‘Trump Just Used Us and Our Fear’: One Woman’s
Journey Out of QAnon
During the political fallout after four years of
Donald J. Trump, one question is what will happen with the followers of
conspiracy theories that bend Americans’ perceptions of reality.
“At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this
doesn’t fit,’” Lenka Perron said. “We are being manipulated. Someone is having
fun at our expense.”
Sabrina
Tavernise
By Sabrina
Tavernise
Jan. 29,
2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
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.”
Sabrina
Tavernise is a national correspondent covering demographics and is the lead
writer for The Times on the Census. She started at The Times in 2000, spending
her first 10 years as a foreign correspondent.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário