Q and on is now the most prolific online conspiracy theory of the twenty one century. None of their predictions came true. Q has vanished and the storm never came, but Q and on is still alive. I'm Jake Hanrahan, and this is series two of Q Clearance, a podcast shedding light on the ongoing Q and on conspiracy theory. This is a production of Kudatar Media and I Heart Radio. Today we're going to be taking a look at the effect Q and on has had on families and relationships.
As you can imagine, much like a cult, it has been devastating for many many people. Now, before we get fully into it, I want to bring your attention to one of the most brutal cases of Q and on warping a family dynamic that I have ever seen. What I'm about to read out is a statement from a Stoneman Douglas school shooting survivor. The Stoneman Douglas shooting being the eighteen massacre in which a gunman opened fire and
killed seventeen people in a Parkland, Florida school. This is what one of the survivors of that is having to deal with thanks to Q and on. This is from the q and On Casualties board on Reddit, and it goes, quote, I survived the Stoneman Douglas school shooting, and my dad is suddenly convinced I'm a liar and part of a false flag operation. Sorry if this is long, but I gotta get off my chest. I think my dad has gone fucking insane. It's going way too far, and I
have trouble processing the last five months. He's always been very conservative, but now q and on has consumed his life to the point where it's tearing our family apart, along with my mental health. Back January, he saw the video of Marjorie Taylor Green harassing David Hogg, another student from Stoneman Douglas, about the shooting being a false flag operation. And while my dad was already inter cue, he'd never
gone down that particular rabbit hole. And now he's convinced everything was a hoax, and it breaks my fucking heart. He's done quote extensive research on body language and claims he can tell Nicholas Cruz is a radical comic actor who was paid to sacrifice his life in order to remove our guns. He's questioning why they released the interrogation footage if not to further deceive the sheep, believing everything
they see. He also stays the trial will be rigged, and the reason they're talking about the death penalty is to prevent him from ever talking just in case. What's really fucked is that he knows I never want to hear about him or see his face ever again. I've been very clear on that, and I always leave the room when he starts talking about him. I keep telling him to please, please fucking stop, but there's no reaction or empathy whatsoever. Even burgundy colored T shirt to make
me uncomfortable. That's what the shooter was wearing, and he used to be so understanding. He stopped wearing it around me. That person is completely gone, and I miss him so fucking much. You're a real piece of work to be able to sit here and act like nothing ever happened if it wasn't a hoax, shame on you for being part of it and putting your family through it too. He'll say stuff like that straight to my face whenever he's drinking, and I wonder if he'd still say it
if he knew what it does to me. It's bringing back so much of my survivor's guilt, and I fucking hate him for it. I worked in it for so long, and now I once again feel like the biggest piece of ship for being able to have good days when their parents still grieving. I can't take more of him berating me and purposely trying to trigger me to see if my PTSD is real or not. He's seen me breakdown and cry my eyes out multiple times, which I
never ever did before. Sometimes I wonder if he's hit his head or had a fucking stroke, because I almost can't believe it's the same person. What the funck is Q and on doing to people. My breaking point was yesterday when I borrowed my little brother's iPad and saw that he'd search for things like Stoneman Douglas fake proof and Stoneman Douglas real dead body. I practically begged my mom to give my dad an automatum to get professional
help or move out. She's really timid and hates confrontation, so all she said was trying not to be home as much and wait it out. I have no fucking idea how to deal with this. It's too painful for me to keep living like this, hearing his name almost every single fucking day and being accused of accepting money to be part of it. Even if my dad magically snap out of this cube bullshit, I don't think i'd ever forgive him for putting me through this when I
was just recently starting to do relatively well. So fuck him for that, and fuck you and on and fuck Marjorie Taylor Green for ruining my dad. Even though I've definitely felt like it, I don't think getting physical would do any good at all. I instead try to remind him to look back at the texts I sent when I was sure the shooter was about to enter our classroom. I asked him to look me in the eyes and still argue I'm able to fake what I wrote in
