Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast. On this week’s Hot Take, we are talking about QAnon. I am joined by Abbie Richards. We are going to explore what Q is and how it has infiltrated the wellness space. We’re going to get a little bit into how to stay safe and smart when you’re exploring spiritual content online, and, even towards the end of the episode, I explore how to talk to people who are maybe getting caught up in conspiracy theory stuff—how to know if you’re getting caught up in conspiracy theory stuff in a way that is harmful to you or others. I think this is a pretty important topic and an important episode, and I hope you do too. 

Abbie Richards: My name’s Abbie Richards. I am currently a student in the Netherlands, but I am from the US. I do science communication online, mainly in short form video content. So I do a lot of TikToks, and I talk about conspiracy theories and disinformation and climate change.

Jessica: It’s so important for me as a person who’s an astrologer and has a spiritual wellness podcast to talk about this because Q has really—and conspiracy theories and the wellness world has really smooshed together. 

So here’s the thing, Q—QAnon, for Q is there a sense of like is Q supposed to be a person? Is there like a start date for Q? Let’s learn about what is Q.

Abbie Richards: Right. Okay, so Q started on 4chan, back in—honestly, it really starts with kind of Pizzagate.

Jessica: Which is what?

Abbie Richards: Pizzagate was the conspiracy theory in 2016, I want to say. It was a conspiracy theory that Hilary Clinton and John Podesta and Democrats, essentially, they were hiding children for a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor. And it led to somebody going and shooting up that pizza parlor. That pizza parlor does not have a basement.

Jessica: Wow. Wow.

Abbie Richards: It was based off of weirdly interpreting Hilary’s emails and just the typical kind of conspiracy theory, like hunting through miscellaneous things and assigning patterns that don’t necessarily actually exist. 

It’s not a new myth. What it is is it’s blood viable, which is from the middle ages. And, basically, it’s the idea that Jews murder Christian children to use their blood in rituals. And we see QAnon evolve into that. 

Back when QAnon started, everybody was LARPing a lot. Which I don’t know if you know what that is? It’s live action role-playing. It’s kind of like it was a game style that was occurring on 4chan, and there were a lot of different types of Anons, so it wasn’t just QAnon. 

There was CIAAnon, where somebody was pretending to be an individual in the CIA. QAnon is just another one of those. It just happened to get picked up. So Q is a supposedly is an individual who has, quote—I’m doing heavy air quotes—Q security clearance, which, I guess, is tied to the—it’s tied to a department of energy clearance. It’s not that special. 

Yeah, so the story that Q was going with was that they have this security clearance, and there’s all these pedophiles in the government, in the deep state. So there’s this cabal of pedophiles, and the deep state is working with them, and Trump is this God like figure who is going to drain the swamp, get rid of the pedophiles that are running the country, all of that. But it starts as the same sort of Anon situation, like LARPing situation that was common. It just happened to get picked up.

Jessica: I see. So it went viral somehow, and people started adding to the myth of it or something.

Abbie Richards: Yeah. It got out of hand—it really did. It just picked up, and with—right, this is the part where I can’t speculate too much because there’s just so much that we don’t know. One of the things, for instance, that we know for certain is that the person controlling the Q account—because there’s like a trip code associated with it, so you can track—because all posts are anonymous, but you can track who posted, basically. And the person switched at one point, so it is not the same person that originally started posting. And the style of writing switched—that’s very much accepted. 

As far as who it officially is, nobody knows for certain. Everybody has different theories. It doesn’t even matter that much because it’s so beyond the who Q is and who’s posting. It’s a whole religion at this point.

Jessica: Yeah. 

Abbie Richards: So it’s not that exciting of a story anymore because it’s just so much bigger than its origin story, as are most religions.

Jessica: Conspiracy theories become like a slippery slope very quickly. 

Abbie Richards: Yeah. And there’s people who are conspiracy theorists about this conspiracy theory, right. Because they’re like—there’s a lot of different theories about who could possibly be behind it and what their intent is. 

