Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Q and on is now the most prolific online conspiracy
theory of the twenty one century. None of their predictions
came true. Q has vanished and the storm never came,
but Q and on is still alive. I'm Jake Hanrahan,
and this is series two of Q Clearance, a podcast
shedding light on the ongoing Q and on conspiracy theory.
(00:24):
This is a production of Kudatar Media and I Heart Radio.
Today we're going to be taking a look at the
effect Q and on has had on families and relationships.
As you can imagine, much like a cult, it has
been devastating for many many people. Now, before we get
(00:45):
fully into it, I want to bring your attention to
one of the most brutal cases of Q and on
warping a family dynamic that I have ever seen. What
I'm about to read out is a statement from a
Stoneman Douglas school shooting survivor. The Stoneman Douglas shooting being
the eighteen massacre in which a gunman opened fire and
(01:09):
killed seventeen people in a Parkland, Florida school. This is
what one of the survivors of that is having to
deal with thanks to Q and on. This is from
the q and On Casualties board on Reddit, and it goes, quote,
I survived the Stoneman Douglas school shooting, and my dad
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is suddenly convinced I'm a liar and part of a
false flag operation. Sorry if this is long, but I
gotta get off my chest. I think my dad has
gone fucking insane. It's going way too far, and I
have trouble processing the last five months. He's always been
very conservative, but now q and on has consumed his
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life to the point where it's tearing our family apart,
along with my mental health. Back January, he saw the
video of Marjorie Taylor Green harassing David Hogg, another student
from Stoneman Douglas, about the shooting being a false flag operation.
And while my dad was already inter cue, he'd never
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gone down that particular rabbit hole. And now he's convinced
everything was a hoax, and it breaks my fucking heart.
He's done quote extensive research on body language and claims
he can tell Nicholas Cruz is a radical comic actor
who was paid to sacrifice his life in order to
remove our guns. He's questioning why they released the interrogation
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footage if not to further deceive the sheep, believing everything
they see. He also stays the trial will be rigged,
and the reason they're talking about the death penalty is
to prevent him from ever talking just in case. What's
really fucked is that he knows I never want to
hear about him or see his face ever again. I've
(03:00):
been very clear on that, and I always leave the
room when he starts talking about him. I keep telling
him to please, please fucking stop, but there's no reaction
or empathy whatsoever. Even burgundy colored T shirt to make
me uncomfortable. That's what the shooter was wearing, and he
used to be so understanding. He stopped wearing it around me.
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That person is completely gone, and I miss him so
fucking much. You're a real piece of work to be
able to sit here and act like nothing ever happened
if it wasn't a hoax, shame on you for being
part of it and putting your family through it too.
He'll say stuff like that straight to my face whenever
he's drinking, and I wonder if he'd still say it
if he knew what it does to me. It's bringing
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back so much of my survivor's guilt, and I fucking
hate him for it. I worked in it for so long,
and now I once again feel like the biggest piece
of ship for being able to have good days when
their parents still grieving. I can't take more of him
berating me and purposely trying to trigger me to see
if my PTSD is real or not. He's seen me
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breakdown and cry my eyes out multiple times, which I
never ever did before. Sometimes I wonder if he's hit
his head or had a fucking stroke, because I almost
can't believe it's the same person. What the funck is
Q and on doing to people. My breaking point was
yesterday when I borrowed my little brother's iPad and saw
that he'd search for things like Stoneman Douglas fake proof
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and Stoneman Douglas real dead body. I practically begged my
mom to give my dad an automatum to get professional
help or move out. She's really timid and hates confrontation,
so all she said was trying not to be home
as much and wait it out. I have no fucking
idea how to deal with this. It's too painful for
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me to keep living like this, hearing his name almost
every single fucking day and being accused of accepting money
to be part of it. Even if my dad magically
snap out of this cube bullshit, I don't think i'd
ever forgive him for putting me through this when I
was just recently starting to do relatively well. So fuck
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him for that, and fuck you and on and fuck
Marjorie Taylor Green for ruining my dad. Even though I've
definitely felt like it, I don't think getting physical would
do any good at all. I instead try to remind
him to look back at the texts I sent when
I was sure the shooter was about to enter our classroom.
