Stephen Ross went from being one of Lady Gaga’s “little monsters” in high school to believing she was a cannibal pedophile.
The Massachusetts native says he was a sheltered kid whose “overprotective” parents severely restricted his screen time before he left home at age 18, shortly after coming out as gay.
He entered the world a smart but insecure and gullible bleeding heart — the perfect mark.
When one of his first serious boyfriends — a fan of InfoWars host Alex Jones — introduced him to the “truther” movement that considers the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting a hoax, he started his lengthy fall down the rabbit hole.
“I became obsessed with Sandy Hook. I got enraged. I couldn’t believe they’d have kid actors,” Ross, 27, told the Daily News about his descent and eventual extrication from the perverse patchwork of conspiracy theories now underpinning the unhinged world of QAnon.
A subsequent boyfriend got Ross involved in an “evangelical cult” that further distorted his world view, he said. By the second half of 2016, he was lost in a morass of online conspiracy theories fed to him by algorithms that compounded and reinforced what he saw, he explained.
“What really got me freaking out was Pizzagate,” Ross said, referring to the baseless conspiracy theory that asserted Democratic leaders were part of a child trafficking ring connected to a pizza parlor.
“I was brainwashed. My lowest was believing Lady Gaga worshipped Satan and ate children with Hillary Clinton,” Ross said.
“Crazy right? I used to think Hillary ate children. It’s like I was a different person. I don’t know who that person was,” he said.
“All I wanted to do was help people who were hurting, but that world turned me into a person who hated everyone,” he explained.
Ross credits his “moral compass” with slowly pulling him out of the abyss.
He started to question Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” moral high ground when the newly elected president appointed wealthy cronies to his cabinet. And he couldn’t shake his disgust at the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump boasted about grabbing women’s genitals.
Ross was struggling with his beliefs and living in a log cabin in eastern Pennsylvania when his parents came to visit in 2017.
“They saw me in a zombie state. The life had been sucked out of me. I was disinterested and couldn’t hold eye contact,” he said. “They were just walking on eggshells at a distance from me. I was so aggressive toward them. I was still so brainwashed.”
Ross said sometime after the visit, he called his dad to say he felt utterly lost and maybe the answer was denying his sexuality and marrying a woman.
“His reaction was like, ‘No, we love you no matter what. We’re just worried about you and want you to be happy,'” Ross recalled.
Ross said he was still on the fence about what to do when his parents pressed him to move to Texas and live with his older sister.
“They paid for my hotels and sent me gas money. They mailed me a big box of snacks and a binder of maps with the route all the way down,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion.
“That three-day trip, seeing the world and knowing there was somewhere better for me, that was the first thing. Then hugging my sister, that was a huge moment,” he said.
Soon he was thrust into a new social realm that “distracted” him from the alternate reality that previously consumed him, he said.
He met the love of his life, got engaged, and with his new fiancé bought the rights to the web address DebunkQanon.com, he said.
They plan to launch the website before the election with research debunking many of the main conspiracy theories behind QAnon.
“There’s clearly been a problem with our education system. I’m pretty smart. I did well in school. Out of 400 kids in my class, I was No. 12. But I did not have good logic skills,” he said. “The second people started shouting at me, ‘This is crazy! You have to be upset!’ I was right there saying, ‘Yes, I’m upset!'”
Ross said he hopes to reach others still struggling with the bizarre beliefs that nearly destroyed him.
“What people don’t realize is that their lives are so filled with stress, anxiety and pain when they believe this stuff, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said. “They just have to start, one at a time, reaching out to people with different opinions.”
That’s what Ross did. He started listening to Lady Gaga again. He turned from the darkest corners of the Internet to Marianne Williamson, Trevor Noah and Hasan Minaj.
“I saw Hillary Clinton’s interview with Howard Stern and bawled my eyes out,” he said. “She’s an actual human being, an amazing woman who’s done so much.”
