It is interesting that even educated people get sucked into the Q wackiness:
>>>Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment in New York City; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cup of coffee; and sits down at her oval dining room table.
Then, she opens her laptop and begins fighting the global cabal.
Gilbert, 57, is a believer in QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Like all QAnon faithful, she is convinced that the world is run by a Satanic group of pedophiles that includes top Democrats and Hollywood elites, and that President Donald Trump has spent years leading a top-secret mission to bring these evildoers to justice. . . .
Gilbert’s elite pedigree — she attended the Dalton School in Manhattan and worked on The Harvard Lampoon with Conan O’Brien in the 1980s — illustrates the wide range of people who have ended up in Q’s thrall. . . .
As an adult, she joined the anti-establishment left, advocating animal rights and supporting the Standing Rock oil pipeline protests. She admired the hacktivist group Anonymous and looked up to whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. She was a registered Democrat for most of her life, but she voted for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the 2016 presidential election after deciding that both major parties were corrupt. <<<
Every morning, Valerie Gilbert, a Harvard-educated writer and actress, wakes up in her Upper East Side apartment in New York City; feeds her dog, Milo, and her cats, Marlena and Celeste; brews a cu…
www.courant.com
>>>In the summer of 2017, Lenka Perron was spending hours every day after work online, poring over fevered theories about shadowy people in power. . . . 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. . . .
The theories were fiction, but they hooked into an emotional vulnerability that sprang from something real. For 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. . . .
When she first left QAnon, she felt a lot of shame and guilt. It was also humbling: Perron, who has a master’s degree, had looked down on Scientologists as people who believed crazy things. But there she was.<<<
During the political fallout after four years of Donald J. Trump, one question is what will happen with the followers of conspiracy theories that bend Americans’ perceptions of reality.
www.chicagotribune.com
