I didn't want Bernie Sanders as president, although I was happy to have him in Congress. But I have long deplored the way the Democrats no longer valued working class, and stopped speaking out for them. I feel Biden is someone who does care. It was obvious Trump really didn't, that he is a manipulator who says whatever he thinks will work for him.
By Sabrina Tavernise
Jan. 29, 2021
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“At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this doesn’t fit,’” she
said. “We are being manipulated. Someone is having fun at our expense.”
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QAnon believers are part of a broader swath of Americans who are
immersed in conspiracy theories. Once on the far-right fringes, these
theories now hold people from across the political spectrum in their
thrall, from anti-lockdown libertarians to left-wing wellness types and
“Stop the Steal” Trumpists.
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But while much has been said about how people descend into this world, little is known about how they get out. Those who do leave are often filled with shame. Sometimes their addiction was so severe that they have become estranged from family and friends.
The theories seem crazy to Ms. Perron now, but looking back, she understands how they drew her in. They were comforting, a way to get her bearings in a chaotic world that felt increasingly unequal and rigged against middle-class people like her. These stories offered agency: Evil cabals could be defeated. A diffuse sense that things were out of her control could not.
The theories were fiction, but they hooked into an emotional vulnerability that sprang from something real. For Ms. Perron, it was a feeling that the Democratic Party had betrayed her after a lifetime of trusting it deeply.
Her immigrant family, from the former Yugoslavia, were union Democrats in working-class Detroit who had seen their middle-class lifestyle decline after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. As an inspector for the insurance industry, she spent decades in factories seeing union jobs wither. Still, she stayed with the party because she believed it was fighting for her. When Bernie Sanders became a presidential candidate she found him electrifying.
“He put into words what I couldn’t figure out but I was seeing around me,” said Ms. Perron, who is now 55. “The middle class was shrinking. The 1 percent and corporations having more control and taking more of the money.”
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The emails were Ms. Perron’s doorway to the conspiracy world, and she found others there too. She was no longer a lonely victim of a force she did not understand, but part of a bigger community of people seeking the truth. She loved the feeling of common purpose. They were learning together how to research, looking up important people in the emails and figuring out how to trace them back to big donors.
“There was this excitement,” Ms. Perron said. “We were joining forces to finally clean house. To finally find something to explain why we were suffering.”
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“Q managed to make us feel special, that we were being given very critical information that basically was going to save all that is good in the world and the United States,” she said. “We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority. We were part of a special club.”
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People who tried to talk her out of the conspiracy theories by sending her factual information only made it worse.
“Facts are not facts anymore,” Ms. Perron said. “They are highly powerful, nefarious people putting out messaging to keep us as docile as sheep.”
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When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was also humbling: Ms. Perron, who has a master’s degree, had looked down on Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was.
But she has come to appreciate the experience. She has talked to her children about what she went through, and has learned to identify conspiracy dependence in others. She agreed to speak for this article to help others who are still in the throes of QAnon.
•••••
Mr. Trump may be gone from government, but Ms. Perron believes that the ground is still fertile for conspiracy theories because many of the underlying conditions are the same: widespread distrust of authority, anger at powerful figures in politics and in the news media, and growing income inequality.
Unless there are major changes, Ms. Perron said, the craving will continue.
“Trump just used us and our fear,” she said. “When you are no longer living in fear, you are no longer prone to believe this stuff. I don’t think we are anywhere near that yet.”
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