He’s a former QAnon believer. He doesn’t want to tell his story, but thinks it might help.

Jadeja would anxiously await each new “Q drop” — they felt “energizing,” he said. “The world didn’t seem like a dark place. It seemed like a simple place. It felt like everyone else was living in a dream world, and I wasn’t. Even though it was the other way around.”

For many followers, the way into QAnon is the belief that pop stars and high-ranking members of the Democratic Party run a secret pedophile ring, a conspiracy theory that existed before Q’s first post but was later folded into the “movement.” That belief led to real-world fallout in 2016 when Edgar Welch burst into the D.C. pizzeria Comet Ping Pong with an assault-style rifle in hopes of rescuing children who were never there in the first place.

But, as Jadeja said, that theory is “like the skin on the body of QAnon. It’s a taut, tiny, small layer. But no one who believes in Q just believes in that.”

“Every single conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard — including some you’ve never heard — are somehow part of the Q movement,” he added, citing the beliefs that the Earth is flat and that some celebrities are actual shape-shifting reptilian aliens from space. They fit into the “grand unified theory of” Q.