And I’m willing to wager that usually most things are just kind of accidents that fall into place. I don’t think the first person who ever posted it had some sort of like crazy, malicious intent that like knew it would get here now. A lot of people have used it because they have malicious intents at this point, but that first person to be Q, I don’t think the origin was, “Oh, I’m going to really destroy the world with this one.”

Jessica: Right. Right. That feels right to me. That makes a lot of sense. So within that, my question is what are Q’s primary claims? I know that there’s like a million things that are kind of attached to it now, but what are Q’s primary claims?

Abbie Richards: Primary claim is that there’s this satanic cabal that is running a child trafficking ring, and they’ve been controlling the world for years. And it’s generally accepted in their main myth is that they are also harvesting chemical from the children that they are trafficking so that they can have life extending powers from it. Yeah. So that’s—and it’s exactly blood libel, right. It’s nothing new. 

It’s a combination of blood libel, which is the anti-Semitic myth from—I think it started in the 12th century, and then The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is anti-Semitic disinformation published in Russia in 1903 that got translated. And it was spread everywhere. It went like the 1903 equivalent of viral. And it was a completely fake document about a meeting of Jews trying to control the world. It was just there to be anti-Semitic. And then our good, old friend, Henry Ford, went and printed and distributed half a million copies in the US.

Jessica: Damn.

Abbie Richards: And that’s basically—yeah, so that’s why so many conspiracy theories end up being anti-Semitic. It’s because it’s really that—The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is the foundation of most conspiracy theories. 

Jessica: And it seems like a lot of people get into this stuff, and they have no idea about the history, of course, but they also have no idea that it’s expressly anti-Semitic until they’re already indoctrinated, eh? 

It’s like hard to hold space for like where is the connection between this and the wellness community. How did they get infiltrated? I mean I think BuzzFeed published something about Gen Z moms, like mommy bloggers are the new Q sponsors or something like that, and I was like, wait—what? So what’s the connection there?

Abbie Richards: So I mean, there’s a lot of different connections that can happen. First of all, with the anti-Semitism and them not realizing until later, that’s very much part of the point, right. Nobody goes over night, and they’re like, “Actually, I hate Jews this morning.” That’s not how that works. You have to be indoctrinated into a certain type of thought before you start accepting that level of hatred. 

As for why QAnon has been so good at sucking up other communities, it’s a combination of things, especially the times that we’re living in. Nobody’s doing great right now. We are all looking for something to grab onto. We’re all cooped up, starting to lose our minds. We’re online all the time. 

There’s a lot of different ways that people can get scooped up into QAnon. Because QAnon is inherently—it’s a big tent for all conspiracy theories are welcome there. It doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you think that there’s a dark, evil force controlling the world, you’re in. They’re very inclusive in that sense. 

So for a lot of the moms, that was save the children, which I think was like this past summer. QAnon hashtags and words started being banned across social media—rightfully because they were inciting violence, and QAnon had to switch up its methods, so it switched to like hashtag save the children or hashtag save our children, children are scared—those sorts of things. 

And the idea is this big threat of massive child trafficking panic, where oh, my God, hundreds of thousands of children are being trafficked in this country all the time, in like numbers that don’t make sense. All of their stats are complete bogus. They’re bullshit stats. They just pull numbers from random things. If you’re lucky, you can even figure out how they got that intermiss [sp] information, but sometimes it’s just made up.

Jessica: It’s a fiction.

Abbie Richards: Yeah.

Jessica: Yeah.

Abbie Richards: And then where that goes is like they’re harvesting this chemical so that they can live forever. And that’s what it ends up as. But it starts as a genuine concern, right. It’s trying to capitalize on your good intentions. And who doesn’t hate child sex trafficking? 

Jessica: Absolutely.

Abbie Richards: That’s not a political issue.

