Waiting for Lazarus: Splintered Realities and Shattered Relations of QAnon
Stella O’Brien
It was a rainy day in Dallas on November 2nd 2021, when hundreds of people gathered where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated and waited with bated breath for the return of JFK Jr. Michael Protzman, aka Negative 48, became a spokesperson and organizer for the group who were convinced that despite having died in a plane crash in 1999, JFK Jr. was very much alive. Protzman, who had also been convinced of a variety of QAnon conspiracy theories about abducted children, was firm in his belief that JFK Jr. would come back and assist Donald Trump in his noble goals to save the world from evil. But Protzman would continue to change and alter his theories up until his death in June 2023, though he never thought that JFK, Jr’s failure to appear that day meant that he was wrong. At one point he claimed that Trump was JFK, Jr, in disguise. Eventually, Protzman himself claimed to be the reincarnated JFK Jr. When he died, the conspiracy theory lived on.
Some who came to the gathering in Dallas trickled out after the resurrection did not occur, but even when confronted with the reality that their predictions did not come true others stayed and waited for months. Those who clung to the idea of JFK Jr’s return waited and waited, leaving their lives and families behind, missing out on moments with loved ones, and pouring thousands of dollars into supporting themselves.
Pulling at the tangled webs of QAnon’s conspiracy theory and the motivations of its followers has often left me with more questions than answers. At its core, the QAnon conspiracy believes that the world is run by a cabal of elite Satan-worshiping pedophiles otherwise known as the ‘deep state.’ QAnon ideology suspects that many top-ranking politicians, Hollywood stars, religious figures, and business elites are a part of this cabal and that Donald Trump’s mission is to take them down in a rapture-like event called ‘The Storm.’ This brief description, however, fails to capture the myriad beliefs such conspiracy-minded people hold and their many divergences with reality.
Mentally, countless believers are still there in Dallas, waiting for a story that has been told countless times – the resurrection of the just and the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil.’ It’s a human story that engages with the centuries-long tradition of people striving for the ultimate triumph over death, our one certainty. Conspiracy theories bring order to a disorganized cosmos; they give reasons for why things are the way they are.
By finding the explanation that fits with the way they want to see reality, conspiracy theorists often make the world out to be a dark and sinister place. They alienate themselves–except from others who share this worldview. Although conspiracy theorists often laud themselves for facing the hard truth or pulling back the curtain on how things ‘really are,’ it may be that sitting in discomfort and uncertainty is far more challenging. The backdrop of this sort of fanaticism and desperation for a god-like figure like Trump who can solve the evils of the world also follows a familiar trajectory in human history.
In 1970, Norman Cohn noted that millenarian conspiracy theories seemed to go together with periods of upheaval. Plagues and famines preceded the first crusades; financial crises at the start of the Thirty Years’ War—catastrophes and punishments that forced humans to search for meaning in the nonsensical. Our age of modernity has been no exception to this trend. The COVID-19 pandemic is often cited as an important influence on membership in QAnon conspiracy circles when much of the population was on their computers, governments were exercising a large amount of control over people’s lives, and public health and economic welfare were extremely unstable. Our times seem unprecedented for several reasons. As public trust in government reaches historic lows and the disparity between incomes in richer places and poorer places has widened for decades, many Americans have begun looking for answers to their frustration–they look for something that will make it all make sense.
But what is so odd–and what I find baffling–is that while absorbing the grief of the Kennedy family and crossing their fingers for JFK Jr.’s return, these believers are paradoxically destroying many of the real-life relationships they have. Over the past year, I have been consistently revisiting a Reddit board, r/QAnoncasualties which functions as an online support group for family, friends, or loved ones of someone who has become convinced of QAnon conspiracies.
There are new posts on this board virtually every day: Some posts describe individuals’ descents into this conspiracy and the occasional success story of how they got out of it. Other posts are a cry for help or an attempt to share their story in a community that might understand. As of today, there are 276,000 members of this one niche community of the internet: a mixture of people like me who are curious and frightened and others living with the direct fallout of this cult-like conspiracy.
Through the distance of my computer screen, I read how one user is about to quit trying to hold normal conversations with his father; another about a woman who fears her child will grow up not knowing her grandmother, who has fallen deep into the conspiracy. Each post is a glimpse into the life of a stranger losing important relationships. It feels dark and devastating from all sides, for those cutting off family members who are dangerously removed from reality as well as for those who have been alienated from their loved ones who are believers. The posts on r/QAnoncasualties are not easy reads—many of them function like obituaries or bereavement posts for the relationships that must now be buried. The site functions like a graveyard.
By buying into QAnon’s many divergences from reality– neglecting their own lives awaiting the return of JFK Jr., who would seem to be an unlikely candidate for a QAnon hero–believers have often destroyed the real relationships they do have. No one motivation or reason could explain why QAnon believers do what they do. They could be written off as mentally ill; they could intentionally be engaging in this self-destructive behavior; they could think it’s fun.
No matter what the personal motivations for buying in seem to be, it is clear that there are groups of Americans getting sucked into this narrative. In addition to their willingness to sacrifice their relationships, there is the perplexing question: why do they think this is real? The fracture with reality runs so deep that many believers cannot lead the lives they did before becoming devoted to the conspiracy. Several involved in QAnon movements have committed crimes motivated by the conspiracy theories that they accept. One QAnon believer died during the storming of the Capitol, and others have faced legal sentencing. Many other believers spread the virus of disinformation on social media sites or internet forums or vote for pro-QAnon candidates. All this for theories that seem, prima facie, to be too absurd for any rational person to accept.
In my attempts to understand this phenomenon, I’ve tried to be sympathetic–I’ve tried to remember that I, too, have felt that I could see things that others couldn’t. I’ve also looked for explanations when the world seemed senseless or broken. Seekers turn toward answers, anything to explain the unthinkable, to run from a painful reality. Pulled into the depths of obsession and fanaticism, Conspiracy theorists often lose themselves, and the carnage of their past relationships is collateral damage.
The epic battlegrounds of politics that QAnon conspiracy theorists fantasize about become fantasies of salvation. Trump will destroy their enemies in the Storm; the children held captive in the Democratic Party’s trafficking ring will be set free; J.F.K. Jr. will rise again, etc., etc. The fact that fantasy and reality might easily be mistaken for each other demonstrates how we, as humans, can get so sucked into good narratives. QAnon tells a story so compelling that its believers will alter their entire lives because of it.
Perhaps when reflecting on how to reach these people who seem very far gone, an alternatively compelling narrative is necessary. Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism wrote that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is “not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Perhaps a narrative that emphasizes that the real struggles and most epic battlegrounds are not necessarily political plots, but our everyday slogs through life would be as compelling as the narrative offered by conspiracy theories. Repairing our broken relationships, hearing those we disagree with, helping a neighbor in need—there is no substitute or quick fix for these. They our everyday battlegrounds.
At some point, we all must come back from Dallas, return to our real lives, and face the difficult realities not of the shadowy cabal creating our problems, but those problems we create and can work on ourselves. Rather than searching for grand cosmic conspiracies, we should first take stock of that which is right in front of us.
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Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., United Kingdom: Penguin Classics, 2017), 474.
Cohn, Norman, and Paul Avrich. The Pursuit of the Millennium : Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.