Did the Houthis Sink the USS Eisenhower?

I think up to like twenty five years. Potentially, it could stay in the field without needing to like refuel or anything like that.

of Aiden right now, throwing down with the Houthis. And on the thirty first of last month, there was a series of attacks launched by the Eisenhower along with some of our British allies, striking thirteen Hoothy targets at various locations in Yemen. This was in response to a number of attacks that the Hoothies had launched recently on shipping in the region, including I think they hit a Greek

ship a couple of times. The strikes came also a day after the Hoothis shot down an m Q nine Reaper drone, which was the third downing of a Reaper drone in May, so the Hoothies have been dropping Reapers pretty regularly. So anyway, all of this led to a massive series of strikes that were kind of you know, launched from the Eisenhower on Houthy targets. Houthy rebels said that the air strikes killed at least sixteen people and

wounded thirty five others. I think that death toll has risen since the article, the Washington Post article I'm looking at now, and that you know, we're going to be talking about things that are credible and not credible. If the Hoothies say, given the attacks launched, that death toll seems pretty credible to me, just based on other strikes that I've read about. The Houthis launched a retaliatory strikes on the Enterprise, or at least they claim that they did,

wait on the on the Eisenhower. We did used to have an aircraft carrier name the Enterprise. I don't. I think we've decommissioned it since I'm blaming real fast.

no evidence of this whatsoever that's been posted. The story seems to have started percolating out into kind of lefty media when Huthy Press people made this announcement. I think the first direct statement I found about it outside of like Hoothy press resources was a Twitter account called for an online news magazine calling West Asian geopolitics called The Cradle.

I'm not wildly familiar with the Cradle. They've got something like one hundred and nine thousand followers on Twitter, and they seem to mostly be you could say, like a broadly sort of anti imperialist left. Most of their content lately is very pro Gaza. You know, there's stuff like articles about Israeli organ trafficking networks in Turkey. You know, they've got like video clips of like pro Palestinian protesters getting dunks in on pro israel protesters, a like protests

and stuff like that, very standard stuff. On the thirty first, they posted a they made a post, yeah, basically restating what the Houthis had said, although they instead of saying the Houthis made a claim that they had struck the Eisenhower, they claimed it was ye Many armed forces. It's an easy way to tell that someone is not accurately reporting on what's happening in Yemen because the Houthis are actively

at war with yem Many armed forces. Like that is the actual reality of the situation on the ground over there. So this got picked up by chunks of lefty media, and particularly like American lefty media. I think one of the first big accounts to take this story was a guy named Ashton Forbes. You know Ashton.

launching massive strikes on Gaza. And they primarily exist within the profit ecosystem that Elon established in Twitter, right, where if you have a verified account and you get a lot of engagements from other verified accounts, you get a chunk of money from Twitter, right, And so all these people figured out that, like there's a huge appetite for reposted videos from Gaza, or videos that you just claim

are reposted videos from Gaza. A huge number of them are from Syria, and if they make people really angry or horrified, they'll get shared and get a ton of engagement and you will get a check, right, Like, That's that's where Ashton comes out of. That's where all these guys come out of. So Ashton sees, I don't know if he picked it up directly from the Hoothy Press people.

I don't know if he picked it up from that thing on the cradle, but he posts the next day breaking and he's got Of course, of course I'll show you. I'll share screen Garrisons. You can see he's got he's got the two sirens. Yeah, he's got the two little signs on either side. Oh yeah, No, of course there's a million of this guy. This guy is all over the internet. A source has informed me that the USS

Eisenhower has been sunk all caps. Mainstream media reports from yesterday claim the ship was not hit by houthy missiles. Social media shows conflicting reports of damage. I'm seeking corroboration on this potentially huge story. So first we see the escalation of the HOUTHI say, we shot at the Eisenhower and we hit it right. They didn't claim they'd sunk it. I think because the houthis are like they're not dumb,

and like that's an easy claim to disprove. Whereas, yeah, you can kind of like there's not as much live footage of this, you could kind of get away for a while with making people think maybe you damaged it a little bit, or at least you got close, you know. But a source a source, yes, a source from citizen journalist Ashton Forbes.

people who call themselves citizen journalists putting out bullshit. But like it's also filled with instances of citizens doing crucial journalism in the absence of credential professionals.

received a Pulitzer Prise the next year for her video. However, journalism, while again there's a lot of value in citizen journalism, journalism is also a technical trade and there are in fact some things that random dirbs on the Internet should not report on, and an attack on the Eisenhower is maybe one of them. To make a long story short,

the USS Eisenhower was not sunk. It is virtually impossible for non state forces like the Houthies, with the weaponry that they currently enjoy, to sink a vessel like the Eisenhower. And for a little bit of context on why that is the case, I want to talk about another aircraft carrier called the USS Independence. The Independence was one of many many aircraft carriers produced by the United States to curb stomp the Empire of Japan during World War Two.