Jessica: Yeah. And I think also so many people who are marginalized don’t trust the government or don’t trust conventional religion, and so I can see as you’re kind of unpacking this, how once you kind of don’t trust the system, you start looking around the internet for ideas or theories about what you can trust or what the government’s really trying to do. 

And it’s complicated because being critical of the government is not a bad thing. But then what you’re sharing, it’s like as I’m listening to it, some of it sounds so ridiculous, and some of it sounds like oh, it is a slippery slope. How do you know the difference, right? 

Abbie Richards: Yeah. Yeah, it’s tricky, and it’s intentionally done that way, right. If the conspiracy theories were complete fiction, they had no grains of truth, there would be no pathway to get people into them. But you do—they have grounding concepts. There is real corruption. There is sexual abuse. Those things exist. Is it because of a secret satanic cabal? No. Is sexual abuse a giant massive child trafficking ring? No. It’s the people that you live with, and it’s an abuse cycle, and these things are very complicated. 

And instead of accepting that things are complicated and that they’re chaotic and unpredictable, it is so much more comforting to go and be like no, it’s that cabal over there. Trump will arrest them. We just have to believe hard enough in Trump.

Jessica: Right. Right. So how does one, knowing that this exists—and this might be a question you don’t have an answer for, and no one does—but how can we use words like awakening, which a lot of people for all of time are like, “I want to have a spiritual awakening. I am engaged in my spiritual wellness.” How can we be careful about our conduct online if they’re using words like awakening, and that’s like some sort of slippery slope, gateway drug to Jews are trying to eat my children?

Abbie Richards: It’s tough. Because they are like—especially from the spirituality community, they are just stealing stuff. They have taken over a lot of vibrational sorts of things, a lot of astrology—I’m sure you know—and then there’s this intersection as well, it’s historical intersection between like new age spirituality and fascism, like Nazism. 

The Nazis were kind of famously very spiritual and new agey, and it can kind of even take you into like a more modern like eco fascism as well, where like you only want pure things in your body. You know how like that QAnon guy, the—what’s his name? Jake, the one with the horns.

Jessica: The guy who only eats organic foods and gel? I remember him, yes.

Abbie Richards: Yes. That comes back to like just putting pure things in your body, and that is very deeply tied with like this blood and soil myth of from Nazis, so it’s tough. It’s not a new intersection; that has been there for a very long time, at this point. 

But QAnon is particularly good at just kind of taking words and appropriating them into their narrative. Look what they did with the word woke. I mean, nothing—ahh!

Jessica: Yeah. I mean, it’s really remarkable. I’m sitting here, and I’m thinking. Because actually up until like a week ago, I didn’t know that astrology and Q had been, like there was any kind of connection, until I was exposed to an astrologer who was like COVID is a hoax and was anti-mask. And I was stunned. I was really shocked. I mean, I shouldn’t be, but I don’t really consume astrology and spirituality very much online, and so it’s easy for me to kind of like live in my little bubble, because this stuff is happening online, right?

Abbie Richards: Mm-hmm.

Jessica: So this is really so helpful for us to hear about.

Abbie Richards: You’ve given me a very difficult question of how do we determine what is where on this slope? When people fall into these rabbit holes, it’s because they are seeking something. They are seeking to learn about something. 

You’re most at risk for disinformation when you know what you don’t know. So you’re going looking for some sort of information. It’s less of a stumble upon and more of like you are trying to learn—fundamentally, you want stability. You want to feel safe and secure. And right now, in a chaotic world where everything’s a mess, people don’t feel safe and secure. Add into that you might be looking for a stronger sense of identity, and if you don’t have a strong sense of identity, what you’re going to end up being drawn to a lot of the time is somebody telling you what your identity is. 

And a really good rule of thumb, and I know that this is like super vague, but if anybody is telling you what your identity is, run away.

Jessica: That’s a great rule of thumb. But it’s very complicated, isn’t it because— and it’s something I talk about on the podcast a lot, this thing of like when you feel a strong way, and you encounter a message that emboldens and makes you feel entitled to those feelings, like, “I feel terrible. Everything is bad. It’s because of those people.” 

