https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wikileaks-julian-assange-at-very-high-risk-of-suicide-attempt-psychiatric-expert-tells-court

https://voat.co/v/QRV/4034259

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange at "very high" risk of suicide attempt, expert tells court

London — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange complained of hearing imaginary voices and music while detained in a high-security British prison, a psychiatrist who has interviewed him told his extradition hearing on Tuesday. Michael Kopelman, a psychiatrist who has interviewed Assange around 20 times, said the former hacker would be a "very high" suicide risk if he were extradited to the United States for leaking military secrets.

He cited as evidence Assange's "severe depression" and "psychotic symptoms," which included auditory hallucinations while in solitary confinement in his cell at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in southwest London.

Kopelman told the Old Bailey court in central London that Assange said he hallucinated music and voices saying "you are dust, you are dead, we are coming to get you".

Assange's suicidal impulses "arise out of clinical factors… but it is the imminence of extradition that will trigger the attempt," he added, warning "he will deteriorate substantially" if extradited.

Assange's partner Stella Moris has previously said she feared he would take his own life, leaving their two young sons without a father.

James Lewis, representing the U.S. government, quizzed Kopelman over the veracity of some of Assange's claims, suggesting he may have made them up.

Assange faces 18 charges under the U.S. Espionage Act relating to the 2010 release by WikiLeaks of 500,000 secret files detailing aspects of U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Washington claims he helped intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to steal the documents before exposing confidential sources around the world.

If convicted, Assange — who has been held at Belmarsh for the last 16 months — could be jailed for up to 175 years.

U.S. authorities recently laid out new evidence, alleging that Assange and others at the whistleblowing site recruited hackers.

The extradition hearing is the latest in a series of legal battles faced by Assange since the leaks a decade ago.

In 2010, he faced allegations of sexual assault and rape in Sweden, which he denied.

He was in Britain at the time but dodged an attempt to extradite him to Sweden by claiming political asylum in Ecuador's embassy in London.

For seven years he lived in a small apartment in the embassy, but after a change of government in Ecuador, Quito lost patience with its guest and turned him over to British police in April 2019.

>>10753541

>>10753544

Welcome to the future.

>>10753542

>>10753525

(72)! wowee zowee

>>10753429

>>10753575

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/21/1008654/cias-new-tech-recruiting-pitch-more-patents-more-profits/

https://outline.com/5zxKRy

CIA’s new tech recruiting pitch: More patents, more profits

The newest federal lab gives the CIA and its officers the unprecedented ability to make money off inventions that come from within the agency.

America’s most famous spy agency has a major competitor it can’t quite seem to beat: Silicon Valley.

The CIA has long been a place cutting-edge technology is researched, developed, and realized—and it wants to lead in fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology. However, recruiting and retaining the talent capable of building these tools is a challenge on many levels, especially since a spy agency can’t match Silicon Valley salaries, reputations, and patents.

The agency’s solution is CIA Labs, a new skunkworks that will attempt to recruit and retain technical talent by offering incentives to those who work there. Under the new initiative, announced today, CIA officers will be able for the first time to publicly file patents on the intellectual property they work on—and collect a portion of the the profits. The agency will take the rest of the balance. Dawn Meyerriecks, who heads the agency’s science and technology directorate, says the best-case scenario is that the agency’s research and development could end up paying for itself.

“This is helping maintain US dominance, particularly from a technological perspective,” says Meyerriecks. “That’s really critical for national and economic security. It also democratizes the technology by making it available to the planet in a way that allows the level of the water to rise for all.”

It’s not the first time the agency has worked to commercialize technology it helped develop. The agency already sponsors its own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, which has backed companies including Keyhole, the core technology that now makes up Google Earth. Meyerriecks says the CIA maintains relationships with a variety of other venture capitalists with the same goal.

It also works closely with other arms of government like the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to do basic and expensive research where the private sector and academia often don’t deliver the goods. What CIA Labs aims to do differently is focus inward to attract—and then keep—more scientists and engineers, and become a research partner to academia and industry.

Officers who develop new technologies at CIA Labs will be allowed to patent, license, and profit from their work, making 15% of the total income from the new invention with a cap of $150,000 per year. That could double most agency salaries and make the work more competitive with Silicon Valley.

CIA Labs is looking at areas including artificial intelligence, data analytics, biotechnology, advanced materials, and high-performance quantum computing.

One example of an immediate problem Meyerriecks says the agency faces is being overwhelmed by the amount of data it collects. Militaries and intelligence agencies around the world deal in a multitude of sensors like, for instance, the kind of tech found on drones. The CIA’s own sensors suck up incalculable mountains of data per second, she says. Officers badly want to develop massive computational power in a relatively small, low-power sensor so the sorting can be done quickly on the device instead of being sent back to a central system.