After that war, we found ourselves with way more aircraft carriers than we needed or could afford to operate indefinitely at peacetime. So we decided to do the smartest thing we could with all these extra aircraft carriers and nuke them.

towed back to San Francisco after being nuked twice. Two nukes could not sink a nineteen forty six aircraft carrier.

send one of these fuckers to the bottom of the ocean. Right, that's just kind of sure physics, you know.

the situation. If the houthies were able to get like some subs that were capable of like actually getting through you know, the dragnet of boats that are defending the Enterprise, and they could get any kind of you know, decent sized torpedo underneath it, they might have a chance of sinking it.

which which is shocking to it is shockingly horny. So I want to note while while I'm talking about the impossibility of the Houthies using their current methods, which are basically when it comes to how they've been attacking the Eisenhower, they've been either flying drones at it, trying to ram it with an explosive drone, or launching cruise missiles at it, right, and all of these are basically aiming for the top of this boat, because that's kind of the option they have.

one point. This French submarine is part of the OP four, which is like opposition forces during a war game, and it sinks the Roosevelt and most of its escorts in like a simulated battle. And this is you know, it's very funny because like the French military posted about this and then had to delete it because it was really embarrassing for the Navy, and it's seen as evidence by people who actually know their shit about naval power and

naval warfare. Is like, oh, US anti sub interdiction tactics and technology really took a hit in the post Cold War period. We stopped putting money into it because like we thought, well, who's going to send subs after us if the Russians are gone? Right?

realistically be sunk. Right, Some bootleg Iranian missiles are not going to sink the most advanced carrier in the world today. Two nukes couldn't do a comparatively shitty carrier in nineteen forty six. Now, this is all pretty obvious to anyone who knows the first thing about modern naval warfare. But it was not obvious to our citizen journalist friend, Ashton Forbes.

When numerous people pointed out to him that his claims were absurd, he replied, yeah, I wanted to hold back on this story in case it's not true, but I trust my source and the media reports stink to me. If this ends up being wrong, all ready tracked. But the implications are too huge not to report.

So when somebody says the implication or too the implications are too huge not to report on what they mean is I wanted the clout in traffic from getting this out first, and I don't really care if it's true. Now, yeah, it happens to be quite easy to prove that the US S. Eisenhower is still among the living because the captain of that boat is a poster. His name is oh God, Oh. This man posts like you wouldn't believe Garrison.

I've never seen a commanding officer in the US military who posts like this man.

which showed no signs of being underwater. I think that was kind of his subtle way of being like we are still making like cinnamon rolls, like everything is fine on board this ship. In short order, Internet Salutes discovered that the the video clip posted by Forbes that claimed to show the Eisenhower in flames was Garrison. Do you want to guess where this what this was a screenshot from?

military vehicles being destroyed. It's just clips from ARMA three. Now, a brief glance into the backstory of Ashton Forbes would have made it clear that his claims were nonsense, As this write up by George Allison in the UK Defense Journal notes, Ashton Forbes, despite his self identified role as a citizen journalist, has I'm told history of posting sensational and often unverified claims, particularly about Malaysia Airlines Flight three seventy.

It almost seventy was a commercial flight that disappeared in twenty fourteen we'll en rout fro Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, leading to numerous conspiracy theories. Now we don't actually know why MH three seventy went down. I think probably the leading theory was that the pilot committed suicide. But even that,

I don't think that there's like strong. I don't think it's it's very unclear, could have just been a fuck up, something like It's we really don't know, which is why there's so much conspiracy.

journalist's big scoops free energy announcement. Free Energy, otherwise known as over Unity, is one hundred percent real. The devices exists already. I have been told exactly how an operational device works. I signed an NDA, so won't be able to disclosed specifics.

You've got people working for Iran, for Israel, for Russia, for the United States, all trying to push their own sundry lines of propaganda using the engines of algorithmic virality. And then, of course there are the legitimately hopeful but ill informed. And these are the people that I have sympathy with and who I'm kind of like total focusing on.

