Two Weeks Later, QAnon Supporters Are Still Awaiting JFK Jr.’s Return on the Grassy Knoll

One may suppose that after ready round Dallas, Texas for weeks anticipating JFK Jr. (a person who’s lifeless) to emerge and provides a shock speech restoring Donald Trump to the presidency, one would merely conclude that JFK Jr. is lifeless and he’s not going to do this. That just isn’t the case for QAnon supporters.

For the uninitiated, QAnon is much less a coherent set of beliefs than an amalgamation of bigots, rubes, and hardcore evangelical Christians satisfied that Trump is secretly waging a worldwide battle in opposition to a Democratic/Hollywood camarilla of Satanic pedophiles.

Earlier this month, lots of of devotees of the arcane conspiracy idea confirmed up at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, which comprises the grassy knoll close to the place President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in 1963. There they waited for JFK Jr., who they imagine faked his death along with his partner and sister-in-law in a 1999 airplane crash to keep away from being assassinated by the evil cabal. The story goes that the Kennedys then waited for his or her second to return and do… one thing. Depending on which QAnon particular person you requested, you may hear that JFK Jr. would return to run as Trump’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, or that he could be making an look alongside his also-dead dad to proclaim Trump the “King of Kings.” (Don’t suppose too onerous about it, Oswald did, and look the place that bought him.)

JFK Jr., who it feels relatively pointless to proceed mentioning is lifeless, remained so. That apparently hasn’t deterred the QAnon sorts from returning, in line with Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer, who noticed a crowd of “hundreds of QAnon supporters” returning to the plaza on Monday night time:

Many of the QAnon supporters who confirmed as much as Dealey Plaza earlier on Nov. 1 went there on the phrase of Michael Brian Protzman, higher often called Negative48, a conspiracy theorist with round 100,000 followers on the messaging platform Telegram. Protzman, according to Vice, runs a demolition firm, is a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, and has a cult-like following in a single phase of the sprawling QAnon neighborhood. He predicted the date of JFK’s return utilizing his personal bastardized model of gematria, a Jewish numerology system of assigning numerical values related to varied religious or mystical meanings to names, phrases, or phrases; Protzman makes use of his model of this technique to prepare dinner Bible passages into QAnon-friendly prophecies.

Protzman additionally promotes his personal web site that includes doubtful overseas trade schemes to his followers, equivalent to investing within the Vietnamese dong or the Iraqi dinar with the promise they are going to accrue in worth sooner or later. The concept that the Iraqi dinar will generate untold wealth for its holders (also known as the “Dinar scam,”) is linked to a prediction widespread with some conspiracy theories that Trump will revalue the Iraqi dinar to pre-Gulf War ranges as a particular reward for his supporters. As the dinar is value $0.00068 {dollars} as of right now, and it was worth over $3 earlier than Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the concept goes that dinar holders will turn out to be fantastically wealthy in a single day.

The QAnon neighborhood is a large labyrinth populated by varied warring sub-factions, loads of whom have both retained sufficient connection to actuality to be credulous of Protzman’s claims or are at the very least involved that the optics of the state of affairs might flip off new converts. At least one other QAnon influencer got here painfully near self-awareness, slamming Negative48 as making “our entire movement look unbelievably dumb, and naive” because the Dallas rally “totally weirds out any ‘new eyes’ that may want to explore what it’s all about by making us all look like crazies.”

Vice separately reported many within the preliminary group of lots of seem to have spent a full two weeks in the city as a result of Protzman switched to claiming that JFK’s reappearance could be based mostly on the Julian calendar (an archaic Roman calendar notably nonetheless utilized in elements of the Eastern Orthodox Church, different branches of Christianity, and because the conventional agricultural calendar of Berbers within the Maghreb, however is in any other case largely of scholarly curiosity). One one who recognized themselves to Vice as a former Protzman follower stated they’d witnessed youngsters asleep on the ground on the preliminary gathering.

When JFK Jr. did not return from the grave for the Nov. 1 rally, Protzman led the gang to a Rolling Stones live performance in Dallas, the place he claimed that varied band members had been changed by Michael Jackson, JFK Jr., and Prince in disguise, with one backup singer truly being the late R&B singer Aaliyah. What any of these individuals should do with QAnon, past the motion’s basic obsession with movie star and the pomp and circumstance of historical past, is unclear. On Telegram, a few of Protzman’s followers have mentioned founding a everlasting compound in or close to Dallas to await JFK Jr.’s return.

As of press time, JFK Jr. stays lifeless, not that it issues to those individuals. A look at Protzman’s Telegram channel confirmed that as his followers gathered on the park final night time, he was promoting t-shirts.