will continue to exist for a long time. They are really just another off shoot of the centuries old Antisemitic canards about Jews secretly running the world and drinking the blood of Christians. And we all know THOSE lies have never gone away, even if fewer believe them these days.
“No, you see, Trump going to federal prison is actually part of his master plan. It’s so he can prepare the proper punishment for the baby eating reptiloids from the inside.” - QAnon, soon (probably)
Because the Q cover works best while it remains anonymous, and he might decide to adopt it again in the future (although by then, there’s likely a dozen different people who will be claiming the mantle).
Rightly so. But it’s far more important to take quick and firm action with the 139 cynical congresscritters who legitimized them. THEY, after all, aren’t true believers, but instead wielded the cultists. If they suffer no consequences they’ll sustain and feed off of many of these flying monkeys.
What does this mean? Is this code language or what? Are we supposed to get hermeneutical and conclude that Trump is going to get parts of the country to secede starting with Missouri?
Back in the Chanology days (Anonymous vs. Scientology), there were a lot of conspiracy types who didn’t like the hard “DOX or GTFO!” attitude on whyweprotest. Someone started another board called WhatIsThePlan, and there was a lot of proto-QAnon gunk there.
With one prediction. And it’s not isolated to cults. Conspiracies, extreme religious groups, false claims about science, extremist political groups. And it’s not even limited to predictions, it could be an exposure, fraud or the definitive disproving of a claim, or failure of an action.
Single failures drive off a few, but the bulk will continue on and the movement will still continue to grow. Even with particularly large failure if the movement or system is vague or flexible enough it can simply morph into something else. That’s how we got Q in the first place, Pizzagate and a much earlier non-Q version of “the storm” which petered out after large scale failures. Before shifting focus and combining with other ideas to form something new and more attractive.
But multiple failed predictions in succession. Particularly as the movement hits a certain critical mass of membership and awareness. Tends to reverse that. As escalating and highly visible failures pile up. Recruitment tapers off, as larger and larger numbers of followers hit their breaking point. Causing the following to shrink.
Q Anon has had many, many small and large failures and exposures since it kicked off. But since November the core, most important predictions and assumptions have repeatedly failed. Donald Trump did not win the election, there was no reveal, the storm did not come. Multiple, specific, ril big versions of these have been “rescheduled” over and over in a short span. On top of that the Capital attack failed, and the perpetrators are being arrested and charged. A VERY big reality check on these people’s expectations.
That sort of rapid fire, large scale failure is what tends to create a breaking point. It becomes the climax.
We’re already seeing the most prominent Q voices duck out, including Watkins. And your central Q spaces online are swamped with people calling it fraud and lies. Arguing over whether it was valid at all.
You don’t see that after a routine failure. It didn’t happen when Hillary didn’t get indicted at all the very specific point where she was 100% going to be indicted. And it didn’t happen when JFK JR failed to rise from the dead in April, and then June.
But like I said these sorts of climaxes do not destroy these movements. They shrink them, and reduce their presence in the main stream. But the most dedicated followers stick around, get more extreme and tend to cook up something new or engage in more extreme behavior. This is, again, how we got Q. Comet Ping Pong turned out to not to have a basement, and the original version of the Storm (IIRC a deep state purge and second civil war) did not happen the moment Trump took office. Those specific things faded initially. But the people most dedicated to them stuck around, dug further into the conspiracy pile. And what came out was Q.
There are a lot of experts who study extremist groups commenting in the press right now about exactly this. Because for Q it’s exceedingly dangerous. The most dedicated, most extreme Q followers have escalated past conspiracy and activism into straight up insurgency.
There’s a good chance that what comes out the other end of this is defined by newly dedicated militants.