These are people who are understandably numb from constant exposure to a barrage of photos and videos of war crimes, and they are desperately ready to believe in some kind of miraculous underdog victory. Right, Hollywood fiction has trained us all to see that as possible. This is being thought of by a lot of people who are just numb and broken from videos of horror as like, well, I don't know, maybe we could have our Star Wars moment, right,

maybe we've got a Luke Skywalker downing the death Star. Now, the Hoothies aren't Luke Skywalker, and the Eisenhower isn't entirely the death Star. It's like it's got shades of Death Star, it's got some Death Star DNA and it sure, yeah, I mean it's closer to closer to a Star destroyer, closer to a Star destroyer, right right, right. One of the posts I came across Researching this was Alden Marky, who describes himself as a counter propagandist and researcher with

a focus on Yemen. He posted a photoshop of the Eisenhower from above with a dagger in the water beneath it. This was accompanied by the text uss Eisenhower was just struck for the second time in twenty four hours and it had something like two thousand likes two hundred and

fifty thousand views when I came across it. Another account quote tweeted this and got nearly five thousand likes, saying it won't happen, but it would be so fucking funny if Yeman sinks an aircraft carrier, like can you imagine? And I think that guy represents the more common attitude, which is this mix of on we and desperation. Right, nothing is going to stop this massacre. It seems like that. It really feels like that, right, But wouldn't it be

rad if something did? And to be realistic, I don't know that. I think there's a real odds that dropping the Eisenhower somehow would stop net Yahoo from what he's doing. I mean maybe it would, like it would certainly reduce the ability of the United States to interdict Iranian missiles coming into Israel. But I don't know that. I think that it's realistic that that's going to stop Netan Yahoo from doing the shit that net Yaho's doing. You can

feel however you want about that. It's not irrational to be like, boy, I don't think this is real, but like I wish it was right, So you can feel however you want about this guy wanting, you know, thousands

of US soldiers to get murdered. I get both, Like, I don't think that realistically anything the Hoothies are doing is going to stop what Israel's doing at this point, but I also understand just desperately wanting some violence to come down on the other side of this thing after months of watching videos of the slaughter in Gaza, you know, especially.

is not an irrational feeling, right. You can contrast that to the posts of independent journalists and newsgrifter Richard Medhurst with four hundred and eighteen thousand followers, who posted this on June second, yem instruct the best ship in the US Navy with ballistic and cruise missiles. The ship is fleeing and the captain of the US S. Eisenhower tried to do damage control by posting a video of the deck on Twitter. But it's an old Instagram reel from thirteen weeks ago. Left Yemen never lie.

hundred thousand likes. Medhers tis hundred thousand or four thousand likes sorry, four hundred and eighteen thousand followers, four thousand likes on the post I see four thousand likes? Is still a mess? Is a sizable super?

one post, he I know it's. In one post, he notes that the Houthis recently shot down an m Q nine Reaper drone, which did happen, and claims the US won't admit to that either, and like, I haven't run into the US denying that this happened. There's three clear cases of m Q nine's being shot down last month alone, right, Like, we actually know a lot about this, which is part of why I don't believe the Eisenhower shot down, as they the Houthis were able to prove quite readily that

they had shot down the MQ nine's. I have seen no proof that the Eisenhower's been hit. Right, And this isn't just a case where like the Houthis should be able to provide some actual proof if they'd done this. The Eisenhower is a floating city with a population of thousands. There's like seven or eight thousand people. I think at least in the whole strike group. I will conceie that the military could probably keep a lid on an attack against the Isenhower and might even temporarily be able to

hide the fact that it had suffered minor damage. But you're not keeping any anything significant secret for the long haul, right, Like you just you can't. You can't keep secrets like that. There's too many people. They're going to talk to their families. If the boat goes down with thousands of people on board, family members are going to be like, boy, none of us have heard from our loved ones in a while. Right.

are just as good as real ones. And I think there are people within the leadership cadres of the Houthis who know that perfectly well, it is entirely possible that the Hoothies find themselves low on munitions after months of conflict with the US, and somebody smart realized, like, what if we just say we shot at them, right, It'll have the same propaganda impact and we won't have to waste a missile.

Israel commits war crimes. Now, the reality of the situation is that the Huthis themselves have committed their share of war crimes, some of which are reminiscent of the very crimes committed by Israel. In December of twenty fourteen, the Houthis laid siege to Yemen's second city, Taies, leading to a humanitarian catastrophe, as this article from The Guardian lays out. Quote.

