and nearly her marriage after her husband filed for divorce. what s going on? when you look at that video, what do you think about? never in a million years would i think that i would have been the type of person to join a cult, but that s exactly what i did. it s very easy to get swept up. based on a poll conducted in 2021, an estimated 15% of the american public still believed a secret group of pedophiles were controlling the government. that s millions of people. i m looking at this reddit page, stories of people who have gone down this qanon rabbit hole. here s one who says lost my mom to this qanon [ bleep ]. talked about killing small children and drinking their
riff that resist that it had in my relationship with my husband. finally things got so heated here that he was like either you cut this qanon out or we re done. i said fine. i ll go stay in a hotel i was filled with rage. i was thinking about everything i had learned about qanon, it s like they re doing this to us. when i saw the maps, i just lost its. [ bleep ], [ bleep ]. i don t have the [ bleep ] [ bleep ]. the target video was just one of several post by melissa. in them, she bragged about connections to q, loyalty to donald trump, and used a torrent of racist language. [ bleep ] [ bleep ] [ bleep ]. elissa lost clients, friends,
some of the things that you saw that really affected you after going down that rabbit hole? i saw clips of videos that were floating around on twitter. it was people in positions of power abusing children with proof, you know, that s their voice, that s their house. i had never seen anything like that. melissa had stumbled into america s fastest growing conspiracy theory. qanon. the information seemed very real and very credible and hor horrifying. but did you ever think that that all could be contrived? i considered that but i was deeply affected by the save the children messaging and the claims about widespread pedophilia. i just wanted to see justice and the truth come forward and i just couldn t let it go. by now most of us have heard of the q aknapp conspiracy
literally a medieval conspiracy theory. it is an anti-semitic idea that juice were meeting late at night to slaughter christian children and use their blood in rituals, but it spread beyond that. you can see elements of it in qanon, which claims that evil doers are meeting in secret to abuse children. the agent lie has been weapon niced again and again throughout global history but still didn t turn elissa. even though there is a lot of anti-semitism that goes along with what qanon is about, that still didn t dissuade you? i picked and choosed what i ascribe to and the rest of it, i was like i don t like that, i m going to ignore that. and the more detached from reality i got, the more of a
donald trump s presidency and it is basically the idea that he is secretly kabal of evil doers and that we are being told what he s doing through mysterious clues dropped by someone who calls themselves q. how is that something people have found themselves wanting to partake in? qanon has become a massive on line role playing game, and it s very addictive, because it gives people a sense of participating in something really big. if you put these clues together correctly, you will vanquish an unthinkable evil. anna tells me qanon is more than memes and viral clips. it s part of a much older, darker story. the idea of a secret group of sexually abusive evil doers is