People in there are at their wit's end with their friends and family. The liberal response to QAnon friends and family members basically amounts to sending these people Vox articles about how incredibly uncivil QAnon is, and since we all know that 99% of the time, this is going to have no effect at all, some of the people there may be open to other approaches.
One of the top threads at the moment is written by a mother describing the rightwing radicalization of her 17-year-old son: https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/or08cw/mother_in_need_of_advice/
Like apparently many of the people who have fallen to QAnon, the kid was pretty non-political until recently. According to the mother, he is now spending basically all day in his room doing "research" on his computer. He won't listen to anything she tells him. The mother describes herself as "moderate left." :cringe:
But here is the thing. The kid is actually pretty far gone at this point. The best way to stop your friends and family from falling to QAnon is to ensure that they are politically literate commies in the first place. But she's past that point now.
If she does something drastic, like cutting off his internet or even throwing him out of their house, is that actually going to help? Since she can't send him to a re-education camp, what is she supposed to do? Is it even possible to help these people in our society as it is right now?
My only suggestion at this moment is for her to find out what websites he's using to brainwash himself and then to block them. (Some apps out there, like Self Control, are extremely difficult to get around, at least for me.) At the same time, since liberal or moderate politics is a stale boring dead end, she should probably send him here, so exposure to actual leftwing memes radicalizes him in a different direction.
Does this approach have any hope of success? What are your thoughts? I was going to message her (since I've been banned from that sub for advocating mass re-education...), but I want to see what people here think first.
If I do get in touch with her, I won't be surprised if she just says something like "communism is just as bad as QAnon" or something. That being said, messaging people who post in that sub still might yield some results.
I watched Qanon evolve from the earliest days of r/CBTS. There's a difference between someone who goes for that and someone who goes for a more genericised conspiracy theory like the deep state. If they're consciously ideological, even if it's just Trump shit, Qanon is an all-encompassing vehicle for that ideology comparable to the Thule Society. You can't counter-radicalise that because swap out Q for television static and it will be just as powerful and necessary to them. If they're not ideological, it's usually reflecting deep personal pathologies and ontological failures. Q lets them be anyone but them. People like that are a liability to anything we could build. Beneficiaries sure, it'd undermine many of the things that make them Q goobers, but their worldview is completely incoherent and they're almost always extremely toxic people.
For family of Q goobers, it's an argument for radicalisation but there's only one element of alienation there. They're losing family and they can see a growing social divide. Because Q is just one stage in a much larger and more diffuse trend not everyone pays attention to, they can see that as one temporary social threat that the state is capable of addressing. They can still hold faith in institutions because the FBI is prosecuting Q like they did Trump while the democrats embrace it as a culture war staple. I'm not materially impacted by Q in any way and neither are they unless they're losing their inheritance to meemaw's brain bugs. The material things culminating in Q are so numerous that I can't point to any one as the upstream fix that person can readily identify with.
It's a good place to participate in and a good thing to study. I don't consider it any more fertile ground for agitation than r/topmindsofreddit is, and one of the mods in that subreddit is a neoliberal DNC strategist who's more anti-conspiracism than I am.
This is why liberal strategies fail against reactionary conspiracy theories, because they're not a coherent ideological framework that bends to experiences or evidence. They're totems for deeply misguided people to organize personal desires around. They don't care about counter-evidence since to them every single thing is evidence for what they already hold true. Showing them something contrary to their worldview only serves to strengthen it.
Best that can happen is the spigot that creates these phenomenons is cut off, which seems to be happening. Getting removed from twitter was one of the biggest blows to their whole movement that could have happened.
This is also a gut level thing, but I don't believe the deeper level assertions of Qanon resonate with most people, which is why it's so split off into different camps who believe in everything from 5G brainwashing waves to secret government time travel machines to UFOs being full of angels. If that's the case, if the Qanon folk have been swept up in something that doesn't actually reflect where people are and their interests, then I doubt their capacity to be radicalized in a different direction. It sounds like herding cats to try and make them into organized leftists. They'll be with you for a few years before swapping back to something else. They sound fickle and confused, possibly in deep need of personal introspection rather than someone capable of integrating into a wider social movement. Maybe I'm being too hard on them.
That's where it becomes an ontology thing for me. I don't see that as Q fragmenting so much as I do Q being able to incorporate new forms of the same bullshit. It's numerology, astrology, evangelical apocalypse fetishism, and the protocols of the elders of Zion all in one. Q himself went away and they just switched to bible maths interpreting the contemporary meanings of old drops. Any new angle that appeals to the same core demographic and their same need to avoid any interaction with reality can be incorporated into it because it's not one defined narrative. It's a subculture based on applying the same dumbass logic to everything which challenges or inconveniences the most fragile people on the planet. So many things speak to that and reward it while Q gives those beliefs a community and power bloc. The fundamental flaws in how those ideas are constructed/communicated are universal to all of them.
As long as it retains its energy, something I think will be at least cyclical with elections, there will always be some new angle to scratch the itch driving that person to Q. Deep personal introspection isn't just unlearning false information, but unlearning falsity and with it core parts of their identity. At the very least that's professional deprogramming but to really fix it you'd need to teach philosophy to functionally illiterate people who don't believe in germ theory but do believe magic cows will herald the apocalypse. That's a lot of investment in someone who only needs to log into facebook to fall back into what's comfortable and easy. I can't even deradicalise my libertarian roommate because of that barrier and he's only half-Q.
Q is convenient and quite comfortable. It says that (((they))) are at fault for everything bad, and eventually someone will make (((them))) go away and everything will be good again. It tells you that you don't need to do anything, you're doing everything right and everything bad in your life can be attributed to minorities and the great, all-powerful cabal. No need for change on an individual or systemic scale, we just need the bad people to go away and all will be gucci again. Just trust the plan.
It's just nice to believe (if you're completely devoid of empathy). The bad people are doing bad things and if they're gone, all will be well. No complicated issues like systemic inequality, racial injustices, climate disasters, all these things that would require massive, uncomfortable changes. No, everything is inherently fine and merely temporarily disturbed by the great cabal. Just vibe and let Trump take care of it.
Q's brilliant in that regard because it combines that conspiracist reductionism with /r/gangstalking. I follow that subculture because I'm super interested in schizophrenia. Gangstalking gamifies the disorder. Whatever individual delusion someone has, the wider group is willing to incorporate it into the conspiracy and validate a lonely and terrified person. The only price is accepting every other individual delusion. Since they're all irrational things everyone is familiar with and they all speak to the same general pathologies, that's super easy to do. I've followed gangstalking since Tia Tequila's public breakdown like a decade ago and I still can't tell you who is doing what. It's completely amorphous and just serves as a conspiracy World of Warcraft where they get to be the hero with all of their friends for 18 hours a day. Short of 9/11 trutherism in its heyday I haven't seen such an institutionalised mania to a conspiracy theory or such a Skinner box kind of dynamic to it.
Damn this ideology sounds super familiar somehow. I feel like I’ve run into it somewhere before!