Sincerely April, when the resistance, an alliance of local forces dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, fought off the Houthi's attempt to control the city, the militia retaliated by cutting off roads, preventing food and medical aid from getting in. Access is only allowed through a single checkpoint dubbed the Rafa Crossing by the residents after its more famous namesake, on the

Egypt Gaza border. Every morning, long queues form outside the crossing by those wanting to enter the city, Huthi malicious search and confiscate medicine, cooking, gas, cigarettes, bottled water, or anything more than a small shopping bag of food. In order to survive. The city has for months been relying on groups of young boys and long trains of donkeys to bring its supplies a long and arduous journey through the mountains. But donkeys alone can hardly fulfill the needs

of the city. Medicine and food have all but disappeared from the market, and the prices of what are left have jumped in the last few months, pushing most of the population below the poverty line. Now the comparison between Ties and Gaza are striking, right, Like the crossing was called Rafa you know.

this conflict was inarguably even worse. The Saudi led coalition, using US weaponry put the whole country in a state of siege that like led to catastrophic famines and situations very similar and in some cases worse than what the Huthi did to Ties. Right, Like, this is the this is I mean, it's war, right, this is like unspeakable suffering compounding on unspeakable suffering. Right. You've probably heard that old saying when you stare into the abyss, the abyss

stares back. And there's a corollary to that statement that I think is relevant to some of the fantasies that some people on the left have about the hoovies. When you start giving yourself up to false realities, eventually you can lose yourself entirely. And we're going to talk a little bit about that, but first lose yourself to these products. We're back. So people like Medhurst, you know, postlike by these guys, they aren't meant to inform people about the

real world. Medhurst's fans, the people who take him seriously, have departed reality in favor of a fantasy. Because that fantasy world is the only place in which victory feels possible. There's a term that you and I talk about a lot garrison, coined by the author Robert Anton Wilson, that I think is useful in dealing with situations like this,

and that term is reality tunnel. The concept is complex and explanations of it tend towards long, but the basic idea is that we in the modern world are all constantly flooded by information from our senses and from the different information delivery devices that we filled our world with. In order to function, we have to triage that information, to pare it away until we get to a reality

that we can live inside. The fact that human beings can and perhaps inherently do this is not necessarily bad, and in fact, I might argue that without the ability to choose and flip between different realities to change the channel, as Wilson put it, positive progress is impossible. I found this explained well in an essay on Wilson's work by Mikola Bilokonski. Quote, we can slide between reality tunnels by consciously choosing to pay attention to things we might normally ignore.

It's hard at first, but is skill that we can develop with practice. Train yourself to pay more attention to the emotions of the people you're speaking to, for instance, and you'll be surprised at how much richer the world gets. Train yourself to pay attention to your caloric intake, and eating fundamentally changes. Train yourself to hear the voices of minorities, and suddenly you see racism and sexism everywhere. Now, those other reality tunnels like that you can key yourself in

on are always there. They always exist, right, You just had to actually learn the filters that you existed within in order to access them.

other realities can find them. I want you to think of one of my favorite recent Trump World grifts, right, is these kind of this company that started putting out these like ads with an obvious AI Donald Trump or Elon Musk voice where they're like, Trump is going to change the monetary system, and if you buy these like trump Bucks debit card things or fake checks, he's going to like when he changes it, they'll be worth a

ten thousand times what you put in. So if you put in two or three thousand dollars worth of this, you'll be rich. He's doing this to reward his loyal fans. He's gonna like he's gonna fix everything, and you'll finally

be rich. Right, you know you deserve to be rich, right, And a bunch of people bought these like fake promisary notes and then like went to Bank of America to cash them in, and the bank was like, well, no, that's not this, this isn't real, this, this is nothing at all, right, And you know, these people got fleeced. And one way to look at the people who got fleeced is like, well they're dumb, right, These people are stupid.

You know, they did a stupid thing. They believed something that was obviously fake, and you can take that out of their story if you want. I don't think that's helpful, though. The reality is that these people represent a cautionary tale. They didn't start out believing that the guy from The Apprentice was their messiah. Their break from consensus reality began years or decades earlier, and it's going to be different

for every individual person. When I think about my own family members who came to believe pretty unhinged things that you know, figures within the Republican Party or Trump himself told them, I tend to trace their break from reality back to well back to the day when the calming, charismatic voice of Ronald Reagan said this about the Iran Contra scandal, a deal in which his administration gave Iron

