QAnon Followers Want Out, but the Hurdles Are Huge
Link to tweet
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a37696261/leaving-recovering-from-q-anon/
For Ceally Smith, it felt like she was suffocating. The 33-year-old holistic health entrepreneur would spend hours consumed with conspiracy theories—about sex trafficking, children secretly being sold on a furniture website, the multimillionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. There was always another video to watch, another media lie to investigate, another stranger to enlighten. Things that once fulfilled her—exercise, her meal-prep business—no longer seemed to matter. Instead, she dug deeper and deeper into the horrors the internet presented her every day, feeling obligated, as a sexual abuse survivor, to “be the adult I needed as a child,” she says.
For Anna*, a 23-year-old pharmacy student in Pennsylvania, it felt like being trapped in a vortex of fear. “I had feelings of hope, but at the same time, I was incredibly scared, distressed, and anxious and even had panic attacks,” she says. She spent as many as eight hours a day poring over feeds on Telegram and Gab, listening to fringe podcasts. “Doing just about anything else,” she admits, “was really hard.”
Another person compared it to a “monster gnawing away at me.” On a message board this summer, they wrote, “My mind keeps circling back to it, no matter what I do. I don’t want this to happen, I’ve seen what it does to people, but I just can’t shake it off, I’m losing my goddamn mind, I can’t focus on anything and my anxiety keeps shooting up, this isn’t who I am.”
“It,” for all three, was QAnon, the infamous and violent pro-Trump conspiracy theory whose followers mushroomed during the pandemic to include suburban moms, yoga teachers, grandmas, and seemingly half of your Facebook feed. The movement was so easy to get into—a provocative post by an acquaintance, a few clicks, a video that rang true, which then surfaced other videos—but would prove to be much harder to get out of.
*snip*
= new reply since forum marked as read
... they were wrong.
I suspect that even the people who actually broke free are still very dangerous, and all it will take is them hearing "liberals are evil" from other media sources to fall back into it.
When I used to listen to right-wing radio (in my car), I used to imagine the propagandists replacing "liberals" with "Jews" and how it would be just like Nazi Germany.
As a review, here's what Q promoted:
1. Liberals are pedophiles and cannibals, and they've taken control of our government which they called the deep state.
2. According to Q, who supposedly had extremely high-level government clearance, he was supposedly aware that Donald Trump would arrest all of the wicked Democrats and RINO's and ship all of them to Guantanamo Bay.
3. These supposed arrests and punishments would be called "The Storm".
Being susceptible to such nonsense is a very bad indication of their mental health! That's like Jim Jones level of paranoid insanity!
Carlos Watson interview of Fredrick Brennan, creator of 8chan:
Last edited Sat Oct 16, 2021, 05:55 AM - Edit history (1)
so tired of being told I need to "understand" these stupid, hateful assholes 
https://www.vox.com/2018/8/8/17657800/qanon-reddit-conspiracy-data