those messages, But no luck. End quote. So that was a post from a lad who survived a school shooting and is now being accused by his own dad of being some kind of crisis actor, some kind of fraud thanks to the insanity of Q and On. This Stoneman Douglas shooting survivor is having to relive the trauma of the massacre over and over again via his own father. As I mentioned, that post is from the Q and
On Casualties board. This subredit has been incredibly sad to read through whilst doing my research for this episode, but it's something that has to be done to really gauge an idea of how destructive Q and on can be. I spoke to one of the key moderators of the Q and On Casualties board. He's known online as Poker Politics. He had a lot to say on the ways that Q and on has helped destroy whole families. Okay, so first of all, give us an idea of what exactly
Q Casualties is. Why was it set up well? And Casualties was a subredit. There was kind of an offshoot from what was called cult Headquarters, which was the separatedit where people were going to make memes making fun of Q and Q and on reporting on that kind of stuff, and then somebody else started it as a more serious um support group for family and friends who have had people get into Q and on and become a different
person and basically strange relationships that were happening. So it was a place it wasn't There wasn't much to it, and that was just what we were going for, making a support group for uh again, family and friends who had someone get into Q and on and now they
they're not who they were before. Then COVID hit and there was the lockdown, and suddenly the forum just becomes huge because so many people are getting exposed to all this misinformation and going down the rabbit hole of Q and on, and then their family and friends are trying to figure out what's happening to them, and then they find our forum, and it just it really became terrible
that we became so popular is what basically happened. And it was at this point that because of what we were doing and because of Q and On's popularity, media and other people started looking into the forum and talking to us. Basically, at that point, the moderators were like, well, we we just sort of started to set this up as a as a support group, as a way to meet other people dealing with this problem. We're not really into Q and on, we're not really um people that
understand that movement. And I'm like, well I do. At this point, Poker Politics essentially became the paman for the Q and On Casualties Board as more journalist media people started to get in touch with them. The reason he knew more about Q and on than the other motivators is because he too was once sucked into conspiracy theories. I grew up basically as a conspiracy theorist. I was in school, I was obsessed of the assassination of Raf Kennedy. I was a nine eleven truther or for a period
of time in my life. And then when I got out of that, I started looking at it from the other side, and I was like, why do people believe in these things? Why did I believe in these things? And then and this led me to following the Illuminati New World Order stuff on the internet and all the
websites about that. And then I started hearing about Q and On in two thousand eighteen, and it was just getting so big and there was so much buzz around it, and I knew it was just the Illuminati story that I've been hearing for decades, and I was like, I was why is why is this breaking through? When the Illuminati story remained really kind of niche and wasn't that uh big in the mainstream. So I started digging into Q and On to try to find out what it was going on about it, and then I saw how
they had tied the Illuminati story to Donald Trump. As the hero, how he was going to save the world, and you were now mingling mainstream American politics and with the niche conspiracy theory. And it was at that point that I was like, well, now I gotta get on social media. I gotta get more active, I gotta start engaging on this. Okay, So let's talk about some of the cases or the situations you've seen through being a moderator on the Q and on Casualties Board. What have
you actually seen? What has Q and on done to some of these families that go there um to talk about it. The stories are always just like so tragic because this person finds something that seems to be innocuous and they started talking about it, and then after that happens for a couple of weeks and then it gets then it gets even weirder and worse, and then you eventually get into the the are people bad people are pedophiles,
They're bad people, are child trafficking. It's like the Wayfair scandal that nonsense, and you you just see it like take off on these people. And it's always and I mean I wunna say it's always, but like so much of the time the person seemed like a grounded, rational person who would never fall for this kind of stuff. And that's what something that always happens is like like people are like, oh, but my husband's so intelligent, he would never fall for this kind of thing or whatever.
