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Thread: QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive

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    Lightbulb QAnon High Priest Was Just Trolling Away as a Citigroup Tech Executive

    Source: Bloomberg Quint


    (Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Like many future Donald Trump voters, Jason Gelinas felt something shift inside him during the presidency of Barack Obama. Things were going OK for him generally. He had a degree from Fordham University and had held a series of jobs at big financial-services firms, eventually becoming a senior vice president at Citigroup in the company’s technology department, where he led an AI project and oversaw a team of software developers. He was married with kids and had a comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb. According to those who know him, Gelinas was a pleasant guy who was into normal stuff: Game of Thrones, recreational soccer, and so on. Things did get weird, though, when politics came up.

    Gelinas had registered as a Democrat in the runup to the 2008 election, but then seemed to drift to the right, and not in an “I’m going to vote for Romney this time” sort of way, according to two friends, who spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek on the condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to be associated with what came next in his political journey. “He hated the idea of Obama,” says one. “He thought that it was a setup and that he was elected to satisfy the Black population.” Gelinas would become agitated when the topic of the president came up, sometimes referring to Obama as “the Antichrist.”

    He was increasingly immersed in right-wing internet conspiracies, telling a friend that Hillary Clinton was at the center of a global cabal of sex traffickers. This was about the time that online trolls were starting to promote a theory known as Pizzagate, which claimed that Clinton and others were holding children hostage in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a restaurant and concert venue in Washington, D.C. Shortly after Trump was elected president, a follower burst into the restaurant and fired an AR-15 rifle, standing down only after discovering that the building didn’t actually have a basement. (Nobody was hurt. The shooter, who said he’d been misled by what he’d read on the internet, pleaded guilty to firearms charges and was sentenced to four years in prison.)

    Some might have taken that incident as a sign to cool down. Gelinas appears to have gone deeper down the rabbit hole, finding his way to an even stranger movement, QAnon. Like Pizzagate believers, QAnon’s are focused on a supposed cabal of pedophiliac liberals, mostly politicians and celebrities. The twist is that QAnon has an apocalyptic component—it holds that, at some point, President Trump will unleash “the Storm,” a military coup that will expose and punish this cabal. QAnon has spurred enough violence that the FBI has labeled it a domestic terrorism threat. Supporters have been implicated in the death of a Staten Island mob boss and in the derailment of a train in California.

    Even so, the movement had been contained mostly to the internet’s trollish fringes until around the time Gelinas came along. In 2018, while doing his job at Citi, he created, as an anonymous side project, a website dedicated to bringing QAnon to a wider audience—soccer moms, white-collar workers, and other “normies,” as he boasted. By mid-2020, the site, QMap.pub, was drawing 10 million visitors each month, according to the traffic-tracking firm SimilarWeb, and was credited by researchers with playing a key role in what might be the most unlikely political story in a year full of unlikely political stories: A Citigroup executive helped turn an obscure and incoherent cult into an incoherent cult with mainstream political implications.

    In January the House of Representatives will almost certainly welcome its first QAnon supporter, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s running without serious competition in a district in northwest Georgia, and many other candidates for public office have professed support for aspects of the movement. The Trump campaign has sometimes asked people not to display QAnon signs at rallies, but they show up all the time anyway. QAnon supporters were also ready with an easy spin on the biggest threat to the president’s hold on power: his own Covid-19 diagnosis. Trump wasn’t sick, the theory goes, he merely retreated from the public eye so that the Storm could begin.




    Because it’s so much more involved than a typical conspiracy theory, QAnon has often been described as a religious movement—and, like many religions, the core of the belief system stems from revelations in a foundational text. In this case, that text didn’t appear on stone tablets handed from a mountaintop or on golden plates buried in the ground in upstate New York, but through a series of cryptic postings on a website best known for racist memes and the manifestoes of mass shooters. Ironically, for a movement obsessed with the evils of pedophilia, the site, 4chan, was also known as a place to download child pornography.