It’s something to be really suspicious as well because there’s like—it’s difficult to be a critical thinker. And I think in this world where we have Google, where like everything’s on the fist page of your results, and it’s fed to you based on your algorithms, it kind of induces more of a laziness in our thought process. 

And these algorithms, I really, I can’t help but wonder if they’re the dear friend of Q and all these conspiracy theories because they feed you what it learns you want to see. Is that right?

Abbie Richards: Absolutely. Algorithms are definitely a huge part of it. It’s not the kind of thing that we can point to a single source and be like it’s because of algorithms, or it’s because of COVID. It’s like no. It’s so many things at once. It’s just the perfect timing. They just scooped everything up and was like, here, have a shit show. 

But the algorithms, they are there to maximize watch time, and if they figure out that what you enjoy watching is this thing that is essentially just like the equivalent of unhealthy comfort food that is not fact, it is not good for your brain, it does not help you to think. In fact, it is diminishing your ability to critically think about things. But it will keep showing you that, and because you liked it, it will continue to show you more and more radical things. And this is the problem with the YouTube alt-right pipeline is we know this about algorithms. 

Last night, I started a new TikTok on a separate phone, just to see if I acted like a teenage boy, how long it would take me to start getting exposed to radical content. I would say within 20 minutes, I was told there were only two genders. Within 30 minutes, it was all abortion is murder, and within about an hour, it was disabled people shouldn’t be able to hold office.

Jessica: Huh! I am shocked. I can’t—I’m sorry, I’m having a hard time moving past disabled people shouldn’t hold office. I’m stunned at that statement.

Abbie Richards: I couldn’t believe that I had seen that either. It’s hard to say how much they meant it. It’s still disgusting either way. And, yeah, and it did not take long. That was just me pretending. I was just swiping like I was a boy, and I was liking conservative things.

Jessica: Wow, 20 minutes. That’s really, really valuable ish, right. Even if it took two hours, I mean, that’s—

Abbie Richards: —It’s still too much.

Jessica: It’s shocking. I mean, because I’ve not been fed any of that content because I’m not swiping or clicking or staying engaged by anything like that. So it’s just really a good reminder that we do have to be really careful.

Abbie Richards: You can go in like three clicks from certain algorithms. I know YouTube used to be like you could go in like three clicks from Joe Rogan to extremist, white supremacy. It’s so fast.

Jessica: It’s so fast.

In terms of people who are like, “This is all really scary; I don’t know how to protect myself,” I think it’s really important to stay critical of the content you’re being fed, and to know that, in part, how you actively engage with things in TikTok, things on YouTube, it encourages algorithms and encourages what you’re shown, and that is something that we can take some measure of responsibility around our online conduct.

Abbie Richards: There are ways that people can improve their media literacy. There’s online courses, first of all, that I definitely recommend people take, that teach media literacy. I know that Crash Course on YouTube did a free one.

Jessica: How do we navigate this? And there isn’t a clear answer. It’s just being willing to be a critical thinker and to be suspicious of anyone who’s leading with fear, hate, or blame. 

Abbie Richards: I mean, if they are trying to make you feel like there’s something else in control, right. And that’s where I think part of the line is fuzzy when you get into spirituality is like when it comes to the radicalization, as they fall down a rabbit hole—because a lot of people can just do one thing and stop. We’re talking about the people who are the ones falling down the rabbit hole and can’t stop. And the reason why they can’t stop is because they are trying to fill something in their life; they’re trying to get an answer.

Jessica: Okay, so let me just stay with this for a minute because this is really important. Any astrologer is going to be—you ask a question, and we tell you, “Oh, this is not a great time to move.” “This is a terrible time to have a kid; wait six months.” There is confusion, I imagine, for people listening to this because it’s impossible to pursue anything spiritual, whether it’s really conventional or really out there, without being open to guidance. 

