1. There’s something intellectually interesting in the rise and fall of QAnon: like almost every influential political worldview (which it is, despite its ridiculousness), it rose and fell on the basis of concrete factual predictions, rather than normative appeals.

2. Factual predictions are necessary for political success because people usually won’t join a political movement that doesn’t predict its own success in relatively concrete terms. But at the same time, those concrete predictions also set the movement up for potential failure.

3. In other words, non-falsifiable ideologies/belief systems (I.e., purely normative ones) likely can’t become influential, but falsifiability is a double-edged sword for obvious reasons.

Now, QAnon turned out, in the end, to be an easily falsified worldview, but that ease of falsification may very well be what drew people to it in the first place: it promised, in no uncertain terms, a quick and easy victory, which people like.

5. And now that it’s trying to reorient itself to vaguer, less falsifiable predictions (“Trump will eventually win, somehow”), it’s losing support rapidly even among its most zealous followers.

6. To some extent, all ideologies (liberalism, communism, Marxism, etc.) are like this, if not quite as outlandish, and all politics are ideological, if not quite as frenzied.