Mad Trump fanatics QAnon in crisis after ’embarrassing’ Capitol riot mess
Donald Trump's wackiest and most committed supporters have had a hard time getting over his loss – especially when they bet so much on him finding a way back.
Leaders of the notorious QAnon conspiracy cult believed Trump would win the 2020 election, and then that he would storm the US government to wrest back control.
Neither of those things happened.
Then again, they were wrong about the world being run by lizard people – though admittedly this hasn't been disproved – about the Pizzagate paedophile ring supposedly run by Hillary Clinton, and about a cabal of secret Jews at the heart of Joe Biden's White House.
The far right movement sprung to the political forefront in 2020 as the pandemic raged and chaos reigned.
Millions – up to 15% of all Americans according to some estimates – were persuaded by mysterious leader Q's cryptic posts on web forums such as 8chan, where they talked of a coming political "storm" in nothing less than apocalyptic terms.
When hundreds of QAnon supporters' tweets and memes were liked and retweeted by the President of the United States, they saw that as a good sign indeed.
But a year on from Q's popular peak and six months after Joe Biden became president and washed away the possibility of a Q-style revolution, the group is in total disarray.
Reddit forum 'QAnon Casualties' has become more popular than the cult itself, with friends and relatives of Q "victims" venting about what the radical ideology has done to their loved ones.
Some of the entries are hard to read.
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On Thursday one Redditor said they "lost" their brother to the cult.
User Either-Ad wrote: "I am sitting in the car with this idiot and I hate him so much. He is beyond saving.
"I never thought I could hate my own brother but I do."
The anti-vax beliefs of many Q followers have torn families apart, particularly when siblings fight over whether to get their vulnerable parents jabbed.
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That's true of literally hundreds of QAnon Casualties posters, which use the 180k-member group as a kind of mutual therapy.
Though it was created in July 2019, the forum has never been more popular.
That's a lot to do with the fact those who still believe in Q – and there aren't as many now – are unlikely to ever change their minds.
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Every event which could have persuaded Q sympathisers to move on with their lives has happened.
Even one of the group's leaders, Ron Watkins, told Q members to "go back to our lives" after Biden was inaugurated as president on January 20.
Yet all that isn't enough for those who still believe.
Q researcher and author of a book about the group Mike Rothschild told USA Today they are going nowhere.
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“It is absolutely going to survive," he said.
“There’s no giving up. What they are doing is rebranding.”
He added: “Every time there’s a major disaster and there’s a shining opportunity for people to walk away from it, they don’t do it.
“They double down, they dig in more. They find a reason to explain why the failure was actually a success."
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QAnon's name itself is an example of that. Supporters of the movement now deny the group ever even existed.
The cult has split into supporters of "Q" and supporters of "Anon", even though the mysterious Q themselves hasn't posted a single word since December 8.
They may not even be alive and we'd have no way of knowing.
If the election was a hit to the group's identity, the disastrous Capitol riot on January 6 which killed four people was a complete debacle.
It showed the group as a bunch of anti-democratic nuts whose idiocy was outweighed only by their incompetence.
It's no surprise we haven't heard from Q in months.
Even still, Q now has a congresswoman in the form of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was elected to the House of Representatives (America's House of Commons) in November 2020 after dozens of posts supporting QAnon.
The group might not have had the kind of revolutionary influence it might've hoped for, but it now has big names in the halls of power.
That also means the Redditors on QAnon Casualties may well have some more victims to mourn soon.
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