Episode 240: Mr. Dez (A Family Torn Apart by QAnon)
A Louisiana family is profoundly changed as dad falls down the rabbit hole. Central to their story: a small-time QAnon influencer based in Canada who set up a numerology cult positioning himself as the herald of the Great Awakening.
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Music by Pontus Berghe & Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 240 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Mr. Dez episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
It's not easy to talk about, and I get emotional every time I do.
But at the same time, people who follow this are very bold and open about these beliefs, and I think it's important to hear the real world effects.
What it does to their loved ones and families.
I'd rather people hear about QAnon through my story, instead of watching a video and falling down the rabbit hole without really knowing what they're getting themselves into.
These are the words of Stephanie, a 42-year-old woman from Louisiana I spoke with over the phone.
She'd sent me an email a few days prior alerting me to a relatively small-time QAnon influencer going by MrDes.
He was asking his followers on Rumble, Telegram, and Twitter to spread his new video.
And only his new video, for seven days straight on social media, in a quest to be named spokesperson for the Great Awakening, a cataclysmic event that would see the return of Christ, an abundance of miracles, and the arrest and execution by the military of the pedo-satanic cabal in QAnon lore.
Before I spoke with Stephanie, I did some research on Mr. Dez, who turned out to be Andrew Fernandez, a 36-year-old Canadian strength and conditioning coach living in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
He had first gained a small following in June of 2021 when he posted a video titled, We Are The Great Awakening.
It was a call to action.
Okay, patriots and digital soldiers, we have one shot at this.
Timing is everything, so I need you to pay attention.
This is that moment, that day you've been waiting for, so don't take this lightly just because you've never heard of me or that I don't have any followers.
It's time for ordinary people to do an extraordinary thing.
So I'm going to put this on Twitter, Telegram, and Rumble.
All you need to do is watch each part of this message, and then share it, and tag General Flynn, Scavino, Pompeo, Trump Jr., Lin Wood, Sidney Powell.
The moment they get this to the President, and he sees this message, we go to war against Satan, and the entire Satanic cult.
Yikes.
Yeah, he's kind of a young man, you know, well-built with cropped hair.
He looks extremely normal.
I think he overestimates Trump, you know, who would watch this video.
Going to war with Satan?
What?
Who wants to go to war with Satan?
I don't want to go to war with Satan.
I don't want to go to war at all!
Is that such a bad thing?
War with Satan?
War with Satan.
It sounds like a lot of work.
Mr. Dez then jumped into some far-fetched pattern recognition, which you'll be familiar with if you listen to our Mud Fossil episodes.
He claimed that one of his tattoos, an F, presumably the first letter of his last name, Fernandez, was the armor of God and could be seen replicated in a mountain range in the Republic of Congo, which he used Google Earth to zoom into.
He went on to explain that his family crest, which he also had a tattoo of, resembled Trump's family crest.
I struggled to see the similarity.
Andrew then talked about the place he lives, Thunder Bay, which contains a mountain range dubbed the Sleeping Giant due to the shape of its skyline.
That much was true, but to him it had a deeper meaning.
None of it was coincidence.
It pointed to giants of old roaming the earth, scientific proof of God, and his personal and pivotal role in the fast approaching Great Awakening, as predicted by Q.
It's time for us to stand up and fight.
Either we destroy them or they destroy us.
Now, military is the only way, but I am the trump card.
None of this happens without me, but I can't do this without you.
Conveniently, Andrew explained that the war between God and Satan was coming to a head.
Satan is so close to having complete dominion of the entire universe, yet we are in the perfect moment to take our world back.
It's all simply a war between God and Satan.
It's just a lot bigger than anything we thought possible.
In Argentina, this mountain range is one mile squared.
This is the upper body of a giant.
I know you all see it.
Don't deny what your eyes can obviously see.
Take a minute to understand what you're actually witnessing right now.
Undeniable proof that first and foremost there is a higher power who created this earth.
Scientific proof that allows for all religion and every spiritual belief to be put aside and for every non-believer to understand that there is a form of God.
It is time for the entire scientific and medical communities to start showing a lot of humility.
Because 400 miles from here is the head of a reptile.
This is six miles square, just the head.
Again, don't deny what your eyes can obviously see.
Another graduate of Mud Fossil University.
Yeah, I was gonna say, is this the first time that we've seen another influencer actually use the same type of, I don't know what you want to call it, scientific discovery?
I don't know, you know, as Roger Spurr from Mud Fossil University?
I think so, yeah.
Like, it is a pretty specific way to see things.
I'm not sure, I mean, he never mentions Roger by name, but it is the same technique, where you're just looking through Google Earth for stuff that looks like stuff, and you're like, well, this is the giant, and then here's a reptile, and it doesn't really explain why it's meaningful that a giant reptile appears, or, I mean, the giants at least are in the Bible.
I don't remember any parts about giant reptiles in the Bible.
I'm sure somebody could point you to a passage that alludes to it.
It sounds like this guy also literally just came off of watching The Devil's Advocate, you know, with Pacino and Keanu Reeves.
It's like, with a war, but the devil has almost claimed dominion over the Earth as he's just about to break through.
As a prelude to the return of Christ, Andrew explained that non-human entities were about to appear on Earth.
The spiritual war has now entered our physical world.
This will be the greatest moment in the history of mankind.
The war to end all war.
So start preparing because you're about to see non-human entities take form in this world.
And it's gonna shake you to your core no matter how ready you think you are.
It's gonna take some balls.
Like these ones in Namibia.
This is a three mile long penis and testicle.
With foreskin.
A lot of foreskin.
*laughter* He said it so matter-of-factly!
This is a three-mile penis.
I know, it's Three Mile Penis.
The red arrow just pointing to the cock tip.
Yeah, that's amazing.
My new band.
My new band is going to be called Three Mile Penis.
That's such a fucking good name.
Holy shit.
And, you know, I mean, you can't see the video, obviously, but there's like tons of Q drops being shown with highlighted text.
This is gonna be the only time we really get to laugh this episode, so enjoy it, fellas.
I was gonna say also, like, if this gentleman has seen the film's Bird Box or the new Bird Box Barcelona, he'll know that, you know, when you do see these celestial entities, it's gonna make you do something bad to yourself.
I'm gonna put you in a bird box.
Andrew then explained that a variety of things were going to revolutionize human life on Earth.
If only those watching his video would like and share it.
And that medicine and science were about to enter a golden age.
Cancer would be eradicated.
Wall Street would be abolished along with the Federal Reserve, replaced by a quote, free and fair market.
The discovery of abundant precious metals would make everyone rich beyond belief.
Taxation would come to an end.
War, homelessness, poverty, and addiction would cease to exist.
Social media would be repossessed by the people.
And, in classic QAnon fashion, the deep state, elite societies, and globalists would be arrested, tried by the military, and summarily executed.
Trump, the Q team, and the military were just waiting for the green light from Andrew and his followers.
The whole thing was ridiculous.
It was being shared by a man who had been posting confusing, self-aggrandizing content since July of 2017, before QAnon was even a thing.
Back then he was claiming to be some sort of alien receiving messages from God.
He was using numerology to predict human evolution and build a tangled and far-reaching taxonomy of the universe, in which he was playing a central role.
Somewhere along the way he had gotten into QAnon and built a small numerology-based following on Telegram.
Plus, he was Canadian.
What did this have to do with him?
But to one man at least, Mr. Dez's video, posted in late June of 2021, was making a lot of sense.
That man was Bob, Stephanie's husband of 18 years.
And the video, in his own words, changed his life.
Bob, whose name we've changed to maintain his anonymity, was a family man with two children at the time, a five-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter.
He and Stephanie had married in 2003 after two years of living together and around three and a half years of being in a relationship.
She described him as quote, "a fun guy, always very nice, not confrontational at all.
He was quiet, introverted, but would have a good time with the people he let in."
She explained their marriage to me.
"We went to work, we came home, we had dinner.
That was before binging was an option, but we watched movies and TV together."
We both loved NFL football and college football very much.
So in the fall, that's pretty much all we did on the weekends.
Watch football together.
We both really got into it.
He said some of the fondest times he had was watching or going to a game with me.
So...
Yeah.
Our marriage was very normal and stable.
We would even do things in the later years of marriage like get the kids to bed and spend the rest of the evening on a Friday night playing darts and cards in our little sunroom and not going anywhere.
Not even going out for a date night.
Just enjoying each other's companies at home.
Both Stephanie and Bob were Christians who attended church irregularly and refrained from evangelizing.
He had been raised Catholic, and she converted to Catholicism around 2014 due to the local community and their daughter's schooling.
Both were at the relative center of the political spectrum, but liberal on social issues.
She voted for the Democratic Party and had studied political science.
Bob didn't pay much attention to politics, nor did he vote until the 2020 presidential election.
As late as 2019, Stephanie remembered Bob expressing a distaste for Donald Trump.
But all of that changed in 2020, during campaign season.
In February of that year, Stephanie remembers Bob sending her a politically charged text message.
He sent me some link for an article about how there was an arrest warrant issued for Joe Biden in Ukraine, and he wanted me to know it was out there.
That was the first time I could remember him sending me any political article in our full 22 years together.
Back in 2018, Bob's brother had gotten into QAnon, sharing Q-related content with his friends and family.
At the time, Stephanie remembers Bob wondering when his brother, quote, was going to realize that none of this ever happened and leave it alone.
She felt certain Bob had no interest in that kind of thing.
But during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, their daughter expressed her support for the movement, at which point Bob brought up George Soros, a billionaire with liberal leanings who often draws the ire of the right wing, in this case accusing him of somehow orchestrating the BLM protests.
At this point in the conversation, Stephanie explained to their daughter that to some people, Soros was the boogeyman, a convenient scapegoat for all of their grievances.
This angered her husband.
That was new for him.
He was very, very non-confrontational, always.
He would sometimes get agitated or whatever, but there was a difference in how upset he was that I said that.
Stephanie thought it was a little strange, but not necessarily a bad thing.
Bob could think what he wanted.
It wasn't something she was going to have a full-blown argument about.
But then, in the late summer of 2020, Stephanie and Bob were in bed.
She was getting ready to sleep, and Bob was talking to her about something.
She doesn't remember what exactly, when he mentioned Q for the first time.
I said, oh God, you're not into that, huh?
And he said, well, I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna go on record and say Q Plus is President Trump himself.
And I remember thinking, oh no.
I felt like, wow, this is not good.
For those who aren't familiar, between 2018 and 2020, certain Q posts or drops were signed Q Plus.
A portion of QAnon followers believe that the plus indicates they were penned by Trump himself.
Bob had clearly been wading into the deeper end of the lore, and Stephanie was worried.
That year, his rhetoric escalated.
My daughter would ask questions about the election and he would ask me in front of her about how I felt about Kamala Harris sleeping her way to the top, which was so abnormal for him.
Just to say something so misogynistic.
Stephanie described an argument she had with Bob around this time about face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19.
It was about some video he had watched.
It was a scene outside of some restaurant with someone telling somebody something for not wearing a mask.
He brought it up and I said, no one's done that to me, and I haven't done it to anyone.
He told me I could keep living with my head in the sand, but he would protect the family.
I got pretty offended by that.
I don't live with my head in the sand.
My first priority is always our family.
That's not ever how he approached me in 22 years.
He always expressed that he knew that I always had the family's best interests at heart.
Then, in late October, not too long before the election, Bob did something else that surprised Stephanie.
They were at a rehearsal dinner for his nephew's wedding.
