Due to rising concerns about QAnon supporters and violence, nearly 5,000 National Guardsman will have their stay in Washington D.C. extended another three weeks.
QAnon supporters still remain convinced that on March 4 Donald Trump will be inaugurated and return to the White House as president.
House Armed Services Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash. brought up QAnon chatter online surrounding March 4 during a hearing this week with defense officials.
“Some of these people have figured out that apparently 75 years ago, the president used to be inaugurated on March 4,” Smith said. “Now why that’s relevant, God knows. At any rate, now they are thinking maybe we should gather again and storm the Capitol on March 4 … that is circulating online.”
Pentagon official Robert Salesses also spoke during the meeting. He stated that 4,900 National Guard troops will remain in D.C. through March 12 at the request of Capitol Police in response to “different missions” that the troops will support.
Salesses added that there is not currently a specific threat that the National Guard is tracking, however, the Pentagon will work with law enforcement agencies to evaluate any potential threats.
Donald Trump has clearly been listening to the chatter and is doing all he can to enrich himself during this time by jacking up prices at his Washington hotel. For the dates of March 3, 4, and 5 room rates have raised by nearly $1,000. The hotel did the same exact things on the day before and day of the deadly insurrection back in January.
The QAnon conspiracy theory is based on the bizarre belief that Donald Trump is secretly battling a satanic cabal of sex-trafficking Democrats. QAnon supporters believe the satanic Democrats drink the blood of children before eating them. Several celebrities have been tossed into the conspiracy theory for example Anderson Cooper, who Qanon believers believe drinks the blood of children, and Lady Gaga, who they believe is a witch.
“Setting unrealistic timelines for world-changing events is nothing new in QAnon world,” says Julian Feeld, co-host of the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast.
“It’s kind of like an evangelical cult waiting for the rapture,” said Robert Guffey, an author and lecturer at California State University, Long Beach. “It doesn’t happen so you’ve got to push the day back, and then it doesn’t happen again — push the day back.”
Feeld adds that the March 4 conspiracy theory is unique because it did not come from a clue posted by Q, but from followers themselves.
“They believe essentially that the 14th Amendment is the last valid amendment, and that basically, the last valid president was Ulysses S. Grant,” Feeld said in an interview. “So the idea here is that Trump would be inaugurated as the rightful 19th president, after Grant, and they chose March 4 is because that used to be the day of the inauguration in the time period that they idealize.”
“They believe that the United States was turned into a corporation and that invalidated, in their minds, everything that happened after that,” Feeld said. “They believe, essentially, that a company was created called the United States of America Inc., or something like that. And that meant that we stopped being a country, like, it broke the Constitution, and made everything after that basically an act of sedition and treason.”
Unbelievably the idea is not entirely new and stems from a related set of delusional beliefs known as Sovereign Citizen ideology. “Sovereign citizens have had a crossover with QAnon for a while,” Feeld said. “But this is the first time that it’s so central.”
