QAnon Broke Families Apart. One Journalist Spent Years Documenting The Fallout.

When Jesselyn Cook wrote about the children of QAnon believers as a HuffPost reporter in 2021, she didn’t expect the reaction she would receive ― hundreds upon hundreds of emails from readers, all of who had lived some version of the same story, and all of who seemed to have some version of the same question for Cook: What happened to the person I love?

In her new book, “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family,” released Tuesday, Cook sought to answer that question, profiling five real-life people who fell into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, and documenting the devastating impacts their departures from reality had on their loved ones. 

These days, “QAnon” represents an umbrella of countless conspiracy theory beliefs. But it started with bogus claims on an internet forum by an anonymous account ― “Q” ― who claimed during the Trump administration to have high-level access throughout the American government, and who painted an unimaginably wide picture of corruption, sex abuse and revenge for their followers. 

According to Q, financial elites and the “deep state” are in fact members of a vast child abuse ring, and they dictate global politics from the shadows. Donald Trump, in this universe, is secretly fighting against them with the help of QAnon believers, or devoted “digital soldiers,” and working toward the eventual “Storm” when QAnon’s villains will be either executed or imprisoned en masse.

Over the years, Q’s predictions have been widelydebunked. And the “Q” behind QAnon has urged followers to stop using references to “Q” or “QAnon” at all, and instead to try and influence politics from inside the mainstream. These days, QAnon believers have largely fused with existing far-right movements, such as the anti-vaccine movement, or Republicans’ moral panic over transgender rights.

Cook’s five subjects ― she uses the pseudonyms Emily, Matt, Doris, Alice and Kendra for them ― come from a wide variety of backgrounds. They’re Black, white, rich, poor, and range politically from hardcore conservatives to a former Bernie Sanders supporter who became disillusioned with politics after his 2020 presidential primary loss. 

But they’ve all fallen under QAnon’s spell. And their families are left to grapple with the devastating fallout. 

Cook spent years detailing the intimate personal lives of the five families featured in “The Quiet Damage,” staying in touch with the devastated siblings, parents, children and partners of QAnon believers as they tried desperately to break the conspiracy theory’s hold on their loved ones. The result is as thoughtful ― and as heartbreaking ― a portrait of the conspiracy theory movement as I’ve ever read. 

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

This book came out of your time as a reporter at HuffPost. Can you talk about that, as well as the research process that went into writing the book? 

I’d been on the disinformation beat for a while, and I ended up going to a QAnon rally in 2020, early in the pandemic. At the time, QAnon and that kind of conspiracy theory thinking was still thought of as a fringe thing, something confined to the internet. And so I wasn’t expecting a huge turnout at this rally I went to, but when I got there, there were 1,000 people marching down Hollywood Boulevard with QAnon signs in their hands yelling about “Pizzagate” and pedophiles taking over the world. And it was just really staggering to me to see all this madness that I’d been reporting on online for so long coming to the fore right out in front of me. We’d hit a fever pitch, and obviously, the pandemic really accelerated our conspiracy theory crisis.

I spent a lot of time at that rally just talking to the people who were there and trying to understand their backgrounds and how they had come to believe what they did. And what was really disturbing to me was a man who approached me and saw the press badge around my neck, and he was yelling that as part of the media I was complicit. But with him was a little boy, maybe 5 or 6 years old. And he had a shirt on that said ‘I’m not for sale’ on one side, and on the other side, I believe it said ‘adrenochrome’ with capital ‘NO’ in the middle. 

And it was just really scary to think about what he would grow up believing, and the world he was entering into, having this strained relationship with understanding what is true and what is not. And so that led me, eventually, to write a piece about the children of QAnon believers for HuffPost. I spoke to seven of them about what it’s like to have a parent who you have to teach right from wrong, true from false, and the trauma that comes with that, becoming a self-taught deprogrammer. And the response to that story was just unlike anything I’ve ever received. My inbox was just blowing up for months with hundreds and hundreds of emails from people all over the country and beyond who had really hauntingly similar stories about people they knew and loved for so long vanishing down rabbit holes, and almost becoming strangers before their eyes. 

And so it became apparent to me then that the scale of what was going on wasn’t fully understood, that it was spiraling out of control. And the question I kept getting from these people who were reaching out to me was, ‘What happened to the person I love?’ And so the book was an attempt to answer that question, and really understand how someone who is sane or ‘normal’ can come to believe these outrageous, ludicrous, insane things.

One of the things that’s striking about QAnon is that it takes the most brutal concept you can think of, which is systematized child abuse, and it provides people with meaning and even joy in their lives. As you explored in your book, people revel in their rage and want to share the high of QAnon with their loved ones. How did you make sense of that?

I think there’s this understandable temptation to focus on the ‘what’ of conspiracy theory beliefs, to focus on the things that people actually believe. But it’s more useful to focus on the ‘why.’ Why do people believe these things? Conspiracy theories give people so much. They can give them control, agency, belonging, community, purpose. They can make people feel smart and unique. And so really, in so many cases, it’s fulfilling these unmet human needs. And I think if we focus more on why people believe, and try to understand what needs these beliefs are satisfying, it’s a little easier for the average person to comprehend. 

