QAnon has always used prophetic and Biblical language, clothing itself in the trappings of a patriotic, Christian, ultranationalist American rhetoric while advocating murder, a “wolf in wolf’s clothing,” to quote Bonnie Kristian. What’s so strange and interesting here is that all the wildness of these claims—the revived JFK and his son, the apocalyptic language—is in service of that most boring of ideas: the Big Lie that Trump is rightly president and will be restored to that office by extralegal means. At least until he steps back from so limited a position to take on his next big role.

Tuesday’s crowd in Dallas was drawn by QAnon’s inversion of the norms of society and reason: Losing means winning, immortality means morality, dead means alive, man means God, the internet is secretly reality. Trump is the Messiah because a dead man will return to proclaim him so? Sure, why not? It’s one of the more bizarre claims of QAnon, but probably not the most…

Yet the power of QAnon, of course, is that every setback, every failed prophecy, every bizarre idea that does not deliver, has little or no effect on believers. Q is silent. The apocalypse has once again not come. JFK Jr. is still dead (or, for QAnon adherents, in hiding). And Trump is still not president. But this week’s failed prophecy will be replaced with a new one. The prophecy never fails, its adherents just have to work harder to understand—through numerology, through ever more intensive study of old Q-Drops, through new gatherings, through violence—and the rest of us just watch on in horror.