THE TRUMP BRAND:

One Saturday morning, Rein Lively discovered her mother dead in the bathroom, having overdosed on alcohol and pills. Told the news as he returned home from the deli, her father passed out in the driveway. Rein Lively said she remembered seeing bagels fall from her father's arms and roll into the gutter.

In the following months, Rein Lively's grades tanked. Her father and a new girlfriend sent her to a now-shuttered and chronically underregulated behavioral-modification school in Montana called Spring Creek Lodge Academy. There, Rein Lively said, she was subjected to a rigid system of discipline that kept participants in military-style lines when walking around the compound; allocated food like butter and sugar based on a system of points; and relied on an autodidact system for which students had to teach themselves using subject-matter textbooks.

Rein Lively also described "development seminars" meant to "brainwash" participants.

"They scream at you, break you down, talk about things that would humiliate you and incriminate you in front of a group of people," she said. [...]

Rein Lively said her entry points to QAnon were through interests in wellness and in spirituality -- both heightened by the pandemic. She said she was introduced to the movement through content on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and on blogs.

At first, the stuff she was seeing was optimistic and uplifting. She liked being told that the patriots within the government would save the public from danger. Later, she tapped into a darker stream of QAnon content about the coming of the second Holocaust.

"Looking back at it now and just how perfectly it fit into my interests, my curiosities, my fears -- I feel like I was almost typecast for the type of person who would become immersed in this," she said.

Rein Lively said she was never exposed to outright antisemitic content in QAnon forums. But she also said that, while part of the movement, she was convinced that Soros, a Hungarian philanthropist who escaped the German occupation, was secretly a Nazi.

"When you start looking at it, it's just so shocking and upsetting," she said of the claims she was reading. "They don't call it a rabbit hole for nothing."

Rein Lively said she was "isolated" within the movement and was not engaging much with other adherents, and did not knowingly encounter other Jews in online forums.

But she is not entirely alone. In one online forum for Q supporters, a user who identified as Jewish asked fellow members of the movement on Jan. 28 to lighten up on antisemitic comments.

"I have seen some broad language against all Jewish people which is grossly unfair," he said in the post.

One commenter responded:

"I am more than disgusted to share my DNA with many evil subhuman forms, and I also suggested not to use the wide paint brush against us all," he said of fellow Jews. "Trump has a few on his team, for a reason: we are well aware of communist hell and we are more than loyal."

Rein Lively said Jews may be more vulnerable to this type of messaging than most people think.

"I think people have this idea of these QAnon people being weirdo neo-Nazis in a basement somewhere," she said. "I know other people feel this way, especially other Jews that have kind of joined -- not even necessarily QAnon but even the Patriot movement -- and there's more and more right-wing Jews."

On Monday, after Rein Lively likened QAnon to a cult [in an interview with CNN's Alisyn Camerota](https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/02/08/qanon-cult-former-believer-melissa-lively-newday-vpx.cnn), some Twitter commenters were deeply skeptical.

They accused her of trying to do a "rebrand," and the various news outlets where she has been featured as being "hoodwinked." A VICE video about her was deemed "embarrassing."

Rein Lively is undeterred. She sent along, via text, a sampling of the hateful voicemails she said she receives on a daily basis.

"I've experienced that snap judgment already," she said. "There's nothing I can really say to that, except my story has been incredibly challenging and I know that by sharing it, it's helping other people."

After the Target meltdown, the police took Rein Lively to a facility for a psychiatric evaluation, and she stayed more than a week. Her husband had filed for divorce and kicked her out of the house after her tirades went viral, so she crashed at a friend's second home, and continued therapy. Eventually, she appealed to her husband, a real estate broker, for a second chance, moved back home and has begun to rebuild her life.

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