In this excerpt from Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer’s new book about the cult, “Trust the Plan,” a father talks about the heartbreaking frustration of losing his son to QAnon.
There comes a moment in every new Q follower’s life when the person closest to them realizes that they aren’t joking. The Facebook binges and the sudden adoration for Donald Trump have been waved off until now. The stray remarks about missing children and experimental vaccines have been chalked up to eccentricities. But eventually there’s no more denying it: your wife, or your son, or your father now believes in QAnon, and they want you to join them.
David emailed me about his son in early 2021 after reading some of my articles about QAnon. We started talking regularly, with David giving me updates as Nathan slipped in and out of his belief in Q. Confounded by the new digital soldier living in their son’s childhood bedroom, David and his wife, Lucy, became QAnon experts themselves. David was an articulate guide to the unique despair of seeing Q take root in your family.
From the outside, Nathan appeared to be living much the same life he had before he discovered QAnon. But for those closest to him, the Nathan who existed before Q was gone. In his place was an angry, frustrated young man with a monomaniacal interest in fantasizing about the Storm. QAnon made Nathan’s life smaller and sadder, and strained his relationships with everyone around him.
The personal destruction wrought by QAnon has put people outside of it in positions they never imagined. There are parents afraid to speak to their children, and children who realize the person they trusted most in the world has lost their connection with reality. QAnon can seem like a distant problem, something confined to Trump rallies and the darkest corners of the internet—until it transforms someone you know, falling on them like an exotic, incurable virus.
After nearly a year of increasing tensions with Nathan about QAnon, David’s wife suggested they go to a therapist. But when David and Nathan sat down for the counseling session, they realized the therapist had never heard of QAnon. David spent the first session trying to explain Q to the therapist, fearing he was coming off just as unhinged as his son. The counselor eventually decided that Nathan’s QAnon delusions would lift if he would stop smoking so much marijuana.
That passive strategy for dealing with QAnon radicalization may be the best approach. It’s also nearly impossible. It asks the family members of QAnon believers to shoulder an enormous burden, acting as a psychologist, epidemiologist, historian, debater, and social worker—all while having the mammoth amounts of patience required to put up with feverish ravings and verbal abuse.
“The reality is that we don’t really know what really works or if anything does work to get someone out of QAnon,” Dr. Joseph M. Pierre, a University of California, Los Angeles, psychiatrist who has studied QAnon, told me. A high school friend on Facebook or a crazy uncle you only see once a year at Christmas might not be worth the aggravation. But working for the remote possibility of restoring a spouse or parent to the real world might make waging what Young calls “a long game” more reasonable. Rather than directly confronting a QAnon believer, Young and other deradicalization researchers suggest a less direct approach that relies on just getting them away, mentally and physically, from QAnon.
“I don’t think that it’s something that you can pull somebody out of,” Heffernan told me. “I think they have to be ready to leave it.”David knew all too well how hard it could be to maintain a relationship with a QAnon believer. He called me again in July 2021. Now Nathan had latched on to a new QAnon rumor that claimed the Chinese army was storming across the Canadian border into Maine. There were videos of strange lights in the darkness.
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