The pandemic has helped radicalize me further left.
It’s laid bare how craven and avaricious the GOP is. How willing they are to sacrifice everyone else’s lives in order to make their money printer print fast.
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So, for a long time, I had a theory that we were due a “reckoning”, when all the facts would be laid bare and all those things we did wrong and were doing wrong would be put in stark contrast with reality. The fact that our “way of life” was so insulted and hateful towards simply “pausing for three weeks in a row” showed a lot of people what was really going on.
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I have on friend who is definitely Q adjacent. Choosing to engage, I tend to just point out the logical flaws in a particular statement.
Almost always he falls back on ‘it’s a joke, jeez’.
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Well, it certainly would be hard to make a corpse marionette if the owner of the body was still alive wouldn’t it?
Oh… not that kind of puppet? Not a taxidermy related question? Nevermind…
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This.
It’s gone well beyond “hey, this idea appeals to me” to “hey, I must believe this even if it’s completely batshit because doing so is core to my identity”…
Convincing someone that an idea is wrong is one thing.
Convincing someone that their constructed identity is wrong is something completely different.
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The last five years, and especially last year, have made it crystal clear that the GOP are one of the greatest current threats to humanity, an insidious political religion that is willing to destroy and decimate to keep power concentrated in the hands of a few and money flowing from the poor to the rich. And largely propped up by people willing to accept all of that in order to maintain white and/or male privilege.
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Not sure I agree. I know someone who turned into a right-winger from being a far lefty, and he was a true peaceful and non-hateful person. Thing is, he’d had a very strict religious upbringing and later some mental issues for which he took medication. When he did, his religiousness, dormant since childhood, started to come back, and from there one thing led to another and he was on board with whatever the evangelicals said. The process took years but I think the combination of all the factors, not anything he really believed, was the cause.
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Have a friend or loved one taken in by QAnon? Look here for support, resources and a place to vent. Peruse old posts, settle in and relax. Learn to heal, deal and deprogram. Posts should relate to the direct experience of dealing with Q/adjacent folk.
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Sane people are all alike; every shitbird lunatic is bonkers in their own way.
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This is why I am thankful that my father is not into this, despite being on the conservative side of the spectrum (yes, we have Q believers here, too. And Trump stans), because he was educated by Jesuits (despite never having been Catholic) and learned these techniques well. He’d just turn it back on you.
It’s bad enough dealing with his cognitive dissonance as it is. I am extremely grateful he got missed by the cult.
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From 2020 but sadly still relevant… Sarah Kendzior makes the case in this whole thread that yet again, every accusation Cult45 levels against its perceived enemies is a confession. She saw it all, and earlier than many of us (her books and her podcast pretty close to dang near prophetic):
[… so why do it? well…]
She nailed it.
Nailed. It.
Having had to deal with two elderly parents and the sometimes difficult-to-spot cognitive decline (sheesh I should include myself in “cognitive decline” category, some days, I swear), I hear you and I admire your willing heart as you listen.
When I listened to my own family elders, I sometimes would stop listening to what was being said. I tried to listen more to how something was being said. What I heard had pain in it, loneliness, boredom, frustration, feelings of being trapped and yet adrift in a culture unrecognizable compared to what they remember.
My modest efforts to bring us all back to reality, to ground us in what is still nice about living (for us here that was movies, music, good food, talking to family members, observing the turn of the seasons and holidays and birthdays) were… not entirely successful. Elders lose their sense of smell, and taste, so food isn’t so compelling. If they have vision or hearing impairments, those are obstacles too. Lack of mobility means even strolls outside in a wheelchair don’t seem appealing, especially if in constant pain. Family members die off and that can turn to a depressing topic.
It’s really hard for caregivers who aren’t into crazy-ass Q stuff to do the job of caregiving for a person who is a true Q-believer because there’s just no way to shut one’s own ears. I hope you have other people in your mom’s pit crew who can spell you, take some of the work and time off of you so you can have a breather. Sit outside in the sunshine. Have a cuppa or a brewski or whatever, making sure you get time to recharge a bit.
I am not suggesting your situation has a lot in common with Stephanie Summerville’s account (below), but she’s had to do end-of-life care as a job, and her charge appeared to have been a KKK cult member. Summerville is Black. What a story. It ends ok, but… wow. I hope you have time to listen to her tell it at The Moth link.
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The old joking-not-joking trolley routine.
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Yep. And then (in my experience) whenever you point out that the “joke” isn’t really funny, you get the old, “don’t be so thin skinned!”
There are some family members I don’t talk to anymore, and this little trip down memory lane makes me realize I don’t miss them. Sad but true. 
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The pandemic has convinced me we absolutely do need a nationalized (free to use) health-care system, and no “insurance reform” is ever going to solve the problem. It has also convinced me that our current form of capitalism is little more than a slightly lipsticked form of feudalism. And we need heavy regulation on the rapacious big corporations, and to tax the living shit out of the super-rich (who are the only ones actually receiving all the benefits of our civilization)
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Well said.
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…And to keep people from getting contrary information from a source that they trust. The fractured nature of the internet and the algorithms of facebook allow people to be flooded with a non-reality based narrative to a degree previously seen mostly in totalitarian regimes.
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Hell just keeping trust at a minimum does most of the work, at least for older people. I’ve been watching internet discourse tear through late-entry boomers in the last few years as the stragglers to adoption in my life have finally come onboard and it is … horrific. I thought growing up on the internet was a bad thing but this is definitely worse, both in terms of their lack of defenses and the actual climate of the internet.
Trying to explain for example that the “big boobed trashy sluts” that keep “hitting me up for my money” are not likely even women or human at all and are likely only “targeting” you because you keep posting comments on trash ads that fish for suckers… and then in the same convo trying to explain why COPD + Covid is likely worse than a vaccine when literally “things I heard on AM Radio,” “an ad on Breitbart,” and “the CDC” are all in the same category.
Meanwhile in any Q type group all you get is “we’re here for you and you’re never wrong” which feels good.
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and of course…
(TW: it’s gross and y’all already know most or all of this already)
“Family values” and “Christian values” seem pretty lacking in the GOP and the GQP, whether bad actors as leaders or endorsements through voting from its base. I guess the first step in validating a Q true believer’s concerns is understanding that when confronted with the actual facts (court records, legit documentation), it may not change a mind even as the heart does perceive something is indeed rotten and wrong.
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