Who's worse? Deluded Qult followers like our OT Peter Pan or the bloodsuckers who play along for personal gain like Flynn and Trump and the Youtubers? I'd say the bloodsuckers are the worst. This cult is ruining lives and tearing apart families, but not Flynn. He's raking in bucks, and not Trump. They're his people. They love him. Its getting less and less funny and more and more tragic. Anyone who plays along with this for their own gain really is the scum of the earth.
Anyway, a great article in Politico. I posted some pieces of it.
When QAnon Invades American Homes
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....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.....
Another woman told her story about creating a fake Q account on Twitter to reach her husband. “They only listen to each other,” she wrote.....Emily is just one of thousands who have found their way to r/QAnonCasualties. Started in 2019 by a Reddit user whose mother was a part of the “Qult,” the subreddit has ballooned in popularity over the past year, growing from less than a thousand followers in February 2020 to more than 133,000 in February 2021. The group’s followers more than doubled in the weeks following the Capitol riot alone. And as QAnon continues to spread—about 30 percent of Republicans have favorable views about the conspiracy theory, according to a January poll by YouGov—so does the forum’s reach....There are stories of marriages and friendships torn asunder, estranged siblings, parents and children severing ties. There are occasional accounts of success. But more often the stories end with people giving up trying to reach their radicalized loved ones. Sometimes, they walk away entirely.
“The ignorance, bigotry, and refusal to question ‘the plan’ have only gotten worse over time,” Sqwakomodile wrote. The user barely talked to their mother anymore, but felt guilty about it. “It only seems to make me feel terrible and feeling like it’s my responsibility to try to lead her back to reality. Having a loved one involved in QAnon is an exhausting, sad, scary, demoralizing experience.”
The flexibility has an added benefit: It allows the community to reinterpret Q’s predictions every time they don’t come true. For example, QAnon followers believed President Joe Biden’s inauguration would never happen because Trump planned to expose the deep state elite for committing election fraud, arrest them on live TV and send them to Guantanamo Bay. But after Biden was sworn in, some Anons started to describe him as Trump’s ally, secretly working to bring down the deep state they once considered him to be a part of. Others believe March 4 is the new day for Trump’s inauguration.
Some humans are more drawn to conspiratorial thinking than others, says Dr. Joseph Pierre, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA who writes extensively about QAnon on his “Psyche Unseen” blog on Psychology Today. Those who have a high level of mistrust of authoritative sources of information are more susceptible, for example. So are those who crave uniqueness and certainty, closure and control.
“I feel like I’m sticking around and doing everything I can do, trying to wait for somebody to come back to me. And I don’t know if they ever will,” Emily said, sobbing. “I keep waiting for my husband to come back but maybe this guy doesn’t exist anymore.”
