"This is a community of people who believe Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi are the high priests of a global human trafficking operation devoted to child sacrifice to harvest hallucinogenic/age-reversing brain fluids, many of whom remained committed to the point of destroying their relationships with friends and loved ones. So don’t get your hopes up too much.
Incredibly funny as much of this is, sliding into a fantasy where Trump, QAnon, and the various other far-right extremists with slightly less baroque aesthetics are getting their comeuppance once and for all would amount to dangerous complacency.
Trump is still alive and quite capable of inspiring followers to new and dangerous heights. More important is the movement he rode to power on. QAnon’s brand of reactionary, apocalyptic fever has always been a permanent fixture in the U.S. political landscape, but this most recent wave of infection has proven virulent and treatment-resistant. Experts on the far right consulted by Gizmodo said that they expect QAnon to ultimately survive as adherents simply cook up new rationalizations for their defeat.
“Today QAnon supporters are experiencing the closest thing to their own ‘great disappointment,’” Julian Feeld, an anti-conspiracy theory researcher and co-host of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, told Gizmodo.
“As the Millerite Christians before them, their ‘great awakening’ has repeatedly failed to materialize,” Feeld said, referring to the millenarian Christian movement of the 1830s which, after a prophecy of the Second Coming came to nothing in 1844, morphed into the millions-strong Adventist/Seventh-day Adventist faith. “We expect this to weaken their numbers but strengthen their resolve—and extremism.”
“With the Biden presidency upon us, QAnon is entering a new period of deflation, heightening the risk that QAnon followers will harm themselves or others around them, as we’ve seen happen again and again,” Feeld added. “The broad Christian extremism and reactionary cultural tendencies won’t be going away, so I believe the macro environment will continue to sustain many of their delusions, whatever the label they use to describe them.”
“QAnon believers are now at a crossroad where they will choose whether they keep believing in lies or they leave the movement,” Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told Gizmodo. “So many people who believe in the conspiracy theory have done so at the detriment of their personal lives and relationships. We can only hope they understand that they have been scammed and are able to start returning to normal life, but that remains to be seen. There will be some who never stop believing in Q.”