And what you’re talking about is so important because I think I even saw some sort of diagram you created where it was like in the like where you start to get into trouble, included astrology. My first response was like, “What’s that? No.” And then I was like, actually, absolutely because how do you have discernment with, let’s say, something like astrology, unless you become a scholar of a thing or a deep practitioner of a thing? You have to rely on other people, right. 

And for a lot of people, what I see happening is there’s a lot of very kind of academic breakdowns of Q and conspiracy theories, but a lot of people who are vulnerable to conspiracy theories aren’t coming at it from an academic place at all. They’re coming from it from a feeling place.

Abbie Richards: Emotional, yeah. 100 percent emotional.

Jessica: It’s strictly emotional. And so, the kind of need for emotional intelligence and discretion and to continue to bring it back in your thinking—and I’m saying this in general, but also if you are listening to me—to bring it back in your thinking to, “This is information; what do I think of this information? What’s my gut check? What’s my commonsense check?” And this is—it is really hard because, like you said, so many of us, we just, when we feel shitty, when we feel scared, all we want is an answer. We want somebody to be like it’s going to be okay. 

I want to hold space for it’s also confusing because you’re hearing this on an astrology—it’s confusing, period, and then you’re hearing it on an astrology podcast, where I’m like doing all this woo stuff, and there isn’t a simple answer. And I think this is part of what makes people so vulnerable to an online campaign of terror and conspiracy because all these things kind of bleed into each other, and there isn’t a simple, easy remediation. 

Abbie Richards: Oh, no, you’re right. We’re in very muddy waters, right now. I think because there’s no definitive answer I can give on how to avoid in the spirituality community because it is just everywhere. But at the same time, if somebody is giving you answers that are overly simplistic, if the answer is “Oh, it’s them,” or “Oh, it’s not your fault; it’s this, like it’s x, y, z,” I think that no matter what, you should always be skeptical of that.

Jessica: Yeah. Personal accountability and critical thinking, as hard as they can be, are really the center piece of any healthy spirituality or any healthy online—like having online hygiene. I mean, we have to be critical thinkers. 

Abbie Richards: And one of the things that QAnon is especially good at is that if there’s a data void, they will highjack that space. So that if you search something, it doesn’t matter where, there’s nothing else with those terms, so you will find QAnon. 

Jessica: Interesting. Who’s they?

Abbie Richards: Like influencers, people creating the content, like people trying to push—believers, right. They essentially create these, air quote, digital soldiers because they believe it so strongly that they feel like it is a moral imperative to be online activists or like citizen journalists. So that is a big problem. 

It’s tough because there’s—their concerns are not unfounded. They just reach the wrong conclusion. There are issues with media, absolutely. That doesn’t mean that, necessarily, there’s a secret group controlling them. And the same with corruption; there is a lot of corruption. 

And a lot of this is just coming from frustration with capitalism, right. Capitalism has failed people, and people don’t understand why because they have been told this is the American dream—if you work hard enough, it will work for you. You will be able to retire and have kids, and you’ll be happy. And you’ll have this sense of identity. And now, we live in a world where, first of all, your identity that used to be tied to your job is much less secure. But also, this American dream that you were promised doesn’t actually exist. And that frustration is going to send people looking for an answer of like why? Was what I was told not true? Why did that not happen? 

Because a lot of QAnon is just like this dualism of good versus evil. It’s rooted deeply in Evangelical Christianity. All of the fears—if you think about the entire moral panic currently created around this myth of this massive sex trafficking ring that exists, supposedly in the US, it’s almost identical to the satanic panic of the 80s. It's a moral panic. It’s inspired by Evangelical Christianity. 

There are people with political power who certainly gain from more people believing in that; they can maintain power. There’s finances behind that. The Church is making a lot of money, and they want more people to be believing in Evangelical Christianity. 

But it’s a lot about this apocalyptic fantasy of this awakening that we all have after Trump arrests everybody, and the evil is purged from the world, and we all can live in a golden age. 

Jessica: Right. Right.

