‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents
Here’s what it’s like to lose the person who raised you to a far-right cult.
Shortly before
Joe Biden was inaugurated, Sam’s mother began stocking up on food in a panic. He didn’t know why, but he knew it probably had something to do with
QAnon.
The 19-year-old started to notice changes in his mother’s behavior around the beginning of the
coronavirus pandemic. She had always been a nervous woman: She stopped flying after 9/11 and had hovered closely to Sam and his two younger siblings for their entire lives. But during the COVID-19 crisis, his mom’s paranoia spiraled from quirky to deranged. It has turned her into someone he hardly recognizes.
Though she didn’t used to be very political, she now fears the president is a pedophile who stole the election. She’s scared of radiation from the 5G towers in her neighborhood and, as a white woman, she told her son, she’s afraid of being harmed by
Black Lives Matter protesters — a movement she once supported. She worries that Sam’s brother and sister are being “indoctrinated” at their public high school and wants to move them to a Catholic one. She’s also refusing to get them immunized against COVID-19 as false rumors swirl that the vaccine contains a secret location-tracking microchip. (She was initially terrified of the virus but now considers the lockdowns an affront to her freedoms.)
“She wasn’t always like this,” Sam said. “It just keeps getting worse.”