Pinking shears were designed and patented by Louise Austin in Washington in 1893. Before this invention, the pretty zig-zag design they created could only be replicated by trained pinking tortoises. 🔊 pic.twitter.com/vHhof5wX9T
And the uptick continues. The world will be over 40 million cases later today or early tomorrow, and if the trend continues, 50 million a few weeks after that.
USAmerica Inc should hit 250,000 dead by this time next month. Happy holidays, everybody.
When President Trump got sick, I had this moment of deja vu back to when I first woke up in the hospital. I know what it’s like to be humiliated by this virus. I used to call it the “scamdemic.” I thought it was an overblown media hoax. I made fun of people for wearing masks. I went all the way down the rabbit hole and fell hard on my own sword, so if you want to hate me or blame me, that’s fine. I’m doing plenty of that myself.
The party was my idea. That’s what I can’t get over. Well, I mean, it wasn’t even a party — more like a get-together. There were just six of us, okay? My parents, my partner, and my partner’s parents. We’d been locked down for months at that point in Texas, and the governor had just come out and said small gatherings were probably okay. We’re a close family, and we hadn’t been together in forever. It was finally summer. I thought the worst was behind us. I was like: “Hell, let’s get on with our lives. What are we so afraid of?”
Some people in my family didn’t necessarily share all of my views, but I pushed it. I’ve always been out front with my opinions. I’m gay and I’m conservative, so either way I’m used to going against the grain. I stopped trusting the media for my information when it went hard against Trump in 2016. I got rid of my cable. It’s all opinion anyway, so I’d rather come up with my own. I find a little bit of truth here and a little there, and I pile it together to see what it makes. I have about 4,000 people in my personal network, and not one of them had gotten sick. Not one. You start to hear jokes about, you know, a skydiver jumps out of a plane without a parachute and dies of covid-19. You start to think: “Something’s really fishy here.” You start dismissing and denying.
I told my family: “Come on. Enough already. Let’s get together and enjoy life for once.”
They all came for the weekend. We agreed not to do any of the distancing or worry much about it. I mean, I haven’t seen my mother in months, and I’m not supposed to go up and hug her? Come on. We have a two-story house, so there was room for us to all stay here together. We all came on our own free will. It felt like something we needed. It had been months of doing nothing, feeling nothing, seeing no one, worrying about finances with this whole shutdown. My partner had been sent home from his work. I’d been at the finish line of raising $3.5 million for a new project, and that all evaporated overnight. I’d been feeling depressed and angry, and then it was like: “Okay! I can breathe.” We cooked nice meals. We watched a few movies. I played a few songs on my baby grand piano. We drove to a lake about 60 miles outside of Dallas and talked and talked. It was nothing all that special. It was great. It was normal.
I woke up Sunday morning feeling a little iffy. I have a lot of issues with sleeping, and I thought that’s probably what it was. I let everyone know: “I don’t feel right, but I’m guessing it might be exhaustion.” I was kind of achy. There was a weird vibration inside. I had a bug-eye feeling.
A few hours later, my partner was feeling a little bad, too. Then my parents. Then my father-in-law got sick the next day, after he’d already left and gone to Austin to witness the birth of his first grandchild. I have no idea which one of us brought the virus into the house, but all six of us left with it. It kept spreading from there.
I told myself it wouldn’t be that bad. “It’s the flu. It’s basically just the flu.” I didn’t have the horrible cough you keep hearing about. My breathing never got too terrible. My fever peaked for like one day at 100.5, which is nothing — barely worth mentioning. “All right. I got this. See? It was nothing.” But then some of the other symptoms started to get wild. I was sweating profusely. I would wake up in a pool of sweat. I had this tingling feeling all over my body, this radiating kind of pain. Do you remember those old space heaters that you’d plug in, and the red lines would light up and glow? I felt like that was happening inside my bones. I was burning from the inside out. I was buzzing. I was dizzy. I couldn’t even turn my head around to look at the TV. I felt like my eyeballs were in a fishbowl, just bopping around. I rubbed Icy Hot all over my head. It was nonstop headaches and sweating for probably about a week — and then it just went away. I got some of my energy back. I had a few really good days. I started working on projects around the house. I was thinking: “Okay. That’s it. Pretty bad, but not so terrible. I beat it. I managed it. Nothing worth shutting down the entire world over.” Then one day I was walking up the stairs, and all of the sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I screamed and fell flat on my face. I blacked out. I woke up a while later in the ER, and 10 doctors were standing around me in a circle. I was lying on the table after going through a CT scan. The doctors told me the virus had attacked my nervous system. They’d given me some medications that stopped me from having a massive stroke. They said I was minutes away.