Abbie Richards: QAnon is big everywhere. So QAnon is in—it’s in 85 countries at the moment.

Jessica: Eighty-Five countries.

Abbie Richards: In Europe, from what I’ve seen, from the research I’ve seen, it tends to be more anti-government, anti-COVID laws, but also some COVID denial, a lot of anti-masks, a lot of anti-vacs. And then you do also see the traditional narrative incorporated. 

Each country does its own spin on it, but it’s a lot of like the typical new world order, cabal—that is pretty consistent. Especially in Europe, it’s a lot of anti-authority and COVID struggles.

Jessica: And would you also say that this is also paired with a rise in anti-Semitism, or is it like more kind of like under the surface still?

Abbie Richards: I would not say it’s over. I’d say they’re more overtly anti-immigrant, and then the Jews are brought in as like the puppet masters who are bringing the immigrants in. But it’s a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment. 

QAnon, fundamentally, creates an in group and an out group. And that out group is committing a crime, supposedly—it’s not—but supposedly committing a crime so heinous that it justifies violence. And that’s how we get people storming the Capital because they sincerely believe—those people sincerely believe that there are evil people hurting children for fun. They believe that, and, of course, that motivates violence, right. 

That’s the exact type of ideology that leads to extremist violence. It leads to terrorism because it makes people feel like they have nothing to lose. The cause is so important to stop that that they will resort to violence. 

The other thing that we haven’t talked about, because we’ve talked about the fact that these things are designed to make you angry and to make you hateful, which is true. But it’s not exclusively that because there are other positives that they offer, in the sense like specially with a sense of community, and I think that that’s also pretty big in the spirituality community and the health and wellness world, right. They have these communities where they can go to, and they’re all partaking in the same consistently more extreme measure of health and wellness or spirituality, if they are going down that path, but they are doing it together. They have a lot of connections. 

I spend a lot of time in the QAnon group chats, and they are friends with each other. It is providing them with a connection that they might not have. 

Jessica: That’s a really important point. When you feel disconnected, which everyone does in COVID, and when you feel disconnected, when you feel lonely or confused, having a community say, “Hey, girl, you’re doing okay. I’ve got your back. I see this like devil cabal, and we are against it because we are the light.” That is very soothing, actually. 

Abbie Richards: Yeah. Their go to slogan is, “where we go one, we go all.” They are constantly repeating that. And they will constantly repeat to each other.

Jessica: What is that? Will you say that term again; I’ve never heard it before.

Abbie Richards: Yeah. It’s, “where we go one, we go all.” It’s WWG1WWGA, they will write. If you ever see those written out, that’s QAnon for sure. And it’s kind of like coded language of we’re in this together. We’re in this apocalyptic [indiscernible 00:31:46] together, where we are the light; they are the darkness. It’s very much reaffirming your—the belonging in that community. They’re constantly affirming it.

Jessica: Is there anything else that you feel like we should know, or any kind of advice you want to give to the people who consume le woo?

Abbie Richards: You can’t just trust every influencer you see, even if you’ve been following them for years. They might be getting radicalized. They might be posting things to their stories. That is how a lot of this is spreading is through people with platforms sharing this information. So be critical of that.

Jessica: I mean, this is so helpful. And I will add to that that if at any point you listen to something that either of us have said, and you’re thinking—and you got really defensive, that’s a great place to linger, hang out a while. 

Explore your defensiveness. If you’re feeling defensive, if you feel really protective of some of your beliefs or your relationship to some influencer, some content, hang out there and be interested in your defensive feelings. Because, generally, when you feel defensive, it’s like a scab on some other difficult to feel emotions and, therefore, a great place to be interested and investigative so that we don’t kind of build that scab and then build something in front of the scab, and we forget that we were defensive, and we kind of skipped over critical thought. So that’s like an important step in all this. 

I think that’s the key is to notice when you have those feelings that you’d rather push past, whether they’re defensiveness or fear or anger, and really linger there—be interested in those feelings because that’s the way you maintain critical thought around something that touches your heart and that provokes feelings, right. 

