NEW YORK What will happen today in Washington, the heart of US power? Nothing special according to the federal authorities who, however, have kept for prudence 5,000 soldiers of the National Guard in the city, to protect Congress and the White House. According to the QAnon conspiracy theorists, however, Donald Trump will return to power today: their latest prophecy sets, in fact, on March 4 his oath for a new presidential term after a quick military coup like the one that has just deposed San Suu Kyi in Burma: same fate for Joe Biden.
However, the security apparatuses have taken seriously the intentions of the conspiracists: to the point that today’s session of the Chamber has been canceled precisely because of the fear of new assaults such as the one that took place last January 6. There are some variations that give even more flavor to this bewildered world of conspiracy theories: a military court that sentences the leaders of the Democratic Party to death and some too celebrity progressives, especially Hollywood actors. the return to the original thesis of the movement: the world ruled by a cabal of government leaders and pedophile opinion leaders, who celebrate satanic rites with the blood of slaughtered children. The only one to fight against the unclean Trump consortium, who arrived at the White House to eradicate this scourge.
It was the thesis that Q, the mysterious prophet of the QAnon – a character described as a senior official of Donald Trump’s White House, if not even Trump himself – has spread in recent years, enriching the plan, with details and prophecies that are always more suggestive or terrible as the arrest and the execution of Hillary Clinton, announced several times. Prophecies that never came true. Despite this, the QAnon tribe has grown from a few thousand followers to hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions with followers who now carry the banners of Q in all manifestations of the far right in America and also around the world.
Trump’s electoral defeat, categorically ruled out by Q, it should have led to the dissolution of a movement evidently based on unfounded theories. Some, in fact, have thrown in the towel, but the thesis of the stolen vote has given the many who have decided to hold out material to build new imaginative theories: from that of the identity of the new leader (it would not be Biden, who died from time or made to disappear, but of a stunt double wearing a rubber mask) to the bloody coup which on January 20 should have prevented the oath of the democratic president.
When even this last prophecy proved unfounded, the bleeding of the adepts resumed, but those who remained immediately set up a new theory, this time taking the beliefs of the Sovereign Citizen anarchist movement early: Trump will return on March 4 and take back the White House and restore legality. Not just the defenestration of usurper Biden, but the cancellation of 150 years of American history: Trump would swear, in fact, as the 19th American president, not as the 46th because for the sect the last legitimate leader was Ulysses Grant, the 18th president.
Then, in 1871, a secret coup would have canceled the political system created in the eighteenth century by the founding fathers, transforming the entire country into a corporation. And Trump would come back today because US presidents originally took the oath on March 4th: the advance of their inauguration to January 20 was decided in 1933 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt to shorten the transition period between the old and new presidency.
In recent days, Trump himself, relaunching the thesis of the stolen election to the CPAC, the conference of ultraconservatives, and declaring that our journey is just beginning, threw more fuel on the fire. Tomorrow nothing will happen, but the QAnon tribe is already working to elaborate new fantasies as the repentants who have abandoned the movement illustrate in television interviews the devious mechanisms of psychological coercion used by the conspiracists and explain because the evidence of the facts does not dismantle the movement: cult members are invited to follow only radical right-wing websites and TVs, ignoring all other sources of information.
Meanwhile, theologians and psychologists warn: attention, history tells us that failed prophecies do not always mark the end of a movement. Sometimes they produce its transformation into a new religion. it has already happened several times: for example in the mid-nineteenth century when Baptist pastor William Miller announced a second coming of Christ on Earth on October 22, 1844. Nothing happened and the Millerite movement fell apart, but the Seventh Day Adventist church was born from it.
Massimo Gaggi
