Endless Thread - QAnon Casualties

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

For nearly two years, a Redditor named Jitarth Jadeja got deep into QAnon, the Far Right conspiracy theory founded on the idea that President Trump is secretly waging war against a satanic cabal of pedophiles who control the world. “I was kind of an addict… All I could talk about was Q,” Jitarth says. But then, all of a sudden he had a (re)awakening: “That was the moment that I realized it was all garbage.” In this episode, we trace Jitarth’s journey into and, ultimately, out of, QAnon.  Background: QAnon originated as a fringe online conspiracy theory born in the aftermath of the 2016 election. Since then, it has grown in influence and keeps creeping further into mainstream consciousness. It’s come up in recent White House press briefings and there are current congressional candidates promoting QAnon messages. Q followers have also been linked to murders, armed stand-offs, and kidnappings.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. I want to tell you a story about the past that will help us tell a story about the present. Two years ago, Thanksgiving of 2018, something happened to me that really looking back almost felt like part of a movie or something. I was back in my hometown for a big Thanksgiving dinner, a bunch of families. There was going to be like 30 people eating at my former church, this Quaker meeting house that could really sort of fit everybody eating.

And the night before Thanksgiving, I did the other Thanksgiving tradition, the one where you go out to the bars in your hometown and see all the people you went to high school with. And because I was out, I took a lift back home. And because I'm me, I, of course, struck up a conversation with the driver. He asked me what I did. And I said, I host a podcast about stories found on Reddit, and he immediately perked up and said something that made me sober up. He was like, do you know about Q? I knew about Q. Followers of a fast-growing conspiracy group called QAnon could have a significant influence in the upcoming election.

QAnon for candidates running in primaries for Congress have promoted messages affiliated with QAnon, either through campaign Twitter accounts or in person. So to just ask you plainly, do you believe in QAnon? FBI has warned that the followers of this theory could pose a domestic terror threat. And the ideology has led to acts of violence, including kidnappings and murder. But asked about QAnon's expanding footprint, President Trump. In July, a 24-year-old man was charged in the shooting death of a reputed mob boss. His attorneys argued he was motivated by QAnon.

So I'm in this car with this lift driver. He's super amped up. He's like, over the last year, I've been researching QAnon. Q is the truth. He's the anonymous government agent working with Donald Trump to take down the deep state. And pretty soon there's going to be a bloodbath. Trump is going to expose all these bad guys and everybody is going to know what they did. I'm asking questions, trying to just listen.

But actually, I ask him to pull over early so he doesn't see the house that I'm going to sleep in. I was just a little freaked out. And when I basically jumped out of his car, he was still talking about Q. And then he drove off. And I realized I left my phone in his car. So Thanksgiving Day, I'm like through the whole rigamarole of getting in touch with this lift driver. And eventually I get him. He's like, where will you be tonight?

I'll come drop your phone off. So he shows up to my church for this big Thanksgiving dinner to give me the phone. I'm so thankful that he has done this. so I have like 40 bucks of cash to give him. And, you know, we had this big spread. So I got him a huge plate of food. Like I've hooked this guy up, all the fixings. And I get outside with this food.

He rolls down the passenger side window. I give him the 40 bucks. He gives me my phone back. And then I try to give him this plate of food. And he's like, no. And I'm kind of confused. I'm like, no, no, no, I made this for you. Like I've got turkey in here, stuffing, pecan pie, the whole deal.

And he's like, no. No, no. It's the usual kind of polite, pushy battle. And then another really surprising thing happens. This guy bursts into tears, like violently crying. And he sort of stumbles out of his car and almost wanders into traffic to the point where I have to basically pull him out of the way of cars driving in the road. It's really dark. I don't know what's happening.

And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, man. I'm sorry. Come over here. Get out of the road. And he is shaking. And I'm like, what's going on? And he says to me, one year ago, my mom died. And I told myself I wouldn't eat today.

I promised myself I wouldn't eat today. And I'm just sort of floored. And I say, can I give you a hug? And he says, yes. So I do. And then he basically silently gets back in his car. and drives away. Amory.