I’ve learnt so much and probably more than I wanted to know about this fucking terrible situation that we’re all in.

Abbie Richards: I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

Jessica: I thank you. I thank you so much. It’s really been so helpful. Can you tell le people where they can find you on la intranet.

Abbie Richards: Yes. On la intranet, I am on TikTok at Tofology—T-O-F-O-L-O-G-Y—Tofology. And then I’m in Instagram at AbbieSR—A-B-B-I-E-S-R and Twitter AbbieASR—A-B-B-I-E-A-S-R. 

Jessica: And if you couldn’t track any of that because she just talks so fast, it’s all going to be in show notes.

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If you would like to learn more about Q and about, basically, the road map of online and social entry points, including language that’s been appropriated by Q so you can kind of take better care of yourself online, go ahead and follow Abbie on TikTok or Instagram. I have linked her ats over in show notes, so you can find her that way. 

And now I want to talk to you a little bit about how to engage with this stuff if you yourself are running into QAnon ideas and you’re not sure how to navigate that, or you have somebody close to you, somebody that you love who’s dabbling deeply or lightly in these ideas. 

So one really important rule of thumb is to know that science is real. This is such an important—and I know it sounds maybe very simple, but it is really important. Science can be politicized, but science is not political; science is real. I think that the use of common sense is really important when dealing with spirituality, but it’s also a little bit tricky because what kind of common sense is involved in astrology, in psychic shit? I don’t know. It gets tricky. It gets tricky pretty quickly. 

I want to say, emphatically, and this is a bit of a reiteration, but there are not simple answers to systemic problems. And I think that the risky thing that we can all look out for when dealing with conspirituality, which is like conspiracy theory-based spirituality, is that it often points to really simple solutions to systemic problems—blaming one group of people, whether that’s an ethnic group, which usually it eventually does, or like the media or the government. It’s really not that simple. Very few systemic, complex things, if any, are actually able to be broken down in such simple terms. 

While QAnon ideas and influencers and writing can often encompass lots of things that are actually great and that make sense for you and me and that are, as Abbie was talking about, rooted in truth, QAnon’s foundation is in anti-Semitism and white supremacy. And as she says, it all ends in violence. And so, it’s important to stay vigilant around conspiracy theory stuff to make sure that you are not losing yourself, losing your ethical and moral center in your investigation spiritually and that you are not seeking quick or easy answers for these really complicated and exhausting times. 

Now, if it’s not you who’s at risk with Q, but instead you have friends or family who have fallen down some rabbit hole that is conspiracy theory esk and centers in any way on, “You’ll never understand; you’re a sheep,” or any of the kind of stuff where it is kind of predicated on this idea that no one understands except for the special people who do understand how x group of people is secretly at blame, and we have a savior and that one savior is going to come and fix everything. 

When we have people who have fallen into the clutches of Q or conspiracy theories, I want to give a little bit of advice about how to cope with it. And the first thing is don’t try to convince anyone to come around to your way of thinking because, essentially, what you’re doing is you’re invalidating what they believe and the information they’ve seen. And as Abbie and I were just talking about, when you’re online and you are clicking through information that goes in a particular direction, you’re only going to be shown information that reaffirms that information—that takes you down that path. 

So anyone who’s really certain of a theory that they’ve learnt online, they probably actually feel like they have a lot of evidence because they’ve seen it on YouTube, they’ve read it, whatever. So don’t try to convince someone to believe what you believe, but instead connect with them. Remind them of your personal connection, your personal love and care for each other. That might mean bringing up memories and redirecting conversation away from conspiracy theory stuff. 

It’s about not engaging with something that you know you’re going to disagree on, and in particular, do not make fun of people. Do not make little of people for believing something that you may think is really, really wrong. Because as soon as you shit on someone else’s beliefs, they are absolutely not going to listen to you anymore. 

