Texas QAnon cult is now drinking bleach, member’s horrified family says

The family of a woman who joined a fringe QAnon cult in Texas says she’s now drinking toxic chemicals with her peers – and brags that she serves them herself.

“She was proud to tell us that she was the one mixing it up and giving it to everybody,” an anonymous relative told the Dallas Observer.

The Observer reported earlier this month that the woman, whose family’s surname is Leek, recently left her husband and children in Delaware to join the cult in Dallas.

Now, her distressed relatives fear for her life as she and others drink from a punch bowl of chemicals including chlorine dioxide, a disinfectant often used to treat swimming pools.

“She’s always been into, you know, natural remedies, getting aluminum out of deodorant, things like that,” her son, Sean Leek, told the paper. “But that led to anti-vaxxing, and anti-vaxxing led to QAnon.”

The sect’s prophet is Michael Protzman, the former head of a demolition company near Seattle. Mr Protzman has repeatedly predicted that John F Kennedy and his son John Jr, both deceased, will be resurrected in Dallas and begin a revolution against liberal, Satan-worshiping paedophiles – the standard villains of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Despite two occasions when the JFKs failed to show up, Mr Protzman reportedly still has dozens of followers.

It is not clear how the chemical cocktail fits into the cult’s mythology. Chlorine dioxide has sometimes been fraudulently sold as a miracle cure for Covid-19, but QAnon believers typically regard Covid as a hoax.

On the other hand, former President Donald Trump, who QAnon followers generally support, once floated the ludicrous idea of injecting oneself with disinfectant.

“I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute,” Mr Trump said at a White House pandemic briefing in 2020. “And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs.”

In reality, an injection of disinfectant would kill the recipient. As for chlorine dioxide, the US Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly warned that the chemical is dangerous if consumed in large quantities, and is definitely not a cure for Covid.

“Both sodium chlorite and chlorine dioxide are the active ingredients in disinfectants and have additional industrial uses,” the FDA has said. “They are not meant to be swallowed by people.”