The dangerous Qanon cult tearing families apart with conspiracies | 60 Minutes Australia

in the history of 60 minutes i'm not sure we've ever reported a story that for the most part is pure fantasy but that's how to best sum up q and on an ever shifting mega conspiracy theory that's bizarre and nonsensical as wacky as it is though millions of people appear to be caught up in the internet-based cult including more and more australians and that means there are dangerous real-world consequences that demand the rest of us stop scratching our heads in disbelief and start to take serious notice of q anon do you want to free yourself it's easy follow cue if q1 was a movie script it would be too far-fetched the world is currently witnessing the largest mass treason event in the living history the world ruled by a cabal of satan worshiping elites who prey on children and harvest their blood with donald trump our only savior ready to defeat the forces of darkness risk their lives to achieve this victory against the greatest force of evil the world has ever known and that's just the start that's just the headline-based theory it goes so much deeper than that discover the names and faces of the cabal agents who have colluded to destroy our republic and bend us to their will how deep does it go uh the german chancellor angela merkel is hitler's natural daughter there's theories about donald trump being a time traveler aliens any any conspiracy theory you've ever heard including many you haven't find a home and cue or not but i mean you couldn't have believed that stuff surely i went all the way up to aliens jatasta deja is an ordinary guy who fell headlong into this extraordinary world an economic student who for two and a half years lived and breathed the ultimate conspiracy theory in all its madness chittarth how does a guy from suburban sydney end up down the q a rabbit hole i was very disconnected from reality i think and i just was looking for answers and that's how i found q and on it was all day every day it was like kunan was my job basically you just become like that crazy homeless guy on the street shouting about judgement day and you just make an ass out of yourself at all these parties right no one wants to talk to you people are like oh that's weird what are you doing right it all began in december 2017 when jatath was struggling to finish his degree he became socially isolated and was drawn to the conspiracies swirling online stumbling onto cuenon he fell for it hook line and sinker people have heard the same thing about kiron like this cabal of elite pedophiles and satanic blah blah blah it's very it's a very dark world you thought that politicians were pedophiles yeah especially you know post jeffrey epstein jimmy savile as well um i definitely thought that there was a cabal of elite pedophiles you know this is almost like an existential battle between good and evil like angels and demons it's just fantasy right this is not real it's not but then you of course not like what you do but how could you believe it how could you believe something so fantastical what you do is that you want something to be true you want i wanted someone to save us to comprehend how someone could believe the unbelievable you first have to understand how q anon works and just how seductive this parallel world can be q anon is a cult-like conspiracy theory that holds that a military intelligence insider is using a variety of message boards to leak clues to an upcoming purge of the deep state you've lost me already it's sort of hard to keep up it is it anytime you spend any kind of time talking about this in any kind of depth people just immediately glaze over and that's one of the reasons why it's been so hard to get people to take it seriously because it is so bizarre mike rothschild is a leading writer and researcher on conspiracy theories who's spent the past year trying to make sense of it all kulan can get as crazy as you want it to be if you want to believe that uh joe biden is a clone if you want to believe that john f kennedy jr has been hiding in a bunker for 20 years if you want to believe that the earth is part of a galactic federation of light that's all there for you that's why we have q the good guys with control over the nsa began the q intelligence dissemination program to invoke an online grassroots movement that came to be called the great awakening the original prophecy of q anon is that donald trump is going to unleash a purge a mass arrest of the pedophile cabal that runs the world well donald trump can't do that anymore but they're not going to give up on believing q anon they've come too far they've sacrificed too much this is too much a part of who they are to walk away from it save our children precise numbers are impossible to gauge but millions of people are thought to be caught up in kyonon's wacky beliefs there are people in humanon who are really just concerned about children there are people in cunanan who really just hate hillary clinton and there are people who do want to overthrow the government so it appeals to almost everybody and it really is almost anybody that can be sucked into it we'll be looking into that over the next short period incredibly it all stems from a single offhand comment made by donald trump in october he was 2017 dinner with a bunch of uniformed military higher-ups and he said maybe it's the calm before the storm this could be the calm before the storm what the [ __ ] could be um it would come before the storm and the press was like what are you talking about now in reality he wasn't saying anything that's what donald trump did as president he just said stuff but people wanted there to be a storm people wanted there to be the punishment of enemies and it caught on very quickly because of that [Music] on forums in the darkest recesses of the internet vague and cryptic messages began to be posted supposedly by a mysterious figure known as q crumbs of information that were shared and deciphered by an online army eager to interpret their meaning it was like a a tom clancy novel happening right outside your door and people wanted to be part of that spawning evermore outlandish explanations about what was really going on the followers think of themselves as as geniuses as sort of playing this 5d high level chess that donald trump