What if I told you that there are still Pizzagate believers? You’d say I was nuts. You’d point me to the brave, violent, yet confused citizen who believed Alex Jones’s claim to “check it out for yourself” and drove to DC to shoot his rifle inside Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant while using it to threaten pizza shop employees and customers. You’d point me to the apology and retraction of Alex Jones, a prepared statement that he read in a bored and pouty tone, saying that James Alefantis of Comet Pizza of Washington, DC, did not actually traffic in child sex abuse victims, and Alex Jones was very sorry to have lied about it day after day. You’d tell me that Pizzagate was proven to be a total hoax, in fact.

Then I’d tell you about the believers in Q-Anon.

Q-Anon was an anonymous random person posting on 4chan /pol/. He posted like a modern-day Nostradamus crossed with 007 crossed with Oral Roberts. He claimed to have a Q security clearance, above Top Secret. His ‘drops’ were image posts: a digital photo, with accompanying text. He mixed sentence fragments that sound like the president, vague warnings of future events in the news tomorrow, and Biblical verses which describe the final battle of Armageddon.

Because Q drops were so incomplete and cryptic, immediately people rushed to fill in the blanks with wishful thinking. 4channers, and then 8channers, brought internet sleuthing to the comment sections of Q’s drops. Swiftly a coherent theory arose: that the president was on the side of Christ and the angels, with the help of Q and other loyalists in the government and military; and that the wicked agents of Lucifer were the Deep State opposing the president; not only that, but they believe that the Deep State are still using pizza parlors all over America to aid and abet the Pizzagate child sex abuse ring with occasional ritual murder. I told you that this was going to be hard to swallow.  The Deep State in league with the sinister Pizzagate villains, in this Opposite Day revisionism, forced Alex Jones to recant… allegedly, of course; there isn’t any proof.

The cult of Q-Anon believes that the evil Deep State are making the whole Trump/Russia collusion story up, as a distraction from Pizzagate, and that a revolution is coming known as The Storm: a day when Q and the other secret plants in the government will rise up to prove that Pizzagate is totally real, and in one fell swoop arrest everyone who is against Trump and therefore responsible for Pizzagate, including Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Maxine Waters, and anyone else they’ve been told to hate. It’s not as if the actual child molesters and traffickers haven’t been prosecuted. One of them was Trump’s Oklahoma campaign chairman. Another one was Trump’s Kentucky campaign chairman. The BBC’s story is that Donald Trump himself has invited middle-aged businessmen to party with girls under 18 on several occasions.

No one even knows if the “Q Anon”  posting on 8chan is the same Q that was on 4chan. Q has been proven wrong when his predictions fail to come true but the excuse is that Q has to drop misinformation to throw the Deep State off his trail. The people who realize that this is bullshit have long since deserted the Q cult, and the only people who are left are impervious to logic. Their belief will doubtlessly sustain them.

One of the bedrock elements of Trump’s base are the Religious Right, some of whom were against racial integration in schools well into the 1990s, seek to pack the Supreme Court with justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade, and, if that weren’t enough, some of whom still teach doctrine that God ordained the white race to rule the world. The largest sect, known as the Southern Baptist Convention, takes its name from a national meeting the member churches had in 1845, on the tender subject of how to remake the spectre of generational racial slavery into an institution that good Christians would uphold. These sorts of churches love the verses in Romans 13 about obeying government; they love the idea of the wicked being punished in the End Times of Revelation; they believe that the Jewish people will suffer the worst and will forsake their faith and become Christian in an instant, and this so called “miracle” will herald the Second Coming of Christ. Yes, literally.

The most fervent Q-Anon believers have a near-perfect overlap with Doomsday Christians, believers in Armageddon and the whole 7 seals, followed by the menagerie of beasts, horsemen, angels, demons, whores, Christ, and Antichrist, and the end of the world. They are looking for a sign that the president is on the side of the angels, and if the reality of the thrice-married, porn-star-banging, Tweeter-In-Chief doesn’t quite measure up to the perfect specimen of holy Roman emperor, they have to believe that the real agents of God are the rest of the administration. Reality intrudes upon their delusions yet again, as all the actual Republicans in the administration and in the campaign are proving themselves corrupt, and their falsities are unraveling in real time. So instead, they believe in Q: a mythical, perfect, unseen Republican, who is surely divinely inspired, and will surely save the Republicans who continue to support Trump. They have faith that they only have to believe in Trump and Q a little longer. After all, the end is nigh.

Q believers are an apocalyptic death cult. They’ve been taught to distrust all major media as tainted by the evil deep state. Even Infowars is seen as compromised and untrustworthy. They believe nothing, except what they read on 8chan, a site where everyone is anonymous, and where no one will bear any culpability when the next intrepid Pizzagate investigator inevitably shoots someone.