    The revelation was delivered on Oct. 28, 2017, and came from a user calling him or herself QAnon. This person, who claimed to be a government employee with top-secret “q-level” clearance (a real thing in the Department of Energy), said Clinton would be arrested in two days and that the event would set off massive organized riots. At the time, 4chan was full of similar nonsense attributed to highly placed government officials. But QAnon—or simply Q—caught on in a way that competing accounts such as FBIAnon and CIAAnon didn’t. The user became the narrator of a tale that cast Trump as the central hero in an epic global struggle, doling out the story in thousands of posts known as “Q drops,” first on 4chan, then on the even more outré 8chan and its successor site, 8kun.

    The identity of Q has been a subject of speculation since the beginning. The theories are all over the place, variously suggesting that Q is Edward Snowden, or former national security adviser Michael Flynn, or the conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones, or even Trump himself. One self-published book, which Amazon.com Inc. includes for free as part of its Kindle Unlimited subscription, claims to have used a mathematical model to determine that Q is former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake. Drake has denied this—but Q would do that, wouldn’t he?

    If Q’s drops are the new movement’s divine revelations, its rites involve the production and consumption of videos and social media posts—often screenshots annotated with arrows and circles revealing hidden connections—designed to interpret them. “Digging deeper,” Q’s followers often call it. Just a few minutes before 1 p.m. on Father’s Day 2018, for instance, Q and Trump each posted a Happy Father’s Day message. Coincidence? Or how about this August, when Trump visited a Whirlpool Corp. plant in Ohio and posed in front of 17 washing machines? Q is the 17th letter of the alphabet. Surely this was the president signaling that Q was going to clean things up. Or maybe it had something to do with money laundering?

    At first, the primary documents for Q were available only to the bravest of web surfers. Most regular people don’t spend much time on 8kun, which is awful in terms of content and interface design. The need to spread the word beyond core users led to the creation of aggregator sites, which would scrape the Q drops and repost them in friendlier environs after determining authenticity. (The ability to post as Q has repeatedly been compromised, and some posts have had to be culled from the canon.) This task, Gelinas once told a friend, could be his calling from God.

    On April 5, 2018, Q posted a short message—drop No. 1,030—insinuating that a recent spate of military aircraft crashes was part of a “silent war.” Later that night, Gelinas registered QMap.pub. His intention, as he later explained on Patreon, the crowdfunding website widely used by musicians, podcasters, and other artists, was to make memes, which are harder to police than tweets or Facebook text posts. “Memes are awesome,” Gelinas wrote. “They also bypass big tech censorship.” (Social media companies are, at least in theory, opposed to disinformation, and QAnon posts sometimes get removed. On Oct. 6, Facebook banned QAnon-affiliated groups and pages from the service.)

    Gelinas raised thousands of dollars on Patreon each month, posting updates using his pseudonym, QAppAnon. “Like many of you, I felt that something wasn’t right in the world, that our country was headed in the wrong direction,” he wrote. “Then something magical happened in 2016 that defied expectations—a complete outsider to the political establishment, Donald J Trump, won the presidential election! Amazing. A glimmer of light in the darkness.” A few months into the Trump administration, Gelinas changed his party affiliation to Republican, and this spring he contributed $200 to Trump’s reelection efforts—his first-ever political contribution, according to federal disclosures.

    QMap developed into a central place for fans to read the drops, to plot, and to commiserate on the site’s “Where We Go One We Go All Prayer Wall.” The site wasn’t just a repository of QAnon posts; Gelinas served as an active co-author in the movement’s growing mythology. The clean, minimalist site was designed around tiles dedicated to each Q drop, which Gelinas titled to make them easier to understand. Tabs across the top enabled users to sort by theme or tags, and the hidden players and themes were explicated along the left side with a series of icons—a few chess pieces, a globe, a skull. Brief descriptions sorted “players” by category. (French President Emmanuel Macron and New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman are in the “Traitor/Pawn” category; Senator Ted Cruz is a “Patriot.”)

    QMap also had a tab for suspicious deaths. John McCain didn’t die from brain cancer, according to QMap. “One theory is that he was secretly tried [by] military tribunal and sentenced to death,” the site said. Q had never made these claims explicitly; they were insinuated by his posts, then interpreted by QMap. “It was all laid out in a way where someone could easily start to believe it’s all true,” says Joe Ondrak, a researcher for Logically.ai, a fact-checking website that follows the movement. “It was like a redpill factory.” (“Redpill” is a reference to the movie The Matrix, in which characters who want to see the world as it actually is take a tablet of that color. It’s been adopted by right-wing activists to connote the conversion of new believers.)