weapons in exchange for hostages. And this is Reagan. A few months ago, I told the American people, I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. Yes, And I think that line is an important moment in the shattering of what we might call reality, consensus reality, right, The undeniable, actual truth is that Ronald Reagan and many members of

his administration committed high crimes and light about it. But Reagan's supporters, his fans, people like my parents, loved him too much to accept this, and old Ronnie offered them a way out, ignore the facts and the evidence, and embraced the deeper truth of his heart and his best intentions. And in that moment, I think that's where a lot of Americans, who are now in an even more unhinged place, started burrowing down and started tunneling away from their friends

and family and towards the heart of something dark. As the years went on, the consequences of many Reagan era economic and social policies became impossible to ignore. No wealth trickled down, Mourning did not return to America. The promise of the Internet boom yielded to the dot com bubble bursting September eleventh sobered us up from the hallucination of

permanent victory. After the end of the Cold War, the housing market crashed, the hideous reality of climate change became unavoidable, The promise of a bright future faded, and people buried themselves deeper in fantasies to avoid oblique and empty horizon. And all Throughout this the left prided itself on a sort of logical sobriety, a willingness to stare into the abyss, to accept the reality of our dire moment, and to propose radical solutions. Yet one by one, the different protest

movements put out by the left flopped and fizzled. Promising organizers and ideological leaders were revealed as frauds or became corrupted by the system. Capitalism failed to fall or reform, and rather than confront the dire complex reality that leaves us in, increasing numbers of leftists found alternative realities, served eagerly by an alliance of conmen and paid propagandists. Now, leftists have always been just as vulnerable to vicious fantasy

as conservatives. This has proven well in the last century. There's a case of a Marxist academic named Malcolm Caldwell, who I think is which I think is valuable depending on who you talk to about Caldwell. He's the Scottish academic.

He was a college professor, apparently a pretty good economist, and he also had this weird thing for agrarian communist movements, which he thought were He believed that there was this like massive global famine coming, and he believed that these like back to the land Marxist movements sweeping Southeast Asia where the only way forward for a lot of humanity.

He was this like third worldist. A lot of his belief was kind of centering that, you know, the United States was the source of all evil in the world effectively, but this kind of led him to he became a stan of every communist state, even the ones that were in conflict with each other. He traveled to like North Korea and came back like talking about all of the wonderful accomplishments of Jucha ideology. You know, he was in love with Vietnam, and he was also in love with

Khmer Rouge in Cambo. And that's kind of part of the evidence that like he had entered a reality tunnel that had taken him away from any kind of logical reality, because like Cambodia and Vietnam went to war, right, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Like these these two were not like Communist

fellow travelers on the same side of a conflict. Whenever this would get brought up to Caldwell when he'd argue about, you know, Vietnam and the conflict that Vietnam was having with Cambodia, or he you know, people would try to argue with him about the realities of the Khmer Rouge system. He would just kind of shut down like he was he was, yeah, he couldn't talk about it right now. Eventually, Caldwell, because he's an academic, he travels to a lot of

these countries and you know, it's fine. He travels to the USSR, he gets a tour there. He travels to North Korea, he gets a tour there, he gets a tour at Vietnam. That's all fine. All of those states are saying states, right, which is not to say that like they don't do bad things, but they're they're run by people who like, there's no benefit in us to anything bad happening to this guy who's out there in the West writing nice things about our regimes. Right, Polepot

was not sane, The Khmer Rouge was not sane. So he goes to Cambodia with two American journalists, one of whom had been in Cambodia in the years prior to the Khmer Rouge overthrow of the US backed government of Law Nol and knew the country well, and when she got there, they had all these arguments where he was like, I think the revolution is working. You know, it's not perfect, but it needs its time. Look at all the wonderful

accomplishments already. And she would point out, I have been to these cities years ago, and there's no people anymore. All of the people are gone. Something is terribly wrong, and he just couldn't listen to her. So they're there a couple of weeks and he gets invited to have a meeting with Polepot, and you know, he has a meeting with him right after these journalists do, and he comes back from it really excited, being like we had a great talk. He's such a smart man. You know,

we talked about economics. I feel he's invited me back next year, you know. And by the way, within like weeks of this, Vietnam invades and forces Polepot out of the capitol, right like the state of the Khmer rouge was deeply precarious at this point. But he comes out super optimistic, and then later that night a gunman shoots him to death and then shoots himself to death. It is really unclear to this day. It's a bit of

