“Now the family tree goes like this,” the man on the tape extolled confidently. “John John and…Trump are cousins. And Trump’s uncle is JFK Sr., and Joe Kennedy, who is also not dead…. And Trump’s father is General George Patton, and his brother is Mussolini…”
Colleen Protzman listened on, despondent. The man talking on the tape was her son, Michael Protzman.
“And the thing is,” she said, “he believes that.”
Her son had become the leading figure in a QAnon off-shoot that believed John F. Kennedy Jr., who died in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard in 1999, was alive and secretly working with former President Donald Trump to save the United States from an evil cabal.
It’s the kind of conspiracy theory that one might assume manifests only in the dark corners of the internet.