When you hear about adrenochrome, when you hear about ‘Frazzledrip,’ and all these extremely wild theories, it’s understandably hard not to look at someone and say, ‘That’s insane, what happened to you?’ But if you take a step back and try to look at the bigger picture, I think that’s where it becomes a little easier to digest. 

And I think it’s also worth pointing out, these really extreme conspiracy theories are not usually where people start out. I think of it kind of like the proverbial frog that slowly, unwittingly boils. People go down these rabbit holes starting out consuming conspiracy theory hors d’oeuvres with nuggets of truth baked in. There is a lot of real corruption out there, and so the idea of this elite and powerful force working against the public, that’s easier to understand. But it’s a gradual process to get to ― elites drinking baby blood. 

You mentioned the ‘why’ of people who follow QAnon, and the needs that these beliefs satisfy. And as you wrote, QAnon believers vary across politics, age, race and class. Can you talk about the people that you profiled and the emotional, the personal commonalities that these characters share? Did you find throughlines when it came to what made someone susceptible to QAnon? 

I did, and it’s really fascinating because, as you point out, people from all different backgrounds are susceptible to this. In the book, we’ve got one woman who came from an extremely difficult upbringing, subjected to poverty and racism, and she had a very difficult life. And then we’ve got another woman who is white and wealthy and privileged. And I think the commonality across all these storylines is this sense of powerlessness, whether it’s perceived or valid. So you can have a white nationalist who feels victimized by multiculturalism and finds a bogeyman in George Soros, claiming he’s been paying caravans of Central Americans to come to the U.S. border. But inside communities that are actually marginalized, this kind of belief in the illogical is comparatively pretty logical. Feelings of powerlessness can be deeply entrenched from generations of acute, legitimate oppression. So conspiracy theories can come from rational hypervigilance, a means to avoid further suffering. 

And I think in the case of the more privileged believers, I guess we’ll call them ― people who don’t actually have a valid reason to feel this sense of victimhood ― there’s some interesting science there. This victim mentality that’s harboring grievances from real or perceived offenses can actually make us feel good. Brain imaging studies have revealed that feeling aggrieved and desiring retribution can stimulate the same neural reward-processing circuitry as narcotics. So once you kind of get into this mindset, feeling like Joe Biden is the enemy of the American people, and his administration is doing all these evil things, that kind of rage you feel ― and the release you feel by sending an angry tweet about it ― it makes us feel good. 

Do you think about QAnon in that sense: as a vice, a coping mechanism, a habit? What are the metaphors you use?

Yeah, a lot of people have been coping by conspiracy, I think. It can serve as a crutch. There was a really interesting study that I cited in the book. It was trying to understand the factors predisposing people to conspiracy theory thinking, and it found that people who have a weaker ability to bounce back from hardship, like some of the characters in the book, are actually more susceptible. 

To me, that really illustrated that espousing these kinds of ideas isn’t even really about the information in question, per se. It can be a crutch. Some people may turn to drugs and gambling as a crutch, and the characters of this book, like millions of Americans, are leaning on conspiracy theories because it’s less about what the theory comprises of, and more about how it makes you feel. 

You write about social media companies’ algorithms, and their policies about what they’ll allow on their platforms. But you also explore the need to invest in public health, mental health and emotional resiliency. Can you talk about those two factors and how they may be effective in combating conspiracy theory of thinking? Over the years, have you seen changes in either that have been successful? 

I went into writing this book as a tech reporter. And I really had the mindset that QAnon and conspiracy theories like it, mis- and disinformation, this crisis we’re dealing with, was entirely a result of social media algorithms that were out of control, and the kind of broader information ecosystem where bad actors are incentivized to lie, essentially, and they can make money and become more powerful by spreading misinformation.

My thoughts about that did change in the process of writing a book. I think, absolutely, a lot of people who have fallen down the rabbit hole were facilitated by social media. You see that in the book. You see the echo chambers that they fall into. But I think going into this, I had kind of overlooked the underlying vulnerability [that people have], and why some people go down these rabbit holes and others don’t. 

And we have seen social media companies take some promising steps to address this, mostly in response to public outrage and really excellent reporting on the harm caused by their algorithms. But I think when we’re looking at what makes people vulnerable, the reason I write about focusing on resilience and fostering social-emotional intelligence in kids is because of what you were alluding to in your previous question, which is when conspiracy theories become a crutch or a coping mechanism.

Some of the experts I talked to really stressed the importance of social-emotional learning in schools and teaching children not just things like media literacy, which is important, but also how to deal with hardship in healthy ways, and healthy coping mechanisms. You know, one of the characters in the book got into QAnon when he was 7, and he really didn’t have those coping skills. This will haunt him for the rest of his life, probably.

