My QAnon Uncle
A man with an impossible dream.
In 2018 I visited my uncle at his gated community in Palm Beach. We had a lovely time walking around the marina and catching up. We barely discussed politics until dinner, when he brought up the Democrats and pedophilia. Right on cue, our salmon arrived, and we switched topics.
The next day he texted me a YouTube video from one of QAnon’s biggest influencers. The video made numerous claims about Hillary not winning the popular vote, ‘globalists’ building a New World Order, George Soros trafficking children, and liberals harvesting people’s organs.
“This is going to be hard for you to hear,” he wrote.
After digesting the arguments (and debating whether to engage), I replied with my thoughts. What followed was an email exchange lasting four years.
In honor of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share what I learned.
One is to acknowledge the fear as valid. “It would be horrible if true” is how one of my emails opened — because it would be bad if liberals intentionally set California ablaze to lay 5G infrastructure. Other times I noted what I agreed with: “Media creates divisions.” “People stick to their own tribe.” Even shared generalities made him more receptive to what followed.
Sometimes it got personal. I’m Jewish, but he’s Catholic. Scattered throughout many articles were ‘globalists,’ ‘the cabal,’ and ‘the Rothschilds’ (though no mention of ‘Jews’).
Rather than call him an antisemite (because I don’t think he is, or was aware of the dog whistles), I reserved my criticism for the authors disguising their hate for others to spread. This seemed to work.
But my favorite email was a Youtube link with the subject line “Pedophilia Warnings - The Globalists Arrests Have Begun”. He wrote, “Do people just make this stuff up????!”
Before YouTube tweaked their algorithm (after a public outcry), it was recommending propaganda videos to retirees like my uncle. He’s a kind, religious, trusting man. He sees himself as (and is) a moral person in a deeply immoral world. But in this case, the world was distorted. Incendiary content gets views. The YouTube videos had pre-rolls. The Blogspots had Google Ads and disclaimers saying ‘everything should be construed as rumor’ (which you won’t find on nytimes.com).
That’s when it clicked.
My dad would tell me bedtime stories as a kid. He’d make up scenarios where I (or a stand-in) was the hero. We’d fight dragons and free innocent people from dungeons (my dad studied theater so the line reads were stellar). In these settings the morality was unambiguous. How could I not fight the evil I saw? How could I stand by while something so wrong was transpiring?
QAnon, InfoWars, and other conspiracy-laden media are bedtime stories. Some consumers might be hateful, but others are people shocked by the depravity and bent on fixing it. When made aware, how can we not want to help? Isn’t that what religion, art, and Don Quixote teach us? To right the obvious wrongs?
But after a while, you fall down a rabbit hole. YouTube becomes your drug dealer.
I don’t know if I changed my uncle’s mind. After the 2022 midterms we went back to texting about March Madness. But I came away from our exchange with a better understanding of where he’s coming from. And by genuinely listening to him, he was open to my points of view.
Today’s politics want us to treat the other side as evil. But a more useful thing might be to treat them as a window.
It’s hard to convince anyone of anything if you don’t see what they’re seeing.
Poignant, as usual, Ben! I was just messaging with an old like-minded coworker in the same vein as this post. It’s our job as liberals to be the better ones, listen to our conservative counterparts, and find some way to meet them at least somewhat in the middle. Thank you for the uplifting article!