Mike Rains interviews Reverend Derek Kubilus to find out how QAnon has impacted his life, his church, and what the reaction has been from his appearance on 60 Minutes. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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| Welcome everybody to a bonus episode of Adventures in Hellworld. | |
| This bonus episode is going to be me interviewing Reverend Derek Kabilis about his dealings with QAnon and how it's impacted his church and his life ever since, well, before he got on 60 Minutes and afterwards. | |
| So thank you for coming on to the show. | |
| Derek is the vicar of the United Methodist Church of Union Town outside of Akron, Ohio. | |
| He's been a pastor for 10 years, serving the churches throughout the Northeastern Ohio area. | |
| He is also the host of the Crossover Q podcast, which I have listened to. | |
| And for someone who is very new to this terrible phenomenon, as it were, he's He's very up with his knowledge of what QAnon is about and what they expose. | |
| So I'm very glad to see we have someone in the church that is working against this scourge, as it were. | |
| So thank you for being here, Derek. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Thank you for having me on, Mike. | |
| And thank you for helping me out. | |
| You just let me interview you for my podcast. | |
| You have just a wealth of information and knowledge about this stuff, and I just want to let you know I really appreciate all the work you were doing and putting into this. | |
| I'm very glad to be doing it. | |
| This is an important thing that needs to be addressed and engaged with. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| So, first of all, did you have a religious childhood and a family life at the start? | |
| What was your path towards becoming a reverend or a pastor? | |
| Raised in the church, pretty much. | |
| I have always been a kind of religiously minded individual. | |
| I was always drawn to, like, the idea of God, the idea of big metaphysical things. | |
| I've always taken a tremendous amount of comfort in ritual. | |
| Ritual is a very important part of my life. | |
| And so when I was fairly young, probably about 12 years old, is when I first started thinking about joining the clergy. | |
| And by the time I was 17, I knew that it was pretty much the only path for me. | |
| That's, uh, that's very, uh, that must feel really good to have that kind of, uh, knowledge and drive that like you're in the right place that you're doing the thing you've always wanted to do. | |
| I find a lot of people kind of, uh, like feeling adrift in this world in a way where they just don't know what their purpose is. | |
| And I think that is one of the things that kind of leads people to QAnon is that it gives them a purpose. | |
| It gives them a sense of, uh, Connection to the world, and that this is where they're supposed to be, and it's kind of terrifying that that's where they get the connection from. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| I think a lot of folks that I have seen who are deep into QAnon are trying to access something that is transcendent. | |
| Right? | |
| Something that is bigger than them. | |
| They're trying to be part of a community that is united around a particular kind of faith, in a lot of ways. | |
| It was interesting, some of the emails I've gotten, one of the themes that I'm going to talk about on my podcast here in the next episode, actually, is that some liberal folks, actually, sent me emails to kind of chew me out a little bit about the fact that I was just one cult leader trying to get the leg up on another cult, so to speak. | |
| And really, when I think about it, when I thought about it, I finally had to come to the conclusion, uh, you know what? | |
| They're right. | |
| They're absolutely right. | |
| The plain fact of the matter is, like, the word cult comes from the Latin word cultus, which essentially means care. | |
| It means tending. | |
| It started in Latin as a horticultural term. | |
| That's where we get the word cultivate, right? | |
| And the fact of the matter is we all have cults in our lives. | |
| We have those communities that tend to our souls and our spirits. | |
| Uh, like a garden, and folks who jump on board with QAnon or enter into cults, anything like that, I think they're just looking for some of that soul tending. | |
| I really commend, in a way, the self-awareness you have, where you're like, yeah, they're pretty much right about that, which is something that when you were talking about that, I really didn't know where you were going to go with that answer. | |
| And then when you went what you did, I was like, man, that is such a refreshing and really kind of honest way to see this thing. | |
| To me, it's really unfair for someone to say that you're just leading one cult, trying to pull people to another. | |
| When you look at the teachings of Christ and the brotherhood, the solidarity, that which you do for the least of us, you do to me, that kind of caring and compassion and empathy for the world, Then you compare it to QAnon's version of the world, which is the world will only be better after we kill all our enemies. | |
| It's... | |
| It's something where I completely understand where people that don't believe in spirituality and those kinds of things would just see this as two sides of the same coin. | |
| But there is so much spirituality and religion out there that is about self-empowerment, self-fulfillment, about Being a better person, setting an example for your community. | |
| And in case anyone's wondering, there's none of that in QAnon. | |
| There is only really the desire for attention, the desire for popularity in the people that | |
| have risen up in the community to become quote-unquote thought leaders. | |
| But the rank and file people, they mostly just want to have a community of like minded folks where they can be racist or transphobic or homophobic or Islamophobic or whatever it is. | |