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I asked him to look me in the eyes and
still argue I'm able to fake what I wrote in
those messages, But no luck. End quote. So that was
a post from a lad who survived a school shooting
and is now being accused by his own dad of
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being some kind of crisis actor, some kind of fraud
thanks to the insanity of Q and On. This Stoneman
Douglas shooting survivor is having to relive the trauma of
the massacre over and over again via his own father.
As I mentioned, that post is from the Q and
(06:15):
On Casualties board. This subredit has been incredibly sad to
read through whilst doing my research for this episode, but
it's something that has to be done to really gauge
an idea of how destructive Q and on can be.
I spoke to one of the key moderators of the
Q and On Casualties board. He's known online as Poker Politics.
(06:39):
He had a lot to say on the ways that
Q and on has helped destroy whole families. Okay, so
first of all, give us an idea of what exactly
Q Casualties is. Why was it set up well? And
Casualties was a subredit. There was kind of an offshoot
from what was called cult Headquarters, which was the separatedit
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where people were going to make memes making fun of
Q and Q and on reporting on that kind of stuff,
and then somebody else started it as a more serious
um support group for family and friends who have had
people get into Q and on and become a different
person and basically strange relationships that were happening. So it
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was a place it wasn't There wasn't much to it,
and that was just what we were going for, making
a support group for uh again, family and friends who
had someone get into Q and on and now they
they're not who they were before. Then COVID hit and
there was the lockdown, and suddenly the forum just becomes
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huge because so many people are getting exposed to all
this misinformation and going down the rabbit hole of Q
and on, and then their family and friends are trying
to figure out what's happening to them, and then they
find our forum, and it just it really became terrible
that we became so popular is what basically happened. And
it was at this point that because of what we
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were doing and because of Q and On's popularity, media
and other people started looking into the forum and talking
to us. Basically, at that point, the moderators were like, well,
we we just sort of started to set this up
as a as a support group, as a way to
meet other people dealing with this problem. We're not really
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into Q and on, we're not really um people that
understand that movement. And I'm like, well I do. At
this point, Poker Politics essentially became the paman for the
Q and On Casualties Board as more journalist media people
started to get in touch with them. The reason he
knew more about Q and on than the other motivators
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is because he too was once sucked into conspiracy theories.
I grew up basically as a conspiracy theorist. I was
in school, I was obsessed of the assassination of Raf Kennedy.
I was a nine eleven truther or for a period
of time in my life. And then when I got
out of that, I started looking at it from the
other side, and I was like, why do people believe
(09:12):
in these things? Why did I believe in these things?
And then and this led me to following the Illuminati
New World Order stuff on the internet and all the
websites about that. And then I started hearing about Q
and On in two thousand eighteen, and it was just
getting so big and there was so much buzz around it,
and I knew it was just the Illuminati story that
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I've been hearing for decades, and I was like, I
was why is why is this breaking through? When the
Illuminati story remained really kind of niche and wasn't that
uh big in the mainstream. So I started digging into
Q and On to try to find out what it
was going on about it, and then I saw how
they had tied the Illuminati story to Donald Trump. As
(09:54):
the hero, how he was going to save the world,
and you were now mingling mainstream American politics and with
the niche conspiracy theory. And it was at that point
that I was like, well, now I gotta get on
social media. I gotta get more active, I gotta start
engaging on this. Okay, So let's talk about some of
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the cases or the situations you've seen through being a
moderator on the Q and on Casualties Board. What have
you actually seen? What has Q and on done to
some of these families that go there um to talk
about it. The stories are always just like so tragic
because this person finds something that seems to be innocuous
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and they started talking about it, and then after that
happens for a couple of weeks and then it gets
then it gets even weirder and worse, and then you
eventually get into the the are people bad people are pedophiles,
They're bad people, are child trafficking. It's like the Wayfair
scandal that nonsense, and you you just see it like
(11:01):
take off on these people. And it's always and I
mean I wunna say it's always, but like so much
of the time the person seemed like a grounded, rational
person who would never fall for this kind of stuff.
And that's what something that always happens is like like
people are like, oh, but my husband's so intelligent, he
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would never fall for this kind of thing or whatever.
