In August, things hit rock bottom. Philip’s focus had grown from coronavirus-specific conspiracies to the wider web of evil posited by QAnon. His YouTube recommendations were no longer about mobile phones and cars; they were for clips putting forward conspiracy theories and fabrications. YouTube has historically been one of the most permissive of the major social media platforms, with few policies against misinformation: instead, the site puts links to Wikipedia pages underneath contentious videos (and deletes only the most egregiously false ones). But even YouTube’s filters started getting in the way, and so he switched again, to the video host BitChute, where “Fall of the Cabal”, a notorious QAnon video primer, shares space with content creators recounting lurid stories of having seen an infamous – yet entirely fictional – video of Hillary Clinton eating a young child alive, chasing a supposed high that can be gained from drinking the blood of a terrified child.
In Philip’s eyes, Rachel was now an idiot, who believed mainstream media. “I became a ‘normie’ who needed to wake up and understand what was really going on,” she says. “He was unable to stick to one topic. If I said something about how we were struggling with social distancing at work, he would respond with a furious diatribe about Soros, Clinton, Bill Gates, 5G and vaccines that control and kill people.”
For Rachel, the final straw was when her husband claimed to have seen a video incriminating a member of the Hollywood elite: a clip, he said, of Tom Hanks “with a three-year-old girl”. For Rachel, who works with safeguarded children, the implication was obscene. If her husband really had seen such a clip, then no matter how it was produced – Photoshopped, edited together – it must have started as real child abuse imagery. That a cult ostensibly focused on saving children could somehow persuade her husband to engage in sharing such material disgusted her. She started packing her bags the next morning.
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