Both of their kids were going to play roles in the ceremony.
We were setting up the venue and my daughter came up to me really upset.
She said, Mom, Dad just made Grams, his mother, come tell me that she was voting for Trump.
And why?
I was like, OK, that's odd.
We were at a family event.
That was not something he typically would have ever done.
That following Monday, Stephanie and Bob received a call from their daughter's school.
She had been cutting herself.
Stephanie, understandably distressed, started bringing her daughter to therapy.
This was around the time of the presidential election.
The rhetoric really stepped up after the election was called for Biden.
Bob thought it was stolen, of course.
We went to my godson's 13th birthday party, and the whole time we're at this party.
And we were extremely close to my brother, whose son this was.
Even Bob was.
Bob and my brother are best friends.
He's visibly angry.
He's reading his phone the whole time.
This was an ordeal.
It was after the election was called.
I said, hey, what's up with you tonight?
He told me the election was stolen and you don't want to talk about it.
I said, no, I don't want to talk about it at my godson's birthday party.
And I don't think it was stolen.
Stephanie described the period between the presidential election on November 6th, 2020 and the inauguration on January 20th, 2021 as a difficult one.
This is when things really started spiraling.
Bob's beliefs were getting weirder and weirder, and fights between us were getting more frequent.
January 6th was their daughter's birthday.
When she got home from school, her father was, according to Stephanie, watching videos of the riot in glee.
This bothered Stephanie, who had wanted to focus on cooking her daughter's favorite meal and celebrating her birthday as a family.
But Bob was growing increasingly obsessed.
The situation came to a head on the weekend before the inauguration.
We're huge Marvel fans.
We love everything Marvel.
All the Marvel movies, all the little spin-offs.
We used to watch them all together.
That weekend, WandaVision was coming out on Disney+.
We had planned to watch it all together as a family.
At this point, his online activity had really ramped up.
It was a Friday, and earlier that day he told me he was at the store stocking up on non-perishable items.
I asked him why, and he told me it was about to get bad, and you don't know because you only look at CNN.
You don't look at real news.
Governments all over the world are falling.
I was like, where are you getting this from?
He told me he was getting it from real patriots.
I noticed the Q lingo.
That night he got home and I was like, Hey, we're going to watch WandaVision together with the kids.
Can you put the phone away?
He said he would not put the phone away while history was happening.
And we were about to have 10 days of darkness and all these terrible things.
I said, Bob, none of this is going to happen.
During this argument, I had to tell him, I'm not your enemy.
That's where we were.
We ended up not watching it with him.
My daughter asked if we could watch it together.
She was in therapy and on medication at this point.
We were having some troubles.
She asked if we could just watch it together in her room.
So we went and watched it.
In the middle of this, she came out of her room to get something and he was sitting at the table on his phone.
He proceeded to tell her that a war was coming and that it was his job as an Anon to awaken people.
He told my daughter, who was on antidepressants and in therapy for harming herself, some pretty scary shit.
He also told her I would crumble when the truth came out, which was awful.
The inauguration came and went.
None of the things Bob predicted came true, but this didn't shake his resolve.
Near the end of January, another nephew of Bob's was having a birthday party at a local pizza joint.
The restaurant was big.
It had its own arcade and even laser tag facilities.
Masks were required in the downstairs arcade area.
Stephanie and Bob's son, who was five at the time, had let his mask slip beneath his nose.
One of the staff members asked him to readjust it.
Stephanie described what happened next.
Bob made a scene.
Started yelling insults.
He left the place and went out to the parking lot.
My son started crying.
My daughter and I were freaking out.
I went outside and told him, You can leave.
I promised the kids we would do this and have a fun day.
We're going to stay for the party.
I'll call you when we need a ride or I'll get a ride for me and the kids.
Meanwhile, he's frantically pacing around his truck and he says, if you would just watch all the videos I try to show you, you'd see they're poisoning us with the masks.
I said, look, Bob, I'm not doing it.
We're going to finish out the party.
So that's what we did.
That night, he didn't go to bed.
Bob's sleep had been growing increasingly erratic.
He was staying up all night watching videos, falling deeper down the rabbit hole.
The next Sunday, Bob woke Stephanie up at 4.30 in the morning.
He told her to get her popcorn ready.
That declass was about to happen.
This was a reference to declassification, a concept prevalent in conspiracy theory circles
that the government is on the verge of revealing a trove of hidden knowledge that will confirm
Bob told Stephanie that he had just finished watching a 7 hour long YouTube video made by a person who claimed to have proof of the existence of extraterrestrials.
Bob explained that the person who made the series had even killed an alien.
She asked him if he had slept that night.
He told her he hadn't.
She went back to sleep.
The next day, Stephanie asked Bob if he would watch a TV show with her, like they used to.
Bob refused, and they got into another argument.
He told her that Joe Biden wasn't the real president, that she didn't understand, that in reality, Trump was still in office.
Stephanie left with the kids to spend the day at her brother's place.
She explained.
The whole day I was at my brother's, Bob was texting me really crazy things about the Satanic Cabal and Adrenochrome.
He'd been talking to my daughter about these things.
We got in the car that evening and she asked me why we were even going back home.
I said, because look, I've been with your dad for 22 years.
This isn't him.
This is going to stop.
You know, there's only so long he can go with none of this stuff happening.
It's going to stop.
The next day, while I worked, he sent me a long text with pictures of the Frazzledrip memes.
He explained that the government had been trying to kill us for decades.
9-11, bioweapons like COVID.
It was just a really long text of conspiracy theories and paranoia.
He finished it with, I want a future with you more than you know.
It's going to be based in hard truths and reality.
So I responded with, I don't know what you want me to say.
I love you.
But then I started therapy too.
Frazzledrip, for reference, is a non-existent video that QAnon followers and other conspiracy theorists believe exists.