    One young QAnon supporter encouraged QMap to annotate posts with supporting evidence and links to additional reading materials, providing “background info for the uninformed so that even his grandma could understand what’s going on,” Gelinas wrote approvingly on Patreon in the summer of 2018. “What a great idea. It’s hard to jump into Q if you haven’t been following it closely.”

    On Patreon, he laid out a plan to add a team, which he hoped would be staffed by disaffected software developers. “Facebook devs: how mad are you. You’ve been lied to,” Gelinas wrote on Twitter in March 2019. “Your talents have been used/abused for evil purposes. Let’s build a new platform for the GOOD of Humanity.”

    By this point, Gelinas claimed he was the No. 2 figure in the movement, behind only Q, according to a friend, and began to dream about turning his QAnon hobby into his main gig. “Who knows, maybe QMAP becomes the media platform of the future one day? :-)” he mused in early September.




    By now, QMap’s growth had attracted an enemy. Frederick Brennan, a 26-year-old polymath with a rare bone disease, had decided to unmask the person behind QMap. Brennan was a reformed troll. He’d created 8chan, but he had a change of heart after the man responsible for the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, posted his manifesto on the forum in advance and inscribed 8chan memes on the weapons he used to kill 56 people.

    Brennan had come to believe that Jim Watkins, an American entrepreneur who’d taken over 8chan and its successor site, 8kun, was somehow involved in QAnon. The mixture of regret over what the sites he’d started had become and the grudge against Watkins, who runs 8kun from his pig farm in the Philippines, had sent Brennan on a mission to bring down the site and QAnon. Watkins did not respond to a request for comment.

    Brennan started by trying to figure out which companies were operating servers that hosted 8chan’s content. Then he would post public messages, on Twitter and elsewhere, urging the companies to cut ties with the site. After 8chan was dropped by the cybersecurity company Cloudflare Inc., which protected it from denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, it found safe harbor in a new U.S.-based DDoS protection company, VanwaTech LLC, which had taken an extremely permissive attitude toward controversial content. “If it’s legal, I don’t care,” says 23-year-old chief executive officer Nick Lim.

    This summer, Gelinas also moved his site to VanwaTech. This made him a target of Brennan, who also began pressuring Patreon to block Gelinas’s site. He referred to QMap in a tweet as “the main vector for Q radicalization.” QMap, Brennan explains in an interview, helped “turn this anonymous format into a way people can be notified immediately.”

    Patreon never banned QMap, and Gelinas took down all his posts on the crowdfunding site after he was identified as QMap’s owner. In messages exchanged over WhatsApp, he told Bloomberg Businessweek that he has no connection to Watkins and has never met him. He said he began using VanwaTech because it protected QMap from frequent DDoS attacks.

    Ondrak, the fact-checker, and Nick Backovic, another Logically.ai researcher, joined Brennan’s hunt. It took Ondrak and Backovic only a few days to trace an email address associated with Patriot Platforms LLC, which had been listed as the publisher of a QMap mobile app in Google’s Android app store, to a post office box in Berkeley Heights, N.J. The next day, the pair published a story outing Gelinas as the operator of QMap. Public records show that Gelinas is the sole employee associated with Patriot Platforms, and New Jersey business records obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek list the company’s address as a house in the same town, a few miles from the P.O. box.

    On the morning of Sept. 10, a reporter drove to the house. It was a beautiful day in suburban New Jersey. Gelinas, in shorts and an American flag cap, was in the front yard, filling up a wheelbarrow with cut-up tree stumps.

    Gelinas is tall and fit at age 43. He clearly didn’t want to talk. He paced around his yard, mostly evading questions, while the reporter stood in the grass. He first said he wasn’t Q, though he did allow that he was familiar with QAnon, which he described as “a patriotic movement to save the country.” Finally, his wife opened the front door and rescued him with a vague request for technical assistance. “I don’t want to get involved, I want to stay out of it,” Gelinas said before he disappeared into the house and, rather than asking the reporter to leave, called the authorities. A few minutes later, after the reporter had left the property, two police SUVs showed up.

