Hi Everyone,
I hope that you’re managing to stay sane, healthy and safe. I feel lucky that I can say two of those three items are true for me … my sanity, I’m not so sure about.

I just read this CNN article and thought it worth pointing out: He went down the QAnon rabbit hole for two years. Here’s how he got out.

I boiled down what I feel all ex-members can relate to:

* Jadeja said he was in the midst of a 15 year struggle to finish his degree. He’d pulled away from friends and become socially isolated. “I just felt completely overwhelmed… I was probably in a deep depression I think when I found Q,” he says.

*Jadeja perused websites that aggregated posts supposedly from Q, … then he’d read the interpretations of from other believers. These interpretations are popular among the QAnon community because posts from “Q” are often so vague that they can be read in any number of ways. The tactic tends to lure in supporters the way fraudulent psychics can — there’s little solid information given, so almost anything can be taken as confirmation of a pronouncement by “Q.”

*QAnon was all he wanted to talk about. That made life offline increasingly difficult for him, and he pulled away from friends.

*”I think superficially it did seem like [QAnon] gave me comfort,” Jadeja said. “I didn’t realize the nefarious kind of impact it was having on me because it was very insidious how it slowly disconnected me from reality.”

*Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher, said QAnon preys on vulnerable people.”I think it’s a mistake to say that QAnon is a conspiracy theory, because this kind of makes it sound like Area 51 or Big Foot,” he said. “It’s a community of people that radicalizes them into a world view, that just essentially detaches them from reality.”

*After two years in the world of QAnon, Jadeja said, cracks began to form in his conviction. He said, he was noticing more logical inconsistencies in QAnon’s theories.

*As his doubts mounted, he decided to research and saw that that information he’d once seen as irrefutable, was simply coincidence. That was a turning point for him.“It was the worst feeling I had in my life,” Jadeja said. 

*Looking back, Jadeja said, he doesn’t think there is a single relationship in his life that wasn’t affected by his time believing in QAnon. “It’s destroyed some of them to this day. It’s strained a lot of them to this day.” But there’s one thing in particular that he regrets the most: sharing QAnon with his father. CNN reached out to Jadeja’s father multiple times for a comment but he did not respond.

The takeaway – if you’re reading this post, you probably know how this happens. So don’t let friends fall down the batshit crazy QAnon rabbit hole.