NYT, Jan. 30, 2021
‘Trump Just Used Us and Our Fear’: One Woman’s Journey Out of QAnon
By Sabrina Tavernise
WASHINGTON — In the summer of 2017, Lenka Perron was spending hours
every day after work online, poring over fevered theories about shadowy
people in power. She had mostly stopped cooking, and no longer took her
daily walk. She was less attentive to her children, 11, 15 and 19, who
were seeing a lot of the side of her face, staring down into her phone.
It would all be worth it, she told herself. She was saving the country
and they would benefit.
But one day while she was scrolling, something caught her eye. People
claiming to be sources inside the government had posted on Facebook that
John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff, was about to be
indicted. And yet on her phone she was watching a video that showed him
chatting casually in front of an audience. Around the same time she saw
Hillary Clinton, another supposed target for an indictment, walking in
Hawaii, looking relaxed and holding a coffee cup.
“She just wasn’t behaving like someone who was about to get arrested,”
she said.
It was the first nagging feeling that something did not add up. Five
months and many more inconsistencies later, Ms. Perron, a consultant in
the insurance industry in suburban Detroit, finally called it quits.
“At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this doesn’t fit,’” she
said. “We are being manipulated. Someone is having fun at our expense.”
Her journey out of that world could be instructive: As the country
begins to sort through the political fallout from four years of Donald
J. Trump, one looming question is what will happen with the followers of
QAnon and other anti-establishment conspiracy theories that have been
bending Americans’ perceptions of reality.
There are signs that some have lost faith: Mr. Trump left Washington
last week, blowing a hole through a key QAnon belief — that Mr. Trump,
not President Biden, was the one who would be inaugurated on Jan. 20.
But others are doubling down, and experts believe that some form of the
QAnon conspiracy theory will remain deeply embedded in the nation’s
culture by simply morphing to incorporate the new developments, as it
has before.
QAnon believers are part of a broader swath of Americans who are
immersed in conspiracy theories. Once on the far-right fringes, these
theories now hold people from across the political spectrum in their
thrall, from anti-lockdown libertarians to left-wing wellness types and
“Stop the Steal” Trumpists.
The theories can be malevolent, causing real-life damage to people who
end up in their cross hairs: the parents of children killed in the Sandy
Hook mass shooting who have been harassed by conspiracists, or a
Washington pizza restaurant shot up by a man who had come to take down a
child trafficking ring he believed was housed inside. Q sweatshirts
dotted the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
But while much has been said about how people descend into this world,
little is known about how they get out. Those who do leave are often
filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they
have become estranged from family and friends.
The theories seem crazy to Ms. Perron now, but looking back, she
understands how they drew her in. They were comforting, a way to get her
bearings in a chaotic world that felt increasingly unequal and rigged
against middle-class people like her. These stories offered agency: Evil
cabals could be defeated. A diffuse sense that things were out of her
control could not.
The theories were fiction, but they hooked into an emotional
vulnerability that sprang from something real. For Ms. Perron, it was a
feeling that the Democratic Party had betrayed her after a lifetime of
trusting it deeply.
Her immigrant family, from the former Yugoslavia, were union Democrats
in working-class Detroit who had seen their middle-class lifestyle
decline after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. As
an inspector for the insurance industry, she spent decades in factories
seeing union jobs wither. Still, she stayed with the party because she
believed it was fighting for her. When Bernie Sanders became a
presidential candidate she found him electrifying.
“He put into words what I couldn’t figure out but I was seeing around
me,” said Ms. Perron, who is now 55. “The middle class was shrinking.
The 1 percent and corporations having more control and taking more of
the money.”
She felt sure the Democratic establishment would back him, and she began
volunteering for his campaign, meeting many new friends in the movement.
But she felt that the news media was barely covering him. Then he lost
the 2016 primary. When she began reading through leaked emails that
fall, it looked to her like the party establishment had conspired to
block him.
