She bought ammunition, camping gear, a water purifier and boxes of canned food. Then, Tyler’s mother started wearing a holstered pistol around the house, convinced that 10 days of unrest and mass power outages were coming.
The chaos would culminate, she assured her son, in former president Donald Trump’s triumphant return to power on March 4, the original Inauguration Day before the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1932.
Tyler, 24, had been living with his mother an hour north of Minneapolis since he graduated college in 2019. The paranoia and fear that had engulfed his home had become unbearable in the months since Trump began to falsely claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
“Any advice for dealing with a qanon parent who thinks ww3 will happen during the inauguration?” Tyler asked last month on
r/QAnonCasualties, a fast-growing Reddit group for those whose loved ones have been consumed by the bizarre and byzantine universe of baseless conspiracy theories known as QAnon.
[
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To some it seemed as if the United States was gripped by an epidemic of conspiracy theories.
The anguish was playing out behind closed doors in therapists’ offices, where overwhelmed family members were seeking advice. And it was painfully clear on QAnonCasualties, the Reddit group where Tyler had turned for support.
The group offered a rough barometer of the growing turmoil. Since last summer it had
grown from about 10,000 members to more than 130,000 in the days after Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Each day there was a flood of new posts:
A woman in Chattanooga, Tenn., was just days away from moving out of the house she and her partner bought five years earlier. “I feel like I’m in a twisted black mirror episode that’s lasting WAY too long,” she wrote. “I feel hopeless that we will ever get back to the beautiful life we shared in our lovely home.”
A woman in Palm Beach, Fla., had gone two weeks without speaking to her mother and was starting to wonder if the rift was irreparable. “I grieve for her every day as if she is dead,” she wrote.
A teenager in Annapolis, Md., worried that she no longer “knew” her father. “I’ve come to the breaking point,” she confessed. “My heart goes out to everyone else in this situation. It really sucks.”
Tyler, alone in his bedroom, read many of the new posts, hoping that they would help him make sense of his mother’s beliefs. Sometimes it felt as if every conversation with his mom and her new husband circled back to Trump-related conspiracies.
[
QAnon reshaped Trump’s party and radicalized believers]
To protect his family’s anonymity, The Washington Post is only using Tyler’s first name. In an email, his mother blamed her son for the tension in the house, writing that he was disrespectful and refused to look for work after leaving his job earlier this year. She added that she “never even heard of Qanon until very recently” and doesn’t “follow it,” but declined to discuss why she had begun purchasing survival gear and whether she believed Trump would return to the White House in March. “My beliefs about Trump are actually none of your business,” she wrote.
Tyler said he and his mother discussed QAnon one time; a bizarre conversation in which his mother insisted that QAnon prophecies were the product of artificial intelligence. He described an atmosphere of growing conspiracy and fear that pervaded his home. “It started a month before the election,” Tyler said in an interview, “and it kept growing until it felt like she was preaching the Bible to me.”
The first QAnonCasualties
post went up on July 4, 2019, some two years after the conspiracy’s unidentified online originator, known as Q, baselessly claimed that Trump was secretly leading a war against an elite cabal of pedophiles who controlled Washington, Hollywood and the world.
By that point, QAnon was no longer just an online phenomenon in which the group’s most fanatical adherents called for hanging traitors and waited for the “Storm,” an awakening that would reveal the true breadth of evil in America. Some followers had begun showing up at
Trump rallies wearing T-shirts and holding signs advertising their cause.
[
QAnon true-believers say their faith is unshaken, despite Biden inauguration]
“My mom has been into QAnon since it got started,” wrote the QAnonCasualties founder, who has since deactivated his Reddit account. “The ignorance, bigotry and refusal to question the ‘plan’ has only gotten worse over time. I’m always torn between stopping communication with her because it only seems to make me feel terrible, and feeling like it’s my responsibility to lead her back to reality.”
The founder described his experience with his mother as “exhausting, sad, scary, demoralizing” and invited members to vent or share coping strategies.
Other Reddit groups, such as
r/Qult_Headquarters, were dedicated to discrediting and mocking the growing conspiracy. QAnonCasualties, the group’s founder wrote, was intended to be a “comforting place.”
Like many conspiracy theories, QAnon supplied a good-versus-evil narrative into which complicated world events could be easily incorporated. “Especially during the pandemic, Q provided a structure to explain what was going on,” said Mike Rothschild, author of
“The Storm Is Upon Us,” which documents QAnon’s rise.
And it offered believers a sense of meaning and purpose. “We want to believe that we matter enough [that someone wants] to crush us,” Rothschild said. “It’s comforting to think that the New World Order would single us out for destruction.”
A big part of what made it novel was that it was interactive, allowing its followers to take part in the hunt for clues as if they were playing a video game. Social media algorithms, built to capture and keep consumers’ attention, helped expand the pool of hardcore believers by leading curious individuals to online groups of believers and feeding them fresh QAnon conspiracy theories.
Unlike other online conspiracy theories, it also had the blessing of some top Republicans, such as Trump, who embraced the movement in the hope that he could channel believers’ rabid, and sometimes violent, passions for political gain. “It’s a bet that they can control this insurgency and use it to defeat their opposition and retain control,” said
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies. “The bet is we can ride this tiger. And sometimes, as in Germany and Italy, you can get eaten by the tiger.”
Tyler held out hope that Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20 might help ease tensions in the house. “It seems like my mom is returning to her old self,” he wrote on Jan. 21. “I mean, she’s still political, but now it’s not in my face 24/7. I’ll take that any day.”
The respite, though, didn’t last. Soon she was insisting that Trump would return to the White House in early March. Tyler said he decided to confront her.
“I told my mom everything,” he texted his biological father’s wife, Heather, on the morning of Feb. 3. Tyler’s father had lost contact with him when his son was a child, and they had only reconnected in recent years.
“Told her what?” Heather asked.
“That I don’t believe in Trump or any of her theories,” Tyler replied.