    That afternoon, QMap.pub and the social media profiles of Gelinas and his wife disappeared from the internet. Within days, Citi had put him on administrative leave and his name was removed from the company’s internal directory. He was later terminated. “Mr. Gelinas is no longer employed by Citi,” the company says in a statement. “Our code of conduct includes specific policies that employees are required to adhere to, and when breaches are identified, the firm takes action.”

    In the weeks after he was outed, Gelinas mostly ignored reporters’ calls and text messages, though he did acknowledge he was the only developer for QMap and clarified several other points. “I’m not going to talk about my own story right now,” he said. “When the time is right, it will come out.”




    QMap’s disappearance has been a significant but temporary setback for the QAnon movement. “It’s not going to be a death blow to the QAnon community, but it is a disruption,” says Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher who hosts a podcast dedicated to QAnon. QMap popped back online a few days later, but it now consists entirely of links to other QAnon aggregator websites.

    Google has tried to make it harder to find such QAnon sites by keeping them from showing up in searches, and Facebook and Twitter have blocked links to them, though posts about Q are easy to find on Facebook and other social networks such as Telegram. Followers also sometimes spread the word about Q-related sites by writing their URLs on signs and holding them up at Trump rallies.

    Meanwhile, Gelinas’s project of bringing the gospel of Q to the mainstream is alive and well. Late this summer and early this fall, Q supporters organized a wave of in-person rallies, ostensibly to combat human trafficking, many of them under the social media hashtag #SaveTheChildren. Some established anti-trafficking groups, including the real Save the Children, a 101-year-old British nonprofit, complained they were being co-opted in dangerous ways.

    Janja Lalich, a professor emerita of sociology at California State University at Chico who’s studied cults for decades, says internet movements such as QAnon have grown at an alarming rate, because of a political debate that’s become increasingly unmoored from a set of universally agreed-upon facts. “It’s times like these that cults can thrive,” she says. “We have leadership that has tried very hard to change our relationship with reality, and people are grasping at straws. The last four years have been precedent-setting in creating an atmosphere of disbelief.”

    Returning from that collective delusion, Lalich insists, won’t be easy. “It’s very daunting,” she says. “You have to give up everything you believed in and decide what to believe again.”


    Source: Bloomberg Quint
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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    Senior Member Aianawa's Avatar
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    Oh noooo another Q thread, into the hoax bin with you

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    Quote Originally posted by Aianawa View Post
    Oh noooo another Q thread, into the hoax bin with you

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    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    That's a fascinating story, Aragorn. But it makes sense that an individual suffering from schizoaffective personality disorder would lead a column of similarly disordered individuals into the bowels of hell.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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    "...President Trump will unleash “the Storm,”..." Like what Stormfront has been wanting for decades. The name is chosen carefully.

    Doesn't it just figure that it's a bankster who brought this stuff more into the mainstream.

    "Ironically, for a movement obsessed with the evils of pedophilia, the site, 4chan, was also known as a place to download child pornography." Not ironic at all. The same folks who criticize so-called sheeple are happy to become sheeple for Trump. The same folks who lambasted 'elite liberals' support a man who was a lifelong elite liberal. Libertine, really.

    The symbolism of the flag is stunning. The Q is literally burning the flag. No doubt many of these folks have been rabid regarding 'respecting the flag'. But of course posturing and actually caring are two very different things.

    The folks who want to 'save the children' do nothing about the children taken from their parents and caged. And lost track of.

    They don't want to save anything. They want to destroy. Just like Beau says.

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    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Aianawa View Post
    Oh noooo another Q thread, into the hoax bin with you
    This is a thread about Q as a deceptive social media phenomenon, and how it came to be that. It is not a thread where Qultists™ can marvel over Q "droppings" and worship either Q or Donald Trump.
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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    Q "droppings". Nice.

    There are indeed no droppings here. Just the relatively mundane, boring, story of yet another lying human capitalizing on those lies.

    I say 'relatively' because the outcome of the Qanonsense is neither boring nor mundane. It's quite damaging. Burning straw men accomplishes nothing. And the criminals remain free to do their ill deeds.

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    frightening
    What is the purpose of your presence?

