QAnon followers believe that former President Donald Trump will be sworn in on March 4, Insider reports.

This belief is rooted in a conspiracy theory that all presidents after 1871 are illegitimate.

Coincidentally, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, has hiked the prices of suites around that day. Some room rates at the hotel, just blocks from the White House, have almost tripled for March 3 and 4.

New York Times: “He was one of the most extreme voices in Mr. Trump’s 77-day push to overturn the election, a campaign that will be under scrutiny as the former president’s second impeachment trial gets underway next week. Mr. Flynn went so far as to suggest using the military to rerun the vote in crucial battleground states. At one point, Mr. Trump even floated the idea of bringing Mr. Flynn back into the administration, as chief of staff or possibly F.B.I. director.”

“And now, safely pardoned and free to speak his mind, Mr. Flynn has emerged from the Trump presidency much as he entered it — as the angry outsider who pushes fringe ideas, talks of shadowy conspiracies and is positioning himself as a voice of a far right that, in the wake of the Capitol riot, appears newly, and violently, emboldened.”

New York Times: “While much has been said about how people descend into this world, little is known about how they get out. Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends.”

“The theories seem crazy to [Lenka] Perron now, but looking back, she understands how they drew her in. They were comforting, a way to get her bearings in a chaotic world that felt increasingly unequal and rigged against middle-class people like her. … The theories were fiction, but they hooked into an emotional vulnerability that sprang from something real. For Ms. Perron, it was a feeling that the Democratic Party had betrayed her after a lifetime of trusting it deeply.”

The Economist: “This is an awkward moment for the QAnon conspiracists who put their considerable faith in Donald Trump. Inauguration Day came and went with no mass execution of Satanist Democratic pedophiles. The Storm, as a million-odd QAnon followers called that wished-for event, was a shower. So there was no Great Awakening—a post-slaughter celebration of Mr Trump—either.”

“But QAnon is not going away. Updated versions of it are spreading—including one on TikTok that has pushed the Storm back to March 4th. And the conspiratorial impulse behind QAnon will be even more enduring. Fully half of Mr Trump’s supporters claimed to believe its core falsehoods: that he was fighting a high-level Democratic child-sex operation. As that suggests, the conspiracy is not only dangerous in itself, but both symptom and cause of the bigger epistemic and democratic crisis that Mr Trump has moved from the murkier parts of the internet to the Republican mainstream.”

Law & Crime: “An empire built on conjecture, conspiracy and a series of fake homeopathic cures for various ailments stands to be sued into oblivion after a Friday ruling by the Supreme Court of Texas.”

“Without comment, the Lone Star State’s highest civil court found that America’s foremost conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, and his flagship media outlet, InfoWars, are subject to liability in four separate defamation lawsuits filed over the past two-plus years. Those lawsuits were filed by parents of children who were killed during the Sandy Hook massacre and by a man Jones and his network falsely identified as the perpetrator of the Parkland massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.”

“Followers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, have spent weeks anticipating that Wednesday would be the ‘Great Awakening’ — a day, long foretold in QAnon prophecy, when top Democrats would be arrested for running a global sex trafficking ring and President Trump would seize a second term in office,” the New York Times reports.

“But as President Biden took office and Mr. Trump landed in Florida, with no mass arrests in sight, some believers struggled to harmonize the falsehoods with the inauguration on their TVs.”

“Some QAnon believers tried to rejigger their theories to accommodate a transfer of power to Mr. Biden. Several large QAnon groups discussed on Wednesday the possibility that they had been wrong about Mr. Biden, and that the incoming president was actually part of Mr. Trump’s effort to take down the global cabal.”

Politico: “A vast swath of the president’s diehard base in MAGA Nation — the conspiracy theorists, the militia members, and the followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory — has disregarded Trump’s Wednesday remarks. Instead, they are dissecting his phrases and using those cues as rallying cries, doubling down on their plans to keep the MAGA movement going after Trump leaves the White House.”

“The absence of a formal Trump concession to President-elect Joe Biden has emboldened their chatter and bolstered their ideology. So, too, has the clamp-down by social media platforms on MAGA extremist content — Trump’s own posts included — which has given white nationalist and unapologetically fascist groups openings to recruit Trump fans to their cause.”

Vice News: Desperate QAnon believers think Trump spoke to them in Morse code.

NBC News: “Right-wing extremists are using encrypted channels to call for violence against government officials on Jan. 20, the day President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated, with some extremists sharing knowledge of how to make, conceal and use homemade guns and bombs.”

“The messages are being posted in Telegram chatrooms where white supremacist content has been freely shared for months, but chatter on these channels has increased since extremists have been forced off other platforms in the wake of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump rioters.”

Steve Benen writes about an email that you can expect “from your weird relatives” blaming the left for the Capitol riot:

“Lou Dobbs and Rep. Mo Brooks, discussed the possibility of antifa instigators’ infiltrating the pro-Trump mob. And former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made the same claim, telling Fox News host Martha MacCallum that it was unclear who was instigating the riots. ‘A lot of it is the antifa folks,’ Palin said, citing “pictures” she had seen. Laura Ingraham, one of the channel’s primetime hosts, spent much of the hour of her show suggesting without evidence that the Trump protesters had been infiltrated by antifa.”

Axios: “A growing segment of the American far right, radicalized via social media and private online groups, views anyone who bucks President Trump’s will as evil. That includes Democrats, the media, celebrities, judges and officeholders — even conservatives, should they cross the president.”

“A great many Trump supporters spent recent weeks on heavily pro-Trump platforms like TheDonald.win and Parler openly discussing coming to Washington on Jan. 6 to launch an attack on the government.”

“Often the idea was discussed in vague or winking terms; other times, users explicitly called for elected officials to be abducted and executed.”

Jonathan Rauch: “Above all, the Republicans’ challenge is part of an information-warfare campaign. They are using a classic propaganda tactic that might be called ‘conspiracy bootstrapping.’ First, you introduce a false idea, spreading it by every available means. Then, once people are talking about it, and some believe it, you cite its prevalence as evidence that it might be true—an epistemic sleight-of-hand by which propaganda validates itself.”

A new NPR-Ipsos poll finds 40% of Americans believe the coronavirus was made in a lab in China even though there is no evidence for this.

And one-third of Americans believe that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election, despite the fact that courts, election officials and the Justice Department have found no evidence of widespread fraud that could have changed the outcome.

This one is particularly bonkers: The poll asked respondents whether they believe that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media” — the false allegation at the heart of QAnon. While only 17% said it was true, another 37% said they didn’t know.

“Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn is going all in on the QAnon conspiracy theory, promoting an online store to sell QAnon hats and T-shirts, the proceeds of which will benefit his partnership with a prominent QAnon booster,” the Daily Beast reports.

“Flynn’s drawn-out legal battle with former Special Counsel Robert Mueller turned him into a hero for QAnon believers. Many QAnon supporters, who rely on mysterious online clues to construct a worldview where the Democratic Party and other institutions are controlled by a cabal of pedophile-cannibals, claim that Flynn is Q, the anonymous figure behind the conspiracy theory.”

NBC News: “With Trump’s days in office dwindling, QAnon influencers have become increasingly restless and militant, urging him to #crosstherubicon, a reference to Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon river after the Roman Senate explicitly told him not to, effectively kick-starting the Roman civil war and Caesar’s dictatorship.”