What Can You Do When Someone in Your Family Goes All 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.
For the person outside QAnon, there’s a scramble to the internet that mirrors the Q believer’s own frantic online searching weeks or months earlier. Adrenochrome? Underground bases? What-Anon?
For David, a blue-collar union tradesman in his fifties, that moment came one month into the pandemic when his son Nathan walked into their family home in suburban Chicago with an announcement. In his late twenties and looking uncharacteristically grave, Nathan said he wanted to prepare his parents for some big news before they saw it on TV.