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    Sometimes I wasn't even allowed to go to bed because I had to watch one more Q video. The minute I came in the door from work he was sitting there with a video. He would say, 'You have to have the veil lifted from your eyes, Jane, you need to know this.’ He quizzed me because he wanted to make sure that I actually watched and paid attention.

    I can’t pinpoint where exactly his obsession started but all of a sudden it seemed he would be watching a YouTube video and become either enraged or go into complete hysterics.

    All of these Q breadcrumbs and things he was reading, these posts, YouTube videos, they took control of his entire day. He got in trouble with his job at the fire department. He was posting terrible things and tirades on Facebook.



    https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwnj...-relationships

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    Quote Originally posted by Octopus Garden View Post
    "Sometimes I wasn't even allowed to go to bed because I had to watch one more Q video. The minute I came in the door from work he was sitting there with a video. He would say, 'You have to have the veil lifted from your eyes, Jane, you need to know this.’ He quizzed me because he wanted to make sure that I actually watched and paid attention.

    I can’t pinpoint where exactly his obsession started but all of a sudden it seemed he would be watching a YouTube video and become either enraged or go into complete hysterics.

    All of these Q breadcrumbs and things he was reading, these posts, YouTube videos, they took control of his entire day. He got in trouble with his job at the fire department. He was posting terrible things and tirades on Facebook."



    https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwnj...-relationships

    The above-quoted article in full...:





    People Tell Us How QAnon Destroyed Their Relationships



    We spoke to people who told us how the QAnon conspiracy theory ruined their marriage, turned their parents into completely different people, and otherwise made their lives miserable.



    One of the most disheartening signs of our advancing hellscape are the thousands of people who wholeheartedly believe in the deranged conspiracy known as QAnon.

    It's near impossible to summarize the entire QAnon conspiracy theory, as it’s fluid and ever-changing. The nuts and bolts are that a secret government insider, the titular Q, has taken to the internet forum 8chan of all places to drop clues (known in the community as Q Drops breadcrumbs) about how U.S. President Donald Trump is taking down the deep state. The conspiracy takes some twists and turns into the occult, an ever-present cabal of pedophiles, possible executions, and the idea that JFK Jr. may have faked his own death and is cosplaying as an old guy who goes to Trump rallies.

    While the QAnon conspiracy often feels like an elaborate troll, an online community of real, actual people has been built up around it. There’s been a lot written about how lonely these people are, how they will cut themselves off from their family (and eat sad sandwiches during holidays), and poking fun at the whole thing. Rick Ross, a cult deprogrammer and executive director of the nonprofit Cult Education Institute, says the community bears a lot of the hallmarks of a cult: The main character is infallible and everything is part of a greater plan.

    And because it's unfolding online, "it becomes hard to [penetrate],” Ross said. “[Followers] spend all their watching time Q material on YouTube, dialoguing with different people online, and becoming consumed by that world online. ”

    No one knows how hard it is to break through a bubble one creates around themselves than loved ones. While maybe it’s funny for those outside peering in, what is it like for those who are close to them, the people who experience their loved one's brain being rotted by YouTubers breaking down 8chan posts in real time?

    I decided to seek them out. I found a woman whose husband became so obsessed with YouTube conspiracy videos he would follow her around the house and force her to watch them, someone who avoids their mother because of Q, and someone who was dumped by the man she loved because she actively attempted to debunk QAnon. Here are their stories.

    Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Names have been changed for the protection of both the sources and their loved ones.



    Deb

    Deb told VICE that her mother had always suffered from mental health issues, but it wasn't until recently that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a personality disorder, and PTSD. Deb's parents' belief in QAnon started when they decided to get rid of cable TV and start watching YouTube a few years ago.

    My mother is in her mid-60s and a Q cult member. It has made dealing with her mental issues that much harder. She had a hard time anyway dealing with the real world, and now the world is so much worse for her because of all the horrible things the cult deals with: devil worship, sex trafficking, children being tortured and eaten or used as sex slaves. She describes the horrible world we live in now with tears in her eyes and frustration in her tone, knowing that I don't believe her.

    I've tried and tried to show her facts, only to have fake news thrown in my face. How do you disprove anything when everything that's different from what the Q cult says is considered fake news? I asked her how she could believe someone who doesn't even use his real name. How can you believe someone who has to have everything he says decoded by people you don't know anything about?