They claim it shows Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, the vice chair of her 2016 campaign, torturing and murdering a child.
Stephanie's goal in therapy was to learn to listen to Bob's conspiracy theorizing without being as disturbed as she'd been so far.
But he was increasing the frequency with which he spoke to their daughter about his bizarre beliefs.
He was telling his daughter that everything she was learning in school was a lie, that Joe Biden was dead, and that an actor in a mask was now pretending to be the president.
He told her that Michael Jackson wasn't really dead, and that the pop star was actually one of the original people behind Q. He also told her not to tell her mother about the claims he'd been making.
Bob's daughter had been, in Stephanie's words, a daddy's girl.
She had always looked up to her father, but his QAnon rants were getting to her, so she told her mother about their interactions.
After finding out, Stephanie sent a text message to Bob asking him to stop talking to their daughter about these things, explaining that they weren't appropriate for a teenager going through anxiety and depression, a teenager that had recently harmed herself.
By March of 2021, Bob and Stephanie's daughter had been expelled from school
for behavioral problems.
She had also begun stealing her father's narcolepsy medicine, Adderall, and taking it.
Stephanie explained, "The way she told it, she was already having feelings of depression
and anxiety and he severely exacerbated them. He made her listen to a frequency video to
kill the parasites in her brain. She She described it as freaky noises, where she covered her ears and he pulled her hands away and told her to let it work.
Twelve days later, she was in the behavioral unit of the hospital because she said she wanted to kill herself.
Their daughter told Bob and Stephanie about her suicidal ideation after her parents noticed some of Bob's pills had gone missing and confronted her.
The doctors considered her self-harm an act in furtherance, and she was placed in a 72-hour hold.
As part of the intake protocol, the hospital informed Stephanie and Bob that they would be testing their daughter for COVID-19.
This infuriated Bob, and Stephanie was forced to finish the meeting with the hospital staff alone.
After being admitted, their daughter told the psychiatrist that there had been trouble at home due to recent changes in her father, who had become obsessed with conspiracy theories.
Stephanie refrained from sharing this with Bob, afraid that he might skip their scheduled family session the next day.
During this period, and while they visit her daily in the hospital, Stephanie and Bob left their son with Stephanie's brother.
After their daughter was released from the hospital, on the way back home, they stopped to pick him up.
Her brother later told Stephanie that Bob took this opportunity to share that he'd spotted what he considered suspicious pedo symbols on a lawn maintenance truck outside of the facility.
Despite his family being in turmoil, Bob couldn't let go of his paranoid conspiracy theorizing.
It was shocking to those around him.
A few months passed.
During this period, Bob grew increasingly interested in Flat Earth conspiracy theories, which he continued to share with his daughter, among others.
Stephanie explained.
He showed a video about Flat Earth to my brother's kids and my daughter at our Memorial Day celebration.
So the children brought it up to me, and my niece told me that it wasn't really the content that bothered her, but how intense Uncle Bob was being about it.
Stephanie spoke to Bob about the incident, and he explained to her that their daughter had asked him to show it to them.
Stephanie didn't doubt this.
Their daughter was a teenager after all, and despite no longer harming herself, she had continued acting out.
Stephanie explained.
Bob told me he only showed the children the video because I wouldn't talk to him about these things.
That night we had a five hour long conversation about everything he had researched.
The longest conversation about it that we'd ever had.
He was so happy to tell me everything.
In June of 2021, the family went on vacation to the beach.
But Bob's behavior was continuing to worsen, and he was isolating himself from the rest of his family.
He'd come down to the beach around lunchtime, two o'clock.
Then he was upstairs in the condo, on his phone.
A month later, Stephanie, her daughter, and Bob's mother went school supply shopping, a yearly tradition.
At the time, Bob was glued to his phone.
He'd stayed up two nights in a row chatting with others on Telegram using Gematria, a form of Jewish numerology popular with some QAnon followers.
During their outing, Stephanie's daughter shoplifted.
When her mother found out, she brought her back to the store to return the item.
My mother-in-law and I brought her back to the store and made her fess up.
We had a heart-to-heart with her about it.
The store staff didn't call the police because they said she had a good family that was trying to teach her a lesson, so they were going to let it go.
When I got home, I wanted to talk to her father about it.
He got up out of bed, shook his head, and went into our sunroom, where he stayed, for hours.
When I went to find him, he was on his phone, on telegram.
I asked him if he was going to talk to our daughter, and he answered, what do you want from me?
In the ensuing conversation, Bob told her about Mr. Dez, Andrew Fernandez.
He had watched the video we explored at the top of the episode.
Stephanie explained.
We were dealing with a pretty significant thing that our teenage daughter shoplifted while at a store with me and his mom, and it's something we needed to address.
But that night, the only thing he wanted to talk to me about was Dez's video.
He told me it was life-changing because it proved the existence of God.
He told me nothing happening with our daughter mattered because there was something bigger at play.
What Stephanie didn't know at the time was that Bob had grown deeply involved in Mr. Dez's community.
He was collaborating with him and was later named an administrator in his telegram group.
Andrew Fernandez's message was clear.
He would sacrifice his life to usher in the Great Awakening.
I was sent here to fight.
To sacrifice my life until my last breath for the freedom of the human race.
So Mr. President, General Flynn, along with the millions of patriots throughout the world, I stand with you ready to fight.
For every man and every woman who's ever suffered at the hands of this evil.
But most importantly, I stand with you ready to fight for every child these demons have taken from us, and for every child we still have a chance to save.
We the people demand the arrest and execution of all who worship Satan, who've harmed our children and used satanic rituals to further their careers and agenda.
Nothing can stop what is coming.
This is the Great Awakening.
A huge aspect of Mr. Dez's story was the messages he claimed to be receiving from God.
He called them downloads.
And it wasn't long before Bob received a download of his own.
Stephanie explained.
A week after he first mentioned Mr. Dez to me, I found Bob in our room, in the dark, visibly shaking.
He told me something was happening to him.
He felt like he was standing in an ice castle.
He needed my help.
He needed me to believe him, that all of these things he'd been talking about were really happening.
I told him I didn't really believe him because none of them had come to pass.
I asked him to let me help him.
But he stopped talking and told me to lay there with him.
I found out later that he thought he received his first vision that night.
He referred to it as a download.
After that, the fights didn't stop.
They got worse.
Bob started spending even more time online after that.
Stephanie's therapist recommended that she focus on that aspect of Bob's behavior, but he had no interest in curbing his internet usage.
He and Andrew Fernandez were doing important work, he told Stephanie.
Andrew had decided that their community should be split up into 30-person groups for unclear reasons.
They held a conference call with other members and divided themselves up based on the Gematria version of their names.
It's unclear what came of this organizing, but Stephanie pleaded with Bob about the amount of time he was dedicating to Mr. Dez's community and his own Telegram channel.
I said, I wish you could understand how much time you're spending on this.
You had a conference call.
You sorted out the 10 groups of 30.
How could you have done all of these things without spending a mad amount of time on it?
He told me he was sick and tired of me and took off running, literally running down the street, but with his phone in his hand.
In the days following, Stephanie reached a breaking point.
I asked him for space after that.
I said, I think our paths have really diverged at this point.
I think we both need to take a minute to kind of figure this out.
I even told him, because he told me he couldn't turn his back on this.
It was a calling and something big was happening and he wasn't going to turn his back on it.
I said, something big is happening in these four walls.
Our family is being torn apart.
You have to make a choice.
The next day, he wore his airbrushed Q shirt with where we go one, we go all on it, and that's when I told him we at least needed to take a break.
I said, go on your spiritual journey.
I'll take care of the kids.
The kids and I need to kind of separate ourselves from this for a bit.
We needed some peace, the kids and I, especially my daughter.
At this point, I truly believed he was sick.
I wanted him to get out of the house.
In the meantime, I took the kids and went to my brother's.
We eventually returned home.
The kids were about to start school in around four days.
Bob left the family home for a couple of days.
When he returned, it was to wake Stephanie up at three in the morning, asking her to lay with him.
The next day, he told her he wouldn't be leaving the house.
I looked through his phone that weekend and found out that during those few days he'd been telling people in the telegram group that they were the only family that was his anymore.
Stephanie told Bob that he needed to see a doctor, that the visions he was having weren't normal.
She expressed her concerns that he might hurt her or the children if he were told to do so in one of his downloads.
He assured her that it wouldn't happen, that her and the children were not a part of his visions, and that he'd never hurt them.
Stephanie was torn.
Her brother, who knew Bob well because they'd been very good friends for a long time, advised her to leave.
So did her mother.
Despite this, she decided to stay.
She desperately wanted her family to stay together.
Her son and daughter resumed school in early August.
By the end of the month, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana.
Bob and Stephanie's area was one of the most devastated by the storm, but they were unable to evacuate because they had caught COVID.
Stephanie was sick for about a week and a half.
Her boss had lost his father a month prior to the illness, so she stayed home, waiting to test negative before returning to work.
I was trying to be considerate of what my boss had just gone through, and I heard Bob on the phone telling his brother how stupid I was, how they couldn't even test for that, how it was a lie, just really going in on me for believing the test was accurate, even though I was very sick.
That was three or four days before the hurricane, maybe.
The whole night as the hurricane was passing, it was bad.
It was very scary.
My son was in the room telling me how scared he was and I was reassuring him that I would protect him and Bob was on his phone with his telegram group decoding the OA, the Netflix series.
The hurricane passed.
On the morning of August 27th, 2021, Stephanie and Bob cleared debris from around their home.
Their roof had been damaged and they'd lost power, but their home was still standing.
For the next three weeks, they were without electricity.
The family was forced to relocate temporarily.
We stayed in this other city for three weeks.
He would stay hunched over his phone in the kitchen of the house.
He wasn't working.
I was driving three hours a day to get back and forth from work.
He wouldn't leave the coop.
He was just literally on his phone the whole time.
Three weeks later, the power came back and we returned home.
That day, I decided.
We had been gone for three weeks.
I really wanted to help people.
My brother needed help with his house.
His house was really damaged and my friend had been alone with no electricity for like three weeks through the storm and the aftermath.
We got back to our house on a Saturday.
On Sunday, I visited with my friend and asked what he needed.
He said just a visit.
So I visited and I went directly to my brother's house afterwards to help him.
The next morning, Bob was being very weird.
Something about the date was significant to him.
It was September 19th.
Silly me, I thought it was due to that day being the anniversary of when we'd had our marriage blessed in a church, but it wasn't.
When I got home that evening, my daughter told me her dad was getting really bold with her brother.
She told me, I don't want dad to do the same thing with him that he did with me.
I think he knows you're not going to leave in a disaster, so he's getting bolder again.
And I said, okay, thanks for letting me know.
That night, I had a talk with Bob about what was going on.
He told me a lot of bizarre things.
That all science fiction movies were real.
They were a form of soft disclosure by the powers that be.
Then he proceeded to explain that he and I were like phoenixes rising from the ashes.
That we were supposed to fill the role in some way of JFK Jr.
and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, the husband and wife that died tragically together.
I had over those six months or so lost 20 pounds between stress and COVID.
He said he'd been talking to his group about the parallels he saw.
Part of his proof was that my birthday was on the same day as JFK Jr.' 's, exactly 20 years later.
He also told me that my recent unexplained weight loss had him wondering what her weight was when she died.
Stephanie was terrified.
She was reaching another breaking point.
The next morning, Bob ran into their bedroom and told her a Batman towel in their son's room had been linked to a picture of a satanic crucifixion on a Telegram account he followed.
She later found out by perusing his Telegram group that Bob believed he was receiving coded messages through his son.
She called Bob's family and told them that she couldn't do it anymore, that she had to leave.
She told them she feared for her and the children's lives.
Bob's brother, who a few years prior had been a full-on QAnon believer, but had since limited his time spent absorbing and interacting with conspiracy theories, agreed with Stephanie that his sibling was in trouble.
Together with Stephanie, they tried to convince Bob to seek professional help, but he refused.
In the days following, Stephanie left the family home with the children, this time for good.
Stephanie filed for divorce, requesting total custody of the kids.
As part of the trial, the judge ordered a psychological evaluation of both parties.
By the next hearing, Bob submitted a bizarre letter claiming that he was a sovereign being and would be refusing to submit to a psychological evaluation.
The judge, surprisingly, stated that Bob had a right to claim he was sovereign, and as such, to refuse the evaluation.
He ordered their son to spend every other weekend with Bob.
This was extremely difficult to accept for Stephanie, who was worried that her ex-husband would continue to push conspiracy theories on their child.
For a year, Bob's daughter refused to see him.
Stephanie says her behavior has significantly improved since they moved out.
My daughter is 16 now.
She's still on medicine for depression and anxiety since we left.
I doubted how much this affected her in the beginning.
The difference in her after we left?
I was so wrong to doubt her.
It was really affecting her.
She admits it wasn't the source of it, but greatly exacerbated those feelings.
Stephanie's fears about her ex-husband's influence on their son were not unfounded.
Bob continues to show his son videos and talk to him about conspiracy theories.
But he seems less affected than his older sister by his father's behavior.
According to Stephanie, and thanks to therapy, her son now accepts that his father has weird beliefs.
Among other things, Bob has told him that aliens are real and that they travel through portals.
He has told him to stare at the sun for periods of time, which his son has opted not to do.
Although Stephanie still checks in on Bob's telegram groups, she tries to avoid questioning her children about her ex-husband's beliefs and allows them to bring the topic up at their discretion.
After a year away from her father, Bob and Stephanie's daughter now joins her younger brother on his visits every other weekend.
In June of 2023, two years after he posted his first video that deeply influenced Bob, Andrew Fernandez, aka Mr. Dez, was back at it again.
I hope you understand.
This is going to happen very soon.
The signs are everywhere.
But more importantly, it's gonna happen soon because it all comes down to you.
And I know you're ready.
I mean that very seriously.
You hold the future of humanity in your hands right now.
With the decisions you're about to make in the next ten days.
Now today marks two years from the day I posted my first video online.
I said that none of this will happen without me.
But more importantly, I said that I can't do any of this without you.
Well, it's been two years, and still nothing has happened.
So on Monday, July 10th, I'm gonna do this one more time.
But again, I can't do any of this without you.
Your decision to stand with me or not will determine the future of this world.
Now you're more than welcome to laugh at me all you want, but I wouldn't if I were you.
We're running out of time.
Look around.
If we don't stand up now and do something drastic, pretty soon we won't be able to fight back even if we tried.
So don't ignore this because you think, there's no way I'm capable of it.
Above all the money, power, and control at the top of this world and everyone involved, this still comes down to the war between God and Satan.
Man, this dude is fucking scary.
Yeah, yeah, he's terrifying.
In this nearly 8 minute video, Mr. Dez prepared the viewer for another video he'd be posting on July 10th, which he claimed would be his last.
His pitch was as grandiose as ever.
Don't you want this to be over already?
Don't you want to see justice finally being served?
Don't you want to start living?
And experience this world the way God intended.
I do, and I'm pretty sure every single one of you feel the same way.
But in order for that to happen, we have to step up and do this next part on our own.
I promise you, I'm betting my life on it, that all of those at the top, from Trump, to all the white hats, to the militaries, and everyone involved with the Q operation, they're ready and waiting for us to get the job done.
So on July 10th, I'm going to post that message on Telegram and Rumble.
If you all do what I'm asking, and like I said, I'm not asking for much, our united voice is going to trigger the most incredible event we've ever witnessed.
It really is time to make this biblical.
We need God back in our world.
It's time that we experience Christ's return.
And of course, we don't know the day or time of His arrival, but I'm prepared to fight for Him regardless.
And I know you are too.
We need him. What is this guy's he's is he literally because to me it's like very like
Jonestown that he's like I'm I'm just gonna go out and like start killing people like
are you guys with me because like I'm ready to go like it feels like I don't know I mean this this
whole thing like watching this guy and seeing how it's affected this this family it reminds me of
something that Travis said a long long time ago when we were you know a couple years into sort of
studying this stuff and after Biden won the election Travis and I were sort of talking about
what we thought this would mean for the future of QAnon.
And Travis, you said something along the lines of like, well, there will probably be less of, you know, there will be people who sort of bow out, but the people who stay in will get like more radicalized and like more intense, even though there's a less amount of them, the rhetoric will be like, ratcheted up by a lot. And I feel that's really true,
especially in watching this influencer and the effect that it's had on this guy. 2020. I mean,
this guy did not get pilled until basically Q was sort of in its sundown period.
Yeah, definitely. And it, you know, it contains that kind of duality we often see with QAnon
influencers, where the rhetoric is very, very intense. And then the solution proposed is
to essentially post. Post about it, like, share, and everyone's going to wake up. But
this guy is kind of dangerous because he believes he's playing a very crucial role in all of
this. And he believes that he's ushering the book of revelations.
Yeah. And he's like, very clear and direct. And he's a good look, you know, good looking
white guy. And, you know, he's, he's a coach.
Yeah, he's a coach and he's got that almost life coach kind of inspirational Well, at least he think, you know, to somebody that's vulnerable and already sort of one foot in the sort of conspiracy world, a guy like this, I could easily see them pushing you to put both feet in and both arms in and both, you know, everything.