And... For the past two years, I've been thinking about this guy. All I know about him is from this 35-minute conversation we had. But I keep thinking about how he had this huge trauma in his life with the death of his mom. And I can't help but wonder if he fell into this Q-Anon hole, in part because he was grieving for his mom. Maybe he was searching for meaning in the absence of other types of support. I've tried reaching out to him to get his take on all of this, no response yet. But in the two

years since that Thanksgiving lift ride, one thing has really become clear. The QAnon conspiracy theory has only gotten bigger, much bigger. There's a recent poll from the Pew Research Center showing that about half of all Americans have heard about QAnon at this point. And something like a hundred current state and congressional candidates are promoting Q&NN messages. 29 of them have already won their primaries. KU-Anon even came up in a question at a recent White House press briefing. I don't know much about the movement other than I understand. They like me very much, which I appreciate.

But I don't know much about the movement. So what started as a fringe conspiracy theory born in the aftermath of the 2016 election has morphed into a kind of mainstream adjacent subculture here in 2020. And to be clear, Q&N as a conspiracy theory is nuts, but it's also dangerous. It doesn't help that a lot of press coverage writes off Q&N followers as completely crazy without any attempt to understand or explore how and why they fall into the conspiracy theory in the first place. Maybe we need to think about some of these people in a slightly different way. Every October, endless thread brings you a series of scary stories.

a.k.a. Endless dread. Honestly, this year, 2020, it feels pretty on the nose. So many of us are already feeling dread that is very real. So we're going to bring you the full spectrum of scary stories this month, from the extraterrestrial to the existential. This episode is going to be a bit of both, because we're talking about Q&On. I'm Amory Seaburtson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. And you're listening to you're listening to you. listening to Endless Thread. The show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.

Today's episode, Q&ONC casualties. How would you describe yourself personality-wise? I'd say I'm a bit of a bipolar personality, which kind of makes sense because I do have bipolar as well. I can be quite affable, very empathetic, just pretty funny, really easygoing. like really easygoing. Things just don't bother me. And then on the other hand, when I'm say down, I can be very agitated, very sharp with my words,

hyper impatient, and just generally quite irritable and not much fun to be around. This is Jacharth Jadasia. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his parents. He's 32 years old, recently graduated from university with a degree in economics and mathematics.

I like long walks on the beach, and I really hate most vegetables. Especially tomato, man, it's just the texture. It's too gross. Jatarth has bipolar disorder, but his politics have also had extreme swings in direction. I used to be quite just like a libertarian left-wing guy, right? Just, you know, like, yeah, dude, get rid of student debt, but like, you know, at the same time, I guess we need some level of government, whatever. He spent some time in the States, about six months on an exchange when he was in college, which is when he got obsessed with American politics, right around the time President Obama won a second term.

The task of perfecting our union moves forward. He was giving that speech, his elections, winning speech in front of, like, just this half-semi-circle of American flags. And it just looks so magnificent, right? I know it sounds a little silly, but it looks just the pomp and the glamour. It just really caught my eye. And then that is also when I found Reddit. When Jatarth returned to Australia, he used Reddit to keep up with American politics and culture. He got especially interested in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

Bernie Sanders was quite popular on Reddit. And I liked a lot what Bernie had to say. It seemed to me that he was the only one who was hitting on the actual one. what I saw as the biggest issue, which is economic inequality. I'm obviously biased because I study economics. Jatarth says when Trump won, he felt like he'd been betrayed in a way, by the media. None of the political analysis he had consumed in the lead-up to the election gave Trump a chance. And none of the explanations Jatarth found as to why Trump won,

or how the pundits could have gotten it so wrong, felt satisfying. So, he started looking for answers. in new places. I tried to find a media organization that had predicted Trump or was least supporting Trump, and that's how I found Alex Jones. Alex Jones, radio host, political extremist, and big-time conspiracy theorist. The guy who sent his followers to harass the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting because he said it didn't happen, the one who's worried about what the government is putting in the water.

