QAA Podcast - The Parental Estrangement Moral Panic (Premium E356) Sample

Episode Date: October 4, 2026

In Premium Episode 328, Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows introduced us all to the sad world of the “Alienated Parent Forums” and, for this episode, they are back with an update on the moral panic related to parental estrangement. Since our last coverage of the topic, the amount of articles written about parental alienation syndrome by the American liberal journalist class has grown considerably. Liv and Spencer walk Jake and Julian through a couple of those pieces along with a few posts from the forums in order to get a better understanding of just how we got here. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Click here to become a subscriber to Cursed Media today to get access to new episodes of Raising Hell releasing right now, plus our other exclusive Cursed Media series: https://cursedmedia.net 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.

Well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 356, the parental estrangement moral panic. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky, Spencer Barrows, Julian Fields, and Liv Agar. Since we've talked about the moral panic related to parental estrangement on the QAA podcast, it's only gotten more intense. Of course. In the last week or so, multiple articles related to the supposedly growing phenomena of adult children cutting off their parents, have been written by the American liberal journalist class. I say go further, let's just cut everybody off.

Just cut, cut everybody off. Let's just live in like our own little vacuums, in our own, like a little plastic rolling bubble. I don't want to talk to people anymore. I'm cutting you guys off, in fact. Advantages and disadvantages. I can think of both. Yeah.

Well, on the last episode related to this topic, we mostly focused on parental estrangement forums and tried to find a general pattern in the family dynamics that produce it. As it turns out, A lot of the forum posts depicted riffs in a family driven by a father being evil to their kids and their mother failing to protect them. But given that adult children cutting off their parents is the moral panic of the month. We decided it would be a good idea to go over the general discourse on the subject and how we got here.

It was this or litigating lesbian masked bars. Oh, yeah. I have nightmares about having to talk about that one on the podcast. I had to talk about that in a group chat and it felt like playing the Jordan Flu game. It was terrible. To understand this phenomena, it'd probably be useful for us to talk about a similar concept, often used in tandem, called Parental Alienation Syndrome, a concept originally invented by Richard Gardner.

Yes, the same one who is an evil pedophile that we talked about in science and transition. I'll have to see his name again. Like its cousin, False Memory Syndrome, parental alienation is a psychology-sounding, but unsupported by the science, concept used primarily in legal context to protect abusers. As an aside, this one is even more wrong than false memory syndrome. syndrome, but we'll get into the data later. Cool. It really bears repeating that when we did the false memory syndrome stuff, we were like insanely

scrupulous and talking about where that came from and the memory war and the satanic panic and all this stuff that adds a lot of ambiguity and nuance to a really fraught discussion. And we gave ourselves a headache running it by like eight different people who work in the field. This one is so much more low stress because, you know, false memories are a real thing. Parental alienation syndrome just isn't. Like, we can just say whatever. We're good.

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, as it turns out, it's very hard to, like, force for an abuser to forcefully alienate, like, their children from their, like, ex-spouse or their partner. Like, it's, it's, yeah, it's a lot easier to talk about. Yeah. So parental alienation syndrome has seen some discussions among the journalistic media class. Thankfully, unlike the moral panic, they also treat it as fake.

Here's an example from a 2023 piece for ProPublica. Parental alienation is a theory in which one parent is a, accused of brainwashing a child to turn them against the other parent. It is most frequently diagnosed and cited as evidence in divorce and custody cases, even though most mental health professionals reject it as junk science. The theory was the brainchild of Dr. Richard Gardner, a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who made a career as a paid expert witness in more than 400 child custody cases, testifying most often on behalf of fathers accused of sexually abusing their children.

Holy shit. Talk about building a really good case for going to hell. Can I go back and talk about Richard Gardner for a second? Because we talked about this on Science in Transition, I think, episode three. But, you know, that was paywalled, so a lot of people haven't heard it. But I'm just going to read verbatim from a paper by Joan Meyer, who has done a lot of great research on this topic and spends all of her time in the fucking trenches battling parental alienation guys

in peer-reviewed journals. She rocks. But this is a quote from her paper. It is called A Historical Perspective on Parational. Parental alienation syndrome and parental alienation from 2009. Based solely on his interpretation of his own clinical experience, Gardner posited that child sexual abuse allegations were rampant in custody litigation, and that 90% of children in custody litigation are suffering from the PAS disorder.

