An 18-year-old claiming to be a survivor of the Parkland massacre says his own father now believes it was all a hoax after he started following QAnon on Twitter last year.
The recent graduate from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., calling himself Bill on a Reddit forum called QanonCasualties, claimed his father constantly accuses him and his friends of being 'paid pawns' in a grand conspiracy to drum up support for gun control laws.
'He'll say stuff like this straight to my face whenever he's drinking: 'You're a real piece of work to be able to sit here and act like nothing ever happened if it wasn't a hoax. Shame on you for being part of it and putting your family through it too,' Bill said.
He added that his father keeps doing this to test whether or not his son's trauma is real.
Bill, who has been through the third university of the horrific shooting, said he wants to move past the incident now that he's graduating, but his father's taunts won't allow him.
He said the breaking point was when he caught his little brother researching the shootings on his iPad.
The shooting left 17 people dead and wounded 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day 2018
Bill said his father became radicalized last year when he fell down the QAnon rabbit-hole
Bill posted his story on the r/QAnonCasualties page, which is meant to offer support to those hurt by QAnon conspiracies
Bill said his father began to follow QAnon during the pandemic, VICE News reported.
'From there it snowballed into what he is today, believing that if the government is able to overthrow an election, then everything else is probably a lie too,' Bill said.
'Anything that contradicted his feelings was wrong,' he added. 'So he turned to the internet to find like-minded people, which led him to QAnon.'
QAnon is an anonymous conspiracy theory group that perpetuates ideas such as that President Donald Trump was waging war against unseen crimes by heads of business and politics.
QAnon, along with 70,000 accounts like to conspiracy theorist, was banned on Twitter in January.
