Kevin Roose reports:

Last weekend, as jubilant Democrats danced in the streets to celebrate the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the country’s 46th president, QAnon believers were on their computers trying to make sense of it all.

“Biden will NEVER be president,” wrote one QAnon believer, still firmly stuck in the denial stage of grief.

“Trump knows what he is doing,” wrote a member of a QAnon forum, well on his way to bargaining. “He is letting the Dems, technocrats and media publicly hang themselves.”

Some QAnon believers, however, were already inching toward acceptance.

“We’re losing,” one tweeted. “Not sure I trust the plan anymore. Not sure there even is a plan.”

These are trying times for believers in QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory that falsely claims the existence of a satanic pedophile cult run by top Democrats. For years, they had been assured that Mr. Trump would win re-election in a landslide and spend his second term vanquishing the deep state and bringing the cabal’s leaders to justice. Q, the pseudonymous message board user whose cryptic posts have fueled the movement for more than three years, told them to “trust the plan.”

But since Mr. Trump’s defeat, Q has gone dark. No posts from the account bearing Q’s tripcode, or digital user name, have appeared on 8kun, the website where all of Q’s posts appear. And overall QAnon-related activity on the site has slowed to a trickle. [Continue reading…]