Of course, efforts to develop new technology inevitably run into questions about how it will actually be used, especially at an agency that has long been a fundamental instrument of American power. Some inventions have been uncontroversial: during the Cold War, Meyerriecks says, the agency helped develop lithium-ion batteries, an innovative power source now widely used by the public. More recently, however, during the war on terrorism, the agency poured resources into advancing nascent drone technology that has made tech-enabled covert assassination a weapon of choice for every American president since 9/11 despite despite ongoing controversy over its potential illegality.

>>10753584

When Kristen Alden moved to Thousand Oaks, California, two years ago, she joined the local moms’ Facebook group, Moms of Conejo Valley. She figured it’d be a good place to find out about activities for her seven-year-old, and she looked forward to unloading some old clothes, books, and toys to younger kids in the neighborhood. Every once in a while, someone would post something that Alden, an attorney, disagreed with—in particular, she began to notice that a few moms had a habit of sharing anti-vaccine memes. But it was infrequent enough that she just rolled her eyes and ignored it.

But then, when the pandemic began, the tone of the posts suddenly changed. The antivax moms became louder, and there seemed to be more of them. They began posting rants about how masks mandates and social distancing rules were “tyrannical,” and violated Americans’ civil liberties. Some of them claimed that the coronavirus vaccine would contain tracking microchips made by Bill Gates, a notion popularized by a viral video called Plandemic, released May 4, 2020 on YouTube.

Alden remembers that when dozens of members of the groups posted the video, she and a few others politely noted in the comments that Plandemic’s wild claims—for example, that the virus was created in a lab and that it’s “activated” by masks—had been thoroughly debunked by a range of medical professionals and fact-checking sites like Snopes. It had “absolutely no effect whatsoever,” she recalled, “because, they would just come back with, ‘Well, they’re, they’re all in on it. Snopes is owned by [liberal philanthropist and conspiracy theory target] George Soros.’”

Alden, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, became more alarmed as she watched the group appear to rally around the blatant coronavirus misinformation earlier in the summer. Then, after a few weeks of this, some strange hashtags appeared at the end of the conspiracy-minded posts: #savethechildren, #pizzagate, #wayfairgate. All of these, she discovered, were key themes for a wildly outlandish and increasingly popular conspiracy theory called QAnon, which alleged that a cabal of elites—especially Democratic politicians and supporters—trafficked children, sexually abused them, and drank their blood. But all was not lost, because Trump would soon stop them with the biggest sting operation in history.

Ever more bizarre plot twists gained currency. Some had been circulating for a few years already: “#Pizzagate” referred to the idea that the child sex ring was operating out of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant—this theory emboldened an armed man to show up there in 2016 to liberate the supposed victims. More recently, “#Wayfairgate” alleged that the internet home furnishings company was a part of the trafficking, too. As the anxiety around the pandemic heightened, Alden watched in horror as these bizarre ideas moved from the fringe to the mainstream of the moms’ group. “There’s always going to be some people who have some have some kind of out-there views,” she told me. “But when you see a post about how Wayfair is trafficking kids through throw pillow purchases, and there’s already 30 or 40 people liking it, it’s just like, wow.”

>>10753597

The intrusion of paranoid ideology that Alden observed in her moms’ group is part of a broader pattern that has appeared in online parenting communities since the pandemic began. Moderators in several different parts of the country, who were in charge of groups ranging in size from roughly 10,000 to 40,000 mothers, told me about a dramatic uptick in posts that refer to outlandish plots by the government, celebrities, and even scientists to control citizens. Moderators—who are responsible for removing posts that violate groups’ policies around misinformation—are finding themselves scrambling to keep up with the influx. Katy Strang, who moderates a moms’ group in Camarillo County, California, told me that before March, she only occasionally had to remove a post. These days, she removes 30-50 posts every week. “It has been infuriating—the amount of misinformation, conspiracies,” she told me. Anne Green, who moderates an online moms’ group in Collier County, Florida, said she faces the same problem, and she often finds it difficult to determine which posts cross a line. “I believe in open discussion, and I value all of my members’ voices,” said Green, whose name has also been changed. “But for some people, this is their only source of information. I feel such a responsibility.”

For that reason, the moderators I talked to stay up late at night combing through the day’s posts—sometimes hundreds—to remove misinformation. For a while, the whack-a-mole strategy seemed to be working. But despite their best efforts, the conspiracy thinking only seems to be gaining strength. Now, the moderators report, conspiracy-minded members have figured out a workaround: When their posts are removed by a moderator, they simply post it again in the comments on another post. “Sneakily, people are commenting on random posts about like, who’s a good dentist to go see,” says Strang. “It’s crazy.”

