"My Mom Believes In QAnon. I've Been Trying To Get Her Out."

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Adam Serwer 🍝
@AdamSerwer
A heartbreaking piece from @AlbertSamaha about what it’s like to have someone you love be in thrall to the Qanon fantasy world https://buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/qanon-parents-millennial-children…
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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertsamaha/qanon-parents-millennial-children


You should have seen my mom’s Twitter page before it got suspended. Maybe you did. Maybe you were one of the 85 accounts that followed her. If so, I imagine you were probably very confused.

Of course, the QAnon hashtags and links to far-right websites wouldn’t have seemed out of place on the site.

“GEORGE FLOYD ALIVE?” she once tweeted with a link to a YouTube video making that false claim.

Her account got flagged once Twitter started policing disinformation; it was swept up as one of thousands deactivated over the last few months. “They’re trying to silence Patriots!” she said to me.

What might’ve seemed strange, though, was that amid all the hardcore QAnon content, she would occasionally drop in links to BuzzFeed News stories I’d written about police misconduct and wrongful convictions: “I hope @POTUS and @DOJ would read the investigative criminal justice stories of @AlbertSamaha & consider the sexual misconduct he has written about, as part of the New Law on Police Reform. #TRUMP2020 #WWG1WGA #TransitiontoGreatness”

The only stories my mom found credible in what she called “the mainstream media” were the ones reported by her son — and even then, only when the subject matter didn’t attack her devotion to the Catholic faith and to Donald Trump. Over the years, she urged me not to write about politics and expressed her concerns that I was falling further into the deep state when I reported on kids repeating Trump’s racist rhetoric or the validity of the election results.

*snip*

[Thomas Hurt]

1. A high school friend had to tell his brother he would no longer speak to him...

after the phone conversation devolved into his brother screaming he had turned into a Democrat and was going to kill him and and their siblings.

[Jirel]

2. My only answer is to throw them out of my life, even family.

Stupid and deluded is stupid and deluded. You tell them they’re brainwashed shitbags and move on, until they figure it out and come crawling back to apologize.

[maxsolomon]

3. Poor guy. I have an (ex) Sister in Law who's Mom has been in a cult for decades.

You can't get them out of it by confronting them with facts and logic. She lost her entire inheritance to them and the scammers they brought into her life.

You have to remove in the input (Q drops, a malign preacher), add rational inputs, and let time reduce the pressure. That's what I took away from "The Brainwashing of My Dad". Also the Dad in that movie got senile so that helped.

Sad to say, when the input is from organized religion, it won't go away.