Like many Gen-Z'ers, 18-year-old Emily doesn’t spend much time on Facebook. Recently, though, she started using the social media platform to find a roommate and look for scholarship opportunities. While browsing, she saw her mother’s page, which she said was filled with “crackpot theories” revolving around the popular conspiracy theory QAnon. One of the posts falsely claimed to find a satanic symbol within the Democratic National Committee’s logo. For a moment, Emily was relieved to see that her mother’s friend had pushed back on the idea with a comment — until it became clear that the friend was only commenting to say that all politicians are satanic.
Emily’s mother is one of hundreds of thousands of people who have fallen into the QAnon conspiracy universe, in which America is run by Hollywood elites and Democratic politicians who happen to be satanic pedophiles intent on trafficking children and taking over the world. Oh, and, the only person who can stop the takeover? President Donald Trump.
The conspiracy theory has exploded in popularity in the past few months, with GOP congressional candidates openly supporting QAnon and the most powerful man in the country giving credence to Q’s ideas, referring to its followers as “people who love our country” and “like me very much.” It was striking enough to see the president refuse to disavow such a bizarre conspiracy theory, but his comments are particularly disturbing given that, last year, an FBI bulletin from the Phoenix office named “conspiracy-theory driven domestic extremists” a threat to the security of the country. In the past year, an alleged QAnon believer armed with multiple guns rammed a truck into a gate near Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s home and another was arrested on suspicion of plotting a kidnapping.
Emily, who requested her last name be withheld so she could speak candidly, grew up in Kentucky, in a family where it was normal for her father to give her reading material like 48 Liberal Lies About American History. She says she mostly went along with her parents’ views until she was in seventh grade and got into the popular blogging site Tumblr. There she was exposed to different ideas than those she'd grown up with, and she felt herself pulling away from her parents' ideology. Soon there was tension between Emily and her parents if they discussed anything political. On her 18th birthday, her father took away her car keys and phone and left her alone in her room because she said she wanted to vote for Andrew Yang in the primaries.
Emily now watches her mother get sucked deeper and deeper into the world of Q. “I hate it for me and I hate it for her,” Emily says. “It’s a spiral. A downward spiral.”
She tries to reason with her mother, telling her the articles she shares are from nonreputable news sources (or once, even a satirical website), but it hasn’t worked. “She gets very defensive, saying I don’t know what I’m talking about and that I think she’s stupid,” Emily says.
As her mother posts QAnon theories on Facebook, Emily gets texts from her friends: “They’re like, ‘I can’t look at your mother’s Facebook.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t look at my mother’s Facebook.’ I wish my parents had no access to social media.”
Emily has since mostly given up on changing her parents’ minds, saying it feels like a lost cause. (Facebook announced on October 6 that their Dangerous Organizations Operations team was moving immediately to remove all "Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts for representing QAnon.”)
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a sociology professor at American University who specializes in extremism, said there’s a reason Emily feels like she can’t get through to her parents. “You can’t fight conspiracy theories with logic or reason,” Miller-Idriss says. “It’s very difficult to get people to come back from. Even talking about the theory can reinforce it.”
Miller-Idriss says it’s important for children to remember that it’s not their job to fix their parents: “It’s already hard in a pandemic to maintain childhood. They need to worry about their own growth and development first.”
Mackenzie, 15, who also prefers not to give her last name to protect her family’s privacy, lives with her dad part-time since her parents’ divorce. When she’s at his house, he tries to convince her to believe in QAnon. “One thing he keeps saying is, ‘Just you wait, crazy stuff is gonna happen, you just wait,’” Mackenzie says. “I just roll my eyes like, ‘Yeah, for sure, Hillary Clinton is gonna get arrested for eating the fetuses Planned Parenthood provides to her.’”
For Mackenzie, the gulf between her and her dad is complex. “I love my dad," she says, "but at the same time I kind of hate him for this.”
Like many other QAnon believers, Mackenzie’s dad is opposed to the use of masks as a means of preventing the spread of the coronavirus. Mackenzie says her mother has even considered going to court to change his visitation rights “until he can wear his mask and until he’s ready to protect his children.”
Mackenzie says she doesn’t want to stop seeing her dad, but it takes a toll on her mental health to be inundated with debunked theories about COVID-19 being fake and the deep state. She considered not seeing her dad for awhile, but decided not to go through with it. “I love him and he loves me. We still have a father-daughter bond, or whatever, but it’s like there’s a distance to it,” she says.
QAnon is no longer just an American phenomenon; it’s gone global, spreading around the world, including to the United Kingdom and Australia, according to The Guardian.
Yesenia, 20, from Costa Rica, asked for a pseudonym to protect her anonymity. Her experience is similar to Mackenzie's: As Yesenia's dad delves deeper into QAnon, she feels like she’s losing him. She says it’s particularly difficult because she’s an only child, so she just has her mom and dad to turn to. Whether she’s having a personal struggle or looking for advice, her dad is now “probably the last person” she will go to because his answers are always wrapped up in conspiracy theories.
Now she doesn’t bother asking him for anything. “I don’t want to waste my time with that,” she says. Instead, she relies entirely on her mother. “You get used to not having your dad there to talk to,” she adds. “That’s the reality of it.”
David Neiwert, a journalist who reports on domestic terrorism and recently published the book Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us, says he typically encounters parents who are trying to save their children from the depths of a conspiracy theory. Children trying to save their parents face an inherently more difficult journey. “They’re going to have a bit harder time convincing their parents because they’re in the position of being the person with less life experience,” Neiwert explains.
Neiwert agrees with Miller-Idriss that you can't bring someone back from conspiratorial beliefs with facts and logic, because conspiracy theories are not built on facts or logic. “Those things don’t matter to a theorist,” he says. “What matters is the overall emotional narrative they get out of it. It’s telling them the stories they want to hear.”
What can motivate a conspiracy theorist to change their thinking, Neiwert explains, are the friendships and relationships they hold dear. If someone wants to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind, it’s beneficial to “find ways to deepen your relationship with them,” he says, because that’s the thing that can encourage them to change.
But even as Neiwert explains the possible paths to bring someone back from the edges of a conspiracy theory, he acknowledges that “some people go really far down the rabbit hole and become very volatile and difficult to deal with. Sometimes, your chances of success are about 1%, but people have to make those decisions to try anyway for themselves.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: How to Convince Loved Ones to Change Their Political Perspectives
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