I stayed in the hospital for three days, trying to get my mind around it. It was guilt, embarrassment, shame. I thought: “Okay. Maybe now I’ve paid for my mistake.” But it kept getting worse.
Six infections turned into nine. Nine went up to 14. It spread from one family member to the next, and it was like each person caught a different strain. My mother-in-law got it and never had any real symptoms. My father is 78, and he went to get checked out at the hospital, but for whatever reasons, he seemed to recover really fast. My father-in-law nearly died in his living room and then ended up in the same hospital as me on the exact same day. His mother was in the room right next to him because she was having trouble breathing. They were lying there on both sides of the wall, fighting the same virus, and neither of them ever knew the other one was there. She died after a few weeks. On the day of her funeral, five more family members tested positive.
My father-in-law’s probably my best friend. It’s an unconventional relationship. He’s 52, only nine years older than me, and we hit it off right away. He runs a construction company, and I would tag along on his jobs and ride with him around Dallas. I’ve been through a lot in my life — from food stamps to Ferraris and then back again — so I could tell a good story and make him laugh. He builds these 20,000-square-foot custom homes, but he’d been renting his whole life. We decided to go in together on 10 acres outside Dallas, and he was finally getting ready to build his own house. We’d already done the plumbing and gotten streets built on the property. We’d planted 50 pecans and oaks to give the property some shade. He had his blueprints all drawn up. It was all he wanted to talk about.
He was on supplemental oxygen, but the doctors kept reducing the amount he was getting. They thought he was getting better. He was still making jokes, so I wasn’t all that worried. He told me: “They’ve got you upstairs in the Cadillac rooms because you’re White, but all of us Mexicans are still down here in the ER.” I got sent home, and I had a lot of guilt about leaving him there. I called him at the hospital, and I was like: “I’m going to come bust you out Mission Impossible style.” He said he preferred El Chapo style. We were laughing so hard. I hung up, and a few hours later I got a call from my mother-in-law. She was hysterical. She could barely speak. She said one of his lungs had collapsed and the other was filling with fluid. They put him on a ventilator, and he lay there on life support for six or seven weeks. There was never any goodbye. He was just gone. It’s like the world swallowed him up. We could only have 10 people at the funeral, and I didn’t make that list.
I break down sometimes, but mostly I’m empty. Am I glad to be alive? I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that.
There’s no relief. This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.
U.S. tops 60,000 daily coronavirus infections for first time since early August New study shows Republican-leaning counties hardest hit in recent weeks
For the first time since early August, the number of newly reported coronavirus infections in the United States on Thursday topped 60,000. More than 36,000 people are hospitalized nationally with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, amid a long-feared autumnal rise of infections and serious illnesses.
This is not a regional crisis, but instead one that is intensifying almost everywhere in the country. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have higher caseloads than in mid-September. The virus is spreading in rural communities in the heartland, far from the coastal cities hammered early in the pandemic.
Wisconsin set a record Thursday when it surpassed 4,000 newly reported cases. Illinois also reported more than 4,000 cases, eclipsing records set during the state’s first wave in April and May. Ohio set a new high, as did Indiana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Montana, and Colorado. In El Paso, officials have ordered new restrictions and lockdowns amid a frightening coronavirus surge.
“We know that this is going to get worse before it gets better,” Wisconsin Department of Health Services secretary-designee Andrea Palm said at a briefing Thursday. “Stay home. Wear a mask. Stay six feet apart. Wash your hands frequently.”
Some hospitals in the Upper Midwest and Great Plains have become jammed with patients and are running low on intensive-care-unit beds. On Wednesday, Wisconsin opened a field hospital on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Fair Park outside Milwaukee and will eventually be able to treat more than 500 patients.
Montana reported a record 301 hospitalized covid-19 patients Thursday, with 98 percent of the inpatient beds occupied the day before in Yellowstone County, home to the city of Billings and the state’s most populous county.
