As QAnon swirls down the drain….
I see the posts from a former narc blogger still finding signs everywhere that QAnoners should keep “trusting the plan.” Everything she writes is a ridiculous break from reality, but she continues to give pep talks and claim that Trump has never lied to them. Not only was she raised by narcissists, but she appears to be an Evangelical, two things which probably made her susceptible. She wrote the other day that everyone who doesn’t believe in QAnon will soon go through painful deprogramming where everything they believed is proven wrong, that she knows what that’s like because she deprogrammed from narc parents, that QAnoners need to be there to help them. And I shake my head and think, “No, you’ve got that backwards.”
I see Richard’s friend Chris spiraling down further and further into a psychotic break, posting on Facebook that he’s leaving Facebook along with his home–and he won’t say where he’s going, because he believes the Facebook Powers That Be somehow care WTF he does with his personal life. Over the years, I’ve seen Chris fall for every single conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, from aliens to birtherism to FEMA camps to Flat Earth to anti-vaxx to microchipped vaccines and QAnon. There has to be some kind of mental illness at work, along with his past in Jehovah’s Witnesses. And yes, some of the weird stuff I’m reading in QAnon blogs about the US being a “corporation” sounds familiar because of a daffy webpage Richard sent to me, many years ago, something he actually believed even though I debunked it in two minutes. That makes me wonder if Richard has fallen for any of this QAnon crap, too. That daffy webpage was part of a website that squirted some of the Sovereign Citizen crap I’m seeing on these QAnon pages.
I see in the Reddit forum QAnon Casualties that many couples and families are being driven apart by this, even turning violent.
I see QAnoners looking at us like we’re the poor, deluded fools. I get my news and history from respected, fact-based sources, which agree with each other and with primary documents. I respect science and doctors. Yet because I don’t listen to some mysterious stranger on the Net, I’m the fool?
But then I’m jolted with familiarity, thinking back to decades ago, when I myself was raised in a fundamentalist church which talked about God “speaking” to people and setting out fleeces and the Satanic Panic. We believed in demons. We believed the Rapture was nigh. One day, I daydreamed about being at school prophesying about the End Times as I got Raptured up in front of all my classmates. Even worse, I started watching Pat Robertson in 1985, where I learned all sorts of Charismatic ideas which tied right in to the teachings of my dad’s favorite TV preachers, such as Oral Roberts.
For years I thought I was the one who knew the truth. “Every knee will bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” was often sung in my church; we imagined the day when all the doubters would see that we’d been right all along.
In college, I imagined God telling me the outcomes of some romantic relationships. I saw a bunch of signs and everything, and kept telling myself to trust the “words of knowledge” even when they didn’t seem to be coming to pass.
Starting in 1991, Pat Robertson claimed that God told him that Bush would ride the wave of his post-Gulf War popularity into re-election in 1992. This was my first election; sometimes I read about Clinton’s ideas and thought they sounded pretty good, but it would be pointless to vote for him when God said Bush would win.
Well, we all know how that turned out: Clinton won in 1992, and won re-election in 1996, while Bush went into retirement. I remember staring at the TV in disbelief, waiting for the news media to correct themselves, then jokingly saying, “Impeach!” Yet shortly thereafter, when the GOP started their Whitewater investigations, I thought they smacked of partisan digging and persecution. This was the second crack in the shell of political and charismatic Christianity that Pat Robertson had built around me. The first crack was the previous year, when an essay in my Persuasive textbook informed me that the 700 Club didn’t tell the full story of the Mapplethorpe exhibit.
So I was there once, myself, in a haze of magical thinking and unreal expectations, based on cult-like brainwashing. Fortunately, reality kept breaking in and finally got me out of it. And yes, it was painful and confusing for some time, but ultimately it was the best thing for me.
However, many people never leave the brainwashing. I don’t know why some people do and some people don’t. Some might attribute it to the Holy Spirit’s leading, but why wouldn’t He lead them, too?
How long will it take QAnon to break out now that all their fantasies are proven false? According to news reports and social media postings, some are breaking out, while others are digging in deeper, looking for signs where none exist, just as I looked for signs that my “words” would come true.
But they weren’t real. They were a fantasy. Q is all fantasy, delusion, brainwashing. Come out of it, QAnoners! Come to the Truth. Come to Reality. Deprogramming will be painful as everything you think is real will fall around you, but it will ultimately be better for you. And no, Biden’s administration does NOT mean the end of the world. On the contrary, we should soon rebound, as an adult finally steps back into the White House and starts repairing the damage done by an idiot who never told you the truth and never had a clue and never cared about you or the country and has the blood of 400,000+ people on his hands. And then you’ll see that your despair is not warranted, that Democrats are not demons and there is no secret cabal and that “V” was just a movie.