    Faith was her answer. Follow the plan, and you'll see when the mass arrests happen and Trump is the unsung hero that is going to save the world. I'd found it more plausible if she said the aliens are going to land on the White House lawn and take over the United States.

    My father follows Q too. He's not as pushy about it as my mother is. He's been doing a lot better now that I've found him a hobby. Not being on YouTube 24/7 has also helped.

    It's the ones with the deep mental disorders that really stick with it.

    I can't really spend any time with my mother because all she'll want to talk about is Q, and I refuse. We used to go swimming at the lake, go shopping, have lunch, or just talk like a mother and daughter should, but that doesn't happen much anymore. I dread talking to her. I avoid her. I love her and care, but this Q cult crap has driven a wedge that is there even when we don't talk about it.

    I've done my research. I've watched the videos, and my conclusion is that this person who claims to be Q is nothing more than a LARPer [live-action role player] who couldn't come up with an original thought if they tried. Everything is taken from other conspiracies or straight from movies and TV shows. All this LARPer had to do was add in a little bit of truth, a dash of the occult, a few villains, and a hero—and we have QAnon.

    We can't ignore the danger that QAnon poses for the upcoming elections; you better believe each and every one of Q's followers will be voting, including my mother who hasn't voted in an election since Nixon. They'll be voting with information that they got from a LARPer, and in my mind, that's worse than Russian interference.

    If I could get my hands on the piece of shit that started QAnon, I might end up in jail. This person has made my mother's life sadder, and our relationship almost nonexistent.



    Jane

    Jane had been with her husband for eight years; they had just bought a house together. Then, one day in late 2016, he started bringing up Q and the deep-state conspiracy. Jane says she’s not positive where it all stemmed from, but it may have come from his friendship with a coworker. From the moment Q was introduced, the relationship changed drastically and her husband became unrecognizable.

    I feel like a ground-zero patient. My husband must have caught on to QAnon very early. It started with an argument one night that came out of nowhere. I was sitting in our kitchen smoking before bed. Everything up until the argument that night was very quiet. But then he came in full throttle. He came at me freaking, berating me, attacking me about this thing I’ve never heard of, this QAnon stuff.

    After that first argument, which scared the hell out of me, my life got flipped upside down.

    It all became about Q from then on.

    Sometimes I wasn't even allowed to go to bed because I had to watch one more Q video. The minute I came in the door from work he was sitting there with a video. He would say, 'You have to have the veil lifted from your eyes, Jane, you need to know this.’ He quizzed me because he wanted to make sure that I actually watched and paid attention.

    I can’t pinpoint where exactly his obsession started but all of a sudden it seemed he would be watching a YouTube video and become either enraged or go into complete hysterics.

    All of these Q breadcrumbs and things he was reading, these posts, YouTube videos, they took control of his entire day. He got in trouble with his job at the fire department. He was posting terrible things and tirades on Facebook.

    Our home became a very hostile environment. I was a robot to him; I was ‘brainwashed.’ There were days that I was going to work and he would call and scream at me to try to make me come home because I was going to go out and get gang-raped or martial law was going to break out. At home, he would follow me around with a phone trying to get me to watch these YouTube videos so I could 'see.’ I was scared to death because his whole personality changed.

    During one of his tirades I told him I was going to go take a shower. (Showers are the one place I thought he'd leave me alone.) This time he followed me. I tried to close the bathroom door but he got his arm in, holding his phone in my face while playing these videos. That was the first time ever that I had my cell phone in my hand with 911 ready to go, ready to call the police on my husband.

    One day my husband went upstairs to take a nap and I decided to go out and grab dinner. I threw my phone in my handbag and didn't pay any attention to it as I was only going to be gone for 10 minutes. When I got back into the car, I noticed that I had a million missed calls and texts from my husband.

    When I answered he was enraged and yelling, ‘Where the fuck are you!? Where the fuck did you go!? You get the fuck back to this house now!’

    I rushed home thinking something terrible must have happened.

    When I walked through the door my husband was a mix of hysterics and anger, and pacing the house with a shotgun strapped to him. The gun wasn’t there to intimidate me. It was for protection. He thought martial law was going to break out at any moment. He told me the terrible things the marauders would do to a girl like me once they got me, that I would be held captive and raped repeatedly.

