Did He Know About the Ceremonial Nature of Mike Pens Counting the Votes?

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Andi: I don't think it's a coincidence that as we got closer to the inauguration, trumps started embracing people like mike lindell and patrick burne. Andd i don't want to guess, because i don't know. But i i know that there were some documentation going around of some of trump's lawyers are trying to explain to him how all this worked. Trump was not in a position where he was listening to anybody at that point. So he was pushing out people who were telling him, mister president, i's over. You lost and embracing people who were saying, we're got this. We're going to figure out a way to do

Michael Shermer speaks with Mike Rothschild, a journalist specializing in conspiracy theories, about QAnon and its followers.

On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt like “the calm before the storm” — then refused to elaborate as puzzled journalists asked him to explain. But on the infamous message boards of 4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own. In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump’s remarks began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America. But did any of what Q predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider and wider? No. Why not?