90%. 90%. It's the most undiagnosed problem in our society. That's fucking crazy. He described PAS as a syndrome whereby vengeful mothers employ child abuse allegations as a quote, powerful weapon to punish the ex and ensure custody to themselves. It's funny because if you look at the empirical literature, a lot of cases where there is actual alienation,

it's abusive dads turning their kids against their moms. Like, it is the complete opposite of this. He further theorized that mothers enlist the children in their campaign of denigration and vilification of the father, that they often, quote, brainwash or, quote, program the children into believing untrue claims of abuse by the father and that the children then would fabricate their own added stories. Gardner also claimed, with equal lack of basis, that, quote,

probably over 95% of all non-litigation sexual abuse allegations are valid because, quote, sexual activities between an adult and a child are an ancient tradition, a, quote, worldwide phenomenon. I mean, that's just true. That's just, you know, that's kind of true. And have, quote, been present in just about every society study to both past and present. Gardner viewed Western society as, quote, excessively punitive in its treatment of pedophilia as a, quote, sickness in crime. He attributed this Western overreaction to the influence of Jews.

Come on. The Jews are stopping us. What the fuck did we do? Thank you, Jews. That's the best stray I've ever seen. Yeah, the conspiracy is usually the other way around when it comes to, you know, Jews and pedophilia. The conspiracies usually go the opposite direction. Yeah, I thought we were eating the babies, not fucking them.

Yeah, I thought that, you know, Jews are like, like in the conspiracies, they're, you know, pro, not anti, but, you know, so goes anti-s. anti-Semitic theories, you can kind of do whatever you want with them. It's a your own adventure. But this guy just strikes me as just kind of medicalizing, you know, like husband's rights, like men's rights, kind of stuff. Yeah, it's, yeah, it is just like, you know, parent custody stuff. He coined like parental alienation syndrome and a big mistake because like making like a diagnostic criteria out of like a cultural phenomenon is kind of a, you know, it's a bad idea because it requires a lot more heavy scrutiny. And And, you know, like the false memory people dropped the syndrome because the idea of it being

like a medical category wasn't really supported by the science. Similar thing here. The pro parental alienation people generally just say PA now or parental alienation. I wanted to get into the fact that this is like an ongoing academic like interpaper debate and it's really funny. I'm not the best at reading like medical papers. So I like sent them to my friend who works in childhood psychology. And he read some of the parental alienation papers with the.

he's like, what the fuck is going on here, man? Like, what are, like, what, they're still replying. And basically, like, the pro PA guys are like, it's, we can't prove this, but they're kind of fudging their data. Like, Meyer, I think, responded to one of their papers. There's this guy like Desmondos or something. He's got some horrible Greek name. And Meyer responded, it's like, yeah, you completely miscoded your data.

If you correctly coded it, then all of these, you would get an old hypothesis across the board. And then in their response, they had to be like, oh, that was a mistake. Sorry. And then they like completely rechanged what they were basing the criteria on. Like they did a study on parental alienation, but they only used confirmed cases of parental alienation that were proved in a courtroom, which is not useful because if it's proven in a courtroom, you can't measure it against a control variable. So no, these, they're, I mean, we can't say that they're defrauding and faking their data, but the impression's there. It seems there's a very clear bias in how these people are going about trying to prove parental alienation. nation is like a real measurable thing. Yeah. And they're doing it with like the most fudged data possible. Yeah, because like every friend of theirs that they're talking to, you know, it's a,

it's 10 out of 10, all parents alienated. Yeah. Yeah. We also have a quote from that demosthenes Lorandos. Yeah, demosthenes, yeah. In the ProPublica piece, in relation to Richard Gardner. Demostanis. Did I get that right, demosthenes?

Demostenis. No one fucking goes. Demostanis. Well, your fucking listener named asbestos is fucking screaming at his computer right now that I'm pronouncing these names wrong. 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 Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickledown 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.