a mystery what happened. The most likely explanation is that the Khmer Rouge wanted to pin the murder of a leftist Western academic on Vietnam to try and generate international outrage against Vietnam who was about to invade. It's possible Vietnam killed him for but I don't really see a benefit to Vietnam and doing that again. They invade right after this. It seems like one of the journalists who was there basically was like a poppot, was out of

his fucking mind. Of course he would do this. There's no like, there's no trying to lay out like the

rationality behind this man's actions. I think what's more interesting is Caldwell had been presented with plenty of evidence that the Khmer Rouge regime was deeply evil and violent, and in fact, he had published right before he went over there, he published an article about like the successes of their agrarian reforms and the Khmer Rouge government official that he cited in that paper that's like the basis of most of his claims about how well the reforms had worked

with it like a couple of weeks before he arrived in Cambodia was tortured to death in the S twenty one prison.

was a family man, he was a good teacher. He just completely left reality in this one thing, and it led him to oblivion.

blah blah blah. Even if even if someone like net and Yahoo then like like comes out and says like, actually, no, this was like quote unquote like terrible accident or whatever, there will still be people defending it. And like, I don't know if all of these people are literally like bloodthirsty, like I don't know if they actually really want to

see like everyone in Gaza killed. I'm sure there's there's maybe some people who are like just bad, But I think the reality tunnel version, I think is a lot more useful for understanding how there's so many otherwise very like normal, normal people who feel totally fine about cheering on the actions of the State of Israel right now as there you know, as the death toll just gets

higher and higher and higher every single day. No, it's certainly been something I've thought about very often these past few months, as I as I'm sure many other people are, you know, both staring into the abyss on on Twitter

dot com, where everyone has a take. But then also you know, if if you're ever going outo any like, if you're ever going into any of these protests, there will probably be like a group of Zionist counter protesters yelling something and it's it's a really tricky thing to navigate.

not like reliable that it happens. And I have you know, as someone who has been in this space of researching cults, of researching disinformation for years now, I'm not aware of any reliable ways to break people out of these now you know, the these tunnels when they get themselves in. And that's the scariest thing to me. Right, there's a

number of people. I don't think it's huge in an electoral sense, but it's probably thousands or tens of thousands of people who now believe that the Eisenhower is either badly damaged or at the bottom of the sea, and they will keep believing that the same way that like a chunk of people believe that when they look up and see clouds, every cloud they see is like poison. The US government shot out into the sky using our

secret planes to murder people with fucking whatever. I don't know it's anyway, or.

you probably don't even realize yourself. People on the outside will point out, oh wow, this is this is uh, this is some interesting beliefs you have suddenly fallen into. Yeah, but it it doesn't, It doesn't happen overnight. It is it is. It is a slow shift in a lot of cases, and yeah, laying out you know, quote unquote facts and logic often cases does not help at all and will actually hurt. It will produce a backfire effect. That's not the case for everybody, but that is the

case for a lot of people. And it's easy to discount, you know, people yelling horrible things at you at a protest. It's easy to discount people you know, saying horrible things

on Twitter. But it's more frustrating when it's like you're on who you like previously, like had a good relationship with, and yeah, no, I mean this, this this kind of reminds me of like, you know, attempts at QAnon and deprogramming back in like twenty nineteen, where you know, we had this influx of influx of older people and boomers and sometimes just like not super old people either also just like like moms in their thirties who started like

leaving all this stuff and cutting them off from you know, contact with you or other people doesn't help, obviously, but they can also be really hard to maintain, like a good relationship. And yeah, it's a weird balance of being able to provide a little bit of like compassion to someone and not completely cut them off while also maintaining your own personal boundaries. It's it's a really tricky thing.

But in a lot of the cases of the QAnon stuff, all the most successful things that I've heard about people getting out of it. It did require a line, like there had to be some connecting thread to the person, and over time that thread could be pulled upon and maybe the person would use that thread as like as like a crutch when the reality so slowly started to crumble around them. And it's really tricky and I don't

have any good solutions for this. Nobody does. Anyone who does say they do is also a grifter who's lying and trying to make money.

that that line doesn't exist. Like I had someone reach out about a family member who had started to believe some conspiracy stuff regarding extra terrestrials that was like obviously untrue and it worried them, and I was like, well, look, you know, you don't have to tell them that you

believe them. You can say like, I don't you know, really feel the same way you do about this, But I'm always down to talk about it, right or like you know, I'm always you know, here to to listen if you want to talk about this and let him know that like they have a connection still, if you make sure that there's like still a way they can get out of that tunnel and back up to something that resembles reality, maybe they will, you know.