also plays but the reason why q on is so convoluted is actually the same reason why a lot of conspiracy theories are really convoluted the more details you add to something the more real it sounds so is the idea that the rest of us are ignorant if we don't understand it yes the rest of us are asleep but the q people want to wake us up they they don't want to hurt us they want to teach us they want us to join them and that's one of the things that's so appealing about q anon is this idea of secret knowledge this idea that i know something that you don't know powers so much of conspiratorial thought the only thing q wants you to do is think for yourself and expand your thinking and find out for yourself and i don't see anything wrong with that turbo charged by fears about covert q anon has found fertile ground here in australia between good and evil pulling believers from every walk of life michelle gilman is a hard-working single mom who's raised two kids back in cuenon's early days at the age of 51 she headed down the rabbit hole into a warren of unconventional thinking where nothing is quite as it seems once i discovered an alternative narrative it really started to change the way i think i mean there's what is there 4 953 cue posts and you worked through every one of them i've read every one of them yeah and or i've listened to someone interpret every one of them so for you q is a person cues more than one person and i believe it's a team of people with very high level intelligence clearance and so and that comes through with some of the posts that hugh has put out it's time to research for yourself you will find many things among them with the dedication of a scholar michelle has studied this alternate reality forming her own world view very different to that of mainstream society it probably makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist and i'm quite happy to wear that tag if people want me to be that but are you a conspiracy theorist no i just believe in questioning i was always a bit suspicious about the 9 11 thing so you don't believe 9 11 happened oh i think i don't know whether it did or not it hasn't been proven either way i don't know who the people were that flew planes in um the murder of john jfk the murder of jfk jr you think there was a deep state conspiracy behind that i think there's a deep state group of people that are behind that yeah this could get me into big trouble you know what giving us this being on television talking about this sort of stuff why um well because there are a lot of people that don't want that information to come out [Music] it may have begun as an online conspiracy but the shock waves of kyonon have already spread far beyond the virtual world [Music] not only did its supporters lead the storming of the u.s capitol building kidnaps assassination plots and murder have all been linked to cune on fanatics including this bombing in nashville on christmas day carried out by a man convinced the world is controlled by a race of reptiles disguised as humans you know while we may say it's foreign to australia it's not it's here and there are people here who believe this stuff nick caldis is a former top cop who is concerned about what could happen here in australia patriots just trying to break free from the prison of the mind that was created for them not only do authorities now have to recognize what a threat it is but they've got to act you can't ignore it anymore i think we have seen obviously right-wing extremism and really muddy conspiracy theorists before but the magnitude and the reach and their ability to influence people is probably unprecedented so it's no longer just a a very fringe group that you can discount and say well they're just a bunch of nuts they are having an impact and i don't for a minute doubt that there are a number in australia who may ultimately move from rhetoric to some sort of action as a counter-terrorism expert nick sees strong parallels with islamic terror and believes we need to monitor q anon with a similar vigilance should police be treating q and on in the same way they would treat a terrorist organization i would argue yes simply because they're capable of inspiring commissioning and encouraging others to do things in in in support of them or their beliefs it's alarming when you think that a fringe conspiracy theory can get to the point where it becomes a global threat absolutely and you see them in terrorism where a lot of people who inspire others to do this stuff are not prepared to put themselves in danger but they're happy to send kids and suicide vests to go and do it on their behalf i wouldn't put that sort of self and selfishness apart from from q anon i think they're very capable of it trump supporters are not violent people human accused supporters they're not violent people did what happened at the capitol not seem violent to you um yeah it was pretty pretty outrageous but there's a lot of um there's a lot that's not being told you know there's a lot of lot of stuff that's not being told michelle gilman sees qnon as a force for good not evil she believes we all need to wake up to what's going on around us and the threat posed by what she calls the deep state these criminals are also known as the deep state or cabal because of how they control things behind the scenes well the deep state's the elites of the world they're deep states the people that have all the money look what they've got planned for the world one world government no borders no sovereignty they're gonna they're trying to take away for people's free speech they're trying to take away people's right to to protest so when you say that people's speech is being suppressed that you you feel as though you're being silenced um i don't think anyone's intentionally silencing me but we hesitate to speak out because um people think you're crazy you know and do you think you're crazy no i don't think i'm crazy i just think i know what i know and i you know i'm pretty confident in the information that i've been given so thank you do i sound crazy [Music] i don't think i really knew what q anon was for a long while and then yeah i sort of had to start looking into it a little bit more and was like oh okay there's actually a lot go to unpack here there's a lot going on michelle's daughter charlotte has had to