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.
:strangelove-wow: uhhhh
From personal experience I know at least two people that have fallen into the Q shit. Common thread in both cases: some form of trauma that they've never confronted with, along with long periods of social isolation, mainly due to not living around familiar people anymore. Now this is obviously not a catch-all thing, but I am very confident that social isolation is a huge factor in falling into Q shit, even if there might not be any real issues underneath.
I have talked to both individuals, and the only thing that has helped is socialization. Not wonkish bullshit where you throw stats at them or try to beat them with facts and logic, because Q is all encompassing. Anything you try and throw their way, they can easily mental gymnastic their way out of because the level of unknowns they can draw from is limitless. You hang out with them, direct conversation to regular ass shit, and then pick your spots where you can. It's a long process and can just be mentally draining for both parties. It even got to a point where one of the individuals was becoming more receptive about seeing a therapist in regards to their family issues and a relationship that went south some years ago.
But, the thread is still razor thin. Socializing with both individuals helped tremendously for a period of at least a few months, until they found themselves in situations where they had to leave the state again for some valid reason. Because there is little to no interaction with a prior group of friends yet again, they've fallen into the same bullshit. Last I spoke to the individual I mentioned earlier, they had become under the impression that my whole therapist spiel was just another way of turning the feds on to them.
Directing the son to Hexbear or anything on the web isn't going to do much. Depending on any thread he opens, he might see more confirmation that there's some authoritarian biblical nightmare headed his way. Unless you can narrow his scope, and the internet is a very poor tool in this regard, you have zero idea what the reaction will be.
Unless you have more info about the son, I think its a futile effort. Ideally he should be directed to someone IRL that he can interact with. Judging from the post, his mom doesn't mention friends, or even another parent figure, which leads me to assume that there are other issues underneath that haven't been confronted with.
I think that the individual-level trauma is something that is forgotten all too often when talking about people who fall into Q anon. We at Hexbear would be largely correct in diagnosing alienation under capitalism as a contributing factor, but I think the combination of individual trauma and isolation is necessary for Q anon to have appeal (think divorce court dads, mothers of children with autism, incels, etc.). These individuals are so incredibly insecure that they are grasping at anything they can find to make sense of the world and suppress their immense negative emotion.
I think that the solution for this kid is probably focusing on addressing his loneliness, bad self esteem, sense of inferiority, etc. The quote "Yea, if you push people far enough at some point they will snap and not take the boot kicking them in the face everyday, so it was pretty epic to see some pushback." might signal that this kid isn't in a great place. His mother being unaware of his political leanings until they got this bad also tells us that he might not feel love and support from his parents. The usage of slurs to put down marginalized groups can be self-hatred turned outward as a moment's reprieve.
I can't do anything but feel bad for people who believe in Q. In a perfect world these people would get therapy and be able to work out their issues, but they have to want to change for anything like that to work. The older ones especially are so far down the rabbit hole of delusion as salvation that even if they got into therapy it would take years of hard work and pain to become comfortable with themselves.
Basically a trope at this point. That's why it's just a fool's game to try and see if some niche community on the internet can help this kid out. There is so much digging that needs to be done in regards to who this kid is, what his relationship is with the people surrounding him, what his mom's situation is in terms of life and her relationships, whether she's all the way there mentally, etc and so and so forth. Every time a parent is shocked by something like this, anyone with some idea of who the kid is will have seen it coming from a mile away.
Yeah, they'd need avenues to pursue mental health, and societal norms would have to be directed in a manner where getting that help isn't so stigmatized. Neither of that exists in the US at any tangible level.
Yeah, it’s definitely a society-wide socioeconomic problem. Society itself needs to change and be less alienating in order to help these people. The issue is that millions of them are ready to take up arms and do basically whatever Trump tells them the moment he presses the day of reckoning button or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
:gold-communist: