STRANGER THAN TRUTH
Jitarth Jadeja lowers his soy latte and laughs as customers at a cafe in Sydney’s Castle Hill area look on. I just made a joke about feeding babies to Democrats and Jadeja is cracking up. There was a time when the 33-year-old wouldn’t have found the joke amusing. Not because it’s in poor taste. But because he wouldn’t have thought it was a joke.
Jadeja, a friendly, gregarious man with a quick wit and an easy smile, is an ex-QAnon follower. Back in 2017 he fell down the rabbit hole. Among other things he believed that a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring. It was far from the craziest thing he believed. “Eating babies is a three or four out of 10,” he says, as I look around to see what other customers are making of our conversation. Blue Avians, a group that believes inter-dimensional humanoid birds are living among us, is a six or seven, he says.
Jadeja believed everything the mysterious ‘Q’ posted on image-board site 4chan (known as Q drops) and then found ‘proofs’ to support the claims. Logical inconsistencies and inconvenient truths were brushed aside or wilfully ignored. Speculative gossip and wild, lurid prophecies on the other hand? Those he swallowed whole.
“I just wanted it to be true,” he says.
Jadeja got his most important, most incontrovertible ‘truth’ early in 2018. Q had told followers Donald Trump would use the phrase “tip-top, tippy top” in a speech. Four months after the post, Trump said it.
“I’m like, that’s a very unique phrase,” says Jadeja. “That was proof Q had a connection to Donald Trump. It was the key moment where I was like, ‘Dude, I’m definitely going all in on this’.”
But it was this same phrase that eventually led Jadeja out of his shadowy world. It took