And intelligence never is a defense against this kind of belief like this Q and on and things like it fulfill an emotional need. They do something for a person that they're not getting from outside sources, and you don't see it coming and most of the time until it's too late. I mean, unless you're with somebody all the time,
you you wouldn't notice what's going on. And that's what makes it so jarring, is that it just feels so sudden for so many of these people that their loved one was one person one day, then a whole new person the next. There comes a point where there is no changing the situation, There is no fixing the problem right. And why is it with Q specifically that it seems like they can't agree to disagree, Like the wife or
the husband or whatever can't just go right. I believe in Q. You don't know, but I'm going to shut up about it to say this marriage or whatever, why is it? Why does it seem that Q is just so destructive in that regard. It's because Q is such an aggressive movement when it comes to prosplytizing. The whole basis of Q and On is the belief in the
Great Awakening, this massive payoff that's supposed to happen. It's some ill defined point in the future when all the bad guys get arrested and Donald Trump saves the world. And one of the beliefs about the Great Awakening is awakening people that when you become a part of Q and On, it's your h You now have a mission to recruit more people into Q and On. You have to grow the community to help trigger the Great Awakening.
And so they and they're on the chains and all these social media platforms, they have guides on how to manipulate people, how to rope them in, how to lure them into the movement. So it becomes it's a um, it's imperative that you get your friends and family to believe because that's the only way we can win and defeat the deep state. So you just really, uh can't uh have a live and let live attitude when you're dealing with a a family member or a friend who
is a Q and on supporter. There's always a part of them that's gonna want to pull you in. They it's very hard for them to not be uh, for them to be quiet, because they've been told by their community and the people who are now effectively like their new family. You gotta get more people. You gotta get your wife, you gotta get your you gotta get your kids,
you gotta get your parents. You got to bring people in because the only way we can undo the brainwashing of Bill Gates and George Sorrows and all the bad guys is by getting superior numbers to them, right right, got you, um to to really kind of give our listeners an idea of how serious this is. Um, maybe just give us a specific example without exposing anyone of
how Q and on has really shout at someone's family. Um. There was a report about a month ago of a husband and wife who were in a custody battle and that when the wife had a custody of the children, uh, she killed them. And it was because she believed that the entire city was involved in a child sex trafficking ring and that the children were going to be abducted
at some point and sold into this bondage. And on the Q and On Casualties for or UM, someone posted a message to that headline and said, this was Q and On. I am a family member, but I want to remain anonymous about it. But the this is I'm I'm a relative of the husband. I know the wife, I know the mental issue she was going through and this is what drove her to this and that's that. So and again it's a it's a message on the internet. Take it with a grain of salt and all that stuff.
But the reporting that came out about what the woman believed about the massive child trafficking community and all that stuff, I mean, it fits the narrative of Q and On. I mean, if it's exactly what they believe or what they subscribed to. Whilst we weren't able to completely verify that horrific situation explained to us there by poker politics. There have been several other shootings that have Q and
On firmly at their periphery. To be frank at this stage, is not at all surprising that someone with serious mental health issues, spurred on by a Q and On would take things too far and commit murder and as we just heard for the last twenty minutes people all across America choosing to destroy their families in favor of an internet conspiracy theory. I don't think there's ever been something this divisive and vicious to come entirely from the Internet
with no evidence whatsoever and become this wide spread. Remember again, there are hundreds of thousands of Q and on supporters on the most extreme end of it. Q and on pulls people away from their families the same way a cultic church does, only there is no church, nor building, nor base nor headquarters. It's all done online. So to escape such a cult, all one has to do really is log off. But they can't. It's as if they're addicted.
It seems that in reality, the so called storm that Q and on predicted is coming was actually the destruction that it has caused to so many people's lives. For some, it's turning from an online conspiracy theory into a dangerous mass delusion. Q Clearance is brought to you by I Heart Radio and cou Data Media. I'm Jake Hanrahan. You can find me online at Jake Underscore Hanrahan. That's h A N R A H A N You can get
Q clearance merch at dark wash dot net. This episode was produced by myself, with fact checking and additional research by Sarah Hightower. The music is by Sam Black and the sound was mixed by Thomas Griffin at Splicing blockh