There were no mass arrests, no declaration of martial law and no “Great Awakening” on Inauguration Day.

Instead, a new president pleaded for unity and an end to the assault on truth and democracy. The first woman -- more specifically, a Black, South Asian daughter of immigrants -- became vice president.

This was not what QAnon, the followers of pro-Trump conspiracy theories, had been promised. They’ve been devoted to the notion that Trump was secretly saving the world from a global sex-trafficking ring of child-eating Democrat Satanists, and that their god-king would remain in office.

The rise of this cultlike world is perplexing enough from the outside. But for those whose loved ones have fallen directly into it, it’s also painful and isolating.

Kayla Elliot of DeSoto, Missouri, said her mother-in-law was a hardcore liberal when she met her 18 years ago. Now, it’s as if a switch flipped.

“She has M.S. and doesn’t work. She sits and listens to Fox News and goes down rabbit-holes on the internet,” said Elliot, who is Black and is married to a white man. After her mother-in-law tried to convince her that Democrats were aborting full-term babies, Elliot completely disengaged with her. She said QAnon has given people’s “latent racism a place to bloom.”

Audrey Brown of St. Louis is grieving the loss of her relationship with the grandparents who helped raise her. She unfollowed them on Facebook when they started sharing racist memes and conspiracy theories. She has tried to keep in touch through phone calls, but has a hard time talking to them because of their outlandish beliefs.

“It absolutely gutted me to have my grandma publicly shame me on Facebook,” she said. “I spent my childhood with them. ... It’s like mourning someone who has died, but they’re still there.”

She partly blames Facebook algorithms, which show users content they are likely to agree with and then introduces them to more extreme sites. Social media has certainly played a role in radicalizing some of these adherents.

“They prey on people who are alone,” Brown said. With more people isolated and adrift during the pandemic, Brown says she has also seen stay-at-home moms find a community and sense of purpose in believing that they are “saving children.” In fact, QAnon purposely infiltrated mom groups on Facebook with messages like #SaveTheChildren to recruit followers, without revealing their QAnon connections.

When Brown’s young daughter asked her why they don’t see her great-grandmother anymore, she explained, “Nonni is believing things that aren’t safe for us. I don’t want to expose you to things that might hurt us.”

Melanie, who asked to be identified only by her first name, said both of her parents are heavily invested in “deep state” conspiracy theories. Her father is convinced the government will try to confiscate his guns, and their basement is full of ammunition. She visited them a couple of years ago, and when she put her toddler down for a nap in their bedroom, the little girl discovered a gun under the pillow.

“My heart stopped,” Melanie said. She hasn’t been back to their home since. “We’re pretty much not speaking to each other.”

Others prefer to try to maintain a connection with their relatives while trying to help bring them back.

“When the insurgency happened, it really scared a lot of people,” said Jess, who asked to be identified by her first name. Jess’ father sends her texts and mass emails with QAnon warnings.

She posted on her Facebook that people alienated from their QAnon-believing families needed a support group. After several people reached out to her privately for help, she created just such a group that meets through Zoom.

“We are all just trying to process how the people we love got where they are,” she said. “The larger question is, how do we prevent this from happening to more people?”

She said some of the indoctrinated parents even believe their own adult children are part of a pedophile ring, if they challenge their beliefs.

Jamie Collier of St. Louis began tracking the sites where some of these ideas take root after losing her relationship with her grandparents. She is trying to figure out how their brains have been short-circuited to accept such illogical ideas.

When she tried to challenge one extreme idea online, someone commented that “the Great Awakening will happen” and that “true patriots have a list of far-left liberals ... to get rid of.”

But now that their fever-dream political fantasies haven’t come to pass, there is a sliver of hope among those cut off from their families that they may have an opportunity to break through to their family members.

“We focus on what’s within our control and what isn’t,” Jess, the organizer, said.

There weren’t any subtle warning signs for the political violence that erupted on Jan. 6.

There were blaring sirens, flashing red flags and alarms in every direction. President Donald Trump’s loyalists had been openly planning an insurrection on the internet.

For months, an older, white male Trump supporter had warned me about impending violence. He’s been writing to me regularly for several years, but after the last election, his predictions had become more dire and frequent.

“In my opinion this action, along with President-elect Biden’s other promises to overturn the Constitution, can only lead to violence and even civil war,” he wrote on Dec. 23. (Biden has never said he would “overturn the Constitution.”)

Earlier, this reader had written to say he was “getting the impression that people are moving from complaining to preparing.” His previous emails had similar warnings: “I sense gunsmoke and violence and blood in the future ... I am horribly afraid that the troubles will make the Watts riots look like a love-in.”

So as horrifying as the events of Jan. 6 were, there was no secret or surprise about what was coming. The Washington Post reported that an FBI office in Virginia had issued an explicit warning the day before the insurrection that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and wage “war.”

Trump, who helped to incite the attack on our Capitol that led to five deaths, had been promoting a protest based on lies of election fraud for days on Twitter. He reiterated his love for his supporters soon after they breached the Capitol, beat a police officer, broke windows, stole items, smeared feces on floors and walls and waved a Confederate flag in the nation’s halls of power.

Everyone knew -- including those lawmakers who fueled the fires of false grievance -- but no one took the threats seriously.

I had feared this scenario.

My parents emigrated from a country that has had four coups, and several attempted coups, in its short history. We never talk about the political instability they left.

Last week, I talked to my children about this attempted coup in America. They watched as the peaceful transfer of power was shut down. And hours later, six Republican senators and more than 100 House members sided with the man who sent armed rioters storming into the Capitol. Seditionists in Congress continued their attempts to delay and cast doubt on a fair and lawful election, which had been deemed so by dozens of courts and judges Trump himself appointed.

As the events unfolded, I received a text from a friend asking if I thought it was safe to go for a hike in a park. (We live in Missouri, far from the chaos in D.C.) Others asked what kind of accountability there would be for those brazenly desecrating democracy. I heard from several immigrants and children of immigrants who thought they had left scenes like this behind.

Adults may have been stunned, but our kids weren’t really fazed.

This is the generation that has come of age in a time of protests, state violence and political chaos. They are living through an information war that recruits their peers. They’ve seen schools turned into killing fields. The online spaces where they socialize are peppered with insults and dehumanizing remarks.

As the shock of what happened on Jan. 6 wears down, perhaps we will take more seriously the threats of violence that lie ahead. Posts are again circulating on social media, calling for armed marches on Capitol Hill, and on statehouses, before and on Inauguration Day.

Just a week after November’s election, the reader who emails me about civil war accused my newspaper of following the methodology of Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda of Nazi Germany, adding that the abuse inflicted by my colleagues was “beyond the pall” (sic).

“As with Herr Goebbels, eventually justice will strike back,” he wrote to me.

What does “justice” look like to the devoted followers of a corrupt and malicious leader?

We saw signs of it during the insurrection. One of the rioters scrawled a message on a door in the Capitol.

“MURDER THE MEDIA,” it said.

A Hollywood screenwriter shared a startling discovery on Twitter after a conversation with his teenage nephews and nieces: They claimed Helen Keller was either a fraud or that she never existed at all.

This absurd belief apparently arose from a meme that spread widely on TikTok, a video-sharing social media channel popular with teens.

“They believe people around (Keller) ‘pumped her up’ and wrote the book for her,” Daniel Kunka posted this week, referring to Keller’s autobiography in the exchange with his younger family members. “And apparently 15 million others on TikTok feel the same way.” He added that his nieces and nephews are “bright and well-intentioned.”

“This isn’t from lack of education or empathy,” Kunka said. “This is more about how groupthink can travel through social media like a virus until it suddenly just becomes the truth, I think.”

We’ve all seen this disturbing phenomenon become commonplace in recent years. There are still millions who believe that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, or that he is a Muslim. Or that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Or that Sandy Hook was staged. Or that Donald Trump actually won the last presidential election.

But in the case of each of these lies, there are people who stand to benefit by duping others.

The Helen Keller lie strikes closer to the “flat-Earth” variety of conspiracy. Why would anyone want to spread such an easily disprovable, silly lie that doesn’t appear to benefit any particular person or ideology?

Isabella Lahoue wrote a post outing herself as a member of Gen Z who doubts Keller’s existence. She wrote that she considers the inspiring historical figure to be an “urban legend.” Lahoue attempted to explain why many in her generation share this mistaken belief.

“Maybe we don’t believe in her because we’re growing up in a world of fake news. We know the power of manipulation and lies in the media, and we’re losing faith in the sources everyone once trusted,” she wrote. “There’s too much data and too many lies circulating for us to process and believe it all.”

Bad actors have capitalized on social media as a fertile ground to spread lies and chaos.

The most perplexing thing about the rising tide of fact-deniers is that no amount of evidence can sway them. They can discount video footage, phone calls, historical records, data and science that is contrary to what they have seen on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit or far-right sources like the OAN Network.

A longtime reader once told me, “Jesus Christ himself could say Obama was a Christian, and I wouldn’t believe it.”

While it can be tempting to write off such beliefs with horrified amusement, the pandemic has driven home the deadly consequences of misinformation. COVID anti-maskers, those calling the virus a hoax or claiming it’s caused by 5G cell networks have influenced the behavior of millions, contributing to the deaths of 357,000 people in America.

The Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review published a study in August investigating the spread of COVID misinformation on social media, and how content moderation by these sites can help contain the spread. The study found that mainstream sources like Fox News and the New York Post actually do more to spread conspiracy theories than alternative sources, because social media platforms filtered far fewer conspiracy posts from mainstream sites. The platforms were too slow to react to the magnitude of misinformation being spread, the researchers found.

As soon as we learn that misinformation campaigns are gaining traction on these sites, that’s when parents, educators and tech companies must act to correct it.

Helen Keller said, “Some people don’t like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions; conclusions are not always pleasant.”

Imagine the conclusions she would have drawn from her social media erasure.