What I Learned Inside the Lonely, Sad World of QAnon Facebook Groups

Good article from Vice. Warning - language.

An avid connoisseur of internet morons, the moment I learned about QAnon I was immediately curious, and began going about joining the private Facebook groups where Q followers regularly congregate. What I found was a frothing cauldron of insanity, where people asserted that the Santa at Trump rallies was the not-actually-dead JFK Jr, biding his time until he could come back and arrest Michelle Obama, and where no admission of belief was too embarrassing. It got much, much worse around the holidays.

If I’m being completely honest, I yelled out loud at the bologna/doritos Thanksgiving dinner sandwich. Nobody was home and I still yelled. Normally I would find these things too sad to be funny, but Q followers (almost all self-described deplorables) blur the line between being tragic and hilariously gullible. And these posts, far from being the exception to the rule, are actually the norm in the Q-niverse.

As you probably noticed from the examples I have provided, the Q crew is made up of a very specific archetype of internet denizen: elderly right-wingers who have gone too far down the online rabbit hole. Diving into any given thread you’d be lucky to find someone who’s age drops below 55—but you will encounter one of the most unnerving melanges of psychotic ramblings and hateful screeds available anywhere. Calls for sanity are met with accusations of “controlled opposition,” and the only theories that are criticized are ones that question if the group has gone too far. But more importantly, almost every single member of Q’s following seems to have one glaring and unifying trait: They are deeply, heartbreakingly lonely.

Given the obviously bullshit premise of the entire thing, it seems likely that the Q movement will fall apart at some point in the future. A more open-ended question is what happens to the army of olds that it has amassed over the year, and what their lives will look like in a post-Q world. These people seem genuinely sad—quietly aware that the world has mostly passed them by, and desperate to define themselves as something more than simply a cog in society’s system. They see themselves as brave truth-tellers, warriors for unnamed children that Hillary Clinton is currently eating sous-vide, and from this they gain purpose and self-worth. When it becomes clear, as it invariably will, that they have been had, I wonder whether they will be able to comprehend this fact, or if they will be able to find their way back to the real world.


https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/gyapg7/what-i-learned-inside-the-lonely-sad-world-of-qanon-facebook-groups