He Told Me to Write

Texts from Dad, 6 January 2021: 

Crimes against children. Evil

Crimes against children unspeakable

Jan 6 2021 will be remembered in history forever. Start writing now and you will have a best seller!

You were made to be living at this time so you have a role. I bet it’s writing about it to share to the world. Write all your feelings and observations now and then again after the truth is revealed. Please do it. If I'm wrong no harm and you can call me crazy, if I’m right – you are a bestselling author

I am 100% serious

If you take my suggestion start writing today. It’s going to happen soon

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I’ve hardly written a word since. How can I write with his words in my head? He says, trust me. I don’t. I love him, but I don’t trust him, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s wrong to love him at all.

He was a ‘good’ father, if a ‘good’ father is one who is often present, sometimes kind, and never abusive. He was the kind of dad who took his kids on road trips and made us say, ‘Goodbye, Texas! Hello, Oklahoma!’ every time we crossed the state line; the kind of dad who made us laugh by dancing behind Mom’s back and freezing when she turned around; the kind of dad who pretended to be the giant from Jack the Giant Slayer, stomping around the house yelling, ‘Fee, fi, fo, fum!’ until we tackled him and killed the giant.

Still, this didn’t come out of nowhere. He was an engineer for a large weapons company. He designed radars, which use radio waves to detect objects. In war, radars locate and aim guns at enemy targets. Once, when I was little, he brought me to work and showed me a demo of his radar rigged up to a gun. The radar tracked a piece of paper on a string and conveyed that information to the gun so it would know where to shoot. When Dad reeled the paper back in, it had dozens of bullet holes. Back then, I didn’t imagine those holes in a human body. I do now.

Dad says I am called to write. He tells me things he wouldn’t usually tell me, horrible theories that I can’t verify. He thinks it is my duty to record these events. His openness grants me access to the inner workings of his mind, a mind that has gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories shared by an anonymous internet user called ‘Q’. Dad claims he cannot even tell me a third of Q’s Truth—that if he did, I would end up ‘dead or in a mental hospital’. (No need to remind him that I’m already being treated for severe anxiety and depression). I want to say, ‘Dad, you’re scaring me,’ but I am worried he will stop telling me his plans if I do.

My goal is to stop him from becoming a mass shooter, an insurrectionist, a suicide bomber. He has caused death before, but never so directly. Now he attends rallies, protests, school board meetings. He obtains a license to carry and keeps a gun clipped to his belt. How can I stop him from using it? He says it is my duty to write, observe, and record – all passive acts. Is there a way to turn passive into active – to write, observe, or record something that will change his mind, something that will save him?

#

I blame retirement, aging, social media, and disinformation campaigns to avoid blaming Dad. When COVID-19 began spreading throughout the U.S., Dad had just retired from his job of thirty-two years. He had nothing to do but ‘research’ – not the kind of ‘research’ I do as a graduate student, Dad points out, because scholarly research databases can’t be trusted. He says I have been brainwashed, like he used to be, into trusting the wrong sources.

#

When Dad took me rock climbing at age ten, I was careful to follow his path exactly because as long as I followed him, I would be safe. Once, we came to a wide gap between two rocks. He jumped the gap. I paused, frightened. ‘Even if you can’t make the jump, I’ll be here to catch you,’ he said. I jumped. Made it. He cheered and called me a natural. Since then, I’ve followed his advice about applying to colleges, buying used cars, traveling, and countless other small and major life decisions. For much of my life, I’ve felt lucky to have a helpful, supportive father.

#

When Dad visited me in the summer of 2021, he stayed awake late into the night, hunched over his laptop, trying to keep up with the latest conspiracy news. He took a short break from his ‘research’ to show me and my wife how to use the survival gear he’d sent us, boxes upon boxes blocking our entryway: solar panels, solar generators, solar flashlights, solar radios, water purifiers, and everything else we needed to survive the coming apocalypse. Then he returned to his laptop.

#

Dad has never been a violent man. Now, I see signs of mounting violence. He calls for former Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged. He says he wants to see Pence’s body swing for the crimes he has committed.

Ironically, Dad and I agree in some ways now. When I was in high school, I developed a firm hatred for George Bush and our country’s military involvement in the Middle East. Now, Dad sees Bush for the power-hungry, fear-mongering politician he has always been. When Pence ran for Vice President in 2016, Dad loved him. I hadn’t yet realized I was queer, but I knew Pence had supported conversion therapy, and I hated him for it.

In some ways, when Dad calls for corrupt politicians like Bush and Pence to be hanged, I am validated. I have argued with him my entire life, and he finally recognizes my enemies as his enemies. Yet, the call for violence feels so out of character for the gentle man I once knew. Would Dad really – could Dad really – hurt someone? Yes, I suppose, if he thought the act was justified. If he thought, as he does, that these politicians were harming children.