But there’s a broader problem, says Seema Yasmin, a Stanford physician and expert on health misinformation. Conspiracies, Yasmin says, thrive in the absence of clear and consistent guidance from leaders. As the pandemic wears on, the Trump administration continues to contradict itself, sending mixed messaging on testing, schools, masks, and social distancing—not to mention the possible vaccine. Parents are left to their own devices, relying on incomplete information to keep their families safe. “We are in a state of heightened anxiety and fear, and we’re looking for a way to understand what’s happening in the world,” Yasmin said. “Charlatans are plugging those knowledge gaps. They’re saying completely false things with a sense of authority.”

Strang, the Camarillo moms’ group moderator, sees that dynamic play out every day as she sifts through the moms’ group feed, trying to root out the most paranoid posts. “I get it, we’re stuck at home with our kids, it’s hard, we’re all losing our minds,” she told me. “Trust me. I’m there too. But I think some people are beginning to believe that thoughts equate to fact.”

>>10753603

QAnon didn’t start out targeting parents’ groups. Its true origins are murky—some have suggested that the theory was amplified by Russian operatives to further destabilize American democracy. It gained popularity beginning a few years ago, first in the right-wing fringe, then it made its way through the evangelical Christian community and into some libertarian enclaves. So sprawling is the QAnon universe that it seems to be able to adapt to prey on the specific fears of subgroups. In the case of parents, of course, that’s kids.

No matter where they lived or how large their community was, all the moderators I talked to had the same experience. It all started when lockdown began back in March with a trickle of odd posts. First, came the questions about social distancing measures, then pseudoscientific “research” about how masks make coronavirus worse and social distancing can weaken the immune system were shared. In May, Plandemic appeared and after that, the trickle of memes became a torrent. Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were part of the “deep state,” for instance, and the government was using mask orders to force citizens into complicity through “trauma bonding” (a psychological phenomenon similar to Stockholm Syndrome wherein victims feel dependent on their abusers). As the spring wore on, the #saveourchildren QAnon hashtag gained momentum, and some members used moms’ groups to organize in-person rallies against child trafficking and what they believed was rampant pedophilia. Some of the moderators I talked to had the impression that many moms who shared these ideas didn’t know that they were part of a broader conspiracy theory.

“It just seemed like the floodgates opened,” said Green, of the Collier County, Florida, group. All of a sudden, the members of her group had gone from obsessing about their kids’ lunches to sharing QAnon memes about child trafficking. In many cases, the posts originated in smaller, private Facebook groups composed of people who share the same worldview. Where Kristen Alden lives, in the politically mixed community of Conejo Valley, a group called Conservative Moms of Conejo Valley is the source of many posts. In Florida, there’s a group called Un-masked Home Schoolers of Collier.

The spread of misinformation isn’t restricted to local parenting groups—it’s also flourishing in holistic child-rearing and natural birth communities. On his Facebook page, Dr. Bob Sears, an attachment parenting guru and vaccine critic with 97,000 followers, rails against school closures and COVID vaccines. Based in Southern California, he has invited his local followers to attend “freedom rallies” protesting mandatory masks and social distancing measures. In his podcast, “The Vaccine Conversation,” he promotes the discredited coronavirus treatment of hydroxychloroquine and celebrates citizens who are “pushing back against state government” on mask mandates and business closures.

While Sears doesn’t explicitly mention any of the more far-fetched QAnon ideas, his followers do in the comments. “It will take the entire world to stop the corruption of Bill Gates, the World Health Org, the CDC and the FDA, collectively known as the ‘#medicalmafia,’ reads one comment on a post criticizing the idea of a mandatory COVID vaccine. In response to a post in which Dr. Sears praises the CDC for calling for schools to reopen, one commenter speculates that the CDC is “planning some 5G rollouts in/near schools which will help fuel their ‘second wave’ narrative.”

>>10753612

Some have gone further. Take the Instagram account Informed Mothers, which has 39,000 followers and the tagline, “Our society isn’t chronically ill + pharmaceutically dependent by accident. It’s time to take a stand.” The group used to share anti-vaccine memes and promote herbal medicine and other alternative remedies, but starting last spring, the mix included coronavirus-hoax memes. Today, the account vacillates between innocuous “hippie mom” jokes (“Hippie dippie mommas teaching their kiddos the alphabet like ‘A is for apple cider vinegar” keep it going”) and QAnon memes. “Nothing to see here…just mainstream media protecting pedophiles again,” reads an August 13 post. A July 10 post reads, “Pizzagate isn’t looking so crazy now, huh?”

