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 they had once enjoyed, like watching football and playing outdoor sports. The couple, she recalled, stopped laughing together; everything suddenly turned serious with him. The pandemic had forced Peter to work from home, but it didn’t feel like he was there.
Before long, there were further turns. Peter started saying things that bordered on “bigoted and xenophobic,” Emily told me. Most shocking to her, 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.
“I was told that I buried my head in the sand and couldn’t see the ‘real’ problems,” said Emily, who shared her story under the condition of anonymity because she fears Peter’s retaliation and feels disloyal for speaking up. (Emily and Peter are not their real names.) Sometimes he undermined her this way in front of their kids.
Emily knew her husband was wrapped up in something called “QAnon.” She had heard the term before—Peter, prior to his conversion, had once dismissed it as “nuts”—but she didn’t fully grasp what QAnon was until early October, when she watched a few of the videos Peter kept talking about. That was when she learned that her husband had been consumed by a complex and false conspiracy theory that accuses “deep state elites” of running a secret pedophile ring. By then, it was too late to pull him out.
That month, Emily read an article online about “QAnonCasualties”—a Reddit forum for people like her, whose loved ones had also been drawn in by the bogus conspiracy theory. Suddenly, she didn’t feel so alone. For the next four days she watched the forum closely until she gathered the courage to post about her husband. “It’s exhausting loving someone and watching them get sucked into this cycle you can’t break,” she wrote.
“Welcome. I hope you find some comfort and support here,” one Redditor commented on her post. “It’s a wonderful group of people who have been in one way or another touched by this rapidly growing cult.” 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.
“Thank you all for responding. Just knowing others are going through this disaster is relieving,” Emily replied.
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.
As American politics scrambles to deal with this fringe ideology and its followers—a set of people seemingly impervious to facts, some committed enough to assault the U.S. Capitol—the country might learn a few things from the people who have to grapple with QAnon in their very homes, and who live with it every day. And what their stories tell us is unsettling. In post after post on r/QAnonCasualties, fathers and daughters, wives and husbands, best friends and colleagues describe their inability to get through to the people they are closest to. 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.
After Emily found the board in October, the tone of her posts quickly went from hopeful to defeated. She began to accept that she might have to leave her husband. One day she wrote: “I would have never married this person, yet somehow, I am [married to him]. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Peter has stopped treating the pandemic seriously, and Emily, who is in a high-risk group, can’t understand. They are both in their early 40s, and over the two decades that they’ve known each other Peter has always been protective of her fragile health. Now he thinks the pandemic is a hoax and doesn’t wear a mask, putting Emily in danger.
So Emily continues to avoid talking about politics and opts to do all of the house chores like groceries herself because she can’t trust Peter to be careful. As she wrote in one post: “This crap means more to him than my life.”
The QAnonCasualties subreddit came to life on July 4, 2019, when user Sqwakomodile shared a story about their mother being consumed by QAnon.
“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.”
At the time, QAnon had already made its way out of the far-right chat rooms where it was born and begun to spread via mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The conspiracy could be traced back to 2017, when “Q,” an elusive figure whose moniker is derived from the high-level security clearance he claims to possess, started dropping cryptic “hints” on the chat boards 4chan and later 8kun. The basic idea was that Donald Trump was leading a secret effort to overthrow a cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking, Democratic pedophiles—a cabal that, according to the mythos, includes powerful politicians, Hollywood moguls and journalists. The conspiracy theory’s followers, often referred to as “Qultists” or “Anons” on forums, awaited the arrival of “the storm”—a martial order under which deep state agents like Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks would be publicly executed.
But that was just the starting point. QAnon has a unique participatory nature that allows Q’s “digital soldiers” to add whatever conspiracies they want to it as long as they fit within the framework that the masses are being lied to by sinister elites. Q, who has been silent since December, used to post hints and leave it up to his willing followers to interpret them with whatever conspiratorial explanation they can find. As a result, today, QAnon has grown into an umbrella for many conspiracies, ranging from the fringe to the absurd. There are claims that vaccines cause autism, that 9/11 was “an inside job,” that John. F. Kennedy Jr. is alive and the government is covering-up the existence of space aliens. Since Trump’s decisive loss in November, the QAnon community has been circulating unfounded accusations of election fraud. Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot during the storming of the Capitol, was a QAnon believer—one of many there that day.
QAnon’s malleability is part of what makes it so powerful. “It’s been inclusive in a way that I’ve really never seen any other conspiracy,” said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts and the author of the paper “QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal.” “You can listen to whoever’s voice is closer to your own. So if you’re not here for satanism, listen to someone who is not playing up the satanic part of it.” QAnon’s participatory nature is also how the conspiracy theory “manages to capture that authenticity, that comes from people genuinely, sincerely, trying to figure out how to make sense of a world that isn’t making any sense to them,” Zuckerman added.
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.
“Imagine a prophecy where the prophet gets everything wrong and, somehow, it ends up being even more powerful,” said Zuckerman.
On r/QAnonCasualties forum, most of the post titles reflect the pain of the people behind them. “A little funny, a lot sad. Bye, dad,” “My mother kicked me out for calling Trump racist” and “Way worse than I thought” are all anecdotes of people failing to get through to their loved ones.
In late October, user acidalice posted “Another family wrecked...” and wrote about her partner of two decades. “He’s gone from the kindest, chilled man to constant anger and major depression. I’m at a loss, not so easy to walk away either - been together 20 years, married 14, 2 kids under 10, mortgage.”
“Prioritise your children’s happiness. They deserve a home free of his black moods and anger. So do you,” commented another user. ...
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