They scoured anonymous web postings from a shadowy Q figure and interpreted tweets and statements by former us President Donald Trump as messages sent from their champion.

They expected some kind of epiphany to occur on inauguration day.

But there was no epiphany.

Biden became President Trump left the White House and Q no followers are facing a harsh reality check.

Well, my colleague, I mean, as if he has been following this story for us, I mean, remind us one of what exactly is Q Annan and is there any way to know how many people are still followers?

Well, Q Annan is a movement based on a conspiracy theory that's based on Trump.

So Trump's presidency was at the center of this.

They believe that he was going to save them from a cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles in the US government.

Uh most among Democrats and also high profile Hollywood celebrities.

They believe a lot of tropes that come from old anti Semitic conspiracy theories and they believe that Trump was going to save them all from this.

Now, in terms of how many people actually follow this movement.

That's really hard because it's all online or most of it is online.

Anyway, some estimates by Facebook and independent estimates by the Guardian have put that number around three million people who have accounts that are associated with qanon accounts and they're all following this one person who posts under the name of Q.

So none of this is based on evidence.

I have to say that may maybe for some people out there listening in.

But um it's based on just these anonymous postings online.

So it's really hard to tell how many people are active.

But just in my travels across the U SI would say 3 million is a huge underestimate because if you just talk to uh people at Trump rallies, they might not say I am a follower of Q anonymous, but they say um they're doing the right thing or I believe that um there is this cabal of uh style child sex tr tr and we know that a key belief of Qanon followers is that Donald Trump remains us president.

So obviously he's no longer in power.

What what's gonna happen then to the movement?

Well, it's been a reckoning for the movement inauguration day when Joe Biden became the president of the United States and Trump had to leave to Florida.

That was an existential crisis for the movement.

Now, we were looking on chat rooms where a lot of Q anonymous Q and non followers talk about what to do next.

And you could see that there was several main things you had people who were continuing to protest as we saw there who are just going on as if nothing happened.

There's people who have left the movement who have said, OK, this was all fake.

I've wasted my time and there's, you know, there's also people who have tried to incorporate Biden's presidency into a new narrative.

And now what you have to, what you can't forget is that Trump is still alive.

He's still out there so he can still play a role in um in organizing this somehow at least being a symbolic uh figure in this.

Now we talked um to uh the, the um head of the podcast, the host of a podcast Q on people are basically faced with a kind of double down or back down position.

What what happens in those cases historically is more radicalization among the people that remain and more uh I suppose violent outbursts.

But what's always been a risk with Qanon is the most mentally ill within the system, they're like kernels of popcorn that go off on the fringes of the movement and they harm themselves and usually the people that they love around them, their family structures, their friend structures and that's what we're going to be seeing very soon, I believe because of the cognitive dissonance created by this great disappointment, you know, kernels of popcorn going off.

I mean, we, we know that Germany is home to a, a fringe, a major fringe of Q annan outside of the US.

What do we know about that?

And what do we know about the role of Donald Trump in, in this fringe?

That's a really good question, Donald Trump being the former president of the US.

Um What does that mean for the rest of the world now?

Like you said, there, Germany is considered to be the home of the largest base of Qanon followers outside of the English speaking world.

There's telegram channels, uh there's uh online chat rooms where a lot of Germans are also communicating about this uh false conspiracy theory and some people have put the estimate around 150,000 followers of the movement within Germany, which is pretty significant.

Now, Trump does play a major role in this.

You'll see these, these trademark red maga hats at a lot of rallies here, especially around the pandemic because pandemic has been big issue for Germans.

A lot of conspiracy theorists not believing that COVID-19 exists.

And because Trump early on had also cast doubt on how serious it was.

They took that as a sign that he was that he was going to do something for them.

So you saw a lot of that playing out here.

And like I said, it's going to continue to play a role as long as Trump is still around and making statements despite all of the cognitive dissonance that he was talking about, I mean, thank you.