During the past week, at least 20 states have set record seven-day averages for infections, and a dozen have hit record hospitalization rates, according to health department data analyzed by The Washington Post.
In the midst of all this, President Stoopid sticks with "Don't worry - let it run its course".
If we get a vaccine in the next 6 months, and it takes another 6 months to get it out to the 250 million people we have to get it out to, then at today's growth rate: 1,000,000 Dead Americans.
Doctors search for treatments for covid-19 ‘long-haulers’ with few guides
Covid-19 took its best shot at Edison Chiluisa in May, sending him to intensive care, but the disease is still not done with him. For the past four months, long after his release from the hospital, Chiluisa has been racked by lingering ailments: Paralyzing fatigue. Shortness of breath. A stutter he never had before.
“The disease, it wears on you — body, mind and spirit,” Chiluisa, a 51-year-old hospital worker, said recently. “You can be fine all day, and then all of a sudden, your body just shuts down. No explanation. No reason. It just shuts down.”
But unlike some “long-haulers” in the early part of the pandemic, who struggled to persuade anyone that symptoms of covid-19 could last for months, Chiluisa is being attended by a team of specialists.
He sees a pulmonologist, a cardiologist, a neurologist, a respiratory therapist and a physical therapist, and soon he will see a social worker for the toll the coronavirus has inflicted on his psyche.
Even as they continue to face the day-to-day medical demands of the pandemic, caregivers like Chiluisa’s are adjusting to the reality that, for many thousands of people, the long-term consequences of covid-19 may have to be managed for months, and possibly much longer.
Long-haulers “are in every country, in every language,” said Igor J. Koralnik, who started a program for covid-19 neurocognitive problems at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, one of numerous post-covid-19 clinics opening around the country. “It’s going to be a big problem. It’s not going to go away.”
Chiluisa’s care is coordinated by the Winchester Chest Clinic at Yale New Haven Hospital. The Center for Post-COVID Care operated by the Mount Sinai health-care system in New York City boasts clinical specialists from 12 disciplines on its website. Penn Medicine’s clinic in Philadelphia bills itself as a “post-covid assessment and recovery clinic.”
While doctors have accumulated many years of experience in the long-term management of diseases such as diabetes and renal failure, they have no such expertise in covid-19, which is barely 10 months old.
“The patients are very scared because nobody has very clear answers for them,” said Denyse Lutchmansingh, Chiluisa’s pulmonologist. “They are happy to feel heard. They are happy that people are trying to help them. But at the end of the day, [they would] like to be told for sure ‘this is what is going to happen to you, this is not what is going to happen to you.’ And that’s the part that’s difficult for us in medicine, because it’s not completely clear.”
So maybe we shouldn't be out there fucking around with people's health insurance.
I get it - we have to pay for stuff - but maybe we should be making sure people get the care they need and deserve first, and then we can we bitch about the cost, and then we can not use the power of the federal government to put bonus money in the pockets of insurance company execs who act like a bunch of MBA assholes looking to collect rent on our health and wellbeing.
Don't try to turn an economic philosophy into a system of government
Never make it dependent on changing human nature
That said, we have to figure out how to put honor back up at the top of the heap. And I promise, the concept of expecting everybody to behave in an honorable way does not run contrary to #3 above.
I guess we have to start by re-acquainting ourselves with the concept of honor, and acknowledging that everything we do is, in fact, in the end, "on the honor system".
I can sign a contract or swear an oath, but when it comes time for me to deliver on the promises I made - in writing or otherwise - I can choose not to honor my word.
You can sue me. I can countersue. Maybe we settle. Maybe it goes all the way through the courts, bankrupting both of us.
The whole thing breaks down and loses its meaning if anyone decides at any time to act dishonorably along the way - which includes the people who are sworn to administer and uphold the law.
We've evolved a sense of honor (morality, ethics, law) because we know that's how it has to be in order to make a partnership work; to make a family work; to make a clan work; to make a tribe work; to make a neighborhood work - to make everything work that has anything to do with a world where there's more than one person involved.
Learn to live your life without needing a cop or Jesus or your mom looking over your shoulder the whole time.
