Quietly into the night?

It was no surprise that cowardly MAGAts did not attempt assaults on well-protected Capital buildings in protest over Biden's inauguration. Unfortunately, it strikes me as more likely that they might wait for the heat to die down before vindictively mounting domestic terrorist attacks on softer targets.

The worst of the MAGAts are nasty, anti-social thugs in search of an excuse to harm others. Every country has them, but among the Western nations, America stands out for stupidly arming religionism-indoctrinated sociopaths.

After writing the above, I found this: [modified for accuracy]

QAnon's 'Great Awakening' failed to materialize. What's next could be worse: [MAGAt] Believers who were stymied by Insurrectionist-in-Cheat’s exit could turn to white nationalism and other extremist beliefs, experts say

"Shortly before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Dave Hayes – a longtime QAnon influencer who goes by the name Praying Medic – posted a photo of dark storm clouds gathering over the US Capitol on the rightwing social media platform Gab. “What a beautiful black sky,” he wrote to his 92,000 followers, appending a thunderclap emoji.

The message was clear to those well-versed in QAnon lore: “the Storm” – the day of reckoning when Traitor-in-Cheat and his faithful allies in the military would declare martial law, round up all their many political enemies, and send them to Guantánamo Bay for execution by hanging – was finally here. 20 January 2021 wouldn’t mark the end of Insurrectionist-in-Cheat’s presidency, but the beginning of “the Great Awakening”.

Instead, LOSER-in-Cheat slunk off to Florida and Biden took the oath of office under a clear blue sky. Now QAnon adherents are left to figure out how to move forward in a world that, time and time again, has proven impervious to their fevered fantasies and fascistic predictions. And while some seem to be waking up to reality, others are doubling down, raising concerns among experts that the movement is ripe for even more extreme radicalization.

“My primary concern about this moment is the Q to JQ move,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, referring to “the Jewish question”, a phrase that white nationalists and neo-Nazis use to discuss their antisemitic belief that Jews control the world. Friedberg said that he had seen clear signs that white nationalists and alt-right figures, who have long disliked QAnon because it focused the Maga movement’s energies away from the “white identity movement”, were preparing to take advantage.

“They view this as a great opportunity to do a mass red-pilling,” he said."

...

[Deranged] "QAnon adherents are used to dealing with predictions that have not come true. The conspiracy theory began in October 2017 when an anonymous internet user posing as a government insider posted on 4chan that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, that her passport had been flagged, and that the government was preparing for “massive riots”. None of that happened, nor did any of the myriad other arrests, declassifications, executions, resignations or revelations that the anonymous poster, who came to be known as Q, has promised believers for the past three years. But the movement has nevertheless grown in size and influence, becoming a meaningful force in the Republican party and a motivating factor for many of the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January."

...

“There may be people who fall off quietly because they were just along for the ride and it isn’t fun any more, but these kind of movements will always have true believers. Over and over again we’ve seen huge dis-confirming events that didn’t cause people to lose faith.”

That resilience in false belief was apparent among some QAnon followers on Wednesday. They took solace in the number of flags placed on the dais when Trump gave farewell remarks from a military base before departing on Air Force One: there were 17, which followers interpreted as a secret message to them, since “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet.

Others returned to the process of “baking” – or reinterpreting through their obscure and esoteric epistemology – the thousands of missives that Q has posted over the years, in order to find a new way to understand the unfolding events, and to tell themselves that Q was right all along. “Like many of you, I am in shock by today’s [events] and then I realized why it had to happen and that Q told us it would happen and, why this NEEDED to happen,” read one popular post on a QAnon forum, which went on to detail a new theory that explains why Q’s false predictions were in fact correct."

...

"The QAnon narrative has always been fundamentally antisemitic (the “globalist cabal” is a remix of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while another major QAnon belief is a modern remaking of the blood libel), but many of the top QAnon influencers shied away from overt antisemitism, leaving it to posters on 8kun while promoting a slightly more sanitized version of QAnon on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

“Now that QAnon has coalesced on alt-tech, where Nazis have had a few years of head start, organized antisemitism is even fewer clicks away,” warned Friedberg.

Friedberg also anticipates that some QAnon followers will choose to follow a path “from the esoteric to the neoconservative” rather than adopting white nationalism. This countercurrent of the movement is focused on exalting American militarism and patriotism, and opposing communism, especially the Chinese Communist party.

Ultimately, Friedberg said, Idiot-in-Cheat’s departure will only help reinforce the “underdog mentality” and sense of grievance that has defined QAnon since the beginning, ensuring that the movement won’t just disappear.

“The things that they hate are still there,” Friedberg said. “The fetishization of 

Putin's Puppet is certainly real, but the hatred of the ‘deep state’, of communists, of liberals, antifa – all these institutions are still there, and they [the designated enemies] won.”

“That underdog mentality, which was illogical when Incompetent-in-Cheat was UNpresident, is now justified,” he added. “There’s no reason [in their tiny, resentful minds] to stop hating.”"

 ------- 

The deranged wanna-be-shaman who insisted on prayer in the middle of the attempted coup demonstrates one of the mechanisms of the correlation between anti-patriotic rebellion, divorce from reality, and the excessive religionism of American society. Much of this parallels the cognitive harm done by fundamentalist (reward for baseless belief without evidence, hellfire for enemies) churches: 

Ironically, "Q" is also used to designate the Q source (also called Q document, Q Gospel, or Q from German: Quelle, meaning "source") is a hypothetical written collection of primarily Jesus' sayings (logia). Q is part of the common material found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but not in the Gospel of Mark. According to this hypothesis, this material was drawn from the early Church's oral tradition.

Along with Marcan priority, Q was hypothesized by 1900, and is one of the foundations of most modern gospel scholarship. B. H. Streeter formulated a widely accepted view of Q: that it was written in Koine Greek; that most of its contents appear in Matthew, in Luke, or in both; and that Luke more often preserves the text's original order than Matthew. In the two-source hypothesis, the three-source hypothesis and the Q+/Papias hypothesis, Matthew and Luke both used Mark and Q as sources. Some scholars have postulated that Q is actually a plurality of sources, some written and some oral. Others have attempted to determine the stages in which Q was composed.

Q's existence has been questioned. Omitting what should have been a highly treasured dominical document from all early Church catalogs, its lack of mention by Jerome is a conundrum of modern Biblical scholarship. But copying Q might have been seen as unnecessary as it was preserved in the canonical gospels. Hence, it was preferable to copy the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, "where the sayings of Jesus from Q were rephrased to avoid misunderstandings, and to fit their own situations and their understanding of what Jesus had really meant". Despite challenges, the two-source hypothesis retains wide support.