January 21, 2021, 7:40 am
Yesterday was a time of celebration and relief for many across the United States. The crude and divisive reality star who ripped at the very threads of our democracy lost his power and a competent, sane man elected by over 81 million Americans took his place.
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But for devout followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, yesterday was an anticlimactic end to what they expected to be Trump’s triumphant victory over the Satanic cabal of pedophiles and cannibals that they believe run the Democratic party and Hollywood.
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In the days leading up to President Joe Biden’s inauguration, people shared frantic texts they received from their families, warning them to stock up on supplies and “tipping them off” that high-level figures from not just the U.S., but from around the world, have secretly been arrested for their crimes.
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In the last years, QAnon spilled over from an outrageous fringe conspiracy theory to something that more and more conservative-leaning people bought into. It mixed in with some people’s existing religious beliefs of prophecy, of a coming battle, of hidden wars being fought with demonic forces behind the scenes. They used it to justify demonizing their enemies and idolizing the deeply flawed, cruel, and incompetent man who had risen to power out of nowhere — it was all part of a bigger plan.
And that’s why they truly believed Biden’s term as president would never come to fruition. Trump has a plan, they would say, this is all part of the plan. Every failure or misstep of their glorious leader somehow got chalked up to being a complex game of chess in which Trump was only letting his opponents believe they had won.
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But on Inauguration Day, as the whole country watched, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn in to replace Trump and his estranged VP Mike Pence, and the bubble of QAnon burst.
“Oaths taking place, there is no plan,” lamented one presumably ex-follower.
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Another admitted that now, they’re “the official laughing stock of [their] family.”
QAnon followers now have to grapple with the hard truth that everything they believed in was a lie. There was no plan.
Trump wasn’t fighting Satanic pedophiles in his free time. He was just a narcissistic billionaire pinned with the wild fantasies of some anonymous “Q” who managed to cultivate a mass of believers from behind a computer screen.
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Of course, some may never give up the charade, because admitting you fell for something so absolute insane and isolated yourself from the people closest to you in the process is simply too hard.
*First Published: January 21, 2021, 7:40 am
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