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turned the frigging fraud. As near as Jatarth could tell, Jones had been bullish on Trump winning when no one else had. I since found out that Alex Jones also said that Trump was going to lose during the election live feed. So turns out I was wrong about that as well. But at the time, he was all in on Alex Jones. It's more interesting to think that there's some crazy evil Illuminati and they're doing all these things and they're conducting like weird. like, you know, 5G warfare. It, like, it almost gives you a level of,

I guess, level of esteem that you kind of know what's going on and no one else does, right? So there's like a positive feedback loop that occurs. I think I was just looking for a different answer because the answers that were provided to me by, say, just mainstream society just didn't seem good enough. One day in 2017,

Jatarth cut wind of the big one. the big, different answer about the world that made sense in a new way. Two QAnon supporters who had just started a QAnon subreddit were interviewed on Alex Jones' Info Wars show. And they talked about Q. I'm going to be conducting an interview with two individuals known as Pamphlet Anon and Baruch the Scribe. And they mainly deal with cultivating the news that QAnon has been putting out.

If you're not aware who Q&Obin, the more he consumed about QAnon, the hungrier he got for more. and the more he found to consume. This is the grand unified theory of all conspiracy theories. It is not like, you know, one particular thing. Like, this is a conspiracy theory unlike any other conspiracy theory that has existed before. Because it is literally every single one of them combined. It's a big tent church.

Correct. Yeah, 100%. It can all sort of connect to you. It all falls there. Flat Earth, reptilians, mole children. JFK Jr. being alive and running for Congress. It's time travel. Donald Trump is a time traveler. Jatarth is a well-educated, politically engaged guy.

So how did he get sucked into this grand unified conspiracy theory vortex? One reason, he says, is just that he had a lot going on. I had just discovered I had ADHD about a year ago. I've had epilepsy since I was about 16. I had not found out I had bipolar yet. So I was not in a good mental state, I would say, and that is further exacerbated by the fact that I was incredibly socially isolated. I had just cut off all my friends because I just couldn't handle it.

I just felt like it was too much. I felt quite overloaded. And I hadn't spoken to them in months, and I just cut them all off. It just felt like, you know, I felt like this, is this what my life is? This seems so, I feel I'm not destined for something more, right? Like a lot of insecurity. And then this comes along and it tells you, dude, you're special and you're a warrior and you're fighting of the good fight for all the right reasons and stuff, right?

That's the kind of, that's the saddest thing about Q, I think, was that it gave me some joy because it felt like there were good guys out there and they were fighting the good fight and I was part of it. even though I really wasn't doing anything, quite frankly. QAnon gave Jatrth answers at a time he was desperately seeking them. As for what exactly those answers were, the basic version goes something like this. Donald Trump is working with military intelligence to take down an evil cabal of satanic child-eating pedophiles, a cabal which apparently is thousands of years old, and now includes Hollywood celebrities, prominent Democrats, and lots of other people the far right generally hate.

How will Trump destroy the cabal? Apparently, at some point in the future, in an event, Q followers call The Storm, he will unseal thousands of indictments, declare martial law, and publicly execute cabal members. Then after that, everything will be great. You know, the evil cabal's dead. It's been going on for thousands of years. We've been fine. We did it. There are so many more layers to this conspiracy, and new layers get added all the the time. QAnon is like the demon baby of a satanic soap opera and a massive choose-your-own

adventure game. The newest chapters to the Q&ONN conspiracy get released in, quote, Q-Drops, which is what Q-Truthers call it any time Q-N-publishes online. Each new chapter ups the drama to keep the audience hooked. And Jatarth was hooked. Q-drops were like, you know, my drug, and I was kind of an addict. I'd just be like waiting for the next Q drop. All I could talk about was Q. I'd talk about it to everyone. Like, you know, my family, like no one wanted to listen, all right, except for my dad. He, yeah, he was with me. He heard everything I had to say, and he ate it up just like I did, and we'd spend hours talking about Q and what's going to happen and what we read. This whole conspiracy started with one anonymous poster, or maybe a couple