Yolande Norris-Clark is the cofounder of the Free Birth Society, a Canadian group that was established to train women to give birth at home without professional assistance. Clark, who has more than 25,000 followers on Instagram, mostly used to share photos of her eight children and memes about the virtues of childbirth without medical interventions. But lately, her account has a distinctly different flavor. “The mask is a religious icon: devotion, piety, propriety, obedience,” she posted on April 11. “It’s a literal muzzle; a symbolic scold’s bridle.” On her Youtube channel, with a serene smile and a lilting cadence she imparts insights from QAnon ideology. In a video she posted on August 1 titled “Bringer of Light—Fear, Surveillance & Revolution,” she describes coronavirus as a government hoax and alludes to a revolt. “More and more people really are starting to wake up,” she warns.

The idea of awakening to the truth is a running theme in the recent social media postings of Dr. Christiane Northrup, a board certified OB/Gyn author of the influential 1994 book holistic women’s health book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom. She describes herself as “a visionary pioneer and a leading authority in the field of women’s health and wellness, which includes the unity of mind, body, emotions, and spirit.” An advocate of unmedicated childbirth and a critic of childhood vaccines, she has 108,000 followers on Twitter and more than 500,000 on Facebook. In her writing and posts, she blends conventional medical advice with alternative and new age practices like herbal medicine and reiki. But since the pandemic began, her posts have become darker, featuring coronavirus conspiracy theories nearly every day. Beginning in March, she has been sharing QAnon videos and memes, often with the “savethechildren” hashtag.

In the spring, she railed against contact tracing, masks, and vaccine development. Nestled among Facebook posts about weight loss and childbirth-caused incontinence are a series of videos called the “Great Awakening,” in which she refers to the idea that the government’s nefarious scheming will soon be revealed. “Those of us who know what’s going on are going to be all hands on deck,”[1] she says in a September 12 video. “You and I know—we see things that others don’t see.” In a September 17 video, she praises the video Plandemic.[2] On Twitter, her posts are more extreme, sometimes with racist overtones. On September 4, for instance, she shared a World News Daily article titled: “Appalling: Airline bans U.S. flag on face masks, but is apparently fine with ‘Black Lives Matter”—a reference to the QAnon-adjacent idea that Black Lives Matter peaceful protest groups are actually plants by the “deep state” to sow chaos and violence in American cities.

Derek Beres, a freelance journalist who hosts the podcast Conspirituality, about conspiracy thinking in the new-age community, recently devoted an episode to Northrup. “She’s been very influential—women, mothers, have really appreciated her advocacy around the idea that you know best for your own kid, that doctors are just trying to make money off you and your family,” he told me. He explained how this fits with Northrup’s recent slide into the QAnon trope of rampant child sex trafficking. “You imagine your child being stolen or molested,” he said, “and that’s just hitting the same fear button.” Indeed, my colleague Ali Breland noted this in his 2019 piece “Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies so Obsessed With Pedophilia?” He wrote, “Conspiracies centering on the vulnerability of children are neither new nor distinctly American.” This is just the latest iteration.

>>10753614

Then there’s the holistic nutrition group Nourishing Our Children, whose Facebook page has nearly 84,000 followers. A project of a 21-year-old popular holistic nutrition advocacy group called the Weston A. Price Foundation, Nourishing Our Children says its mission is to “address the dramatic deterioration in the health of our children,” and it promotes diets for babies and kids that are heavy on high-fat foods that come from animals—think red meat, lard, and butter. The group advocates against vaccines and in favor of the consumption of raw milk (which is illegal in many states because it can harbor dangerous bacteria).

In the past few months, the Weston A. Price Foundation and Nourishing Our Children have promoted ideas that go far beyond quirky diet advice into the territory of health disinformation, especially around COVID-19. The groups oppose mask mandates and social distancing measures, and they rail against the idea of a coronavirus vaccine. Once more, the transition from garden-variety health disinformation to QAnon conspiracies seems inevitable. An August 10, post on Nourishing Our Children reads, “Spread the word. #savethechildren in the comments of this post, please!”

On August 14, Nourishing Our Children invited followers of its Facebook page to join a book group to discuss a book called The Contagion Myth. Written by Weston A. Price Foundation president Sally Morell and a naturopathic doctor named Thomas S. Cowan, who is currently under probation for gross negligence in the treatment of a patient. The book puts forth the theory that not only is the coronavirus not contagious, but that the symptoms of the disease are actually caused by 5G cell phone networks, part of the government’s master plan to track citizens. It also argues that “masks, social distancing and vaccines do no good and can only make the situation worse.”