So, yeah, very disturbing stuff.
Yeah, I mean, the saving grace of QAnon was always the fact that their solution usually just involved posting until it didn't.
Incidents like, you know, January 6 or something like that.
But yeah, it's like, I was always concerned about, like, what happens when they get antsy and, you know, there's this concept in cults called forcing the end.
When they decide that they're sick of waiting around for, you know, the comet to come or the cataclysmic event to sweep away everyone and destroy their enemies, they start taking action on their own.
And Even though he's still just suggesting posting, just the intensity of it, I don't know, just suggests that he's willing to go a step further than most other QAnon influencers.
Yeah, you know, I spoke to Stephanie about this and her and her brother sat down and tried to watch the video that we'll be talking about in a moment and they just couldn't because it was just so intense.
The manipulation was so intense and the way he was talking about it.
It's, you know, sacrifice.
It's...
He makes it really feel like life and death and, you know, it's just maybe a question of time with this kind of stuff before someone takes it way too far.
I mean, obviously, it has the power to tear families apart.
It has the power to change a person's mind profoundly, change 20 years of ideological trajectory, 20 years of relations.
It has the power to have somebody go out and commit violence, you know?
Like we've seen a bunch of times.
Yeah, because it attracts people who are already pretty destabilized, and you just never know, like, what you're screwing with.
Well, and also, I think one thing that sticks out to me is this idea of putting, like, a ticking clock on this.
Like, this is the last time I'm going to do this.
With it or against it, I'm going to post one more time, and if you are, you know, if you have put this guy on a pedestal and you do believe that God is speaking through him than you, and he says, hey, this is your last shot, you know, he's making the people that are sort of like radicalized to his belief, he's making them ask that question, hey, am I with God or am I not?
And historically, you know, that can take you to a very not-so-good place.
So, I don't know.
It's pretty upsetting stuff, still, after all this time.
On July 10th, 2023, Dez posted a nearly half an hour long video titled, Uniting the Great Awakening.
In it, he essentially positioned himself as the central spokesperson for QAnon.
Despite his extremely alarming rhetoric, his ask was simple.
"Like and post my video for the next seven days.
Refrain from posting anything else.
Accompany your posts with the phrase, 'I stand with Dez.'"
"We need to have 80% of our movement committed to this by the 17th.
Give me the next seven days and let me show you what I'm capable of."
God gave me a job to do and I'm here to do it.
Now if we actually make this happen, then most of you watching have never seen or heard of me before.
My name is Andrew Fernandez and you're watching this because someone somewhere either sent this to you directly or is reposting this on their page or channel.
So no matter who you are, I don't care how many followers you have, no one is above another in this movement.
Give me your complete focus and attention.
Put away every distraction and be 100% with me right now.
Because if I time this right, which I think I have, and if I deliver this the way I need to, together we are going to change the world.
In the video, Andrew also addressed pushback he was getting from people in the QAnon community claiming that he was a false prophet.
He explained that the obvious candidates to represent the movement, in his mind, Trump, JFK Jr., or unnamed members of the Q team, would be too divisive as messengers.
It would have to be him, a 36-year-old Canadian strength and fitness coach.
In his words, a, quote, punk with no money.
No power, no influence in the world, who was willing to sacrifice everything.
He had been chosen by God.
He explained to the audience that this would be the last chance for the Q team and Trump to prove they're on the side of God in his war against Satan.
But as it always goes with these delusional conspiracy theories, by July 17th, nothing had happened.
Dez deleted both videos and posted the following to his Telegram channel.
Well, today's the 17th.
Now, we didn't get to 80% commitment, but what did we accomplish?
We grew both this Telegram channel and Unrumble by over 35% in 7 days.
That means that thousands of people have at least taken an interest in seeing where this goes and many of you joined because you're ready for action to be taken.
So thank you to everyone who shared that message for the past 7 days.
I know it wasn't easy.
Many of you were shut down.
Some even blocked from certain channels.
That's not what I intended to happen.
So what do we do from here?
I'm going to be taking that message down since it was solely directed on finishing today, the 17th.
What we do from here is we refocus and keep going.
We stay on track with the mindset that we the people need to stand up and press the issue of the white hats and everyone else involved with President Trump.
To flip that switch and start the process of finally telling the truth to the public.
Now this is fascinating to me because this goes against your normal sort of instincts on how to grow a community.
You post a video and you leave that video up and over time it accumulates views and it might bring people to your channel and all of this stuff.
But what this guy is doing I think is actually in a way kind of genius marketing where you have a QAnon radicalization video that goes out for a certain amount of time.
If you don't get it you miss it and it goes back into the vault.
You know, that sort of creates a conversation.
Oh, did you see the video?
Did you see the Mr. Dez video?
And it's like, oh, no, I missed it.
I missed it before.
Oh, well, I have a rip and I can get I can get it to you or whatever.
This idea of posting like timed content in the conspiracy world is something that I don't think we've seen.
And given how crazy this guy is and how scary he is, him doing something like this.
I don't know.
There's something like different about it.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I think Travis is right, you know?
Forcing the end, you know?
It's this kind of manufactured crisis, and he's able to make it feel just as urgent two years after he said, like, it's about to happen.
Yeah.
And then again, here, he's preparing you for, okay, looks like we're gonna go back to just our usual stuff, and eventually I'll come up with another scheme like this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The next video, and it'll only be up for 10 days, and you've got 10 days to share it and all this stuff.
It actually does gamify the sort of sharing and cross-pollination of different conspiracy communities.
Today, Bob continues to post on his personal Telegram channel, and seems to remain a supporter of Dez and the general QAnon belief system.
His posts show he's at least somewhat connected to, and interested in, the claims of various QAnon-based cults still operating today.
