With their hero defeated, QAnon followers ask, ‘Now what?’

Last weekend, as Democrats danced in the streets to celebrate the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., QAnon believers were on their computers, trying to make sense of it all.

“Biden will NEVER be president,” wrote one.

“Trump knows what he is doing,” wrote another on a QAnon forum. “He is letting the Dems, technocrats and media publicly hang themselves.”

Some QAnon adherents, however, were already inching toward acceptance.

“We’re losing,” one tweeted. “Not sure I trust the plan anymore. Not sure there even is a plan.”

These are trying times for believers in QAnon, the conspiracy theory built around the baseless claim that there is a Fsatanic pedophile cult run by top Democrats.

For years, they had been assured that Mr. Trump would win in a landslide and spend his second term vanquishing the deep state and bringing the cabal’s leaders to justice. Q, the message board user whose posts have fueled the movement for more than three years, told them to “trust the plan.”

But since Mr. Trump’s defeat, Q has fallen silent on 8kun, the website where all of Q’s posts appear. QAnon-related activity on the site has slowed to a trickle — one recent day, there were fewer new posts on 8kun’s most active QAnon board than on its board for adult-diaper fetishists.

There are also signs of infighting among QAnon’s inner circle. Ron Watkins, an 8kun administrator who some believed was Q himself, announced on Election Day that he was stepping down from the site, citing “extensive battles” over censorship and the site’s future.

Though QAnon has had some success infiltrating the Republican Party — an adherent won a congressional race in Georgia last week — the movement has been dealing with other setbacks. QAnon followers have been banned from most major social media platforms, deflating the movement’s momentum and depriving it of its most effective organizing tools. Facebook groups and YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers disappeared overnight.