You should have seen my moms Twitter page before it got suspended. Maybe you did. Maybe you were one of the 85 accounts that followed her. If so, I imagine you were probably very confused. Of course, the QAnon hashtags and links to far-right websites wouldnt have seemed out of place on the site.
GEORGE FLOYD ALIVE? she once tweeted with a link to a YouTube video making that false claim. Her account got flagged once Twitter started policing disinformation; it was swept up as one of thousands deactivated over the last few months. Theyre trying to silence Patriots! she said to me.
What mightve seemed strange, though, was that amid all the hardcore QAnon content, she would occasionally drop in links to BuzzFeed News stories Id written about police misconduct and wrongful convictions: I hope @POTUS and @DOJ would read the investigative criminal justice stories of @AlbertSamaha & consider the sexual misconduct he has written about, as part of the New Law on Police Reform. #TRUMP2020 #WWG1WGA #TransitiontoGreatness
The only stories my mom found credible in what she called the mainstream media were the ones reported by her son and even then, only when the subject matter didnt attack her devotion to the Catholic faith and to Donald Trump. Over the years, she urged me not to write about politics and expressed her concerns that I was falling further into the deep state when I reported on kids repeating Trumps racist rhetoric or the validity of the election results.
I pray you will not be a journalist for the deep state, shed text me. Its either you are protecting the deep state or Trump. I love you. If you are pressured by BFN to be part of the evil deep state, please resign.
I wasnt sure how long I could hold on to whatever thread of trust still bound us together.
An early adopter of the QAnon mass delusion, on board since 2018, she held firm to the claim that a Satan-worshipping cabal of child sex traffickers controlled the world and the only person standing in their way was Trump. She saw him not merely as a politician but a savior, and she expressed her devotion in stark terms.
The prophets have said Trump is anointed, she texted me once. God is using him to finally end the evil doings of the cabal which has hurt humanity all these centuries We are in a war between good & evil.
By 2020, Id pretty much given up on swaying my mom away from her preferred presidential candidate. Wed spent many hours arguing over basic facts I considered indisputable. Any information I cited to prove Trumps cruelty, she cut down with a corresponding counterattack. My links to credible news sources disintegrated against a wall of outlets like One America News Network, Breitbart, and Before Its News. Any cracks I could find in her positions were instantly undermined by the inconvenient fact that I was, in her words, a member of the liberal media, a brainwashed acolyte of the sprawling conspiracy trying to take down her heroic leader.
The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children. ... She has always been a stubborn soul, committed to her fundamental positions and eager to battle any infidel foolish enough to engage. I felt overmatched, helpless. Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didnt seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles. ... Her preferred candidate in 2012 was the socially conservative Rick Santorum, which I couldve guessed. But I was less sure where shed land four years later as the party she pledged allegiance to spiraled toward a demagogue. Her decision had new consequences: She had just become a US citizen and could finally cast a ballot. When she revealed her choice, I was relieved that she had backed Ted Cruz and deemed Donald Trump vulgar. When Trump won the nomination, my mom said she was only voting for him because he would appoint Supreme Court judges who might overturn Roe v. Wade.
But when my mom picks a side, she digs in and holds the line. Within a year, bolstered by an expanding far-right media ecosystem supplying information about the secular threat, she elevated Trump from a noxious necessity to a decent man whod made mistakes in the past but found his way, a modern-day Saul. She picked up print copies of the Epoch Times, subscribed to the Judicial Watch newsletter, and stumbled onto YouTube videos claiming to reveal mysteries about the deep state Trump was combatting.
Trump is not a perfect man, my mom would text me. God chose him to serve His purpose. It took a strong character to overcome the slings & arrows of the deep state/cabal.