That name though… maybe some one is (wait… is there an American sounding way to say “taking the piss?”)
Probably doesn’t matter though.
From the outside Q really seems like a spontaneous unmoderated ARG run by absolutely malignant sociopaths.
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This is the moment where the followers either:
- Splinter off and join other extreme fringe groups like Oath Keepers or No Compromise.
…or
- Double down and form a religion, like Scientology and Mormonism did when their founding beliefs were unequivocally shattered.
Whether 1 or 2 happens to the group as a whole is down to how many choose each path. As others have said, the facts never matter. It’s not the strength of evidence that holds these groups together, so Biden winning isn’t what’s important. It’s whether enough people are in deep enough that their cognitive dissonance would be fatal if acknowledged.
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Brilliantly played. Even if it counters my unbreakable rule of plurals (‘if in dispute, answer is -podes’)
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Yeah, I got that. How is it relevant to the rest of the post? I would understand if he said something like “I don’t understand X. Show me like I’m from Missouri.” but there isn’t anything like that.
I think it’s just an attempt to be witty.
I don’t care if that is genuine or parody. Either way it is one of the funniest things I’ve seen this week.
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise…
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Maybe that was what the whole Q thing was?
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Trump followers being repelled from the capitol dome would have been solid money though… (after the “courtesy delay” of course)
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Ron Watkins’ “we gave it our all. . . . we have a new president” sure implies that it was all a phony-baloney propaganda trick from the get go. Translation : “we tried to keep Trump in power with a ridiculous hair-brained scheme and failed, oh well, better luck next time.”
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Knowing their true name requires forbidden knowledge in old, long-dead languages that would awake the Sleepers In the Deep and bring insanity upon us all.
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From that Daily Beast link:
QAnon’s utter failure to come true somehow hasn’t shaken her faith in the conspiracy theory.
“I’m still all in with Q,” Hatch said. “I have not distanced myself from what Q meant to me personally.”
So there ya go. It IS a cult now. Whether any of it true or not doesn’t matter, they did all this “research” and found “clues” to give themselves some kind of ego-security in a chaotic and hard to understand world.
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That read to me like a guy who started something as a joke, ran with it when he saw it had legs and could benefit him, panicked as it started to get away from him, and then white-knuckled it out until he saw a chance to step away in the hope it can vanish before he’s indicted.
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That still leaves person, camera and TV on the table. Looks like they stumped him. 
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This. As a quick move, at the very least I think any of them who voted to deny the election who are also in the so-called “problem solvers caucus” should be removed from that caucus, effective immediately. I did a quick crosswalk of the 121 who tried to hold up the PA vote, and it looks like Bill Johnson of OH is an offender. It’s a baby step, but no one of any principles should be attaching themselves to those traitors as a voting bloc.
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Though now I’m reading that Jim reversed his decision about deleting the boards after some pushback, so we’ll see what happens, long-term, now that his family has lost interest in Qanon.
I understand Ron hasn’t posted as Q since he quit his job as administrator of the message board after the election.
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Really it’s been nothing but a series of failed predictions. Yet that not only failed to dissuade people from believing, it brought in more followers. I suspect at this point, Biden taking office and basically breaking the core of Q, making it impossible for any of the predictions to come true, becomes like the failure of the “big predictions” in apocalyptic cults. There’s chaos now, but there’s also signs that the group is successfully pressuring members not to reject it. It helps Qanon that even the people questioning it are falling into false dichotomies - that either it’s all true or “Qanon” was a “deep state psy-op.” People can make convincing arguments for why Qanon wasn’t a deep-state psy-op because, well, it wasn’t, and the claim doesn’t make sense.
Right now I’m seeing them furiously brainstorming new variations of Qanon to incorporate current events, to allow them to move forward, seeing which versions are rejected and which one resonates with people. People don’t want to reject the thing they invested so much time and energy and belief into, and the group provides them with excuses not to. I suspect that a number of people current upset and apparently rejecting it are going to end up sticking with it, in whatever form it ends up taking.
But did they actually peter out? Seems like the question is whether people stopped believing in those things (and then found Q appealing for the same reasons and later started believing in that), or if they just seamlessly shifted their belief from Pizzagate to Qanon. Or maybe not even belief, but just their energy and focus - the Qanoners seem to still believe in the Pizzagate conspiracy specifically, they just grew it out to include more people.
Yeah, and in fact I feel like we already hit that stage after the election, which is part of what gave us the attack on the Capitol. We’ll see how much more hard-core they become now.
I also wonder if we’ll see some splits in the orthodoxy, different sects arising now that “Q” has lost interest, different people taking the reins and pulling it in different directions.
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Spoiler alert: that already happened.
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It dissuaded people, it just attracted more people. Growth with these things seems to come in waves, constantly shedding people and adapting. Either attracting new members or not as the determining factor for growth and how attractive it is to the main stream.
But you’re also seeing a sizable number of people who are just done and are pressuring others to give up. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a fight.
People did. Some didn’t. Then the new iterations attract different people. When these new spins attract more than were lost the group grows. When they don’t it shrinks.
This tends to happen over and over. But when a group hits a certain critical mass of membership and visibility a big stumble like this can cause the thing to collapse. Recruitment craters as less hardcore believers leave. Remaining elements fracture, spinning off into different reinterpretations or new ideas and explainations.
This is exactly what happened with the Millerites. Sort of the headline test cast for this. Miller made multiple failed apocalyptic predictions.
Each caused his movement to stumble, but as they adapted and moved the goal post the movement continued to grow. When membership, mainstream appeal and influence peaked, there was one big, really definitive, specific go for broke prediction. It’s for sure gonna end this time.
In the aftermath most Millerites left the movement. The most dedicated believers and congregations scrambled to deal with the failure. Forming multiple competing churches. Only one of which turned into 7th day Adventistism.
One of the things that seems to factor is that the bigger and more visible these things grow. The larger the proportion of less hardcore believers in the total group. There are more people who can be driven off. Once they do make the break, the loss of such a big chunk can cause a cascade. As more people leave it causes more people to leave. With that community (or even fandom) aspect that attracts many disappearing as the base shrinks.
I’d almost guarantee it. This sort thing is really well studied and this particular cycle is pretty well understood.
The big problem is that Q Anon, among other things, really bound together the disparate elements of the militia movement and other militant groups. And pretty rapidly turned to a recruiting bonanza for those groups.
So in the shake out a lot of what’s left in terms of the sorta centralized, organized leadership in Q is pretty fucking extreme. Heavily armed. And already has a history of right wing terrorism.
When this happens your remaining members aren’t just more extreme to begin with. But they get more extreme in response. And who is standing there to consolidate? The Proud Boys. The Oathkeepers. The same douches that pulled off the Oklahoma City Bombing. The people who showed up armed with a plan at the Capital.
The vast majority of Q followers are keyboard warriors. Watching and shouting at home (and voting). Those people mostly move on. The kind of person who is already armed up and roaming the streets probably doesn’t.
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