CNN profiles a South Carolina woman who became obsessed with the QAnon conspiracy theory, but actually managed to pull herself back from the brink:
Ashley Vanderbilt says her four-year-old daughter Emmerson knew "something was wrong with her mom."
"I wasn't one hundred percent there like I should have been," she recalls.
After November's election she spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube becoming indoctrinated into the world of QAnon. By inauguration day, she was convinced that if then President-elect Joe Biden took office the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter.
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A key tenet of QAnon is that there is a master plan at work and Trump is in charge. "The plan" said he would round-up the so-called deep state and bring them to justice. "The plan" said he would win the 2020 election in a landslide. When this didn't happen, QAnon supporters began spinning absurd predictions that Trump would somehow halt Biden's inauguration in the days or hours leading up to it.
None of that happened. But like in many cults, the lore and predictions in QAnon are ever-changing. Each time a prophecy fails to come to fruition, a new theory crops up to fill the void.
And so some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory in the hours after inauguration. President Joe Biden's inauguration itself was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as President in the coming few weeks. Then, certainly, all the deep-state arrests would happen.
That was a step too far for Vanderbilt. She began to realize that she had bought into a lie with an almost religious fervor. Over the past two weeks she has been posting on TikTok, the platform that dragged her into the conspiracy theory, sharing her story in the hope that it might help or inspire others to see the light.
Some followers of QAnon cite specific posts from the anonymous person or people behind the conspiracy theory as if they were scripture.
Vanderbilt credits her faith in God for helping her out of QAnon. While she was deep in the conspiracy theory, she said that Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no wrong. She recalls once asking herself, "Am I putting even Trump above God?"
Vanderbilt reflects that she could perhaps have been pulled out of QAnon before inauguration day if Trump himself condemned it. Instead, he flirted with it and tacitly embraced it by retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon followers.
Instead, she had a revelation of her own.
She was able to do something that many people, including some elected representatives and a few members of the Republican Party, are not. She has admitted she was wrong and has condemned QAnon as a dangerous political movement.
It’s tempting to laugh at these deluded QAnon cultists, and I’m sure I will keep doing so for the foreseeable future. But we also have to give them an off-ramp.
Russell Moore, a conservative evangelical who never jumped on the Trump Train, has some suggestions for people whose loved ones are falling under the QAnon spell:
1. If you know of a threat of violence, contact the authorities. Not everyone who falls for conspiracy theories are domestic terrorists, but most domestic terrorists are radicalized by conspiracy theories. If someone is a clear threat to themselves or to others (talking about killings or assassinations and so on), call the police. Usually this is not the case, but, when it is, be responsible.
2. Learn to recognize the beginning stages of conspiracy theories. Sometimes people are not so much “conspiracy theorists” as they are just having trouble discerning what’s real and what’s fake. That can be difficult in a time when so much false information (and misinformation) is sent around online. If you recognize that early on, you can alert the friend or family member to the sketchy nature of their news sources.
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6. Work to live with integrity and truth-telling. As I’ve written elsewhere, the problem is not just those who fall for falsehoods and conspiracy theories, but those who know those things to be false but speak of them as true anyway because they find the lies useful, or, more often, because they are afraid of the liars.
That’s not new either. Even Simon Peter stopped eating with Gentile believers and “drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party” (Gal. 2:12). That had terrible implications for his own heart—his conduct was “not in step with the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14). But it also had terrible implications for Barnabas who was confused by the hypocrisy and, of course, for the church in obscuring a gospel that unites all of us together in Christ.
You will see this all the time: People whose ambition will cause them to say things or to remain silent—even if that results in the character assassination of others—because they fear the people who believe things they know to be false. Sometimes you are in a position to rebuke this—and, as in the case of Peter, see people change. Often, though, there is nothing you can do.
But what you can always do is not be that kind of person. Let your “yes” be yes and your “no” be no (Matt. 5:37). You do not always have to say everything you think, but you should never say what you don’t believe. If that puts you on the outs with your “tribe,” so be it. There will be another tribe out there, waiting to see who they can trust to speak from the heart and not out of cunning.
“People whose ambition will cause them to say things or to remain silent…because they fear the people who believe things they know to be false.” Now, what political party does that remind you of?
The Proud Boys have been named as a domestic terrorist organization by the Government of Canada:
The decision also brings a range of “significant” legal and financial implications for people participating in or who are otherwise affiliated with these groups. Specifically, the Criminal Code includes charges for people or organizations that deal with property or finances of a listed entity. It also criminalizes certain supporting activities such as training and recruitment. These charges could be laid on a going-forward basis and cannot apply to past actions.
For example, any future purchasing Proud Boys merchandise from the group could now be considered a criminal act in this country, though belonging without any financial ties to a group is not illegal.
Further, anyone looking to enter Canada may not be allowed in if they are found to be associated with a listed group, and Blair can revoke the passports of anyone deemed to pose a threat to travel to engage in terrorist activities.
“Behaviour becomes a threat when people advocate or engage in violence as a means of promoting or furthering their ideology,” said one senior government official briefing reporters on a not-for-attribution basis.
I have no sympathy for these white supremacist assholes, but I did muse on twitter about whether this was done because they pose a real terrorist threat, or because of political pressure following the storming of the Capitol. That went over about as well as you’d expect, especially because it was in response to a tweet from the Toronto Star.
Adnan R. Khan, in Maclean’s, goes even further and says this is a mistake:
So is the group he founded worthy of the terrorist designation it now carries? White supremacy in and of itself is not a terrorist ideology, in the same way Islamic supremacy of the kind practised by ISIS and al-Qaeda is not a terrorist ideology. There are millions of Muslims, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, who are Islamic supremacists. They are not terrorists.
There are also millions of North Americans and Europeans who are white supremacists, but they are also not terrorists. Supremacism, white or otherwise, is a societal disease that cannot be addressed by a fundamentally political concept like terrorism.
We should not confuse what is merely a group of criminal chauvinists for a disciplined and determined organization willing to commit mass casualties for their cause. The Proud Boys hold up a mirror to our society. They show us what happens when masculine white privilege crashes headlong into an economy that no longer values them. If we want to address the problem, we must resist the urge to tuck them away in a box labelled “terrorism” and hope the appropriate authorities will deal with it.
Indeed, doing so may actually exacerbate the problem. If there is one lesson learned since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, it is that overreliance on security-centred mechanisms to confront violent extremism only creates more violent extremists, which in turn generates more draconian police responses. It drives groups that have operated openly underground, forcing law enforcement to resort to ever more draconian measures to keep tabs on them.
The Proud Boys are loud and brash and attention-seeking, which makes them more a policing issue than a national security threat. …
[…]
Designating the Proud Boys as a terrorist organization only gives its hardcore members the recognition they crave, and the group the legitimacy it does not deserve. Now we really might have a terrorist organization on our hands.
Fuck the Proud Boys. Seriously. But we have to be vigilant about making sure the government doesn’t misuse this kind of power.
NGL this almost makes me like him a little.
"...overreliance on security-centred mechanisms to confront violent extremism only creates more violent extremists, which in turn generates more draconian police responses."
That's pretty much the strategy behind political terrorism isn't it?
I think Canada pretty much screwed up on that desgination. Yes, PB are a bunch of assholes... but "terrorists"?
QAnon is not something I’d personally laugh at. It’s drawing in people who should know better. The internet gives it a much wider base than, say, Jonestown. And it allows people to get sucked in deep right in their living rooms, making it much harder for friends and family to see that something is going wrong until it’s too late.