In the comments on Nourishing Our Children, readers draw comparisons between what they see as unwholesome additives in children’s food and far-out theories of government control. In a comment on the post about the book group, one follower expressed skepticism about the notion that 5G networks are to blame for coronavirus. Another disagreed and pointed out, “WHO, funded by China, also has vested interest in one of the biggest 5G makers, Huawawei. So this is similar to McDonald’s telling you that vegetable oil is not going to make you sick.” In a way, the group’s longstanding fixation on purity of food seems to have primed them for other paranoid ideology.

That holistic parenting and birth groups are venturing into extremism doesn’t surprise Timothy Caulfield, a professor of law at University of Alberta’s School of Public Health, and the research director of its Health Law Institute. Caulfield, who studies health misinformation and is the author of the book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? notes that many parents might find a single point that rings true in their message. “Yes, pregnancy and birth have been medicalized inappropriately in the past, that it has been a problem, and yes, women’s health needs have been ignored, and women haven’t been listened to,” Caulfield said. These groups use those perfectly legitimate complaints to defend their belief in dangerous practices such as having a baby without any professional guidance, skipping vaccines, and feeding children unpasteurized milk. And Caulfield notes that these hardliners have little tolerance for other points of view: “It’s like, ‘If you agree these things are a problem, then you agree with the entire package of our perspective. And if you disagree, then you’re the enemy.’ They’re very good at doing that.”

>>10753615

It’s alarming enough that these especially toxic conspiracy ideas are spreading in online parenting communities, but now those groups are beginning to organize face-to-face events, as well. Several of the moderators told me that moms had used the Facebook groups to plan anti-mask rallies. Strang, the Camarillo group moderator, said that when community leaders warned against Halloween trick-or-treating, some parents said they would pass out candy anyway in protest. Green, the Collier County, Florida, moderator, said that when moms in her group planned a Black Lives Matter vigil in the wake of the George Floyd killing, other moms showed up to counter-protest. Another time, when moms in her group planned a “Save the Children” rally, she agonized over what to do: She supported the idea of raising awareness of child trafficking, but some of the members planned carry signs promoting discredited QAnon ideas like #wayfairgate. “What was I supposed to do?” she said. “It would have looked like I wasn’t in favor of ending human trafficking.” She ended up leaving the post up but turning off the comments. (The rally did end up happening, but Green doesn’t know how many people showed up, since she didn’t attend.)

Nourishing Our Children regularly urges its Facebook followers to attend the Weston A. Price Foundation’s annual conference. The agenda includes several sessions targeted at parents, including “Homeopathy for Children” and “Vaccine Fraud.” It also includes a session about the group’s belief that coronavirus isn’t contagious, and another about the dangers of 5G cellphone networks. Originally, the event was supposed to take place in Portland, Oregon, but because of the coronavirus, the city has temporarily banned large gatherings.

The conference is now scheduled to take place at a Sheraton hotel in Atlanta. “This hotel won’t require our group to wear masks or keep distances,” the group explains on its events page. On Facebook, about 800 people have already RSVP’d for the conference—some of whom may be nurses who will earn continuing education credits for attending. The group says that these credits are accepted by the credentialing body of the Maryland Nurses Association. (The Maryland Nurses Association didn’t respond to my request for comment.) A spokeswoman for Marriott, the hotel chain that owns the Sheraton brand, said that the company “requires everyone, at all hotels across North America, to wear a face covering” and that “we have engaged the franchise manager of the hotel to address this.” As of publication of this piece, Weston A. Price Foundation was still advertising its mask-free conference.

The prospect of actual virus cases coming out of online communities’ live organizing rattles public-health experts. When I told Caulfield, the health law and misinformation expert, about the Weston A. Price’s maskless conference plans, he was audibly shocked. “Really?” he said. “That’s incredible.”

>>10753617

Over the summer, Kristen Alden, the mother in Thousand Oaks, California, left her Facebook moms’ group. The conspiracy posts were weighing on her, and she didn’t need the extra stress they caused. Still, she struggled to make the decision to quit. “I realized that it’s a form of denial to leave the group because it’s not like they don’t exist anymore,” she said. “Those are still women who are next to me at the grocery store, but I don’t need the detailed reminder.”

The moderators I talked to all said they knew of many mothers who had quit the groups, like Alden, because they felt alienated among people who had once served as a supportive community. Strang, the moderator of the Camarillo group, says she feels deep sadness when she thinks of the mothers who come to the group assuming they will find a safe place—and are met with conspiracy theories instead. “These groups are such a support system for so many people,” she said. “So it’s just sad when people try to take them over advancing their bizarre agendas.”

