This is how my one high school friend got sucked in. She lives in a rural area with a legit missing and murdered Native women issue, and has two Native American children, but somehow it went off the rails. I un-friended her and then I got off FB all together, so I’m curious how far she went.
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That lurch from dead Biden to powerful puppet Biden is a fabulously extreme example of “The enemy is both weak and strong, depending on rhetorical context” from Umberto Eco’s how-to-spot-fascists list.
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The QAnon garbage seems to transcend factors like education level, income level, and even political alignment in a startling way. One of the hotbeds for this nonsense is Beverly Hills.
My working theory is that it has a lot more to do with the general distrust of government and of the institutions of civil society that’s been inculcated in the U.S. over the last 40 years. The Libertarian conception of a country of “rugged individualists”, all on their own in a Hobbesian war of all against all, has poisoned us to the point that even logical thinkers from the political left can get caught up in bizarre conspiracy theories.
Not all of that distrust is unwarranted, either…
That’s a large part of what drives this. As one example, take affluent liberals in California who are also anti-vaxxers, basing their science-denying woo in the solid foundation of Big Pharma’s less-than-honourable history.
And yet not all of them descend into incoherence and self-contradiction (or ragequits) when asked to explain their belief system. It’s strange and frustrating, but facts and logic stand no chance against whatever narrative the grifters and cult leaders have cooked up. Once they’re in it’s really hard to pull them back out.
My mother falls for some of the talking points, divorced from QAnon, but I can usually talk her down quickly. I’ve seen some progress from her, too. One of the caregivers for a family member was citing stories from Newsmax when they were chatting, and my mother told her straight out it was a source of disinformation.
Despite that, I can never rest assured my mother is safe from it. Like the phone scammers who constantly call her house trying to rob her, she gets a steady stream of e-mail forwards and social media posts from a handful of acquaintances and distant family members who are cult members. They’re often couched in a way that makes them seem like real news from reputable sources, so I’m constantly de-bunking them.
Usually I get this reaction when I try to warn her off that latest phone scam. She gets defensive and says she’s not stupid. Which she isn’t, but at her age she also isn’t as sharp as she once was, either.
I have to remind her that she’s already lost money to these crooks and that she’s on hundreds of sucker lists. We’ve also had to set up protocols with the bank to limit any future losses. It’s difficult and frustrating, but it’s nothing compared to reduce potential damage caused by the death cultists.
Anyone trying would immediately find themselves making millions of dollars. Whatever happens to that money requires keeping up the grift and adding to the poison.
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Deep fakes, Deep State, Deep waters.
Very deep waters.
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Oh, I don’t know. Make the millions, then reveal it as a spoof and announce all the profits have been donated to the Dems 2024 campaign. But then the Q-susceptible would insist it was a double bluff.
More likely, millions would need to be spent on lawyers facing down legal suits from Ivanka.
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Reading that reminded me very much of the basic idea behind Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”, language being used like a virus to rewrite the underlying structures of the brain. There’s more to it than that, but there are far better people on here who could unpick what I’m trying to get at, and present it in a manner that’s easier to understand.
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Q friend of a friend tells me do research. Apparently this is done at Sidney Powell’s website, as Newsmax has been compromised.
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It may be as simples as “when things are uncertain, people like a definitive villain and a definitive hero”. Reality is hard, requires people to do science, and lots of history, and understand where other people are coming from. Trump and friends good, liberals and rich celebrities evil pedophile cannibals are the bad guys has a sort of charm to a lot of folks. Sort of like how superheroes and zombie movies are popular. (Nothing against those genres, they’re fine as movies, but not as political belief systems).
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my other thought was – maybe it’s the kind of push back they they’ve gotten in areas that are their area of expertise. especially women or older americans ( re: the bit qanon including many 50+ )
my uncle seems to believe there’s one conspiracy theory which will unify them. he’s still looking for the exact details, and then it will make sense to everybody. he could talk for days with irrelevant details, never missing a beat.
my mother doesn’t want to talk. ( to the point of hanging up the phone, threatening to break off contact, etc. ) she’s not as out there – i think – but still believed that trump was going to rise ascendant on inauguration day, and that covid is overblown.
her main logic about covid is – she doesn’t know anyone who’s had it, and if it were really bad people would be dying right in front of her eyes. her main logic about trump was “god’s plan”.
i’d worry less, but because she doesn’t take it seriously… she’s putting herself ( and other people ) at risk. left retirement to teach kids in person, wasn’t feeling well but wouldn’t get tested, lied about getting vaccinated, yes: wears a mask… but only because it was required.