| They want to have shared hatred, shared enemies, And that's really all it is. | |
| It's a very negative mindset and a very negative point of view. | |
| And it really makes me sad whenever I see people who use Christianity as a cudgel to get people in the queue and on, like David Hayes, who literally goes by the name online of Praying Medic. | |
| And you see him with all these followers saying, I've gotten closer to Jesus through QAnon. | |
| And I can totally see where you call this a heresy. | |
| And I feel like that would be a really obvious sign of the heretical nature of QAnon. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| To believe that this could get you to Christ. | |
| So if you want to expound upon that, I'll give you the floor. | |
| So part of that is, the case that I want to make is that my cult is just better than that one. | |
| Because my cult is singularly focused on growing in our compassion, in our empathy, And in our love for our neighbors and even for our enemies, right? | |
| Whereas, I think you said it really well, QAnon is based in a kind of violence, I think, that it's the shared vengeance And the grievance that binds folks in QAnon together, the dream of punishing a certain group of people that they believe did a certain kind of bad and terrible thing, that's a terrible thing to be united over. | |
| Honestly. | |
| And the way that they keep that anger going, the way they continue to stoke one another's flames by passing the memes back and forth and so on and so forth, the only virtue that I think I've ever seen in folks that talk about QAnon that they'll point to as something that they aspire to is, quote, patriotism, unquote. | |
| It's all about being a good patriot. | |
| But their definition of that word is hopelessly violent and exclusionary and ultimately, I think, racist. | |
| Oh, it absolutely is. | |
| They are steeped in racism and anti-Semitism and also in the lie that the party switch in the 1960s never happened. | |
| So they project their racism onto the Democratic Party under the idea that the Democrats are, quote unquote, the real racists, which is one of their favorite tropes. | |
| So how did you start your church? | |
| In your intro, it said that you had been a pastor for 10 years in the community. | |
| How did it come to be that you had your own place of worship? | |
| Yeah, I didn't start this church. | |
| And in my denomination, the United Methodist denomination, pastors are tied to their bishop. | |
| And so I serve the Bishop of East Ohio. | |
| And she can appoint me to any church in this area that she wants. | |
| There are, I think about 600 churches in East Ohio. | |
| And I could be appointed to any one of them. | |
| Our appointments only last for a year at a time. | |
| So, I was appointed here in Uniontown in July of 2018. | |
| I was reappointed in 2019 and then again in 2020 to the same church, which I'm very thankful for. | |
| This is a wonderful community of faith and they are very supportive. | |
| And for the most part, they are supportive of my ministry of outreach and speaking up against this terrible heresy. | |
| That's really interesting. | |
| I didn't know the inner workings of that and also it kind of was, it gladdened my heart that the person appointing you was a woman because the church has always been kind of just sticklers about the whole patriarchy thing as it were. | |
| The United Methodist Church has been ordaining female pastors and bishops for a very long time. | |
| That is awesome. | |
| That is such a cool thing. | |
| So when did you notice QAnon? | |
| Was it through your congregation or was it outside your congregation? | |
| How did the tendrils of this poison seep into your life? | |
| I think it was literally just on the news. | |
| They were covering some Trump rally or something and there were signs Or t-shirts in the background with Q written on them. | |
| And I think I just got on the internet to kind of, uh, see kind of what that was about. | |
| Right. | |
| And for the first year or so, I didn't really think anything of it. | |
| Like I knew it existed. | |
| I knew about, you know, the democratic cabal that they were talking about. | |
| I think I just kind of played it off as just sort of a nutty thing that, you know, in our increasingly nutty politics. | |
| It was just one small aspect of it. | |
| It wasn't until, I think, the pandemic hit and the political rhetoric around masks and vaccinations in the upcoming 2020 election when I started to realize, oh no, this is very nearly mainstream now. | |
| And I just, you know, I talk to people in the community all the time and I just started noticing this edginess and that people were no longer talking about their political opponents as if they were stupid or silly or not worth their vote. | |
| They were talking about them as if they were evil. | |
| And that started to make me really concerned because I'm a pastor of a church that has very diverse political views, from we have socialists in our congregation all the way down to libertarians, right? | |
| We, and everybody in between, and But what keeps us together is our shared humanity and the God that we worship. | |
| And to imagine that God is of a particular political party and that God has a chosen political champion, that is heresy. | |
| That was the same heresy that they made when Jesus was being crucified and they called for the release of Barabbas the Zealot, right? | |
| Barabbas was a revolutionary against Rome. | |
| That was the kind of messiah that they wanted. | |
| A militaristic one, a violent one. | |
| But the Messiah that God was trying to give them was, of course, the non-violent Prince of Peace. | |
| And so, then when the Capitol riots happened, and I saw, you know, crosses and flags that said Jesus 2020 being carried alongside, you know, queues and Confederate flags, I said, man, I gotta say something about this. | |