#

After retiring, Dad buys gun after gun. He goes to the shooting range regularly, perfecting his skills. Dad’s always been a great shot. He used to shoot groundhogs with bb guns on our farm in Illinois. Whenever we went on a family trip to Six Flags or a state fair, he’d spend all his tickets winning human-sized stuffed animals for me and my brother. The games were always rigged, he said, but if you could find out just how they were rigged – like if the gun always shot too far to the left and you adjusted for the inaccuracy – you could still win.

Now Dad says elections are rigged. Yes, I agree, but they are rigged in your favor. I tell him about gerrymandering, and how it is particularly bad in my home state of Texas, where the voting districts are drawn in a way that disenfranchises people of color. He says there hasn’t been a fair election since 1980. I say there has never been a fair election at all due to gerrymandering, Jim Crow laws, and other bureaucratic tricks that stop people from voting. He doesn’t really listen because he is too focused on his own anger. He feels betrayed by a system he once trusted. I have the privilege of never having trusted the system.

#

His anger builds and focuses. He attends school board meetings to oppose mask mandates. At one meeting, he presents the school board members with a Bible and tells them to read it carefully. It was an expensive Bible, he tells me later. He didn’t want to give it away, but it helped make his point and made the audience clap.

Dad, never one for the spotlight, enjoys having an audience now. He wears shirts printed with the American flag, the Constitution, and the letter Q. He gets compliments on his shirts every time he goes outside, he says. The shirts help him find people who believe what he believes. He joins local groups that attend city council meetings. He yells at the Collin County Sheriff, who refuses to arrest anyone for voter fraud. He meets with the Sheriff one on one and sends angry letters to other politicians.

#

Anger mounts. Maskless, Dad enters a grocery store with a mask mandate. One of the workers tells him to put on a mask. Dad refuses. 

He says, ‘Make me.’

The worker says, ‘I will.’

Dad balls his hands into fists. ‘I was ready to punch him,’ he tells me later. ‘He can’t make me do anything.’

Dad’s voice bellows with rage when he relates the story. He would have punched the worker, I know, if the worker hadn’t backed off when he saw Dad’s balled-up fists. Then what would have happened? The police would have been called, surely. Dad, thinking he was in the right, would not have responded well if they approached aggressively. Would he have reached for the gun clipped to his belt – the gun embossed with an American flag?

#

At a QAnon conference in Dallas, Mom and Dad are interviewed by the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse, who is doing an exposé-style podcast on America’s QAnon conspiracies. 

Transcript from episode 6, The Usual Suspects, of the BBC Radio 4 show The Coming Storm, released 4 January 2022:

Gatehouse [to listeners]: I meet Rick and Connie Worrel. They’re a couple in their sixties, I’d guess. They’re originally from North Dakota, but they now live here in Dallas. They found QAnon quite recently, on the night of the election in fact. Q went silent shortly after, but they’re not worried about that.

Dad: So we haven’t heard from Q publicly online, but we’re hearing from Q in other, more subtle ways. Some of the speakers, uh, you have to be able to pick up on it.

Gatehouse: Can you give me an example of the kind of, er, subtle meanings—double meanings?

Dad: Uh, well, we’ve got, so, I really can’t because there’s operational security that we’re maintaining. It’s for the people that need to hear ‘em, that are gonna be involved in this, so I’d just rather not, um, go into any more detail.

Gatehouse [to listeners]: Nor are they deterred by the fact that none of Q’s predictions seem to have come to pass.

Dad: But it’s coming. There’s a storm coming.

Gatehouse: What do you think it is?

Dad: The truth is gonna come out, you can see it, uh, the dam’s starting to crack, and it’s gonna come out like a flood.

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Later in the episode, Gatehouse remarks, ‘Most of the conference-goers are much like the Worrels: civil, polite, and deeply convinced that America is in the grip of evil forces.’

Civility and politeness mask the violence lurking beneath the rhetoric used by Q’s followers. Dad and Q’s other followers are preparing for war: the coming ‘flood’. Much like the Biblical flood, which wipes out most of the world’s population and leaves Moses and his family with a sin-free world, the flood Dad imagines will cause great destruction.

#

At some point in our lives, many of us will have to recognize the harm our family members have done, regardless of how ‘civil’ or ‘polite’ those family members may seem.

Dad politely tells me he doesn’t believe America was founded on racism.

Dad politely tells me he wants to rid school libraries of books about queer people.

Dad politely tells me he plans to overthrow the government alongside his fellow ‘patriots’.

Behind the veneer of politeness is an imagined future where my wife and I – and anyone else deemed sinful by a conservative regime – don’t exist. His utopia erases us, assigning us to the ‘sinful’ category as if the categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are black and white. Nothing I write will change his mind. The most my writing can do is illuminate the shades of gray, the nuances missed by QAnon extremists. Writing is not enough, but it something I can do. Maybe one day it will be enough.