After MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell made the ridiculously false claim that former President Donald Trump would be back in the White House by August 13, when he was ostensibly due to be reinstated as president, pollsters found that one in five Republicans said they believed that the 2020 election loser would be returned to power.
Lindell, a pro-Trump business owner who spread misinformation that the 2020 election was a fraud, has made a number of similarly bizarre claims, but the nutty network remains unperturbed by the obvious and repeated failure of such predictions to materialize.
The claims that Trump will be reinstated appear to be linked to the widely debunked QAnon, an anonymous but prolific source of zany conspiracy theories.
QAnon followers espouse an intertwined series of beliefs, based on anonymous Internet posts spread on social media outlets such as 4chan, 8chan, and Twitter from “Q,” who claims to have insider knowledge of the Trump administration.
A core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that U.S. President Donald Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of child-sex predators that includes prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites and “deep state” allies.
There has been no evidence to support these ideas, but people have taken them so seriously that at least one mass shooting incident was narrowly averted when a North Carolina man traveled to Comet Ping Pong and fired a rifle inside the restaurant expecting to uproot a non-existent pedophile ring.
Some supporters of QAnon, which asserted that Trump was secretly fighting a cabal of child-sex predators that included prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites and “deep state” allies, have also claimed that President Joe Biden’s election was not legitimate and that the military is secretly in power waiting for Trump to return to office.
QAnon borrows some elements from the bogus “pizzagate” theory about run out of a Washington, D.C., restaurant, has become a “big tent” conspiracy theory encompassing misinformation about topics ranging from alien landings to vaccine safety.
Supporters have unsuccessfully claimed several dates that Trump would be back in office, such as on inauguration day (Jan. 20) and March 4.