| We gotta start taking this on. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, what troubles you the most about QAnon? | |
| Is it just the heresy? | |
| The hatred? | |
| Definitely what it's doing to families. | |
| That is the most troubling. | |
| If you check out the QAnon Casualties subreddit, And here's some of those stories. | |
| I have someone in my own family who has gone down the Q rabbit hole, so to speak, and it's so difficult. | |
| These people send me emails and they say, you know, my spouse, my sister, my mom, Whoever it is, they're into this stuff. | |
| They won't stop talking about it. | |
| We can't talk about anything else. | |
| They get furious when I argue with them about it, and there have been people that have gotten divorced over QAnon, you know? | |
| People that have left their homes Uh, because they are trying to save the world from cannibalistic Democrats. | |
| That's just where we are. | |
| Yeah, I'm a moderator on QAnon Casualties, so I know the pain of Yeah, I know well of the pain of that forum and what happens there. | |
| It is brutal. | |
| It is absolutely brutal. | |
| The worst part about it is when the QAnon believer's side of the story gets told to QAnon, The support and the encouragement that they receive from QAnon people that be strong and that their, their spouse will come back to them at some point when they see the truth, they'll get their kids back and their kids will venerate them as being knowledgeable. | |
| And, uh, the person who saw the, saw the truth before anyone else did. | |
| Nobody in QAnon tells these people. | |
| Dude, go back to your wife, go back to your children, or honey, go back to your husband, go back to your children. | |
| They don't never tell you to give up on this and to go back to the real world. | |
| They always tell you to stay in their community, stay with them. | |
| They're more important than your blood and your blood, your family. | |
| And we are your family now. | |
| And that is a technique cults use called love bombing, which it's one of the most frightening things about the movement to me. | |
| So how did you end up appearing on 60 Minutes? | |
| How did that whole like kind of negotiation? | |
| As near as I can tell, the producers, Came across my podcast. | |
| I had actually posted it on the Q casualty subreddit, and I don't know if that's where they saw it or if they were just googling or whatever, and I think it was a very different perspective than what they had heard before to actually hear a real-life pastor speaking out against this, because there are, unbelievably, some pastors who | |
| support QAnon, and then I would say most pastors don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole because it is necessarily tainted with politics, and they don't want to alienate anyone, and I understand that. | |
| I don't want to do that either. | |
| And so when they contacted me about it, I had a talk with my superintendent, sort of the person one rung up on the ladder from me, and I had a talk with my wife, and we just said, you know what, you're in this position. | |
| There may be something of God in this to use this platform to speak out against this terrible thing that's hurting people. | |
| So I said yes, and our interview was like an hour and a half. | |
| I think they used maybe 45 seconds of me talking, but I was grateful for that. | |
| Oh, welcome to TV. | |
| The media hits I've done have been the exact same way, so I know well of pouring your guts out for this really long period of time, and hoping you did right, hoping you nailed it for them. | |
| And then you watch it back, and it's like a snippet. | |
| You're like, oh, really? | |
| Wow, that's it? | |
| It's really made me respect the people that make it on television for even the briefest period of time, the amount of work and effort that goes into getting into that moment, and however it works out, it works out. | |
| But I would love for that to be a thing that you could request and get the outtakes, get the 90 minutes and be able to post it somewhere. | |
| What was the reaction? | |
| What has been the response? | |
| Like positive, negative, the percentages of each? | |
| Because I mean, this is... QAnon is nothing if not frantically online. | |
| So when the news came out that this was going to be a segment done, they were freaking out about it. | |
| And so I wondered, I'm sure that they were knocking on your door after you appeared on television. | |
| Well, let me say, first of all, The overwhelming majority of the responses that I have gotten have been positive. | |
| I would say at least 90-10. | |
| Folks reaching out to say, hey, thank you for talking about this, telling me about their stories. | |
| I've had clergy reach out to say, thank you, you've helped me start a conversation. | |
| And that makes it all worth it, completely, you know. | |
| The 10%, first of all, I did something you're not supposed to do. | |
| I looked at the The comments on the 60 Minutes YouTube video? | |
| Hugh was out in force just saying whatever they could to try to shoot that video down, you know, voting it thumbs down, making all these outlandish statements in the comments. | |
| And of course, there were some personal things. | |
| People on there made fun of my weight. | |
| I got emails that were like, you're just one cult person trying to get the leg up on another cult. | |
| Probably the funniest one I got, or the most interesting, was that when, at a particular point in the interview, I said, Something, something really drives a stake into my heart. | |
| And someone interpreted that to me in coded language, telling other folks that I too was a blood drinker, right? | |
| Like a vampire. | |
| That's awesome! | |
| That was... Oh, I immediately told my wife about it. | |
| It was amazing. | |
| And I got this person who sent me these really intense collages. | |
| I should take you a picture. | |
