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March 4th revealed that the MAGAts don't actually care whether Trump won the 2020 election or not.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/us/politics/qanon-capitol-washington.htmlThat’s because law enforcement officials had sounded the alarm that the Capitol might find itself under attack again, after today’s date, March 4, recently became a fixation among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
When President Donald Trump left office in January, rather than staging a military coup, as many QAnon supporters had hoped he would, some adopted a hypothesis that Jan. 20 wasn’t the real Inauguration Day anyway — that it was, in fact, March 4, which really did serve as the presidential swearing-in date until the 1930s. That, they said, was when Trump would wrest back power from President Biden.
...
So as the date drew nearer, something ironic happened: Many of the online influencers who tend to drive the conversation around QAnon started throwing cold water on the March 4 idea, though it had been theirs in the first place.
“In the lead-up, all these influencers realized all these false prophecies are going to look bad and might hurt their profit,”
...
Bloom, who is also a communications professor at Georgia State University, said that since December, when the original person (or people) who had been anonymously posting online under the name “Q” stopped writing publicly, a growing aristocracy of writers had sprung up to create paid content, using platforms like Patreon or PayPal to monetize their ever-evolving torrent of conspiracy narratives.
“They were the ones that floated March 4,” she said. “They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s a false flag. It’s not QAnon that’s going to do anything on March 4. It’s a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.’”
...
For Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this is just one more sign of how malleable — and potentially long-lasting — the QAnon conspiracy theory appears to be.
“What’s really worrisome about QAnon is that it’s basically a choose-your-own-adventure,” she said. “It allows people to co-create a conspiracy that gives them a strong sense of positive community and belonging, in a world that’s very isolated.”
“And it’s a community in which there’s an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, ‘Yes, and’ — not, ‘No, but,’” Kleinfeld said. “If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability.”
When President Donald Trump left office in January, rather than staging a military coup, as many QAnon supporters had hoped he would, some adopted a hypothesis that Jan. 20 wasn’t the real Inauguration Day anyway — that it was, in fact, March 4, which really did serve as the presidential swearing-in date until the 1930s. That, they said, was when Trump would wrest back power from President Biden.
...
So as the date drew nearer, something ironic happened: Many of the online influencers who tend to drive the conversation around QAnon started throwing cold water on the March 4 idea, though it had been theirs in the first place.
“In the lead-up, all these influencers realized all these false prophecies are going to look bad and might hurt their profit,”
...
Bloom, who is also a communications professor at Georgia State University, said that since December, when the original person (or people) who had been anonymously posting online under the name “Q” stopped writing publicly, a growing aristocracy of writers had sprung up to create paid content, using platforms like Patreon or PayPal to monetize their ever-evolving torrent of conspiracy narratives.
“They were the ones that floated March 4,” she said. “They were also the ones in the last two weeks saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s a false flag. It’s not QAnon that’s going to do anything on March 4. It’s a false-flag operation by antifa to make us look bad.’”
...
For Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, this is just one more sign of how malleable — and potentially long-lasting — the QAnon conspiracy theory appears to be.
“What’s really worrisome about QAnon is that it’s basically a choose-your-own-adventure,” she said. “It allows people to co-create a conspiracy that gives them a strong sense of positive community and belonging, in a world that’s very isolated.”
“And it’s a community in which there’s an idea, rather like an improv group, to say, ‘Yes, and’ — not, ‘No, but,’” Kleinfeld said. “If someone throws out an idea, others are encouraged to build on it. That suggests a long life, a durability.”
You see? It was never about who won the 2020 election or not.
They come together and cook up these fantasies to create alternate realities in which they are heroes standing up against something. And it doesn't even matter to them WHAT EXACTLY they are against.
I have seen this phenomenon before. With Flat-Earthers. No Flat-Earther can explain how things work on a Flat-Earth and Flat-Earthers cannot even agree with each other on what this Flat-Earth is like. But they are all ADAMANTLY UNITED in their belief that being a Flat-Earther means being in opposition to the evil conspiracy that hides the true shape of the world.
MAGAts don't give a shit about whether Trump is President, just like Flat-Earthers don't give a shit whether Earth is flat. These claims are nothing but constantly redefined excuses to form culturally isolated communities in which they can feel at home, to create alternative realities in which they belong to a merry band of heroes that fights against evil.
Once Trump has outlived his usefulness as a cudgel to own the libs, once all the lawsuits and investigations reveal him to be undeniably useless as a culture-war prop, his fans will backstab him faster than you can say "OAN is better than Fox News."
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