But the date came and went without serious incident. It wasn’t that the false and sprawling conspiracy theory that accuses “Deep State elites” of running a secret pedophile ring was losing steam. Rather, it was at least in part because QAnon followers smelled a trap.
“FOR ALL YOU SHILLS, MSM LURKERS AND NORMIES VISITING TODAY – Q HAS TOLD US MARCH 4 IS A TRAP,” a user posted Thursday on GreatAwakening.win, one of the larger QAnon web forums. “THEREFORE ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS IS NOT US!!”
Across their few remaining social media platforms, QAnon followers kept reposting a screenshot of a 2019 message from “Q”, the mythical intelligence agent working against the Deep State, according to the QAnon conspiracy theory. In it, “Q” wrote a message that contained the words “March 4, 2018” and “trap” — which a user had circled in red.
“Q knew,” it said. “Is it a trap for [them] or a trap for us?”
But unlike January 6 — the concrete, indisputable date of the actual ratification of the Electoral College results and thus the presidency — a March 4 inauguration had always rested on a nebulous theory, even by the standards of QAnon lore. That theory, based on a misreading of an 1871 law, claimed that March 4 was the actual, legal date of the inauguration, and that Biden had been falsely sworn in on January 20 — perhaps as a feint, or perhaps as president of a globalist-backed corporation.
Most QAnon influencers — such as Trump lawyers Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, or Ron Watkins, the former administrator of the QAnon message board 8kun — did not treat March 4 with any significance, unlike the date of the Capitol riot.
“The entire thing was based on a misreading of a law from 1871, and even major QAnon influencers weren’t buying into it, actively trying to persuade their followers that it was a hoax designed to make their movement look bad,” said Mike Rothschild, a QAnon researcher currently writing a book about the history of the movement. “It really had nothing in common with the January 6 insurrection — that was the culmination of years of Trump conspiracy theories that voter fraud was the only way Democrats could win the election.”
Influencers with smaller audiences, in fact, were actively trying to stamp the March 4 theory out as far back as January.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/07/qanon-trap-violence-474034