She spent weeks combing through the emails, hacked from Mr. Podesta, the
Democratic National Committee and Mrs. Clinton. Her stunned discovery
enraged her and put her on the path to conspiracy theories and,
eventually, QAnon.
“There was no hint of conversation about the working class,” she said
about the emails. Instead, she said, it was “expensive dinner parties,
exclusive get-togethers.”
The emails were Ms. Perron’s doorway to the conspiracy world, and she
found others there too. She was no longer a lonely victim of a force she
did not understand, but part of a bigger community of people seeking the
truth. She loved the feeling of common purpose. They were learning
together how to research, looking up important people in the emails and
figuring out how to trace them back to big donors.
“There was this excitement,” Ms. Perron said. “We were joining forces to
finally clean house. To finally find something to explain why we were
suffering.”
The community was growing, and also going to darker places. Ms. Perron
remembers watching and sharing videos appearing to link a Washington
pizza parlor to Mr. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton and a child sex trafficking
ring. The dots were hazy, but she and her newfound friends on Facebook
and Reddit drew bright lines connecting them. It sounds crazy now, she
said, but at the time it felt so real and disturbing that sometimes she
felt physically ill.
“It was all of us,” she said of the early months of her immersion. “It
was these puzzle pieces that we all got to play around with. We were all
sort of authoring this.”
If the early months were a build-your-own-adventure designed by
different groups, all the theories were snapped together into one giant
“deep state” explanation after Q, the anonymous person or people at the
center of QAnon, first posted in late 2017, she said. Q’s information
drops had an addictive effect, drawing her in again after she had
started to have doubts.
“Q managed to make us feel special, that we were being given very
critical information that basically was going to save all that is good
in the world and the United States,” she said. “We felt we were coming
from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club.”
Meanwhile, her family was eating takeout all the time since she had
stopped cooking and her stress levels had shot up, causing her blood
pressure medication to stop working. Her doctor, worried, doubled her dose.
People who tried to talk her out of the conspiracy theories by sending
her factual information only made it worse.
“Facts are not facts anymore,” Ms. Perron said. “They are highly
powerful, nefarious people putting out messaging to keep us as docile as
sheep.”
As the months went on, the claims she was seeing grew more outlandish.
There were slickly produced videos of cannibalism and Satanism within
the Democratic Party.
“The people I got to know on social media, they started to look stranger
and act stranger and I didn’t want to be like that,” she said.
Mr. Trump himself was a source of doubt. Q presented him as a brilliant
mastermind, and for a while she accepted that. But it became harder to
reconcile that persona with what she observed in real life.
Another twinge of self-consciousness came during a phone conversation
with a childhood friend. “I remember calling my best friend and getting
all into the number of pedophiles in government and that they’ve taken
over the whole government system,” she said. “I felt a part of her
saying, ‘This is not the friend I recognize.’ It never came out in
words, it was just a sense that I had.”
When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was
also humbling: Ms. Perron, who has a master’s degree, had looked down on
Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was.
But she has come to appreciate the experience. She has talked to her
children about what she went through, and has learned to identify
conspiracy dependence in others. She agreed to speak for this article to
help others who are still in the throes of QAnon.
There are many. Ms. Perron volunteers as a life coach, and recently was
working with a 40-year-old man who had lost his marriage and was falling
asleep at work. At some point, he began texting her Q links. She
realized he was staying up all night consuming conspiracy theories.
“I was watching his life fall apart,” she said. “I had no way to
penetrate it. I could not even make a dent.”
She said she was no longer working with him.
Mr. Trump may be gone from government, but Ms. Perron believes that the
ground is still fertile for conspiracy theories because many of the
underlying conditions are the same: widespread distrust of authority,
anger at powerful figures in politics and in the news media, and growing
income inequality.
Unless there are major changes, Ms. Perron said, the craving will continue.
“Trump just used us and our fear,” she said. “When you are no longer
living in fear, you are no longer prone to believe this stuff. I don’t
think we are anywhere near that yet.”
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