But it can be difficult to figure out how to change the minds of people who are convinced that they are correct. In a recent advice piece about conspiracy theories spreading through online parenting communities, The New York Times suggested, “If it’s someone you don’t know personally, respond with facts.” That’s a start, but Yasmin, the Stanford physician and health misinformation expert, believes that approach might not be enough. “More and more I’m seeing that misinformation and disinformation are packaged with political information—vaccines and masks are anti-freedom, anti-American,” she says. “You don’t counter that by citing studies. These are tied into beliefs about freedom and what it means to be American.” In other instances, the misinformation is packaged in a way that’s meant to tug at parents’ heartstrings —say a story about a child who died after receiving a routine vaccination. In order to combat misinformation, Yasmin says, pro-science groups will have to beat the purveyors at their own game, finding effective ways to reach fellow parents. One idea that some vaccine advocacy groups are already trying out: sharing stories of children who died of vaccine-preventable diseases. “Compelling and well-told stories on parenting sites—those can really connect with parents,” she says. “They offer an emotional connection that’s very hard to counteract with facts.”

Moderators are trying hard to dial back the misinformation and instead promote the kinds of things that the groups were founded to provide: maternal bonding, information about community activities, and advice-sharing on parenting. The onslaught of paranoia can be utterly exhausting, and the conspiracy theorists are relentless, especially the way they recombine in private groups. After I reached out to Un-masked Home Schoolers of Collier for comment on this piece, a member sent me this post:

Still, the moderators keep doing their jobs because they believe the groups are important. “Some days it’s like why, why do we do this?” said Strang. On the especially late nights, when she’s reviewing the day’s mountain of posts, she reminds herself that for many moms, the group is a lifeline. “I’ve had people come to me and say it saved their lives—if it wasn’t for this group, they would have literally jumped off a bridge, but they found support,” she said. “That’s the reason I keep doing it.”

>>10753621

These articles are always so damned looooong.

stop beating me over the head I'm not buying it

>>10753595

>https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/23/qanon-conspiracy-theories-loved-ones

The QAnon orphans: people who have lost loved ones to conspiracy theories

For some Republicans, QAnon is an opportunity to garner support. But for those who have lost loved ones to it, QAnon is a destroyer of families and relationships

‘We’re going in opposite directions on the reality scale.’

“I lay awake at night and worry if my brother’s going to shoot a bunch of protesters,” said Daniel, 36.

Daniel, whose name has been changed to protect his family, always had a close relationship with his twin brother, Greg. They had “that twin thing, that twin bond”, Daniel said.

The brothers had visited each other often when they both lived in Wichita, Kansas, usually spent holidays together, and continued to talk at least once a week, even when Daniel moved overseas. They disagreed on politics – Daniel is a centrist Democrat, and Greg had espoused libertarianism – but their political differences had never come in the way of their relationship.

In early June, however, they had a major fight. Daniel had heard from their mother that Greg was posting on social media about the Boogaloo Boys, an armed far-right movement in the US that seeks to incite civil war. When Daniel called to confront his brother about the extent of his involvement with them, Greg had insisted that the Boogaloo movement was just an internet joke – but he also said that he hoped the country would, indeed, descend into civil war. The brothers argued and hung up on each other.

On 1 July, Daniel called to apologize. Greg said he was busy, as he was on his way to a counter-protest to a Black Lives Matter (BLM) rally in Lawrence, Kansas. He had packed his guns in the car, and was intent on helping local police identify BLM protesters. According to Greg, protesters and antifascist activists were “looting and rioting”, and he intended to do his part to stop them. “He said that antifa was lynching people and sending them to re-education camps,” said Daniel.

The demonstration was not without violence, though not on the protesters’ part: two cars attempted to plow through the crowd; no injuries were reported. There was no truth to what Greg had said. The brothers have not spoken since.

“He couldn’t tell what reality was,” said Daniel. “I didn’t know who I was talking to. I felt like I was talking to someone else.”

Daniel began to research online, trying to find where his brother was getting his misinformation. Greg had said something vague and outlandish before about pedophile rings, but Daniel had assumed his brother was talking about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, and that he had been especially upset because both twins had experienced childhood sexual abuse.

But Daniel soon learned about QAnon, a far-reaching and baseless conspiracy theory that alleges, among other things, that Donald Trump is conducting a covert operation to save millions of children from a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles.

From the outside, QAnon is a deranged spectacle. For some Republican leaders who stand to benefit from its influence, QAnon functions as an opportunity to garner political support. To the FBI, QAnon is a domestic terror threat. But for those who have lost loved ones to it, QAnon is a destroyer of families and relationships, a multi-faceted virulent idea that is often impossible to combat.

