THE CALIPH AIN'T COMIN':

QAnon won't last forever. Sooner or later, even if the failure of their prophecies doesn't necessarily do them in, conspiracy theories unravel and violent movements associated with them eventually end. 

I make this prediction based on a study of the demise of recent violent religious and religious-related movements around the world, including ISIS, which is the subject of my forthcoming book, When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (University of California Press). Often, I have found, they erode from within. They can vanish as quickly as they emerged. 

The QAnon conspiracy and the extremist movements related to it are like summer storms. They boil up from the hot air with fierce intensity. Just as quickly, they can disappear, with only lingering gusts and gales to remind us of the turmoil they've left behind.

Summer storms, however, are based on real meteorological phenomena. Conspiracy theories and the movements that promote them are even more fragile constructs, since they're based entirely on fiction. QAnon is an imagined reality that can deconstruct, though not necessarily easily. [...]

I talked with a militant fighter for the Islamic State, whom I will call Muhammad, in a prison in Northern Iraq who told me that the defeat of Mosul was not the deciding moment in the demise of ISIS. 

"It was dead before it was destroyed," Muhammad told me, saying that infighting and bad leadership had corrupted the movement. To illustrate the point, Muhammad pulled up his shirt to show me the scar from where he'd been stabbed in an encounter with a fellow ISIS militant. Increasingly, it'd seemed to him that they were fighting as much among themselves as they were against their perceived enemies. 

He was also frustrated with the movement's leadership. Though Muhammad clung to the idea of a Caliph as a righteous ruler worth fighting for, he seemed uncertain about whether al-Baghdadi was a sufficiently strong leader to deserve that title. Faith in a movement can erode when its leader is seen as less than legitimate. 

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