of different anonymous posters, who go by the name QAnon, and QAnon is. supposedly a government employee with Q-level clearance, as in he can see all the top-secret documents. And he, quote, leaks this supposed top-secret information to 8chan. It's this website that is basically for posting images, but also attracts a lot of anti-Semitism, racism, and all kinds of toxic stuff. QAnon originated on 8-chan with the Trump v. Evil Kabal idea. But as that conspiracy launched a thousand more, Qiu moved into more mainstream. stream parts of the web, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit.

That Alex Jones interviewed Jatarth heard in 2017 was part of that push to bring Q to a wider audience. Some of those platforms have since cracked down. YouTube de-platformed Alex Jones. Reddit started banning communities devoted to Q&N in 2018, but QFollowers kept jumping from online platform to online platform. And part of that is because Q&Non followers think they're fighting in this war for the soul of the entire world. It is literally a battle between good and evil. And when you paint your opponent, right, political, ideological, whatever, when you paint them as demons, like the scum, the biggest, most evil people that could ever exist, you

won't only just watch them burn. You will celebrate them burning when you've dehumanized them to such an extent. Are you self-aware about sort of how it changed your behavior outside of just like taking up a ton of time? Like with this, like if you went to the grocery store, would this change your behavior? If you went to like what, how did it change your behavior in the way that you interacted with the world? I resented the world. Like I resented anyone who didn't know what I knew. I thought they were blind.

I actively looked down on them. I as a result I was constantly agitated I was constantly just just absolutely it's like I like I was super rude right I almost like lost all my

empathetic ability all my values changed all of a sudden I became like just just like right wing like I started having all these opinions like oh dude abortion that's wrong man And just thinking about that now doesn't make sense to me

because that's so antithetical to who I am. I definitely, I started watching Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson all in one go. And if you hang around enough far right people, you're going to start absorbing some of their values and some of their views. Jatarth spent more than two years down this rabbit hole. He says he didn't go quite as deep as other conspiracy theorists do. which is pretty unsettling considering some of the beliefs he held.

I used to believe that there was a group of aliens called the Blue Avians, who were like humanoid birds who were actually the ones behind QAnon, and they were about to stop these evil sort of reptilians from conquering us. You can believe in whatever you want with QAnon. That's the allure. You can believe in whatever you want. But eventually, Jatart started to question his own beliefs again. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science.

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for a couple years when he started to have questions. Not about the humanoid bird aliens. No, that seemed credible enough. His doubt stemmed from much smaller, more technical inconsistencies. One of those inconsistencies had to do with all those sealed indictments that Q believers point to as proof of the evil cabal. Long story short, those sealed indictments are actually sealed court proceedings. Similar, but not the same.

And Jatarth noticed that a lot of QAnon followers, and also Q, like the original Q, didn't acknowledge this difference. The other inconsistency had to do with a key Q&on theory about Trump's supposedly speaking to Q&on followers in a coded language. The phrase in question, tippy top. And we keep it in tip top shape. We call it sometimes tippy top shape. And it's a great, great way. This is from a speech he gave in 2018. He's referring to the White House here. Q followers describe all this importance to this phrase. It's like a secret signal from the president,

supposedly. But spoiler alert, there is no coded language. Jatarth found a video debunking the whole thing. Hey folks, it's a oil guy here. I'm going to show. telling you people how the QAnon tip-top, tippy-top trick works. The gist is that President Trump uses this phrase all the time, dating back to way before QAnon was even a thing. It's just one of his verbal tics. Tired and his nuclear is tippy-top from what I hear. It's got to be in tip-top shape.

And everything was tippy-top. I like tippy-top. I like everybody goes to my buildings and my clubs are tippy-top. Right, tippy-top. that was the moment that I realized it was all garbage. It was about a year ago. I think it was last June. I went outside.

