This is what the anthropologist and ritual scholar Roy Rappaport called "oversanctification of the specific." To tie a general set of religious beliefs to the outcome of one historically contingent event like an election is to court extreme dissonance.
washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
washingtonpost.com/technology/202…
Most conspiracy theories provide a language for alienation, but Q is unique in that it is ultimately predicted on one consummate instance of non-alienation: Trump actually being in power.
The idea 'conspiracy theory is for losers' speaks to its traditional consolatory function in articulating political defeat & social or cultural alienation. Tells who's *really* in power. But Q was paradoxically a product of political victory: Trump was in power but he also wasn't
It staked its claim not on the classic unfalsifiable claims of some shadowy malevolent entity which is really in power (Jews/communists/Illuminati/lizards &c.) but on its own historically contingent and electorally revocable claim to power.
Faced with political defeat, it will have to revert to the more traditional function of simply naming the amorphous object of your alienation: "the deep state" without the correlative salvation story of light overcoming darkness.
What's somewhat alarming here is that the claim to power, the notion that POTUS and patriot allies in the national security establishment were already taking care of all this, may have kept the movement more passive, and less violent than its mythology would indicate. What now?
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