    I was scared to death.

    I had no idea who the hell my husband was anymore because there was a monster in his place. He completely isolated himself. He went to work and didn't speak to anyone. He did his job and went to his room. People were afraid of him.

    People at work worried about my safety. I took a loan from my job and I moved out last summer. We had been together for eight years and it took this QAnon stuff six months to ruin that.

    Before this, my husband was my Prince Charming, a super cool guy. There's a reason I married that man. He's fun and outgoing and spontaneous, a little bit of a grump here and there, but who isn't? He had a lot of pride for serving his country and was very excited to come back west, once his service was over.

    I don't know if I'm angry. I'm just so confused. There is a part of me saying: ‘Are you fucking kidding me, dude? YouTube videos? Breadcrumbs? This could be anybody sitting in anybody's basement.'

    To this day, I feel I still don't know what to do. I survived this Q thing somehow and was able to get out. I really fear for the people in the world if this is what's happening to men and women and families out there.



    Joan

    Joan met her boyfriend on Match.com. It turned out they lived close to each other, were both divorced, and had grown children. They had an amazing first date and, even though they were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, they soon moved in together. They called their relationship their “perfect imperfect life” and would often discuss the next 30 years they were going to spend together.

    About a year into the relationship I started hearing and learning about QAnon, which quickly became a big, deep, dark rabbit hole for him. He’s a very smart man—he had two college degrees, owns a business, was a great dad.

    I knew Spygate [the idea Obama was spying on the Trump campaign] was really intriguing to him. He liked to try to connect the dots between all these players. But then it became Pizzagate [a secret pedophile conspiracy] and the pedophilia thing and the tribunals and who was going to be hung for treason.

    God knows he tried to red pill me. I saw all the literature; I saw more YouTube videos on the 'Great Awakening' to know that it was clearly a hoax. It was started by a handful of gamers and continues now to this day even though the original founders aren't even involved in it anymore. I was not going to buy into that. And I was told, 'I can't save you because you're not "woke."'

    Of the three years that we were together, almost two were fraught with conversation about Q. I came home from work one day to find a huge poster, about 4 feet by 4 feet, tacked up on the wall detailing the connections of Spygate. I had to look at it every single day. On the refrigerator, he had a Bingo-style card that he had made with all of the Democratic enemies with nooses by the ones he thought were going to be executed.

    It was a very slow transition process from this happy-go-lucky, extremely funny man. He was a distinctly different man at the end.

    I decided the only thing I could do was work with people to help expose and shine a light on QAnon and what it really is all about—who started it and who's running it today. And so I became involved with a small group of active Q debunkers. In a way, I think that made him dig his heels deeper into that world.

    We were in this relationship for the long haul, joining families and finances and furnishing things together. So it came as a total surprise to me one day when he told me we were done. He said my politics made him dislike me, and that me working to debunk Qanon hurt him hugely and made him very angry.

    We truly used to say all the time that we meant more to each other than politics. At some point in time, that became not true anymore.

    There are a lot of people dealing with loved ones into Q. They all say the same thing—that you get to a point where you can no longer reason with them. One of the first things I tell people who reach out is you cannot make fun of them. You can't criticize their beliefs. You can keep trying to show them over and over again how their beliefs are misguided, that there are all these Q predictions where the dates have come and gone and nothing has happened. You can show them these things. But the minute you try to make a judgment call or say, 'See, look at how stupid it is. You're an idiot,' you know you'll lose these people forever.

    It's been, without a doubt, the most devastating experience of my life. I love the man with all my heart. I’d give anything to have him say, ‘I'm done with Q. Come back. Let's see if we can make this work again.’ But I'm not sure that's ever going to happen.
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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    Christ. People are nuts
    What is the purpose of your presence?

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    They cannot change their minds...because it's no longer their own mind.

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    They are not their thoughts. And yet they are consumed by them. And humanity slips away.

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    Question

    Quote Originally posted by donk View Post
    frightening
    Yes, if i'm not mistaken, i see this thread
    has become publicly available again.




    The Qanon posts, and associated US political analysis
    Started by Harley, 25th October 2017 07:00

    pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 715

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    Presenting an alternative to the alternative community.

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    Well, well, well.

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