I saw a snippet of something last night that showed there’s a bunch of them still there.
Looks quiet now.*
*not sure about that guy in a poncho handing out literature on the corner.
It is supportive of Trump by definition. The whole concept of it is that Trump is secretly a good guy who is rooting out all of this corruption. That’s what the appeal is: Trump seems so absolutely awful that he can’t actually be that bad. So it must be a secret conspiracy!
If you meet anyone who thinks Trump is still secretly president, then they are at least in part being influenced by QAnon. They only ever used the “Clinton is a secret pedophile” stuff to support Trump.
If QAnon survives the current disillusionment, it will almost certainly be based on some idea that Trump is still in power, or that he named an actual successor. If Q ever goes back on his prophecies, then the movement dies.
Not that it isn’t starting to do so already.
@Sam_Stone While firm adherents to all of the ideology are surely a small minority, I don’t think you can call QAnon fringe when so many of its ideas have spread so well. The big pedophile scare last year that every Republican mom was talking about was due to QAnon influence. The idea that Trump is secretly still president comes from QAnon. QAnon had a large role in pushing the Republicans against masks.
QAnon is where pretty much all of the election fraud conspiracies came from. Sure, Trump himself pushed the general idea of election fraud, but all of the specifics came from QAnon. And when you have Fox News who repeated some of the stuff as true (i.e. why they are being sued by Dominion et al), I don’t think you can call it fringe.
Heck, Trump himself wasn’t above repeating some QAnon conspiracies. He loved those guys.
How would they come to believe that Presidents can choose their successors?
I know one that is explicitly a Q believer and one that I suspect is (anti-vax, skeptic of a round earth, right wing). Neither has a mental illness, but they’re both very stupid. The mainstream Republicans I speak to all know what Qanon is though.
Exactly. Q is completely about Trump, the other parts of it are in support of the idea that Trump is some kind of messianic figure; sometimes overly religious (tied into fringe Christian theology like doomsday stuff), sometimes not.
I think that Q could even survive Trump’s death. They already believe JFK Jr. is secretly alive, so they’d either believe that Trump faked his death for some reason that they’ll make up, or the “deep state” just wants everyone to think he died, or he did die but will rise again like Christ. Something nuts.
I didn’t mean necessarily successor as president, just successor in who is ultimately calling all the shots behind the scenes. Trump, in their minds, is the secret puppet master. But he’s also old. To them he is the leader of the cult, and cult leaders usually have successors.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if they think the guy could appoint a successor as president. They already believe he is secretly still president despite having officially lost the election, and think that he can do all of these things behind the scenes that not even presidents have the power to do.
For the true believers, American Civics is not their strong suit.
I disagree. I don’t think Q has any allegiance to Trump. Their allegiance is to division and chaos. My theory is that Q breaks down into two parts: The manipulators of Q, some whom are working in concert, like maybe cyber farms in Russia with political interests. And others working independently, for their own reasons whether it be for the LOLs, or some other nefarious BS. And then there are the Useful Idiots, those who give voice and believe whatever BS the manipulators are spewing.
These manipulators, who know damn well the BS they spew has no basis in reality, have discovered a powerful weapon. Which is social media. No way in hell are they going to give that power up just because Trump is no longer a thing.
Q ain’t going nowhere for a long time. THAT much I’m sure of.
No one is saying they’ll give up power. But why do you assume Trump will ever be “no longer a thing” in the conspiracy? The QAnon conspiracy was founded on the idea that he’s this secret mastermind behind the scenes. Even if Trump is no longer a thing in public, there’s no reason he won’t be considered such in the conspiracy.
For Q to survive as a prophet, they must push the idea that he was right the whole time. So Trump must still be a mastermind as far as they are concerned. That’s why I suggested they’d likely have him appoint a successor. Though I also think that @Atamasama’s idea of Trump still being there in the shadows (even if he supposedly dies!) would work, too. In fact, I could see their idea morphing into mine.
All of this is based on what I’ve seen in cults and cult-like movements. If they survive, they have to come up with some excuses like this. The last thing they’ll do is admit they were wrong. At most they’ll say something like they misunderstood what Q was telling them.
Problem is, early Q wasn’t nearly so ambiguous. The pro-Trump stuff is canon in the movement.
I just don’t think Trump has that kind of staying power. I mean hell, he got booed by his own audience for suggesting maybe they should get the vaccine. In order for Trump to be the type of Prophet you’re talking about. I think first the “prophet” has to die. Then there needs to be a passage of time by at least a couple of generations, and then some manipulator can point to this person and say; “See this guy here! He’s the guy! And I personally just so happen to be privy to his gospels”. And the manipulators choose said person because they know their targets weren’t alive to witness said Prophets doings. And the history they may have been taught about him are limited at best.
I think that tends to be the calculus of how legends of this type are born.
I have a coworker who is a conspiracy theorist. The only thing we don’t know for sure is flat earth. I don’t know if he’s full on Q, but he believes in pizzagate and that Sandy Hook was staged. I haven’t seen any Q paraphernalia, but he does have a Three Percenters patch on his backpack.
The craziest thing I’ve heard from him, is that the stripes on Old Glory represent the 13 families the run the world.
Let me clarify… I mean the people who are true believers are cultists worshiping Trump. The troll(s) playing at being Q only care about causing chaos and getting attention.
I was referring to the Qanon movement, not the mythical figure.
Despite the fact that JFK Jr. came from a long line of dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. Is that unimportant?
If he was actually going to come back from the dead and help arrest Hillary and Obama, it might.
But he’s not. One of the conceits of QANON is the claim that it’s non-political. I’ve heard this said about multiple Capitol stormers….they claim aren’t political, claim they didn’t even vote, it’s all about exposing the Deep State pedophiles - and the fact that the list of Deep State pedophiles is virtually identical to the list of people who have publicly disparaged Donald Trump (or otherwise done him wrong) is nothing but coincidence.
Now the list does have some prominent conservatives, there’s a disturbingly well-developed CT out there that revolves around Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, his adopted children and Jeffrey Epstein - this theory surfaced around the time the Supreme Court refused to hear the case for overturning the election. And some QANON adherents aren’t particularly conservative - new age types seemed extraordinarily susceptible to the QANON CT’s……but that’s a cohort that has always been susceptible to conspiracy theories and cults.
But the people driving the theories are definitely gearing them towards the conservative agenda.
This is exactly along the lines of what I was thinking. We are witnessing the birth of a new religious sect.
20 years from now, somebody will write down the “true history” of Messiah Trump, complete with miracles, and anointment by God Himself. 200 years from now, it will be a mainstream religion, with people absolutely convinced that The Trump will rise again soon.
In two weeks?
And so it is written in the Book of Flynn: “Verily The Trump shall rise again, and the time of the rising shall be two weeks”
I have a co-worker who I think flirts with it. I am Facebook friends but I wince at some of her posts. She’s getting more Conservative Christian and her husband is an ex-Marine who hates hates hates Biden.
JFK Jr. didn’t come from all that long a line of dyed-in-the-wool Democrats. His granddaddy, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., was a right-winger and an ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy.