People Are Sharing The Final Straws That Made Their Ex-QAnon Loved Ones See The Light, And I’m Truly Shocked By Some Of These

Remember QAnon? I wish I didn’t.

If you also haven’t heard that name since way back when (well, 2020), let me refresh you. It’s a conspiracy theory alleging that President Donald Trump is waging a secret war against the “deep state,” or “a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” that controls the world.

It’s called QAnon because an anonymous poster known as “Q” began spewing nonsense about the deep state and “the Storm,” aka the day of reckoning that will one day come for the pedophilic, omnipotent cabal, on the imageboard website 4chan in 2017.

Although it’s somewhat faded out of mainstream conversation, QAnon is still very much alive. One of the most infamous January 6 Capitol rioters was known as “QAnon Shaman.”

It’s also been embraced in the past by folks like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

There’s an entire subreddit devoted to people whose lives have been affected by a loved one falling into QAnon, both trying to support those individuals and help them bring their loved ones back to reality. It’s aptly called r/QAnonCasualties, and today, I wanted to share several stories from people who actually managed to get out:

1.“My uncle, who is my dad’s brother-in-law, was raised in a very Christian conservative environment but was generally very cool, calm, and collected, and a great role model for what an uncle/husband/father should be. But when Trump came around in 2016, it’s like that whole positive demeanor he had flipped on a dime. I genuinely don’t know what exactly sparked the change, but over time, he just started spouting crazier and crazier things. Anti-vax, JFK and JFK Jr. resurrection, Pizzagate, election fraud, the deep state, Democrats sacrificing children in satanic rituals, you name it. And he also believed literally anything Trump said on TV and would defend it like his life depended on it.”

“He even accused his wife, with whom he had 10 children (because he believed it was God’s plan for them to create as many children as possible), of vaccinating her children to turn them sterile/infertile and end his bloodline… Yes, I’m serious about that. This led to her filing for divorce, the older children hating him, and the younger children being confused about what was wrong with their dad. So, since about 2021, when the divorce was finalized and they moved away from him, he’s been hated by basically his whole family and the extended family, too. I always looked up to him; he was the ‘cool uncle’ and appeared very intelligent when I was younger, and like I said, he was generally a good role model, which is why watching this downward spiral filled me with a mix of sadness and frustration…”

“…Fast forward to about a week ago, I got a message from him on Facebook. My crazy, Trump-loving, conspiracy-theorizing Q-Uncle, who’s estranged from his whole family, sent me a random message at 8 p.m. He said he was looking through some old scrapbooks and family photo albums and found old pictures of me as a baby that he thought I might want to have, and asked if he could come over to give them to me. I agreed because I hadn’t seen him in several years, and against my better judgment, I wanted to have a conversation with him about his behavior.”

“So he shows up late at night with a small box of photos and comes inside. I set the box down, open it, and start looking at all the photos. It’s a bunch of pictures from around the time of my birth, and what caught my eye was how happy his family and mine looked and how full of life he looked. Looking at him standing in my kitchen now, he looked so different. Before his divorce, he was very well-kept. Clean cut and in very good shape. Looking at him now, he’s gotten visibly skinnier, lost muscle mass and looks dirty and disheveled. I said thank you for the photos, and he said something to the tune of ‘You’re welcome, my lib ex-wife probably has the rest, but she’s too convinced I’m crazy. I just wish she wasn’t blind, she’ll see the truth soon enough…'”

“…And I basically lost it but didn’t lash out. I started ranting about his behavior, explaining how it’s torn the family apart, especially his family. His own children either hate him or don’t know what’s wrong with him, and the woman he was married to for 30 years wants nothing to do with him anymore. How the rest of the family is embarrassed by him, and he threw it all away for Donald fucking Trump. Who, unlike us, does not know who he is and does not care if he lives or dies. All of this didn’t really seem to phase him, which I was half expecting.”

“What I wasn’t expecting was what I said after to completely snap him out of his 8+ year-long brainwashed trance: ‘Just look at you in some of these photos. The man in these photos is not the same man standing in front of me right now, and you have no one to blame for that but yourself. It breaks my heart to see how far you’ve fallen; it breaks all of our hearts. The man in these photos had everything: a life, a family, and people who cared about him. You were someone who genuinely cared for the people around you, someone I looked up to as a kid. But now, you’re just a shadow of the man you used to be. What happened to you? Where’s the uncle I used to look up to? You’ve completely lost yourself, and I don’t even recognize you anymore. You’ve traded everything that matters in for conspiracy theories and a man who doesn’t even know your name…'”

“…Throughout that little rant, his expression slowly changed from a smug look of annoyance to a fearful look of regret. His eyes widened slowly, and after I mentioned the man in front of me being different than the man in the photos, his eyes started darting back and forth between the photos on the table and me. And by the time I got done speaking, he was breathing very shallow and fast, hyperventilating. And then his eyes were just darting all over the room, almost like he was replaying his life, and he was covering his mouth and eyes and mumbling stuff like ‘fuck,’ ‘oh my god,’ and ‘no no no.'”

“I genuinely wasn’t expecting this reaction and asked if he was okay, and he just started shaking his head and covering his eyes with his hands. After doing this for about a minute, I could hear him start to groan like he was in pain, and then he let out this raw, guttural scream. I swear it shook my house; I’ve never heard anything like it. He was hitting himself on the forehead with the base of his hand and then collapsed to the floor. He took his hands off his eyes and his face was bright red, and he had tears streaming down his face. It was the most emotion and clarity I’ve seen from him in years. He tried to talk but he was still choking up on his words and his voice kept cracking. He eventually muttered, ‘You’re right, everyone’s always been so goddamn right. I can’t believe I got to this point’ and kept bawling his eyes out…”

“…Then he said something that I’m still thinking about: ‘I traded my life for a lie; I don’t even know who I am anymore.’ And he kept crying on the floor. This man was completely broken and realized the consequences of his behavior far too late, and all he could do was cry. So I let him. It went on for about 15 minutes. Eventually, he looked up at me, and I helped him stand up. And I ended up just giving him a big hug. Despite all the pain he’s caused for the family, I still loved him deep down, and I know everyone else does, too. After he pulled away from the hug, all he said was ‘thank you… I don’t know if I’m past the point of fixing things, but I’m going to try,’ and then he turned around and walked out my door.”

“The next day, I called my aunt (his ex-wife) and explained this whole interaction, and after talking about it for a while, she decided she was going to give him one chance. They’re gonna talk over dinner this weekend, and I really do hope they figure out what to do and everything goes well for them. Since the interaction I had with my uncle, he’s been messaging me on Facebook every single day, expressing gratitude for ‘opening his eyes’ and telling me that he can’t believe he was the one who was really blinded for so long. For the first time in about eight years, I was talking to the real uncle I knew. I truly hope for the best for him, and I truly hope anyone else out there with family like this is able to get through to them in one way or another, too. It may take a while, maybe a year, maybe five, maybe 10. But I truly believe, especially after this interaction, that everyone is capable of change.”

—_Mcdrizzle_

2.“So, I was having a convo with my FIL, and he was pissed and feeling himself after the Trump victory. He was saying all sorts of crazy Q tangent-type stuff, and I calmly said, ‘None of that happened.’ He screamed, ‘I saw it!’ I asked where he gets his news from, and he said it was from all the sources. I said no, you don’t, you never saw that on CNN or a trusted news source. He later admitted, when he calmed down, that he saw it on YouTube or X, which I said wasn’t news.”

“Since then, he sent me some links to YouTube videos that are pure AI by some right-wing whacko, and they fooled him. I have shown him, and we are making progress. But now, when he sees something, he at least checks CBS News to verify. My thoughts about the country are that a lot of them don’t pay for TV anymore, so they don’t have trusted news feeds in their face. They have pure internet propaganda.”

—tknames

3.“I used to be a conspiracy theorist who held many beliefs that I now realize are spread by QAnon believers. Eventually, I had to get the COVID-19 vaccine for work, and nothing happened. This led to me starting to question my other beliefs, and I realized I had been tricked. I didn’t die of any horrible side effects like people were saying. I met a classmate who was trans, and he was really cool. That made me see that the narrative I was fed was untrue since he clearly wasn’t a horrible person like the right-wing media portrays. I also got involved with TikTok (mostly for the funny videos lol), but that led to me seeing a lot of diverse people and beliefs I hadn’t heard of before.”

“I was a teenager when this happened, so I understand how I fell for the ploy so easily. I was socially isolated during COVID-19 and became wrapped up in the wrong crowd. Since then, a few years have passed, and I’ve continued to learn about politics and the dangers of conspiracy theories and extremist ideas; I’ve become much better at forming my own ideas rather than just listening to whatever I hear online…”

“…What I struggle to understand is how my dad, who is much older and in many ways wiser than me, fell for it, too. Not only that, but he is falling deeper and deeper into this group, and all of my efforts to talk to him have failed. This change happened over a period of time when I was living with my mom. All of a sudden, he started talking about Trump and how great his policies were. He ended up voting for Trump that year, but I would say his level of enthusiasm was still in the normal range at the time. He just wanted more jobs in America and for the middle class to prosper. 2020 was when things really started to go downhill, starting with all the COVID theories that were floating around. He fully believed them, and so did I.”

“Fast forward to 2021, and the election conspiracies came next. By that time, I had moved away from that type of thinking, but it only made him more convinced that Trump was the best choice for president. He started to only watch Fox as his sole source for news. That made the situation the worst it’s ever been. My dad used to be the sweetest, kindest, most understanding person, always willing to lend a hand. He still has those qualities, but he has a new type of anger that really confuses me, and it’s toward liberals and “woke” people (which he used to be). He’s started to argue with people on Facebook regularly about politics and refers to Kamala Harris as ‘Kamaliar.’ My friends and family used to compare my dad to Mr. Rogers because of his friendly attitude and relaxed demeanor. Imagine if Mr. Rogers turned into an angry right-wing Trump supporter. That’s what I’m dealing with. I honestly want someone to pinch me because I can’t believe this is happening. I don’t want to lose my dad.”

—Iridescenthedgehog

4.“Part of the QAnon story my dad believed was that the USD had to be removed and replaced by a new currency because the dollar is the currency of the deep state. Some hours or days ago, I can’t remember, Trump said that he would preserve the USD at all costs, and if BRICS tried to develop a currency to battle the USD, he would establish a 100% tariff on BRICS members (something along those lines). My father was heavily disappointed, so I exploited the doubt momentum my father was stuck in, and I told him, ‘Remember what I told you days ago? This is what I mean, Trump is not the hero they portrayed.'”

“Father replied, ‘Yeah, now they say it’s actually a Trump clone, the one that said that. The real Trump is hiding in a bunker, but that’s bullshit, this is dumb.’ From there, he started to express a lot of inconsistencies in what QAnon was saying, and I gladly helped him to explore and debunk the BS. I’m so fucking glad he finally sees it. With the hero image Trump had in those channels being gone, the rest will fall off by itself; the snake is pretty much decapitated. My father is on a solid path to healing from this bullshit QAnon thing. I hope whoever decided to start the QAnon rots in jail by the amount of harm their vomitive thing did.”

—CrowBoth2477

5.“They ended up in rehab and started to think more like a normal human after that.”

—laffnlemming

6.“My whole life has always been just me and my mom. My father died before I was born, so it was just us girls up against the world. Mom clawed her way up from food stamps and Section 8 to a six-figure research-based job. I am so proud of her. She did seem oddly against me getting ‘optional’ vaccines like HPV and meningitis, but whatever. I didn’t think much of it.”

“Cue the pandemic. I viscerally remember sitting in the parking lot of a plant store, trying to hear my mom’s panicked phone call over the sound of a passing train. What about microchips? Something about Bill Gates? The train was so loud, and obviously, I was missing major parts of her story because nothing made any fucking sense. But I tried long after the train passed to sort it out. On the phone with her. In a parking lot. How do these microchips get power? How can they be small enough to pass through that gauge of needle? Why would the government be complicit? Who are ‘They’? How many people are involved in this conspiracy because it sounds like A LOT?…”

“…She has no real answers to any of these questions and I thought this was the end of it. She had a theory, we talked about it rationally, nothing in her theory made any sense, and now we could move on with our lives. I am not exaggerating when I say I thought she was going to disown me when I got my COVID vaccine. This woman is a research scientist, y’all! What is happening!? She descended deeper and deeper into anti-vaxx conspiracy theories and fringe religious practices and… I honestly still don’t understand the Bill Gates thing. I didn’t even know this person anymore. This person who witnessed my first breath. The first heartbeat I ever knew. Ugh, I’m getting teary just thinking about this now.”

“I got pregnant shortly after my second Moderna shot. I didn’t tell her for six whole months. It was hard, and the whole world felt dark. I didn’t tell her any of this. Just that I was pregnant, my due date was SOON, and that if she wanted to see the baby, she would need to be FULLY vaccinated. Two shots, plus the efficacy time. There was protest and #Q-logic, but I just could not care at all. We didn’t talk again, not a real talk based in reality, until she called to tell me the fire department had to come to the CVS since she was hyperventilating in the pharmacy area waiting for her shot. They still gave her the shot. She was one round in and half the way to seeing my baby be born. I felt this odd twinge of an emotion I wasn’t sure I would ever see again. Pride…”

“…I was so proud of her for facing her fears for my kid. She didn’t do this for me, her kid, but somehow, my kid was worth it. I’ll take it! She got her second shot on a delayed schedule. Ok, fine, whatever. This delay made it so that she wasn’t going to be considered fully vaccinated until after my due date, but I held firm, even though that meant that I was realistically facing being in the delivery room alone. This was such a scary time of my life, and I had no one to hug me. In the end, my kid decided to come late. Very late. So late that my mom could be in the hospital with me.”

“…He’s 2 now, and they love each other to bits! I feel like I have a family again. She’s still an RFK Jr. brainworm supporter, but at least it’s not Trump, I guess. I take my victories where I can. I will probably never have her fully back, but it’s honestly pretty good. Conspiracy theories pop up every now and then, and I ignore them. I just don’t give these thoughts any power in my life. To me, they are delusions, and like someone having a visual hallucination, you are never going to convince them that what they see isn’t real…”

“…I feel SO LUCKY because I know this could have been so so so so so so so much worse. I have a reasonable approximation of my mom back with just one really dark year that I try to never think about. I credit her recovery primarily to my son and, more specifically, that I got pregnant so quickly after COVID-19 vaccines came out. She didn’t have time to really steep in the Q-ness because the ultimatum came relatively quickly.

—petitbunnyfroufrou

7.“My two successes were with people who were not 100% full Q yet. They were at the point where they thought Alex Jones was a gift from God. So, pretty far in. I got them out with challenging conversations and consistency. Sometimes, I would be more empathetic and not try to act like they were crazy for their beliefs and just try to gently ask, ‘Oh, I get how you see that; have you ever thought about (thing) though?’ Other times, I was more direct and would try to make them feel dumb/embarrassed. Consistency was a huge part.”

“The friend who was in deeper was a childhood friend/roommate at the time. Being physically present every day really helped make it easier to slowly try to change how he would think of things instead of just having random, sporadic convos. It’s their interaction with the world that needs to change before they accept they got it wrong, not just a political thought on a topic being proven false. They are Q because it helps make the world seem simpler, which is a comfort to them, and they are addicted to getting the ‘real’ info on stuff that is hidden and makes them feel part of a cool club. The other part of it, though, is even harder for most people. It’s becoming experts in lots of the topics they talk about. You have to understand their worldviews to poke good holes in them, but you also need to have a good counter for what is true and know how to frame it. Luckily, I was already into the political debate-type world, and I enjoyed Destiny content debating both far right and far left people, which helped me a lot with framing and some info…”

“…I definitely don’t have the magic solution, even if you put in the 500 hours of prep/research you would need. I’ve been successful twice but failed three other times so far. Being with someone daily gives you a huge advantage in being able to frame information they are getting every day in a different, more sane way. Most people don’t really have a thought on any topic until their chosen demagogue tells them how to feel later online. If you can start to change how they think about something before they get programmed, it can help a lot.”

—SuperMadBro

8.And finally, from r/skeptic: “I am an ex-QAnon and conspiracy nut, and one strange phrase helped me get out. I left the conspiracy world five years ago after heavy involvement for 10 years. I got out of QAnon around the end of Trump’s [first] presidency. One very strange phrase was common among the believers, and it gave me a lot of internal conflict at the time: ‘Even if Q turns out to be fake, I still value my time in QAnon because it taught me to pay attention and how to think.'”

“This sort of speech was very common among adherents and really bothered me bc it was so self-insulating and protective. Basically, claiming that even if I find out I’ve been a rube believing in batshit conspiracy, I still can’t allow myself to think of myself as wrong, so I’ll spin it as learning to be a ‘critical thinker’ rather than realizing I was conned and I’m ignorant. As for me? I got out and realized I was wrong.”

—diceblue

What do you think? Have you or a loved one ever fallen down the conspiracy pipeline, and how did you fare? Let me know in the comments.

Responses have been edited for length/clarity.