Feb 12th, 2021 | Guest Interviews

CAN Q-ANON FOLLOWERS ESCAPE FROM THIS CULT? Lenka Perron did! An intelligent, articulate woman with a Masters Degree who got sucked into the vortex of conspiracy theories such as those that fueled the January 6th insurrection, tells Tom how she got out of that black hole and what it's like to be in it!

From The New York Times: ‘Trump Just Used Us and Our Fear’: One Woman’s Journey Out of QAnon
What do you think? Tell Tom: tom@blowmeuptom.com.

HOUR 1

Comments

Submitted by mwkirlin on

Discussing your cousin and ex wife stuck with me the most. For me, the impact of early life experiences is so significant, and there probably is an evolutionary component to it. I wrestle with my own to this day. Young kids are impressionable. They are vulnerable. It takes something very special to keep one from breaking fully from destructive guidance, but like a cancer is some aspects of that past we really never eradicate. For me, Qanon is the latest, most successful reinterpretation of something that taps into our vulnerabilities on a large scale, even when we think we have dispensed with religion, family, and other destructive connections. There is always something that brings us back, and in our political climate, we are occasionally brought back on a large, very dangerous scale. When we say we are into something, "too deep," we likely have not done is gotten into our own emotions that led us there in the first place. We allow the right sales pitches to take us there, and avoid looking within.

Submitted by tonymontana on

I've been balls deep in Conspiracy Theories for easily the past 15 years and I can say I think she hits it on the head when she says there are nuggets of truth that aren't addressed. Then you add the warranted distrust of the media and the government on top of that.

Submitted by dude_lmao on

Its the other way around: conspiracy theories are balls deep in you. There are two ways around it: 1. knowledge from first principles (no one can convince you the world is flat if you understand geometry or astronomy or physics) or 2. knowledge of logical proofs (you don't need to know everything, just recognize the invalidity of certain claims about reality).

Submitted by dude_lmao on

It wasn't until junior college I took a class called "Logic" that I realized there was a way to tell bullshit from the truth. Later I found out Logic was systematically removed from the curriculum of American primary schools in the latter half of the 20th century. The culture had, for some reason, decided it was better to use institutional education for brainwashing and as a horse race to see which kids had "native" ability to plug into the industrial economy. Today's educational system is a legacy of this. Today's "woke" higher ed. culture and postmodernist "relative truth" pedagogy is the legacy: the system has been graduating (or failing) kids without the skill of knowing how to think properly. Now we're a nation of perfect idiots. Listening to her talk I perceive an absence of understanding of logic's role in determining the validity of arguments and claims about reality. Without this discipline, she is fearful of anything that "sounds like a conspiracy" and unfortunately for us all, our problems today now all sound like grand conspiracies: industries colluding to pollute the climate, lead and mercury in our baby food, etc. Without logic, the population cannot ever climb out of the hole they are in. They are spinning in place and making no progress, and dropping off their kids at school thinking they are being educated.