do plenty of research herself to understand her mum's newfound views of a world where donald trump's political rivals harvest the blood of children i was like oh so you don't actually believe this right and she was like no no it actually happens if you do the research and you look into it and i was like okay like yeah sort of something much bigger than i'd anticipated really it's not every day that you find out that your mum thinks that there's youth serum being distributed to the higher powers in secret you look like besties there yeah that's her my mum my best friend as her only daughter charlotte has always been very close to her mum i think we're definitely closer than most mother and daughter for sure but q1 on has taken a serious toll on their relationship she's almost like created a different realm like it's a different reality really to the point where i just got frustrated because it's like i can't really have a conversation with you because we can't just agree on the basic principles of what's happening we would argue so we'd have discussions and sometimes they'd get a bit hated sometimes they get a lot heated and she'd shut it down we'd shut it down i think it was about two or three months before the election i was like we're finished like i need to not speak to you until this is done and even prior to that every conversation we'd have would end up screaming or crying or this or that you just don't know anything anymore it's like if my mom can fall for this crap then what hope is there for the rest of us jatath jadeja knows firsthand the impact qnon can have on relationships with others and how the isolation it brings can become a vicious cycle qnon only adds to that because it separates them from society from their family and their friends there's parents who have threatened their children kicked them out of their house there's decades-long marriages that have broken up you know so families are losing loved ones to this theory this crazy concern they've already lost hundreds of thousands have already lost like it's an epidemic [Music] be grateful you came out of it i'm very grateful i'm not sure how it happened i feel like i've dodged a bullet stepped out of the darkness into the light jatath spent two and a half years caught in the grip of qnon before he finally got out quite unexpectedly it was all thanks to donald trump there was a straw that broke the camel's back at a time when i was probably about teetering on the edge essentially someone asked q anon to get trump to repeat a phrase in order to prove some kind of connection between q and trump and the phrase was tip top tippy top shape four months later donald trump used that phrase in front of the white house it is special and we keep it in tip top shape we call it sometimes tippy top shape i was like wow that's this is a very unique phrase i've never heard that phrase before right that has to prove some kind of connection it was only until much much later when i looked into a little deeper that is just something that donald trump says he says that from time to time it's like a personal catchphrase of his my clubs are tippy-top it's got to be in tip-top [ __ ] everything was tippy-top it was the obvious manipulation in this that a someone had to pick up on the fact that donald trump says this phrase i like tippy tap to find a way to use that in order to slide into this sort of conspiracy as proof it was almost genius really it was genius and i looked at that and i thought i've been manipulated here it's so obvious i've been manipulated so that was my moment and i sort of yeah i just felt the world crash in on me and i i threw out every single conspiracy theory i'd ever heard [Music] these days michelle and charlotte have made their peace and i missed you although they tried to avoid too much political discussion agreeing to disagree about their very different views of the world so you've been able to find this piece but ultimately you still believe in cue you still disagree with your mum's heavy opposite yeah yeah completely um on the opposite spectrum really um yeah i still think she's being hoodwinked and i'm i'm excited to be proven wrong [Music] is there a part of you that wonders whether you've been hoodwinked here a little bit yeah and i'm very and you know i've had that conversation with charlotte it's like if i'm wrong i'll you know declare that i'm wrong i'll concede and but you don't think you are i know i'm not i really really know i'm not to taste to deja has seen kuan onon from both sides and views the world as a much nicer place without conspiracies in his life but with trump's chances of fulfilling the prophecy of q slipping away what followers call the storm he worries about what might happen next should australians be alarmed yeah well a hundred percent why wouldn't you be alarmed kunon has only been around since october 2017 that's not even four years and it's now got millions of people around the world their harm because they still think this plan is going to happen and donald trump is in control if they become the storm if they start thinking they need to bring about this doomsday imagine what they could do hello i'm sarah arbo thanks for watching 60 minutes australia subscribe to our channel now for brand new stories and exclusive clips every week and don't miss out on our extra minute segments and full episodes of 60 minutes on ninenow.com.eu and the nine now app

Channel: 60 Minutes Australia

Views: 507,042

Rating: 4.0698395 out of 5

Keywords: 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes Australia, Sarah Abo, karl stefanovic, 60Mins, #60Mins, qanon, Q followers, the great awakening, what is qanon, qanon cult, storm is coming, truth about qanon, qanon families, talking to family about qanon, conspiracy theory, dangers of qanon, qanon truth, trump, biden, jfk, 9/11 qanon, jitarth, cabal, satan, paedophile ring exposed, reddit qanon casualties, wwg1wga truth, fake news, capitol riots, mike rothschild, rothschild

Id: nbmMwMQEK9Y

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021

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[u/TesseractToo]

lol from 60 Minutes Australia:

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WTF :D

[u/wwarnout]

Not just in Aus. That cancerous growth has metastasized in the US, and I fear it is now stage 4.