Among them, those of Romana Didulo, who claims to be the Queen of Canada, Austin Steinbart, who claims to be a time-traveling young Q, and Michael Protzman, also known as Negative48, a man who led a Dallas-based QAnon numerology cult before recently dying in a motocross accident.
Stephanie, despite being relatively stable and happy in her life and relationships, still worries about Bob.
It just seems so surreal that all of this happened.
Bob and I were together for 22 years.
I legitimately thought I was growing old and dying with this person.
Even if he realizes that all of this is not true, and he's wasted all of this time and went so deep, it's still going to be a very long road for him.
He's so hardcore with it.
I would have never thought it would be possible for him to hurt anyone or himself, and that's not the type of guy he ever was.
And now I can tell you, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he ever did.
Even though we're not together, I'm not in love with him anymore, it's sad to think about what could happen to him.
I'd like to thank Stephanie for bravely sharing her story with me.
This one was definitely a rough one, but I think it's also kind of important, you know, to highlight just how powerful this stuff can be and how it's still so active in people's minds, you know?
I mean, people are still thinking all day, obsessed, posting about this stuff.
They're still, you know, mentally so involved with Q and QAnon, and there's all these mini-cults, essentially, that are developing and remaining Really very radical with a sense of like urgency kind of baked into their message.
It almost seems like QAnon set up a kind of franchise system where it created this template that anyone can sort of like copy and paste to create their own, you know, breakaway cult like we saw with the late Michael Prossman, we saw Ramona D. Lowe and Austin Steinbart a bit and also Mr. Des is that, you know, this The tale of white hats versus black hats and how you can usher in this great new glorious golden age by posting the right things in the right channels and obsessing about it enough is so fucking appealing that it can be replicated over and over and over and over again in order to get some followers.
And oftentimes, you know, with this content, you'd think we were still in 2018.
You know, it feels just as fresh, you know, the Great Awakening, it's right around the corner, and it's like five years later.
So much time has passed, and yet, if anything, this stuff has gotten more powerful for the people still involved in it.
I feel like in the absence of the actual Q-drops sort of shaping the narrative, or at least giving people stuff to bake, you have these new influencers sort of, like Travis said, developing their own franchises.
But in a way, what I've seemed to notice is that in the absence of of the drops in a sort of unifying narrative,
everybody is free to come up with their own version.
And oftentimes, it's way more intense and way more because they're not Q, right?
They need something to draw people in, whether it's Austin claiming that he's from the future,
whether it's negative 48 predicting that all of these people
are going to come back from the dead and play a part in the awakening,
whether it's Mr. Dez saying that he is the sort of civilian representative of QAnon
and God, it's like they all feel like they need to come up with something bigger than the original to bring people in.
And what's happening as a result of that is that the rhetoric and ideology
is becoming far more radicalized, far more intense, more leaning towards the violent and the sort of cult.
And look at these examples that we brought up, Roman Adidolo, negative 48.
I mean, these are people who are really destroying families as well and lives.
I mean, these are real cults, real cults.
In the beginning of this, we were hesitant to call QAnon as a whole a cult because there wasn't any sort of real
sort of central power structure, but now that is different.
And it's unfortunately even more important to sort of keep an eye on and, I don't know.
Yeah, this also I mean, I mean, this also goes back to something we've talked about the supply versus demand kind of problem.
These kinds of radical movements and conspiracy theories is because it's just like someone falls into this because something is giving them something that's more satisfying and more fulfilling than even their own family that they've been with for many years.
Even the well-being of their own children, which is absolutely heartbreaking.
Just the this the absence of a sense of meaning in the sort of the more personal things.
It's just that they, you know, they ignore all that in order to be a digital soldier in
this great battle of good versus evil.
They're just, their mind just obsesses over that because it's just so much more fulfilling. It's
very tragic. Yeah, the circumstances haven't changed. And so these movements are going to
continue to crop up in new forms. And potentially there will be another kind of great central focus
again in the future. But in the meantime, you know, these kind of mini cults are festering
just out of sight. And I have a sneaking suspicion that there are thousands, if not tens of
thousands, if not more stories of this kind of quiet desperation and loss happening across the
country and, you know, in other countries as well.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our archive of premium episodes.
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It helps to stay advertising free and editorially independent.
I'd like to thank Allie Metzi for help with transcription for this episode.
You can follow her on Twitter at PinielDeCalcify.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week.
May the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's auto-tune.
My relationship with my mother has become completely estranged in the last year.
My parents have fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole and we have become extremely obsessed with it.
I have a sister who believes in the QAnon conspiracy theory.
She's watching YouTube videos and she's just getting funneled down that algorithm, right?
Like to more and more kind of radical, bizarre things.
My dad was my best friend growing up.
We did everything together.
And then in just the past year, for sure, he's just changed into a different person.
My sister has always been my best friend, and she is to this day.
I mean, I love her.
It's hard to explain sister love.
I love her in a way that I can't love anybody else, and I worry about her.
Right before the pandemic year was the closest we ever were.
We would go on walks.
She would come over and play with the kids.
It's easier to feel angry at her than it is to start thinking about how much I miss her.
I've always been really proud of my mom.
She's a nurse.
She's a cancer nurse.
She's helped a lot of people and their families kind of face difficult moments and face death.
She's a kind, loving person and I feel Like, she's been tricked into believing all of these things that contradict her core values in a way that is so obvious to me.
What QAnon is doing is, they're trying to make the entire world a conspiracy.
Literally.
They will connect the dots to everything that you touch, see, feel, whatever.
And that is where the danger zone.
That's when I started to be fearful for her.
These people believe that you can't take the COVID vaccine because it's going to attract you.
Well, that's very dangerous for people to be believing that because they're putting themselves at risk, but they're also putting more other people at risk.
They're putting people at risk that they love.
It's not just like a funny conspiracy theory that unicorns and Bigfoot is real and all of like aliens and all these things.
