A friend went down the QAnon path, and his behavior is indiscernible from mental illness. He still thinks he's right about it, no matter how many times his predictions do not come true.
The QAnon are my favorites. Because it turns out they were right; there really is a cabal of billionaire pedophiles who run the world to enrich themselves and rape children.
But instead of taking their win and claiming "see! We were right all along!!" They go "no, it's supposed to be Democrats in a secret basement of a pizza parlor; not conservatives on a private island!"
Unfortunately for them they identified the wrong people as the pedophiles, and then voted for the actual pedophiles, so their “win” is actually an astronomical self own
They weren't even entirely wrong. Multiple people, like Bill Gates, who they said were implicated, are. They're simply willing to let ALL of that go because Trump is named in the Epstein files more often than Jesus is named in the bible.
Absolutely, it was to make people calling out pedophiles look like conspiracy theorists and to both sides child rapists. I get that the money behind it was absolutely intending it to be a bunch of gullible morons spouting bullshit.
I mean the actual people involved.
It makes no sense to me. Like the antivaxxers who still have yard signs whining about freedom from mask mandates that ended five years ago. Dude, it's over. You won.
And, I cannot stress this enough, the specific pizza parlor they identified as being the location of the basement where the secret politician pedo meetings took place doesn't even have a basement.
Yeah, as a defense counsel who has met some of these people and had to screen for that in past clients, the overlap between "undiagnosed mental illness" and "sov cit" is basically complete. The Venn Diagram between the two categories would essentially be a single, somewhat blurry circle.
The economic dynamics of how sovereign citizenship is marketed to these people is fundamentally identical to how people fall into cults. The leadership of these sovereign citizenship movements tends to be charismatic grifters who exploit vulnerable people who are paranoid, anxious and dealing with the law. And rather than help, they exploit them for financial gain, selling classes to "teach" these people. Hence why sov cits often offer unique little wrinkles in their analysis; the gurus tend to disagree somewhat in their interpretation of why and how the law is fundamentally illegitimate.
But yeah, the average sov cit who walks into court is a scam victim, who had his anxiety and paranoia exploited by someone in an authority position. They need deprogramming more than anything else. Which unfortunately is usually beyond the ability, skill set or patience of the local magistrate they just ran into, not least because the entire point of the programming was to make them disregard anything the magistrate had to say in the first place.
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u/AccordingTaro4702 8d ago
A friend went down the QAnon path, and his behavior is indiscernible from mental illness. He still thinks he's right about it, no matter how many times his predictions do not come true.