'This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life': When QAnon Invades American Homes

[brooklynite]

Politico

For months, Emily has been married to a ghost. The trouble began last summer, when her husband Peter, the man who once showered her with affection and doted on their kids, started to spend all of his free time online, watching videos and reading message boards. He skipped the family activities they had once enjoyed, like watching football and playing outdoor sports. The couple, she recalled, stopped laughing together; everything suddenly turned serious with him. The pandemic had forced Peter to work from home, but it didn’t feel like he was there.

Before long, there were further turns. Peter started saying things that bordered on “bigoted and xenophobic,” Emily told me. Most shocking to her, Peter made her feel like an enemy for disagreeing with him. When she pushed back on his new strange ideas, like Tom Hanks being a pedophile, he answered her with disdain and treated her as if she were stupid.

“I was told that I buried my head in the sand and couldn’t see the ‘real’ problems,” said Emily, who shared her story under the condition of anonymity because she fears Peter’s retaliation and feels disloyal for speaking up. (Emily and Peter are not their real names.) Sometimes he undermined her this way in front of their kids.

Emily knew her husband was wrapped up in something called “QAnon.” She had heard the term before—Peter, prior to his conversion, had once dismissed it as “nuts”—but she didn’t fully grasp what QAnon was until early October, when she watched a few of the videos Peter kept talking about. That was when she learned that her husband had been consumed by a complex and false conspiracy theory that accuses “deep state elites” of running a secret pedophile ring. By then, it was too late to pull him out.

That month, Emily read an article online about “QAnonCasualties”—a Reddit forum for people like her, whose loved ones had also been drawn in by the bogus conspiracy theory. Suddenly, she didn’t feel so alone. For the next four days she watched the forum closely until she gathered the courage to post about her husband. “It’s exhausting loving someone and watching them get sucked into this cycle you can’t break,” she wrote.

[arlyellowdog]

1. I'm choosing to embrace a new one

My friend had told me during the election stuff about Oprah and all that. She pitied me for just believing “mainstream American news.” But she just couldn’t dislike Biden like her husband wanted her to. Last week I saw her and she was so happy and said, “Isn’t the news great? Biden put Trump in prison.” Yeah, I don’t really believe this, but such a happy place for me.

[Joinfortmill]

2. Someone needs to out QAnon - for certain.

[thucythucy]

3. Absolutely.

I'm hoping this is a priority for law enforcement.

Whoever is behind all this, individual or group, obviously have no scruples about inciting violence and undermining democracy. We need to find out who they are, and the real motivation for spreading this nonsense.

As an aside, I wonder if some of the celebrities named as supposed "pedophiles" can't sue for libel, and in doing so find out who these people are.

If I were the object of such spurious and vicious nonsense, and had the resources that some of the defamed, I'd sure as hell want to go after the people behind this bullshit.

[Blue_Adept]

4. Those of us who lost parents to Fox know this cycle all too well.

I hope the Qanon folks get more help. There needs to be a nationwide push for deprogrammers of these cultists.