( and now her state no longer has a mask mandate 
)
yeah. it might have been better to only ask questions. anything perceived as push back only causes my mom to shutdown. my uncle though wants to answer questions. he will just talk until you get tired.
i do worry a bit that silence is complicity, i dunno.
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Basically The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but somehow even stupider.
The secret isn’t to put together a conspiracy theory/ideology/cult that is especially convincing. The secret is to find the people who want to be convinced.
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I think this is a really good point! I saw some one get roped into it from the alt-spirituality new-age side and I saw a lot of that person’s trauma start to get sort of almost weaponized (struggling for the right word here) in a way.
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I have found that to be the key.
The problem with Fauci is that he’s an immunologist, not an epidemiologist, so he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
(said recently by someone in their 80’s who dropped out in the first term of college and worked only dead-end office jobs)
My response:
“What is an immunologist? What do they do?”
Wait while they look at you quizzically, let them struggle a bit to answer. After they’ve given some type of answer:
“Then what does an epidemiologist do?”
At this point in this particular conversation, I got a vague claim that they needed to ‘go do more research on the subject’, and we were able to move on to other, less irrational subjects of conversation.
You do not have to accept the terms as they present them. Instead of answering their entire statement, pick out one or two things and just drill down a bit. They’ve memorized their talking points in chunks, so breaking the chunks apart leaves them with nothing.
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All of this reminds me of things Neil Stephenson has written about including his portrait of “Ameristan” in Fall and the disintegration of truth after the Moab incident:
The man is probably really Enoch Root.
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You might want to listen to this GREAT podcast on spreading anti-vaxxer disinformation. It turns out that it is a sophisticated & hugely profitable business. Check out this Incredibly informative interview with @imi_ahmed , founder of Center for Countering Digital Hate @CCDHate on @MattBinder’s DOOMED podcast
He talks about how they do A/B testing to target different groups via social media
Here’s the link to the show.
In earlier episodes he talks to guests who explain how the Qanon people used the anti-vaxxer crowd to grow their following.
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I created this as a goof, but I really do think that there
need to be programs that help the family members who have been sucked into these conspiracies.
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I want to express my sympathies for all of you who’ve posted about having to deal with this in your own family/friend circles.
To the questions about how to talk to them about it, I’m a big fan of the Socratic method. Asking questions to get them (ideally) to start to think about things they’re saying, and how those things might conflict with their realized experiences.
We don’t have any hardline Qanoners in our circles, but Mr.Linkey’s mother can get off on some conspiracy theories. I hear him often on the phone asking her things to help her put her ideas into perspective. It won’t work for everyone, but it seems to help, and offers an alternative to coming across as arrogant, or being silently complicit.
Years ago my mother started down a dark, ugly path of homophobia. When I asked her why she was thinking about these people in the bedroom (this was a specific she brought up), or whether she thought about other hetero people in the bedroom, she kind of blinked. When I asked her why it mattered in her life what other people do in the bedroom among consenting partners, she dropped it altogether. It may not have changed her mind, but she stopped bringing it up to me.
Qanon is a whole different ball of wax, but I thought this might be helpful. Good luck!
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So I grew up in the deep south, with a racist upbringing, and for a long time I believed these things myself but felt something was wrong with being a racist. That it inherently violated some core tenant of a peaceful society. I knew it was wrong , but I still believed it and believed in it.
When I got away from that society, I stopped believing the wrong things in my life. So this leads me to two conclusions:
One, peer pressure is a hell of a thing.
And two, anyone who says they believe these things despite the evidence are NOT logical thinkers, didn’t learn much from those multiple degrees, and never truly were “left leaning.”
It’s not anti-depressents or opioid addiction or anything but the stark reality: They actually were like this all along, and now they’ve found people to justify their hatred and actions.
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I could see some type of IT consulting business aimed at sinkholing this Q nonsense on brainwashed parents’ networks, hired by desperate adult children as part of the deprogramming process. Of course they would show up like Harry Tuttle, Air Conditioning Repairman, in Brazil.
…Spins up LLC…
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I mean this is going to be tough deprogramming this at this point. This thing has wormed its way into churches and is now tied directly to their religious beliefs. It’s become inseperable to that. You may get some people to let go of this, but the sad reality is it’s a cult and it’s a destructive cult that has worked its way into nationalist christianity, and the vast majority of people who believe it are not going to be recoverable.
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