RandomGuy
11-12-2020, 04:17 PM
Long article-RG
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The 26-year-old, who lives in Austin, Texas, and once wanted to become a journalist, hadn’t even voted, nor did he ever really like Donald Trump. But he quickly found himself falling down a familiar rabbit hole, following one Twitter thread after another in search of proof that the election had been rigged by the Democrats against the president.
“I just became obsessed with figuring out that it was rigged and putting pieces together that it was,” Justin, who asked to be identified only by his first name, told Yahoo News. “I wanted to say that I was on to this before everyone, when everyone else blindly believed the lies of the media.”
As Tuesday night spilled into Wednesday, Justin said, he called off work and he spent the rest of the week “on Twitter trying to convince myself of this election fraud stuff.”
...
But Justin’s failed search for evidence of fraud in the election had a very different effect. It was the key that allowed him to escape his years-long obsession with QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds millions of people around the world in its cultlike grip.
...
“If you are interested in QAnon, QAnonCasualties is a must subreddit to read regularly and to get to know what is happening in QWorld from those closest to QAnon adherents,” Argentino wrote before proceeding to share several screenshots of recent posts from the Reddit forum, which, since it was created in July 2019, has served as a sort of a virtual support group for friends and family members of people from all over the world who’ve become consumed by the cultlike conspiracy theory. As of Thursday, the QAnonCasualties subreddit had more than
42,000 members.
“My sensibilities lied with these types of people — paranoid conspiracy theorists who are confused by all the social changes that have happened in this country in the past 4-5 years,” Justin wrote on Reddit. “Their sense of humor resonated with me. I liked the memes. There was a feeling of brotherhood and community — always knitted together by the common thread of not trusting the media or the government or *anybody* but each other.”
Eventually he says he stopped keeping up with current events altogether, “a dangerous turning point” that seemed to coincide with the rise of Pizzagate.
...
“I’ve been taking the past day and a half to rethink the past three or four years of my life,” he said, adding that he plans to talk to some of the other Q defectors who’ve been responding to his Reddit post before reaching out to other family and friends.
He also said he needs to “learn to trust the media again,” noting that he had started that process by watching a clip from CNN. “Baby steps,” he said. As for whether there was widespread voter fraud in the election, Justin said he’s decided to take the word of the official media and government sources that he’d long rejected. “Now I accept that there very, very likely wasn’t,” he said.
https://news.yahoo.com/life-after-q-anon-trumps-loss-allows-some-to-escape-conspiracy-cults-grip-182003557.html
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The 26-year-old, who lives in Austin, Texas, and once wanted to become a journalist, hadn’t even voted, nor did he ever really like Donald Trump. But he quickly found himself falling down a familiar rabbit hole, following one Twitter thread after another in search of proof that the election had been rigged by the Democrats against the president.
“I just became obsessed with figuring out that it was rigged and putting pieces together that it was,” Justin, who asked to be identified only by his first name, told Yahoo News. “I wanted to say that I was on to this before everyone, when everyone else blindly believed the lies of the media.”
As Tuesday night spilled into Wednesday, Justin said, he called off work and he spent the rest of the week “on Twitter trying to convince myself of this election fraud stuff.”
...
But Justin’s failed search for evidence of fraud in the election had a very different effect. It was the key that allowed him to escape his years-long obsession with QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds millions of people around the world in its cultlike grip.
...
“If you are interested in QAnon, QAnonCasualties is a must subreddit to read regularly and to get to know what is happening in QWorld from those closest to QAnon adherents,” Argentino wrote before proceeding to share several screenshots of recent posts from the Reddit forum, which, since it was created in July 2019, has served as a sort of a virtual support group for friends and family members of people from all over the world who’ve become consumed by the cultlike conspiracy theory. As of Thursday, the QAnonCasualties subreddit had more than
42,000 members.
“My sensibilities lied with these types of people — paranoid conspiracy theorists who are confused by all the social changes that have happened in this country in the past 4-5 years,” Justin wrote on Reddit. “Their sense of humor resonated with me. I liked the memes. There was a feeling of brotherhood and community — always knitted together by the common thread of not trusting the media or the government or *anybody* but each other.”
Eventually he says he stopped keeping up with current events altogether, “a dangerous turning point” that seemed to coincide with the rise of Pizzagate.
...
“I’ve been taking the past day and a half to rethink the past three or four years of my life,” he said, adding that he plans to talk to some of the other Q defectors who’ve been responding to his Reddit post before reaching out to other family and friends.
He also said he needs to “learn to trust the media again,” noting that he had started that process by watching a clip from CNN. “Baby steps,” he said. As for whether there was widespread voter fraud in the election, Justin said he’s decided to take the word of the official media and government sources that he’d long rejected. “Now I accept that there very, very likely wasn’t,” he said.
https://news.yahoo.com/life-after-q-anon-trumps-loss-allows-some-to-escape-conspiracy-cults-grip-182003557.html