I had a cigarette and I was like, man, this is the worst. That was the worst moment on my life. And yeah, I guess that's long and short of how I got out of the cult. It's so interesting to me that like, you're, you know, the way that you describe this, it's kind of fragile. Like, you're so deep into it. You're so deep. You're so deep. But the things that pull you out of it are these really minor, like, little things. And I'm just surprised that you didn't explain them away. It's always the little things, right? Like when you are spotting, when you're trying to spot a lie, you know, you ask about details, right? Because people mess up the details. When you are looking for a crime, you're looking at a, I don't know, a crime scene.

Right? You're looking at the small things. What's out of place? It's always the little things that stick with you, I think, and these definitely stuck with me, right? That I just couldn't explain away. Jatarth gave up QAnon a little more than a year ago. And in the time since, he says he's managed to reclaim a lot of his old self, that easy-going, left-winger with libertarian tendencies, who likes long walks on the beach and hates tomatoes. Jatarth credits two things for his recovery. getting better at managing his mental health and Reddit.

In particular, he credits two fast-growing subreddits, one called Recovery, spelled with a Q in the middle instead of a C, and another called QAnon Casualties. Recovery supports former Q&Non addicts, and Q&N casualties offers emotional support to close friends and family of current Q followers. I cannot speak more highly of these particular subreddit. I was broken and they put me back together again.

That's another reason why I do this kind of stuff because the only thing that they asked of me these people who I don't even know who probably saved my life is that I paid forward, as you Americans would say. I think that they did save my life in the sense that they gave it back to me. Like they gave me back something that I thought I would never have,

which is like a sense of esteem and self-worth. Jatarth is grateful for this second. lease on life. He's doing his best to move forward, which has been hard. He's living with his parents, and his dad is still deep into Q territory. It's like North Korea, South Korea a little bit. It's like a bit of a demilitarized zone, right? Like, we just don't talk about Q. He tries to talk about it with my mom. My mom really doesn't listen. If she does listen, she just sit there quietly and drink her tea and then ask him if he's finished. But he doesn't really talk to anyone about it. Like, he's just, he's just watches YouTube videos.

He doesn't talk to anyone. He's very isolated at the moment. And it's like, yeah, I hate that. Because I did this to him. I feel this is my fault. And that's kind of the reason why I'm so open about it and, like, willing to go on the record and everything. Because it's like, man, like, I have to do something.

That's not something I can just let go. Like, I have to find a way to de-radicalize him. At the end of the day, like, I did this. It's not even Q that did this. I did this to myself. Like, I did this to my dad. And I don't blame Q. I don't blame Reddit.

I certainly don't blame my computer. I think in some way, the only person I could blame is myself. But I try not to loathe on myself too much, if that makes sense. Jatarth got in deep. and then he got out. But his dad is still flying around this QAnon vortex. And there are plenty of examples of this, situations where Q&N seems at the verge of breaking a family apart.

So Jatarth's hope is that treating some QAnon followers with dignity and empathy might actually change things. The only chance we have to get people back is to approach them with empathy like they did with me, let them keep some level of dignity and kind of just say, like, look, it doesn't matter what happened. Like, we're happy that you're here with us.

Better you be here with us than back there with Q. Jatarth, thank you very much for talking with us. No worries, Ben. Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure. At the tone, please record your voice message. When you are finished recording,

you may hang up or press pound for more options. Hey, Chuck, this is Ben. I don't know if you remember me, but two years ago on Thanksgiving in 2018, I left my phone in your car. And you brought it back to me where I was eating Thanksgiving dinner. And we talked about a couple of things. We talked about Q. And you also mentioned that your mom had passed. And yeah, I've just been just been. thinking about you and wondering how you're doing, man. So give me a call sometime if you'd like to talk. I guess that's all. I hope you're doing well, man. Thanks. Bye. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Josh Swartz is our producer, mix, sound design, and original music in this episode by Matt Reed. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit. On Reddit, we are Endless underscore Thread.

If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and senior producer is Ben Brock Johnson. I'm co-host and producer Amory Siebertson. We'll let ourselves out.