As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off
On the afternoon of Feb. 24, President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was “very much under control” in the United States, one of numerous rosy statements that he and his advisers made at the time about the worsening epidemic. He even added an observation for investors: “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”
But hours earlier, senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident. Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, told the group he could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy. To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.
The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.
The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark. “What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”
The consultant’s assessment quickly spread through parts of the investment world. U.S. stocks were already spiraling because of a warning from a federal public health official that the virus was likely to spread, but traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.
The piece goes on to chronicle the assholery of (mostly) GOP politicians and their sugar-daddy donors, and it makes my blood boil.
The one thing that makes the economy run is people having a fairly high level of confidence that they're not going to be ripped off every time they turn around.
The one thing that makes a democracy work is people having a fairly high level of confidence that their votes count, and that a government of, by, and for the people isn't just a nice-sounding rhetorical flourish, but actually bears some resemblance to a government of, by, and for the fucking people.
When "justice" becomes selective, and depends on your level of affluence, because that makes it possible for you to buy influence over the justice system itself, then it's a pretty short road to the collapse of the whole mess.
Don't get me started on the near-perfect parallel between what we've got going here in USAmerica Inc and full blown Daddy State fascism. We are teetering on the brink of the event horizon.
Americans may need to ‘bite the bullet’ and cancel Thanksgiving, Fauci warns
Surging coronavirus cases in many areas of the country may make it unwise to hold large family gatherings at Thanksgiving this year, particularly if elderly relatives or out-of-state travel are involved, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert told “CBS Evening News.”
“You may have to bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering, unless you’re pretty certain that the people that you’re dealing with are not infected,” Anthony S. Fauci said, adding that his three children will not be coming home for Thanksgiving because his age puts him at elevated risk.
Fourteen-year-old Barron Trump tested positive for the coronavirus at the time of his parents’ diagnosis but did not experience any symptoms, first lady Melania Trump revealed Wednesday. Later that day, President Trump cited his son’s good health while urging schools to reopen.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that a new economic relief bill is unlikely before the election and suggested that Democrats were refusing to make a deal because they do not want to hand Trump a victory in the lead-up to the election.
In nine states, the rolling average of hospitalizations from coronavirus complications has risen by double digits over the past week, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. The largest jumps were recorded in Wyoming and Montana.
So, in case you were harboring any doubts about how fucked up this "administration" is - or if you still believed our government was holding us in any regard other than lowest that's humanly possible - ladies & gents, behold the awesome wonder of a "president" who will just ignore us until we go away - or die off, so he doesn't have to hear the complaints anymore.
Proposal to hasten herd immunity to the coronavirus grabs White House attention but appalls top scientists
Maverick scientists who call for allowing the coronavirus to spread freely at “natural” rates among healthy young people while keeping most aspects of the economy up and running have found an audience inside the White House and at least one state capitol.
The scientists met last week with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who has emerged as an influential adviser to President Trump on the pandemic.
When asked for comment, HHS referred a reporter to Azar’s subsequent Twitter statement about the meeting: “We heard strong reinforcement of the Trump Administration’s strategy of aggressively protecting the vulnerable while opening schools and the workplace.”
A senior administration official told reporters in a background briefing call Monday that the proposed strategy — which has been denounced by other infectious-disease experts and has been called “fringe” and “dangerous” by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins — supports what has been Trump’s policy for months.
“We’re not endorsing a plan. The plan is endorsing what the president’s policy has been for months. The president’s policy — protect the vulnerable, prevent hospital overcrowding, and open schools and businesses — and he’s been very clear on that,” the official said.
“Everybody knows that 200,000 people died. That’s extremely serious and tragic. But on the other hand, I don’t think society has to be paralyzed, and we know the harms of confining people to their homes,” the official added.
The piece goes on and paints a very grim picture of the darkness that has completely enveloped this White House.
And the main point stands out in stark detail: "200,000 people died and that's tragic..." must never be followed with anything that starts with "...but..."NEVER NEVER EVER
There's nothing more dismissive and condescending. It shows a callous disregard for people's lives, and shows utter disrespect for the survivors - for the people who loved those who have died because this fucked up administration couldn't get its head out of its ass when some of this shit could've been prevented, and now can't figure out how to come to terms with its fucked up response in any meaningful way, so they just pretend that hundreds of thousands of dead Americans is simply the price we have to pay for some decent returns on Wall Street's investments. It's just the cost of doin' bidness.
