So one of the central pillars of post-election QAnon, which keeps growing among the remaining faithful, is this bizarre belief that the "good guys" have to let the "bad guys" get away with a crime before they can punish them for it.

You can see why this idea appeals! Because the mythology is that Trump and Q are both unstoppable geniuses who never miss, never lose, never fail, and may have access to literal time travel or future-scanning computers.

So how can they lose an election?

The answer must be that they lost on purpose.

Why would they lose on purpose?

Because the election is stolen and they want to expose the crime by catching the criminals in the act.

But isn't the act over?

No, not until the crime is "sealed", which is always... later.

For a while it was "We have to let states certify because then we can implicate the corrupt state officials." Then it was the corrupt courts. Then it was the corrupt Supreme Court. Then it was the corrupt Electoral College. Then the corrupt Congress and Vice President.

Each time the goalpost zoomed past without a goal, the scope of the imagined crime expanded to implicate whoever was next. And then we came to the inauguration, and apparently, Biden supposedly "stealing an election" wasn't a crime until he was sworn in. Because of reasons.

So that's why today is such a fracture point for them, because Biden was inaugurated and not immediately arrested. And some of them can't shake the sense that the "crime" they imagine can't widen any more, there can't be a higher or bigger target left.

And possibly some of them understand that at this point Donald Trump isn't president and Joe Biden is, so. The whole "plan" is moot.

(Though some also have some interesting workarounds for that, like "Trump dissolved the failed republic so Biden is president of nothing.")

Yes. Though just as with Scientology, not all the rank and file are aware of the more sci-fi beliefs undergirding it all until they're more deeply invested in the mythology, but time travel and a future-predicting "quantum computer" are real Q beliefs. https://twitter.com/mllocy/status/1352016911836581891

Since they receive their holy writ from anonymous people on an anonymous image board, and since they believe things that support what they want to believe, it's been very easy for trolls to pose as time travelers offering assurances that "patriots" are "in control".

"I'm from the future and we've already won" is a very resonant message in these circles, along with "Trump planned this all out and he even scripted what Biden and Pelosi and Mueller and everyone is saying and doing, they have to go along because he has them cornered."

I mean, search me. I've studied them probably as much as almost anyone and I can't wrap my head around that specific disconnect. Like they imagine Trump shredding the Constitution and then say under his new republic it will be the highest law of the land. https://twitter.com/Heather_No_Rum/status/1352018337472024578

The only thing I can say, I guess, is that they're big believers in The Spirit of the Law. Like during the kraken/clown lawyer court cases, all their legal theories didn't actually work but some of them kind of sounded like they were close?

For instance, there is a specific procedure that happens under the law if no candidate gets a majority of the electoral votes: the House votes *state by state* (not by rep) on the new president. The Republicans control more states, so Trump could win that way.

But the thing is, they kept bringing that up all excited in their Underpants Gnome Plan Flowcharts in cases that had nothing to do with getting or not getting a majority of electoral votes. They mentally generalized it to "If there's a dispute, the House votes by state."

I also think of that as "turn your head and squint" law, as in, the law doesn't say that but if you tilt your viewpoint and squint really hard at it, let your vision go out of focus... well, it might kind of look like it does, right?

So if you think of law as a series of things that are Essentially True, In Spirit... if you think that the way things *feel* like they should be ought to be a solid legal argument, then you can imagine shredding the Constitution to save the Constitution as a good, workable thing.

Because even though there's no Constitutional basis for Donald Trump to dissolve the republic or institute a new one... to those who see him as the savior of the country, it feels like he should ought to be able to do that sort of thing.

If you've defined him as the savior of the Constitution and you've defined the party of Joe Biden as the enemy of the Constitution, then maybe you can imagine destroying the Constitution is better than letting Joe Biden have power under it.

I don't know. I'm saying this and I don't find it compelling myself. I cannot construct an argument for this that I can look at and go, "Yes, I can see how, from their point of view, this makes sense and would seem to be true."

My point is, to a lot of them... don't know how many, even proportionally, but a lot of them... today changes nothing. Biden being the actual-factual 46th president of these United States is just one more step in the plan, and will lead to his undoing.

I've read fetish smut that operated on this logic, that the law cannot deal with fraud except after the fact. It wasn't good as fiction. Even for a paper-thin excuse plot, it didn't hold water.

But for a lot of QAnons, a big part of the mythology was that they couldn't lose, that they had already won, and the rest was details. The details can change any number of times before they'll be willing to give up on the victory.