>>10753647

Qanon first appeared online in October 2017, when a user named Q began posting to 4chan, an anonymous imageboard, about a coterie of Satanist pedophiles who control the media and kidnap children en masse. Since then, the conspiracy has exploded in popularity; in June, the Guardian found that QAnon pages on Facebook and Instagram together have an aggregate 3 million members or followers.

While many conspiracists were originally Trump supporters who have now found an additional reason to back him, the theories have also started to convince others.

“When Trump was first elected, Mike was really upset,” said Susan, a 33-year-old teacher from the Minneapolis-St Paul area in Minnesota. “Neither of us voted for him. He didn’t have anything positive to say about Trump. And now he’s saying Trump’s working with John F Kennedy Jr in order to rid the world of pedophiles and human trafficking.”

Susan and her partner, Mike, have been together for seven years. Susan has requested that she remain anonymous to avoid further friction with Mike. In the beginning, Susan was drawn to Mike’s kindness and altruism. “He’s really thoughtful and always really positive,” said Susan. “He was always pushing me to do better things.”

Mike had long been interested in conspiracies, and had said strange things about aliens and water fluoridation, but Susan had found it “endearing and weird and harmless”, she said.

But over a year ago, Mike began talking about QAnon. After the pandemic hit and Mike spent more time indoors, on social media, he became obsessed. “It’s been an exponential thing,” said Susan. “He’ll spend hours ‘researching’, which is just watching YouTube videos and going on Twitter.”

Susan and Mike began to fight frequently. Mike continuously tried to convince her, sending her videos she found upsetting. “He would get so mad that I wasn’t ‘open-minded’,” she said. “He’ll say I’m programmed, or that I don’t realize I’m a slave, or that there’s a secret war. He has all the information and I haven’t ‘done the research’. It got to a point where I just didn’t care.”

Susan researched how to speak to loved ones who have joined cults. She attempted to establish common beliefs with Mike, and encourage him to examine cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, to no avail . Susan now believes that her relationship is over. “I would like to help him navigate out of QAnon, if that’s something he wants to do,” she said, “but it doesn’t seem like it is.”

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On the subreddit r/QAnonCasualties, users gather to support each other and share stories about the people whom they’ve lost to QAnon. “Losing my marriage to QAnon,” writes one user. “I lost my entire family tonight,” writes another. Together, they theorize about the potential common factors that could be driving their loved ones into conspiracy thinking.

“There’s really no evidence that belief in conspiracy theories like QAnon should be thought of as a symptom of mental illness,” said Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist and professor in the department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He has authored a Psychology Today series about QAnon.

“Inasmuch as QAnon has been likened to an online cult, it’s possible that evidence about who tends to join cults – people who feel lonely or are struggling with symptoms of anxiety and depression and are searching for emotional connection and group affiliation – might apply to some who get immersed into the online world of QAnon,” Pierre said.

This analysis has resonance for Crystal Wade, 35, who met her best friend, Denise, in beauty school. After Crystal moved to another state, she and Denise kept in touch digitally and regularly had hours-long phone conversations.

“We used to talk about everything,” said Crystal. “If I was upset, she was the first person I’d call, and she’d bring me back down to earth. She made me feel grounded.”

In April 2020, Denise began seeing a new boyfriend, whom Crystal never met. Denise was concerned about his social media postings, however, and seemed embarrassed about how incoherent he was online. She shared her boyfriend’s accounts with Crystal.

“There were no periods in his sentences,” Crystal said. “It went from gods, to demons, to Katy Perry.”

He was posting QAnon conspiracy theories, and to Crystal’s disappointment, her friend seemed to believe parts of it. QAnon’s allegations are often based in a smattering of truth, such as Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities and the entertainment industry’s struggle with widespread sexual abuse and harassment. But in the conspiracy world, there are no coincidences, and everything is interconnected to a farcical degree. “He was taking it to another level,” said Crystal. “Hidden messages in music videos, illuminati symbolism, celebrities abusing kids to have eternal youth.”

Denise’s relationship lasted only two months, and from what Crystal heard about it, it seemed very volatile and at times hostile – and the conversations she had with her best friend turned increasingly towards the subject of the occult. “She’d say it wasn’t his fault he was being such a terrible person to her, he’s suffering because he’s being possessed by demonic forces,” said Crystal.

Denise had been interested in new age spirituality and was not particularly religious, but the boyfriend seemed to influence her towards an apocalyptic version of Christianity. Denise soon threw away her tarot cards, believing they were “inviting demons” into her house, and began frequently posting Bible verses on social media.