Fuck that shit - and fuck them.
Maybe now Americans begin to see what America has been doing to the rest of the world for over a hundred years. Maybe we finally begin to understand the kind of shitty things that happen by way of plutocratic exploitation - because now it's being turned around and focused on us.
Let's be clear - when we're talking about QAnon and Alex Jones and AM Hate Radio and (most of) DumFux News, we're not talking about "conspiracy theories". There's no theory to it - this shit is purely a childish indulgence in fantasy.
These fuckin' fuckwads seem to be watching movies like Enemy of the State, and TV shows like 24 - and even pro wrestling - as if they're documentaries.
Which I think must have something to do with their willingness to accept a washed-up has-been game show host as the leader of their death cult.
There was a time not long ago when the letter held no special meaning for Jacob, a 24-year-old in Croatia. The 17th letter of the alphabet, usually followed by “u” in English words. What else was there to know? He certainly never expected it to end the tightknit relationship he shared with his mother.
But Jacob, who grew up in the United States, told The Washington Post that he has cut all contact with his mother now that she’s become an ardent believer of the QAnon conspiracy theories.
Though they long held different political beliefs, they had “a really, really strong relationship,” he said. “We were inseparable.” He had no reason to think anything had changed. But during the holidays in 2019, “our relationship just completely tanked.”
QAnon can be traced back to a series of 2017 posts on 4chan, the online message board known for its mixture of trolls and alt-right followers. The poster was someone named “Q,” who claimed to be a government insider with Q security clearance, the highest level in the Department of Energy. QAnon’s origin matters less than what it’s become, an umbrella term for a loose set of conspiracy theories ranging from the false claim that vaccines cause illness and are a method of controlling the masses to the bogus assertion that many pop stars and Democratic leaders are pedophiles.
As QAnon has crept into the news, it’s become a testament to our age of political disinformation, not to mention easy online comedic currency. But what’s often forgotten in stories and jokes are the people behind the scenes who are baffled at a loved one’s embrace of the “movement,” and who struggle to keep it from tearing their families apart.
According to Jacob’s recollection, his mother spent her days browsing these various theories on YouTube and Twitter. “I told her, ‘I came here to visit you,” he recalled. But she refused to stay offline.
“I finally got her to turn [her phone] off once, and it was unreal. She treated it like a chore,” he said. “It’s like she’s addicted. It feels like she’s been swallowed up by a cult."
“Finally, I realized that my relationship with her had brought me nothing but stress and unhappiness for, at that point, really years,” he said. “That smart, awesome person that I used to know just didn’t exist anymore. So I decided to cut my losses and cauterize the wound.”
Jacob hasn’t spoken to her since February, but she continues posting conspiracy theories multiple times a day to Facebook. She declined a request for comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is using only Jacob’s first name.
“It’s devastating,” he said. “It really, really does feel like my mother abandoned me. She implicitly chose QAnon … over me.”
Jacob is one of many who have turned to makeshift online support groups, the most prominent of which is the subreddit r/qanoncasualties. “Do you have a loved one who’s been taken in by the QAnon conspiracy theory? Look here for emotional support and a place to vent,” reads the group’s description.
It had fewer than 3,500 members at the beginning of June, the earliest iteration captured by the online archival website the Way Back Machine. It now has more than 28,000. “I have been completely isolated from other friends and family members because of this cult,” one user posted recently. “You guys have definitely been a lifeline, reminding me that sanity does still exist in this world. Thank you guys, very much.”
The loneliness of losing loved ones to QAnon is something Kerry, of Oklahoma City, knows well. “QAnon” meant nothing to him, he recalled, when he found a stockpile of water and food in his house, which his then-wife told him was “because she believed Trump was going to be declaring martial law any day in order to effectuate a mass arrest of Democrats,” something known to QAnon believers as “the storm.” (His ex-wife declined to comment, and to protect her privacy, The Post is only using Kerry’s first name.)
Kerry dug deeper, trying to understand his wife’s beliefs. They would debate. Eventually they started avoiding it “to keep peace in the house,” but she eventually grew more assertive and “what was once a taboo topic became something we were arguing about all the time.”
Still, he empathized.