And intelligence never is a defense against this kind of
belief like this Q and on and things like it
fulfill an emotional need. They do something for a person
that they're not getting from outside sources, and you don't
see it coming and most of the time until it's
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too late. I mean, unless you're with somebody all the time,
you you wouldn't notice what's going on. And that's what
makes it so jarring, is that it just feels so
sudden for so many of these people that their loved
one was one person one day, then a whole new
person the next. There comes a point where there is
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no changing the situation, There is no fixing the problem right.
And why is it with Q specifically that it seems
like they can't agree to disagree, Like the wife or
the husband or whatever can't just go right. I believe
in Q. You don't know, but I'm going to shut
up about it to say this marriage or whatever, why
is it? Why does it seem that Q is just
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so destructive in that regard. It's because Q is such
an aggressive movement when it comes to prosplytizing. The whole
basis of Q and On is the belief in the
Great Awakening, this massive payoff that's supposed to happen. It's
some ill defined point in the future when all the
bad guys get arrested and Donald Trump saves the world.
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And one of the beliefs about the Great Awakening is
awakening people that when you become a part of Q
and On, it's your h You now have a mission
to recruit more people into Q and On. You have
to grow the community to help trigger the Great Awakening.
And so they and they're on the chains and all
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these social media platforms, they have guides on how to
manipulate people, how to rope them in, how to lure
them into the movement. So it becomes it's a um,
it's imperative that you get your friends and family to
believe because that's the only way we can win and
defeat the deep state. So you just really, uh can't
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uh have a live and let live attitude when you're
dealing with a a family member or a friend who
is a Q and on supporter. There's always a part
of them that's gonna want to pull you in. They
it's very hard for them to not be uh, for
them to be quiet, because they've been told by their
community and the people who are now effectively like their
(13:53):
new family. You gotta get more people. You gotta get
your wife, you gotta get your you gotta get your kids,
you gotta get your parents. You got to bring people
in because the only way we can undo the brainwashing
of Bill Gates and George Sorrows and all the bad
guys is by getting superior numbers to them, right right,
got you, um to to really kind of give our
(14:14):
listeners an idea of how serious this is. Um, maybe
just give us a specific example without exposing anyone of
how Q and on has really shout at someone's family. Um.
There was a report about a month ago of a
husband and wife who were in a custody battle and
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that when the wife had a custody of the children, uh,
she killed them. And it was because she believed that
the entire city was involved in a child sex trafficking
ring and that the children were going to be abducted
at some point and sold into this bondage. And on
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the Q and On Casualties for or UM, someone posted
a message to that headline and said, this was Q
and On. I am a family member, but I want
to remain anonymous about it. But the this is I'm
I'm a relative of the husband. I know the wife,
I know the mental issue she was going through and
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this is what drove her to this and that's that.
So and again it's a it's a message on the internet.
Take it with a grain of salt and all that stuff.
But the reporting that came out about what the woman
believed about the massive child trafficking community and all that stuff,
I mean, it fits the narrative of Q and On.
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I mean, if it's exactly what they believe or what
they subscribed to. Whilst we weren't able to completely verify
that horrific situation explained to us there by poker politics.
There have been several other shootings that have Q and
On firmly at their periphery. To be frank at this stage,
is not at all surprising that someone with serious mental
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health issues, spurred on by a Q and On would
take things too far and commit murder and as we
just heard for the last twenty minutes people all across
America choosing to destroy their families in favor of an
internet conspiracy theory. I don't think there's ever been something
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this divisive and vicious to come entirely from the Internet
with no evidence whatsoever and become this wide spread. Remember again,
there are hundreds of thousands of Q and on supporters
on the most extreme end of it. Q and on
pulls people away from their families the same way a
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cultic church does, only there is no church, nor building,
nor base nor headquarters. It's all done online. So to
escape such a cult, all one has to do really
is log off. But they can't. It's as if they're addicted.
It seems that in reality, the so called storm that
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Q and on predicted is coming was actually the destruction
that it has caused to so many people's lives. For some,
it's turning from an online conspiracy theory into a dangerous
mass delusion. Q Clearance is brought to you by I
(17:36):
Heart Radio and cou Data Media. I'm Jake Hanrahan. You
can find me online at Jake Underscore Hanrahan. That's h
A N R A H A N You can get
Q clearance merch at dark wash dot net. This episode
(17:58):
was produced by myself, with fact checking and additional research
by Sarah Hightower. The music is by Sam Black and
the sound was mixed by Thomas Griffin at Splicing blockh