Daily Beast: “QAnon’s anonymous leader has been silent for more than six months. Now QAnon is in upheaval over what’s next. When pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell took the stage at a QAnon convention in Dallas late last month, she was wearing a biker vest with a ‘Q’ patch sewn on the back. And yet, when Powell began speaking, she did the unexpected: she trashed some of QAnon’s most cherished ideas. According to the worldview held by many QAnon believers, Powell will actually lead the military tribunals at the heart of QAnon lore, imprisoning pedophile-cannibal Democrats in Guantanamo Bay and restoring Donald Trump to power. But at the conference, Powell broke some hard news to the QAnon faithful. ‘There are no military tribunals that’s magically going to solve this problem for us,’ Powell said, to scattered applause.”

“Powell even went against one of QAnon’s central pillars – the idea that believers should ‘trust the plan,’ putting their faith in the idea that Trump and the military are carrying out a secret agenda to depose Democrats and bring back the Trump administration. ‘I don’t have any evidence that there’s some grand underlying plan, pursuant to which all this is going to be made right,’ Powell said. ‘I don’t want to give anybody false hope that this is happening.’ The crowd didn’t mind Powell’s off-message remark too much; that night, a picture of Powell riding a kraken sold at an auction at the conference for thousands of dollars. And Powell didn’t do much else to dissuade QAnon supporters of their bizarre beliefs. She claimed the election was stolen and raised the prospect that Trump would retake the presidency later this year. But she did break it to the disappointed crowd that Trump wouldn’t get his second term extended to account for Joe Biden’s time in office. And Powell’s attempt to debunk the military tribunals and ‘plan’ aspects of QAnon orthodoxy marks a new phase in QAnon’s tumultuous post-Trump era.”