“I would never judge a friend for being religious,” said Crystal, “but it was overnight and didn’t seem organic at all.”

>>10753657

Crystal tried to handle the situation delicately, reasoning that her friend was going through a traumatic time. After the relationship ended, however, Denise began to talk about “Pizzagate”, a conspiracy theory that served as the precursor to QAnon.

Crystal froze once Denise mentioned it; she had, until then, not yet realized how deep her best friend had fallen into conspiracy thinking. “My stomach dropped,” she said. “I felt sick.”

In 2016, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory falsely alleged that Hillary Clinton and other prominent figures in the Democratic party were trafficking children, and that victims were being held at Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC. In 2020, alongside a deluge of Covid-19 misinformation, Pizzagate has experienced a resurgence.

Denise began to send Crystal videos. One of them, titled “PedoGate 2020”, opens with a chilling piano theme. A soft-voiced narrator then claims that a hidden message in a photograph of Barack Obama and Anthony Bourdain is linked to trafficking children. It also makes bizarre and seemingly-unconnected allegations tying together Instagram hashtags, Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis, and internet personality Bhad Bhabie.

“I couldn’t make it through even a minute of those videos,” said Crystal. “It was absolute insanity.”

After the upsurge of Black Lives Matter protests in June, Crystal became more active on Facebook and Instagram, making posts in support of the movement – and found herself in an uncomfortable social media cold war with her best friend. Denise was convinced that Black Lives Matter and the Covid-19 pandemic were orchestrated ploys to distract the public from the allegations made by QAnon. These were not just political or ideological disagreements: they were disagreements on the nature of reality. They never discussed it. Their conversations just seemed to stop.

“I haven’t reached out to her, and she hasn’t reached out to me,” said Crystal. “How could I have known a person for this many years and not know that she’s like this? Am I a bad judge of character?”

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“Falling for these types of groups happens to all types of people,” writes Steven Hassan, a mental health counselor who specializes in destructive cults and mind control. “It is a human experience to be taken advantage of, in many cases, and life goes on. You aren’t stupid or a bad person. We must continue to educate.”

Hassan advises the family members and friends of QAnon conspiracists to engage with them carefully, steer them away from sources of conspiracy information, and encourage them to start questioning what they believe.

But combatting an idea planted in the mind of a loved one is a complex undertaking.

“I don’t really know what my wife’s thinking, and it’s not my business to know everything she’s thinking,” said Henry, a 56-year-old from the Portland, Oregon, area. “She’s her own person. But at the same time, we’re going in opposite directions on the reality scale.”

Henry’s wife, Lisa, began talking about QAnon at a family dinner. Henry was alarmed to discover that Lisa appeared to believe that kidnapped children were being kept on a secret base on Mars. Lisa was raised in a Christian Evangelical community, but began to lose her faith as an adult and no longer considers herself religious. Henry theorizes that part of QAnon’s attraction, for Lisa, is the resemblance it bears to Christianity: notions of struggle between good and evil, a maligned messianic savior, a narrative that invokes the massacre of the innocents. QAnon adherents speak of “the Storm”, an event that echoes the Abrahamic concept of the Last Judgment, when Donald Trump and the US military will carry out a coordinated global purge of the members of the supposed pedophile cabal.

“My greatest fear is that she’s being brainwashed,” Henry said. “I’m working really hard to show her I’m on her side. We both want the truth, we want the same thing.”

In an effort to limit the amount of conspiracy content Lisa views online, Henry said that he regularly uses her iPad to access her Facebook and YouTube accounts. As surreptitiously as he can, he unsubscribes her from QAnon accounts. It feels like an intrusion, though, and makes him uneasy.

“I’m not a snoopy guy or a jealous guy,” he said, “but this Q thing is a danger. She doesn’t need to be in the exact same spot as me politically, but she can’t be in a different reality.”

The QAnon conspiracy may assert the existence of untold masses of abused children, but perhaps it is an easier pill to swallow than the unfettered chaos of present reality, where the gap between poor and ultra-rich is ever-widening, and rising sea levels threaten the future of human life on Earth – where millions of children are indeed abused, but not at the hands of a singular organization that can be eliminated with a simple mass arrest.

QAnon presents an idyllic alternate reality where the Covid-19 pandemic is a hoax rather than a deadly threat egregiously mishandled by multiple governments, where systemic racism is but a psy-op, where the universe is ordered and finite, and justice is on the horizon. Conspirators have convinced themselves of the world they wish to see.

Henry, meanwhile, also has a conviction he wants to believe: “Faced with undeniable evidence, she’s going to have to swing towards truth,” he said. “The truth will eventually win out.”

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