A Story About a Mind's Trip Into QAnon and Then Out Again

Lenka Perron: “At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this doesn’t fit.’ 

We are being manipulated. Someone is having fun at our expense.”

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A major personal interest is in how a normal, educated human mind can leave reality and enter a world of reality-detached nonsense and obvious lies. The New York Times writes about one woman's trip into the crackpot conspiracy theory QAnon world than then back out. What led to her ability to see that she was being manipulated was her acceptance as real of the bits of contradictory reality she allowed herself to see. Her ability to see and accept contradictory reality for what it was saved her from an ugly life. 

Her journey into QAnon began with her fears for the future and her deep disappointment in the democratic party with its abandonment of the blue collar middle class. 

The NYT writes:

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. .... It would all be worth it, she told herself. She was saving the country and [her children] 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.”

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

“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.” (emphasis added)

The emotional component overwhelms the rational

Perron put her finger on a key aspect of people's descent from reality into bizarre fantasy. Specifically, emotion overwhelms reason. She was fearful about growing wealth inequality, democratic party betrayal of blue collar workers and a sense that everything was out of control and going in the wrong direction. She was not stupid or uneducated. She was not authoritarian. She was scared.

This is why I keep discouraging the labeling of all supporters of the ex-president as stupid, vindictive or authoritarian. Most are frightened, deceived, manipulated and betrayed. Perron is a example of that. How many are like Perron? I don't know, but believe it is more than half for rank and file republicans.[1] The research I've looked at suggests that fear was one of the top factors that drove people to support the ex-president. In my opinion, it was and still is the most important factor. Economic fears. Social, racial and demographic fears. Fear of democrats and the press as enemies of the state. All kinds of fears, some reasonable but most not.

Perron figured out for herself on her own what had been done to her. Unfortunately, she is probably in the minority. Probably no more than about 15% of the deceived can do this on their own. The rest need help, but how to help isn't clear to me. Trying to stay civil, respectful and understanding but consistently truthful is the best I can come up with. 

Footnote:

1. I bet that most (~75% ?) of the low to moderate tens of thousands of people who have dropped their republican party registration since the Jan. 6 coup attempt have somehow managed control their fear level enough to let them see reality with less distortion. When emotions go up, rationality tends to go down. That is the human condition. It is well-known among experts. People who make their living based on dark free speech also know this. Propagandists use this aspect of the human condition ruthlessly to manipulate minds and perceptions of reality to serve their own ends. 

People who claim to deceive and manipulate to serve the public interest are flat out liars. They are just selling a product that people most people (~65% ?) would not buy unless it was packaged in toxic snake oil. Therefore, it comes packaged in snake oil, a/k/a dark free speech.