Paris (AFP)

One day, they found themselves facing an unknown person.

A father, a mother, a friend, passed "on the other side of the looking glass", in an inaccessible world of cabals and conspiracies.

The conspiracy broke their couple, their family, leaving them in astonishment and incomprehension.

Some call it "evil of the century".

Others of "mirror" of a society in crisis and in search of story.

Conspiracy lives and proliferates in the digital world of the internet and social media, but it touches very real lives and its repercussions are very tangible.

It's a forum on the American community site Reddit.

His name: QAnon Casualties ("the victims of QAnon").

Created in July 2019, it now has more than 150,000 members, desperate anonymous whose relatives have become QAnon, this movement of pro-Trump extremists persuaded to fight against pedophile and satanist elites, which has become a real phenomenon of society in the United States.

Many QAnons were among the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6.

The testimonies, often heartbreaking, follow and resemble each other.

"Tonight I lost my mother", "QAnon and the antivax stole my daughter", "QAnon is he stronger than love?" ... They tell of people sucked into conspiratorial delirium, radicalized, unrecognizable.

"My mother is destroying our family with her crazy beliefs, every day it gets worse, especially with the confinement and the fact that she spends more and more time on Twitter. I am afraid of losing her", writes a British internet user.

"I have the impression of drowning myself", testifies a woman while recounting that her mother preferred to abandon the family home rather than to wear a mask.

"I didn't pay attention when she started talking about all this, I wasn't interested. Today it breaks my heart to think that if I had known more at the time, I 'could have perhaps done something,' says another net surfer.

- "Explanatory software" -

Few are the people who accept to testify openly so much these stories are painful, incomprehensible, even shameful.

How to admit that her uncle is a "platist" (those who think that the earth is flat) or that her husband orders his children to remove their masks on pain of denying them?

How to understand, like Yves, a retired French teacher, that an old friend posts on the WhatsApp group of friends that "the pandemic is junk"?

"I have known him for 50 years, we often had heated debates, but never, never, never, we had such an opposite view of reality," he told AFP.

Conspiracy is everywhere and affects everyone.

"There are the radicals and the softer ones, you, me, all those who at one point say to themselves: + we are lying +", estimates Marie Peltier, author of several books on the subject.

"The climate of mistrust vis-à-vis institutions, the media, has spread to all spheres, university, associative, political", she notes, noting three major markers in the history of conspiracy in the 21st century. century: the attacks of September 11, 2001, gigantic collective trauma, "major structuring event for contemporary conspiracy";

the development of social networks;

and "today, the Covid, which acts as a huge revealer".

"Conspiracy provides explanatory software, it designates heroes, culprits, it is a large part of its success," she underlines.

- Sectarian drift -

"My mother, it was a long slide over years and years. Today, she is completely inaccessible. She has completely gone to the other side of the mirror," says Paul (the name has been changed) to the 'AFP.

This 48-year-old French bookseller narrates with sobriety the "toxic" story of the slow change of a mother who, at the end of the summer of 2020, terrified by the prospect of a second confinement, left everything to join a of these "conspiratorial gurus" proliferating on social networks, a man who bought an entire village in Bulgaria for a community of French people who had broken the ban.

Paul had already cut ties with his mother, "a woman deeply unhappy and anguished, revolted, against a background of bitterness and disappointment".

But he followed his course from time to time.

"She lived a recluse, she spent an incredible time on the internet, looking for answers to her rage against the injustice of the world. She drank 24 hours a day on Youtube, the conspiracy channels were her only window to the world", he recounts.

"Containment was the icing on the cake, the Covid, the confirmation of all his theories on the end of the world" and that triggered his departure.

"When I think of her, I see the core of a nuclear reactor melting away and sinking into the ground."

Paul addressed Unadfi, the French National Union of Associations for the Defense of Families and Individuals Victims of Cults.

Unadfi has been studying sectarian aberrations since the early 1980s and, for its spokesperson Pascale Duval, the processes for adhering to conspiracy theories are the same: radicalization, submission to a community, control.

The process "leads to a triple break", she explains.

"The person completely changes their values, their identity, to mark their adhesion to the community. They cut themselves off from their original environment, there is no longer any dialogue possible. And finally they break with society."

- "Political factor" -

Whether it is the anti-mask or anti-vaccine radicals, the "platists" or the QAnon, these communities, which have many bridges between them, are sealed off from doubt and questioning. Thus, the QAnons are characterized by "the extremely aggressive way of displaying their beliefs and the disconnection with those who do not want to follow them into their burrow", according to Mike Rothschild, an American specialist in the movement.

The political aspect is essential, also believes Marie Peltier.

"At the beginning, we made a lot of conspiracy a far-fetched or funny affair. But these are people who adhere to a vision of the world, to a narrative" very often taking up anti-Semitic and far-right antiphons or adhering to "theories deeply reactionary, with the underlying idea that progress will destroy us, ”she notes.

For Pascale Duval of Unadfi, "behind every sectarian movement there is a political or at least societal project".

She cites as an example the New Age movement, its followers of personal development, yogists, veganists ... which constitutes a common gateway to conspiracy.

Paul remembers the revolts of his mother, from the extreme left in the 70s "to justify the attacks of the Red Brigades" and today rather from the extreme right "with Putin in the background of his computer" and member of 'a community whose leader denounces "Zionist plots".

"It is not because there are flaws or personal suffering that there is no activism. Individual paths come together in a collective construction", insists Marie Peltier.

And followers of conspiracy can go from "keyboard activism", in the words of researcher Tristan Mendes France, to action.

"There are different degrees of acting out. Not subjecting your children to compulsory vaccination is one, invading the Capitol is another," said Ms. Duval.

This particular activism does not suffer from contradictory debate, to the greatest suffering and incomprehension of those who remain outside.

And if some conspirators break with their community and "come back", it is still a "long and painful process", "so far rare", according to the American Mike Rothshild, author of a book (no translated) on the most famous conspiracy theories.

© 2021 AFP