Members of the 'QAnon' conspiracy cult were left disappointed when John F Kennedy Jr failed to come back from the dead at a rally on Tuesday at the exact site where his father was assassinated in 1963.
Hundreds showed up at the Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, US media reported, expecting the son of the former US President to show up and take his place as Vice President to Donald Trump, whom they expect to be reinstated.
JFK Jr didn't show, of course, having died in a plane crash 22 years ago.
QAnon, which began with a series of cryptic and anonymous online posts in 2017, has a core belief that Trump is on a secret mission to unearth a global network of Satanic cannibal paedophiles.
It has since expanded to include various other conspiracies, one being that JFK Jr faked his death in 1999 and is secretly the group's leader, 'Q' - who claims to be a high-level official with access to classified information. There is zero evidence any of it is true, and none of Q's previous predictions - such as that Trump's rival for the presidency Hillary Clinton would be arrested - have come true.
But that didn't stop hundreds turning out on Tuesday (US time) in Dallas. Some were carrying professional-looking campaign flags and signs reading 'Trump/Kennedy 2020'. Video showed some members chanting "let's go Brandon", a meme among the US far-right that's used in place of the less broadcast-friendly phrase "f**k Joe Biden".
"Frankly, I’m kind of shocked at how many people turned out for this," Jared Holt, an expert in extremism at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told the Seattle Times. "This wasn’t a widespread belief, even among QAnon followers."
That's because Q him/herself in 2018 explicitly said JFK Jr was not alive, making this latest gathering strange even by QAnon standards.
The Daily Beast, a liberal US news site, reported livestreams of the protest revealed JFK Jr wasn't the only dead celebrity people were deluded into thinking might show up - including basketball star Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in January 2020; actress Debbie Reynolds, who died at 84 in 2016; NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, who died in a crash in 2001; and rapper Tupac Shakur, who died in 1996 but has probably been sighted more since then than any other deceased music star aside from Elvis Presley.
John F Kennedy was assassinated at the Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. His death too is infamous for having been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories - memorably satirised by The Onion, which reports he was simultaneously "slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons… shot 129 times from 43 different angles".
