Why They Won't Leave

Why QAnon Supporters Stay Even After Trump Left

From the outside it seems so obvious that it’s all over for QAnon. They had dozens of failed predictions they had swept away and yet now came the one event they couldn’t handwave away. The election of Joe Biden and the defeat off Donald Trump in the 2020 Presidential election seemed to be a death blow to the QAnon movement that was based upon the idea that while he was President, Donald Trump would use the power of the Presidency to jail his enemies and expose their rampant criminality to the world. Without that QAnon’s whole narrative crumbled. Yet here we are two weeks into the Biden administration and we still have QAnon believers holding out hope. For people seeking to get their family and friends out of the QAnon cult the question is simple. Why do they still believe?

The first reason they still believe is that they are part of community. QAnon is where their friends are. It’s where they meet like minded people and share stories about their lives and swap ideas about how The Great Awakening will happen. QAnon is their ‘in group’ and everyone outside of it is the ‘out group’ and right now the leaders of the movement are demanding people be patient and understanding as the mysterious Plan Q had talked about for years slowly reveals itself to the world. To give up now would mean abandoning their friends, their support system, and their belief in Q, which might even be akin to their belief in God. Plenty of QAnon supporters have said they have become more religious and more in touch with God via their relationship with Q.

QAnon gives it’s followers a sense of empowerment and adds excitement to their lives. They have been given secret knowledge about the world that only a chosen few know about. This knowledge makes them feel enlightened and superior to the people who go about their day to day lives either not knowing or denying the horrible truth about the world. On top of this being involved in QAnon means that you see events in the news as either proof of the Deep State’s existence and corruption or events that will lead to the downfall of the Deep State and the inevitable victory of God and Donald Trump.

This last part leads me to the biggest thing QAnon gives it’s followers, and that is hope. It might seem insane to imagine that a belief system that stresses that the world is run by the most evil people imaginable is a movement based on hope, but that is exactly what QAnon is. QAnon promotes the idea that these terrible people will face a day of reckoning. That their horrible crimes will be exposed for the world to see and that justice will be done to them. You and I see Biden in office and thing the story of Donald Trump has concluded while QAnon sees Trump’s return behind every corner.

They imagine that a military coup will at some point very soon restore Trump to power. This coup’s deadline is typically set for March 4th based on the belief that this is when the Constitution stated that Presidents were to begin their term of office. There’s quite a bit of wishful thinking and revisionist history to make it all work but QAnon is OK with such things and are willing to hold on to hope for one more month to see their hero return back to his rightful office. While the days tick down to March 4th QAnon sees signs of their impending victory all around them. The coup in Myanmar is a blueprint for what will, and should, happen in America. The military steps in and overturns the results of a corrupt election and installs the rightful leaders into power. There are also a belief that the coup was carried out by Patriots to gather evidence against the Deep State and that Obama, Hillary, Soros, and all of QAnon’s other enemies have secrets hidden in Myanmar that are about to be exposed for the world to see.

Add onto this the craze over Gamestop, AMC stocks, and silver and you have a QAnon supporter feeling full of confidence and hope for the future. While some of QAnon see Gamestop and silver as a means to get rich quick, others see it as a way to topple the corrupt system that has allowed Wall Street and the ultra-rich to prosper while the working man struggles to make ends meet. Whatever their belief about the markets is QAnon is sure it’s all trending in the right direction and that direction is The Great Awakening.

While these events will fade away soon enough and Trump will fail to take office on March 4th QAnon will continue to endure. It’s promoters will constantly find things to claim are positive signs for the movement and the followers, desperate for things to believe in, will take them at their word. Without hope QAnon would lose it’s appeal and so the people leading this movement must find hope and reassure their followers that everything will work out in the end. That God will win and that all they need to do is to Trust The Plan. It’s enraging, it’s frustrating, but it’s also reality. These people are searching for something and even now QAnon is giving it to them.