dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Now you guys have done it, you're breaking up families!!

My Boyfriend Reads QAnon Theories. I Still Love Him—But I'm Worried.

The mother of all conspiracy theories disrupts family dynamics and tests loved ones.

While sipping wine and enjoying dinner one chilly evening in February, Kim Holmberg's boyfriend Blake Sohn told her with a straight face that he'd found an online thread claiming to have substantial evidence that Hillary Clinton is a pedophile.

"I was horrified," Holmberg says. "I said, 'That's absolutely insane. Where is this coming from?'"

It was coming from QAnon. The conspiracy theory, spread via social media, encompasses a range of pre-existing theories, from Pizzagate, to the belief the DNC arranged the murder of Seth Rich, to the idea of a witchy Hillary Clinton who oversees a coven.

For some families in which politics is already a fraught topic, the emergence of someone who follows QAnon can transform family dynamics into a hothouse of raw emotion and test relationships in extreme ways. It's not uncommon for loved ones with varying degrees of interest in conspiracy theories to reach a fork in the road. At that point, the person either accepts it or else they move on.

Holmberg and Sohn, both 60, met on Match.com a year and a half ago. They knew about their polar opposite political views and teased each other about it. She campaigned for Clinton in 2016, and he, a staunch conservative, was a Donald Trump devotee. But QAnon—which Sohn had been looking into long before news outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post started reporting on it—was unlike anything she'd heard.

One of the main QAnon theories boils down to this: According to some believers, there is a cabal of Democrats running a child sex ring, and Trump is trying to shut it down with the help of Robert Mueller. Yes, in this theory, Mueller is helping Trump. The Russia investigation, according to the theory, is merely a cover to keep the pedophiles from discovering Trump and Mueller have teamed up to take them down.

QAnon was born in 2017 after an anonymous poster on a 4chan message board (some think it was created as a hoax by trolls) claimed to be a government insider with highly-classified intel about "HRC extradition." Later, some users would nickname the poster (or posters) "Q," after Q clearance, the Department of Energy's top-secret security clearance designation. QAnon has since gained popularity on Reddit and social media, but went mainstream at a Trump rally in Florida on July 31 when people sporting "Q" shirts showed up.