“She was getting frustrated that nobody in her immediate family was buying in and supporting her,” Kerry said. “She felt like she was alone in this crusade. … And I know this was extremely frustrating and hurtful for her.”
He and their then-18-year-old son held an intervention. It failed. “We were together a very long time. We managed to get past a lot of things I’ve seen end other marriages,” he said. “But this was the thing we couldn’t get past.”
Their 20-year marriage ended.
His is one of a flood of stories. There’s the South Carolina doctor whose mother blocked him on Facebook and no longer trusts his medical knowledge. The Florida woman who thought her mother — a physician in Canada who refuses to wear masks when not seeing a patient and tried to persuade her daughter not to vaccinate her grandchild — was senile when she began hawking QAnon theories. The woman whose unemployed aunt is quarantining alone and suddenly began diving into QAnon because it “gives her life meaning.”
“I love my mother, but she sucks the life out of me with her conspiracy theories,” said one Florida woman via email. (Many interviewees spoke on the condition of anonymity, which they requested for a variety of reasons, including fear of violence from QAnon followers, pending legal action and the worry that speaking would hinder their attempts to repair relationships.)
This is not strictly a U.S. phenomenon. Users from Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, New Zealand and the Netherlands all shared similar stories.
One recurring theme is how often people who fall into QAnon aren’t digital natives. A 30-year-old Sacramento resident said his stepmother of 20 years “has always been not really an Internet person,” until the 2016 election. She soon stumbled upon radical aspects of online politics on outlets such as 4chan, “going from a zero to a 10.” Soon enough, she was seeking “Q drops” (supposedly when Q reveals new “information”), telling others how “there are children in bunkers under Central Park who are being trafficked” and telling her stepson he was “brainwashed because you went to college.”
When this person spoke to The Post last month, his mother hadn’t left the house in 16 weeks because she refused to wear a mask after watching the viral “Plandemic” conspiracy video, which made the false claim that billionaires aided in the spread of the coronavirus to further the usage of vaccines and made the baseless and dangerous assertion that wearing masks is harmful.
“This same person who told me not to believe strangers online, her entire worldview is informed by strangers online,” he said.
Joan Donovan, the research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, said often people’s point of entry into a conspiracy narrative is the fear of something specific, such as illness or violent crime. Maybe they seek out answers on the Internet, only to find conspiratorial ones.
“If you have someone in your family in this mode of inquisitiveness, who is trying to figure something out, then rather than coming at them judgmentally or accusingly, there is a window of opportunity to reorient their thinking to understand why they perceive something in a certain way,” Donovan said.
That window might eventually close, though, as they find community among other online conspiracy theorists, many of whom create massive amounts of text, memes, videos — you name it — to sift through. “It’s not necessary that you convince your friends or family to join, because you have a whole separate set of friends … It’s the kind of community where you could be lost in it for hours and hours a day and still not see everything,” Donovan said.
When someone goes too far down the rabbit hole, it’s unlikely that anyone will convince them otherwise. “My main advice is not to get into a debate about, say, how many politicians are secret satanists,” Donovan said. Instead, she suggests trying to help someone “see how much of their life they’re missing out on and how much it’s impacting your relationship. … And if they can’t have a conversation about someone else, a conversation that’s mutually beneficial and interesting, then there’s a different kind of problem going on.”
“The one-on-one approach of trying to understand where someone is coming from and where their fears are … works,” Donovan said. If someone is “willing to take on the burden of trying to get one of their family members to change their mind, I hope they approach them with passion and concern.”
The situation can become increasingly difficult when a child is involved. A Florida firefighter said his ex-wife fell hard for every QAnon theory in the book, from a complicated plot connecting UFOs and the Illuminati to the (false) idea that prominent celebrities, entrepreneurs and politicians are lizard people disguised in human skin. Her obsession with conspiracy theories helped lead to their divorce.
“Her intentions are to do good, but it’s just not real,” he said. “It’s like living in a fantasy world. It’s a need to believe in something.”
Her beliefs wouldn’t matter to him much at this point if they weren’t co-parenting a son. He found out that his ex-wife told the son to avoid banks because the Federal Reserve would put microchips in him.
His father said that he and his ex “do a pretty good job of trying to raise him,” but added, “I couldn’t imagine trying to raise a child to be a functional adult while living so far outside reality.”