And this is something that I actually talked about on the podcast in episode 160; it’s called Hearts and Minds. I answered a question for a listener whose family member they strongly disagreed with, and I gave advice about how to deal with defensiveness. And this is a really important thing because most of us, when we engage with defensiveness in ourselves or in other people, we have a tendency to want to explain—explain, explain, defend, defend—and that doesn’t really work. 

It’s important to understand the emotions underneath why a person believes what they do or acts the way they do. And in order to truly listen to someone else, honestly, you’ve got to approach them without judgment, you got to approach them with some measure of love. And that can be really hard if you are being hurt by their beliefs or if you have an ongoing dynamic where they’re alienating you or being cruel towards you. 

Now, I’m not encouraging anyone to put themselves in a place where you’re getting harmed by a family member or a friend, at all. But if you have someone that you’re close to and you want to reach them and you feel that you are maybe losing them to conspiracy theory stuff or you see that they’re kind of like slipping down a rabbit hole, it’s really important to ask questions. It’s really important to connect with them personally, not convince them of anything. 

Once you’re connected, once you have an emotionally affirmed connection, then you can start asking questions, then you can start investigating. It’s really not about forcing facts on people. Because in today’s world with conspiracy theories and propaganda as it is, there’s just limitless amount of data—noise, noise, noise, noise, noise. It’s not about facts. It is about feelings. 

And so, it’s important to first approach your family members or friends with as much kindness and empathy as you can and to listen before you decide what you need to say to them—listen to what it is that they are concerned about. Because if it is that someone believes that COVID is fake—okay, ask a lot of questions. Ask where they get the information. Ask how they feel about it. Ask a lot of questions. Be interested. Listen to their answers. 

And maybe don’t give them any new information in that particular conversation because something that tends to happen within conspiracy theories is that people feel really defensive of being told that they’re wrong. And this is part of the thing—it’s like us against them. And so, as soon as you’re like, “Yeah, you’re wrong because…,” unfortunately, you are making yourself into them, and there’s an us against them thing happening. 

And so, these are approaches where you just practice listening and building or rebuilding trust with a family member so that you are not just about good versus evil, us against them, but instead you are relatives, you’re friends, you’re people who care about each other, and you want to understand each other, and you want to communicate, and you want to be heard. And that will, often times, take time. It’s a long game strategy instead of a short-term strategy. It’s not something you can always fix in a conversation. 

And, you know, through my whole investigation into Q and conspiracy theories and my conversation with Abbie Richards, what I keep on coming up against over and over again is that there is no simple solution here. There is no quick fix. And that a lot of people have fallen prey to QAnon and other conspiracy theories that are actually like on the surface and at the beginning not inherently problematic, but they kind of end of sucking you into something that is, at its core, really violent and hate based. 

And it’s incumbent upon us as individuals, but also as a community, as a society, to care for each other, to look out for each other. The internet is this mammoth place, and it is filled with influencers—people who have influence. It’s hard to be a critical thinker all the time. None of us are doing that. Who could? Who has the energy to constantly be critical? When you are constantly critical, doesn’t that become its own vulnerability, right? 

So there is not a simple answer. There’s not an easy answer. There’s not a one size fits all answer. But what there is is a need for us to continue to return to this conversation, to check in with our defensiveness, to check in with our assumptions, to make sure that we are using the internet responsibly and engaging with our spiritual values and interests responsibly and to know that in order to do that, we need to keep on checking back in, and also to cultivate a certain level of emotional intelligence and self-awareness that allows us to sit with our defenses, to sit with our uncomfortable feelings or with the fact that maybe we fell down a rabbit hole for a couple of weeks where we just lost track of our values, or we starting seeking simple answers and getting really caught up in pointing fingers at a specific group that we now realize is not actually how we feel, and it doesn’t check. 

It’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay to make a mistake. It’s not weakness to acknowledge those things. We’re all learning. We’re all growing, and we are all going through an unprecedented time. Be gentle with yourself. Be generous with others.