QAA Podcast - Alienated Parent Forums (Premium E328) Sample

Episode Date: March 22, 2026

This week, Julian and Jake have been strapped into the zoomer torture chamber, as Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows take us into the weird sad world of 'Alienated Parent' forums. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done. You've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 328 alienated parents forums. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky. Liv Egar. Spencer Barrows. And Julian Field. Well, it looks like the only two people who are young enough to not be able to make babies

are going to torture two fully grown men who've passed the age of making babies have become infertile. And in the process, expose us to parents who are extremely alienated online. Is this about right? Or am I misinterpreting because I don't have my reading glasses? Pretty much dead on, pretty much. Beautiful. That's why we've got Spencer Barrows.

So glad to have you back after that incredible series that you did for cursed media, Science in Transition. Thank you. Well, I kind of see this as a little bit of a spiritual sequel, albeit a much a funnier one, a more lighthearted one. It's P for P and it's like two parents. having a relationship. So I pay attention to certain trends in the anti-trans spaces, as well as just the media in

general, like the certain moral panics they like to glom on to. And one that has been gaining a bit of steam, I think, recently is this fear over kids going no contact with their parents. Oh, yes. Specifically, adult children going no contact with their parents and these articles that are trying to say, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Don't do that. You should work it out.

You should always work it out. We actually have covered something like adjacent to this, which was Stefan Molina, who basically was getting people to go no contact with their parents, but to turn them into like bizarre little freaks that like listen to him all day. But this also was a guy who was like crawling through his own like air ducts like the fucking xenomorphs. Like I don't know exactly how much we want to take this guy at his word. His wife was a therapist and he was piping his voice through the vent.

commenting on the therapy sessions that she was doing with a client. Like in the middle of it, you just hear a disembodied goblin in the vents. And it was Stefan. Yeah. So we're going to tie this into science and transition a little bit because Liv and I spent some time looking at the world of forums for alienated and aggrieved parents. Now, one of these forums is a substack blog, specifically for parents of trans kids and trans young adults that don't like their kids very much. And it's pretty depressing, but there's kind of a through line here. We also looked at ones where there's no transness involved.

The kids are not any type of gay. And it's just relationships that have frayed and broken down. And I was really interested in reading these because I am a huge fan of the seminal like blog series by Isundi called The Missing Missing Reasons or Down the Rabbit Hole. It is a formative text by a blogger who spent years on alienated parents' forums back when there were more forums on the internet, and now it's just one app for child pornography and nothing else. Is and I wrote about the phenomenon of like the psychological processes that go on there. Now, I recommend reading the whole post.

Again, it's called Down the Rabbit Hall, and it's fantastic. But the important thing to know here is that alienated parents, like genuinely alienated parents, do exist. There are absolutely cases where a kid gets addicted to drugs, has a severe behavioral problem, or just acts abusively towards their parents when the child gets into adulthood and the kid is at fault. That absolutely happens.

Those people don't go on alienated parents' forums or if they do, they don't stick around because what they realize is is that alienated parents are not for alienated parents. They are for abusive parents to commiserate about how ungrateful their kids are. Yes. Now, you're going to notice some trends here.

You're going to notice that people on these forums, even if you're sympathetic to the parents involved, are maddeningly vague. They offer as little details as possible. They say almost nothing about what could have caused the alienation or what could have caused the break. They don't really specify what has gone wrong. And there's a common thread through all of them that is also not discussed, but you'll

be able to pick up on as we read some of these. So Liv and I have chosen some of our favorite. We went on a couple of forums. The big ones are Gransnet, which is vaguely related to the anti-transforum mum's net, but Grands net seems a little bit more, shockingly seems a little bit more normal. They all they have beef with each other where mum's net is weirder than grandsnet.

Yeah, mum's net is insane. Which shows something about like the where the moral rot in the United Kingdom is. Yeah. It's like generationally. Yeah, it's like Gen X. It's all Gen X. It's like Gen X moms.

And the boomers are like, all right, how do I rescue my grandson? Pensioners, just, just ranting. Yeah, pensioners. Yeah, no, where the Gen X ones, it's like people, like women who are 15 years away from retirement and are like acting crazy about it. They fully lost their minds. But anyways,

so Liv and I have chosen a couple of these. We're going to start with Gransnet. We might read some from a gardening forum, which actually had some of the most insane store. It was so bad that we had to stop reading it. We had to stop reading it. And it was like, again, a forum for like backyard gardening.

And it was some of the most disturbing things we've ever read. Yeah, it was just like a sub forum where it was like, you know, family problems or something. Yeah, and it's appalling. And then we will turn to Pitt, which is for, it's called Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans. It's a terrible title. And Pitt was formed by two like anti-trans psychotherapists in like Oregon and Seattle. For some reason in the Pacific Northwest, there just seemed to be like 100,000 evil psychotherapists who are like, all right, I have a cure for transness.

It's called a needle. And the other half of that. It's those people and skinheads are the only people in the P&D. It seems like. And then puppy girl polycules. Yeah. Yeah. So you can cause transness and cure it with a needle.

Yeah. Perfect. Which one should we start with? I think maybe the rent story. That's like a kind of classic. This one's great. Now, I really want to specify before we go in, please do not go and like track these people down.

We considered like using like AI to anonymize the stories a bit. We decided against it since you really do need some of the exact phrasing. That said, we're leaving out usernames. And please, for the love of. of God, don't like tap the glass. Don't bother these people. This is their own thing. We are inadvertently putting them on the couch and psychoanalyzing it because I think that it's worth looking at these trends and understanding how these people think. That said, don't look. Don't look. We did that for you. We are very used to cursed online communities. I think our

listeners are a no low cow just as a baseline. So we're going to present this one. Liv can start reading it. We're going to present this one as something as almost like a mystery. I want you all to kind of figure, like, as it goes on, Jake and Julian, try and, like, guess about, like, what's going on here? What's the real story here? It's very Rashaman-esque. All right. It starts. Have two children, age 20, boy and 22 girl, for university students in Ireland. The oldest finishes university at the end of April. In Ireland, unless you are very poor, parents have to pay for university.

I moved to the UK 18 months ago to get a better job to be able to support my children through university. Irish defector detected. The children live in a house that I own in Dublin. I bought it when I was 23. They pay no rent as their students. I pay all the utility bills and maintain and insure the house. They have a very expensive lifestyle as students. Lots of foreign holidays, designer clothes, no drinking several nights a week,

eat only at the best restaurants and cafes, have sushi delivered to the door when they feel like it, and take taxis whenever they wake up late and can't get to work in our university on time. This is so good. There's so much resentment here already. Just the description itself, it's like, they're ungrateful brats. They work full time and go to university. to be able to pay for their expensive lifestyles.

They still get good grades. So they're paying for all of this. They get sushi delivered, but they're paying for it. The only thing they're not paying for is their rent, apparently. Yeah. Well, they give you good grades in exchange, so be grateful. This is where the story takes a turn. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.

For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.

Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude maybe?

That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.