| I should send you a picture of it. | |
| On the top it says, America, the Titanic, feces everywhere. | |
| And then it just has all of these headlines that have been cut and pasted. | |
| There must be a thousand of them, honestly. | |
| And I feel really bad for whoever made this because it feels like this person, when my wife saw it, she just said, oh, it's madness, you know? | |
| Yeah, you worry for the mental health of a lot of these people when they get down that rabbit hole. | |
| I was really surprised when you said collage. | |
| I really expected it to be a bunch of people either with hair obscuring one eye or a circle around an eye or the Black Eye Club. | |
| There's a lot of photo galleries that QAnon loves. | |
| You had earlier talked about these people passing along memes to each other as a way to upset and outrage each other. | |
| One of the worst parts of QAnon is when they pass around photos of abused children to each other and lie about the... | |
| And lie about how the child got abused, and one of the crummiest things that I've had to do is actually source those photos. | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah, and that, it takes a lot of the, I mean, the mystery out of it once you find out what they're actually doing, and it's so vile, and it's so not acceptable. | |
| That this is the kind of thing that these people are so obsessed with and they refuse to acknowledge the reality of the images that they're looking at because they got to blame it on. | |
| They got to blame it on Hillary and Biden and all these other people in it. | |
| One of their favorite images is a child who has black eyes and they are | |
| screaming and yelling about it being some sort of a ritualistic abuse. | |
| And actually the black eyes are due to brain cancer and the child died from the | |
| cancer and it's like, and they're using a sick child to get their point across. | |
| And there was another child that was horribly abused. And, um, | |
| actually the child, and it wasn't, uh, it wasn't a highly ranked multimillionaire, | |
| billionaire elite liberals. | |
| It was a, uh, a woman in Arkansas who took her kids away from their parent, their father. | |
| And she was with her new boyfriend when the father came and found his children that were horribly abused at their hands. | |
| And the mother and the new boyfriend went to jail for many years for what they did. | |
| So, uh, but it's just, it's just that it's just this thing where they had to, uh, They got to do these things to rile themselves up and then blame it on their enemies instead of actually looking into what really happened and finding out that these terrible things are just kind of random tragic events that have nothing to do with John Podesta and the other people they really hate. | |
| Finally, I wanted to ask you, what do you think the church can do? | |
| More or better, as it were, to confront QAnon and to try to push back against it? | |
| Well, number one, the church needs to start holding the pastors who promote QAnon accountable. | |
| That is a big piece of this puzzle in actual denominations like mine, where we have levels of accountability. | |
| We need to start putting those into place and say, look, you're not allowed to spout this stuff to your congregation. | |
| We have rules about that kind of thing, and we need to start looking at how to go about that in this particular context. | |
| You know, the biggest thing that I think we need to do, the only piece of practical advice I've been giving to sort of other Christians, is they navigate this stuff with people that are close to them. | |
| is to stay calm, to resist the instinct to be horrified and angry and frustrated, and to look with compassion on those that have fallen down this rabbit hole. | |
| For a lot of these folks, this is an addiction. | |
| Right? | |
| They're not doing this just because they're mentally ill or something like that. | |
| It is a means of becoming mentally ill, is the problem. | |
| And I've had people reach out to me and say, you know, I'm trying to quit QAnon. | |
| I know that it's false, but I keep clicking the links. | |
| There's an addictive nature to this that should elicit Not our anger and our contempt, but our empathy. | |
| And we need to make that the starting point of where we untie this knot. | |
| I – compassion is such an important part of this and getting people to a point where they can understand that. | |
| People that are outside of QAnon looking in, it's such a vital thing to do to offer that path back to sanity and back to reality for these people. | |
| This has been really enlightening for me on a lot of issues and I appreciate you very much for doing this interview. | |
| I would like for my listeners to check out Crossover Q, and if you happen to be in the Ohio area, go looking for Reverend Derek Billis' church if you want to hear him give a speech. | |
| Because if you listen to his podcast, you can tell this is a man who knows public speaking and knows how to talk. | |
| I listened to your podcast and I found Your cadence, the way you use your voice, your words, you are very powerful. | |
| It is a very... I feel like I'm there. | |
| I feel like I'm in the congregation listening to you really explaining this in a very heartfelt and sincere way. | |
| And I appreciate it very much. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And thank you for doing this holy work that I think you were doing in exposing this stuff. | |
| I'm bringing some of this darkness out to light. | |
| I know it is not easy. | |
| I know that there are some images and things that are said that probably stick with you and continue to haunt you. | |
| But I just want you to know that I appreciate it, that there are a lot of people who are appreciating it, and I'll be praying for you and hope we get to talk again soon. | |
| That'd be great. | |
| Thank you so much for this, and thanks everybody for listening. |