So I think when we’re trying to look at our collective vulnerability, it’s just as important to focus on the human element of this and not just the tech ecosystem in which we find ourselves ― which is absolutely broken and harmful and getting worse, and AI is going to take this to a whole, much scarier level. But I do think facts alone can’t fix this. And when we realize that it’s not just about the information that’s being shoved down our throats, it becomes more apparent that regulations, fact-checking and media literacy, while important, are not going to get us out of this mess we’re in. When we focus on fact-checking, we’re addressing the symptom, not the cause. 

You mentioned Jonah, the 7-year-old whose mother fell into this conspiracy theory universe, and in turn influenced him a great deal. Jonah blamed his aunt for a family tragedy because she was pro-vaccination, and it tore the family apart. Talk about the effects of QAnon on young kids. Given the generational gap, are they a little savvier about what to believe on the internet? Or, are these sorts of ideas reaching them before kids have real critical thinking and emotional resiliency skills? 

I think there is this assumption that as digital natives, kids are equipped to deal with this. When we think of conspiracy theorists, many people envision baby boomers, so-called digital immigrants, who did not grow up with social media. But I think that’s a flawed assumption. Studies show that even as digital natives, most young people really terribly lack the ability to parse true from false, and trustworthy from untrustworthy in their online worlds with these reality-distorting algorithms and very highly-motivated purveyors of disinformation. And kids today are facing the most complicated information landscape in history. They don’t come into it understanding what a ‘deep fake’ is. 

Media literacy is very important, and thankfully, it is being taught in many schools around the country. But especially with the AI boom, and with disinformation becoming so much more advanced, I think it’s dangerous to assume that kids are prepared for this. And as we see with Jonah in the book, it can be so harmful. 

So many of the conspiracy theories that are thriving right now center children as victims in really terrifying ways. Kids aren’t just being snatched off the streets in these theories, they are being flayed alive in some instances, they’re being tortured. This is what makes people so passionate about it. 

That ‘save the children’ element draws a lot of people in. It’s very effective, and that’s why it’s so often raised. But imagine being 8 years old and seeing that on your mom’s phone or listening to them talk about this ‘deep state’ that eats children. For Jonah, it is deeply traumatizing. For really young children, especially, it can cause something called toxic stress, which literally reshapes the architecture of the still-developing brain and causes all kinds of lifelong harm. Unfortunately, there’s really not a ton of research out there right now about the harm of conspiracy theories on children. But given the scale at which we’re seeing this, given that studies show millions of Americans believe in some aspects of QAnon, you can only imagine how many kids are hearing about it at home. 

Let’s talk about the interventions people tried in the book. There was one person, Alice, who was a Bernie Sanders supporter, and she became disillusioned with politics after he lost the Democratic presidential nomination. And she fell down this QAnon rabbit hole. Alice stands out in the book as someone whose relatives and loved ones successfully got her to reconsider her beliefs. Can you talk about how Alice came to challenge her beliefs?

Yeah, she was extremely fortunate in the sense that she did have loved ones who were so devoted to helping her. And I think she would agree that without their support, she wouldn’t have come out of the rabbit hole. 

For her, as you mentioned, she was a disaffected Bernie Sanders supporter. QAnon really appealed to her as well because it gave her the sense of control and agency at a time when so much of her life felt out of control. It gave her easy answers when she had none, and clear villains, and above all, a sense of hope ― just something to hold on to. 

And so where things started to turn for the better for her was when her loved ones did take a moment to think beyond the actual beliefs she was espousing, and instead tried to understand, why? What is the deeper need that these beliefs are satisfying? And so once they understood that she was really craving certainty, and craving something to be hopeful about, they were able to focus on addressing that rather than trying to just endlessly debunk all the nonsense she was spewing.

But there was a level of trying to restimulate her critical thinking as well. There were two complementary approaches that her father and her then-fiancé adopted, one was motivational interviewing, the other was the Socratic method. These are two methods that were recommended to me over and over again by experts who have studied this closely. 

The Socratic method comes down to asking strategic, open-ended questions to encourage someone to think critically and examine the validity of their own ideas, while challenging their biases and blindspots. So it’s about curiosity, not criticism, and really a mindset of cooperation, not conflict. In Alice’s case, her fiancé, ultimately kind of became a partner in finding the truth. So rather than telling her she’s wrong, he would try to look at these complicated issues that she was trying to understand. COVID vaccines were a very scary thing to her. She believed that Bill Gates was out to depopulate the world with these bioweapons. And so rather than just telling her she was wrong, he gently questioned, ‘Well, how did you come to believe that?’ And, ‘Let’s look at the videos you’re watching, and let’s really start to do this together and try to get to the bottom of this.’ A very non-judgmental approach. 

For motivational interviewing, which was more of the strategy her father took, it comes down to rather than trying to convince someone of the ‘true’ or the ‘false’ in their theories, instead getting them to consider the harm in them, helping them to step back and see the big picture, and recognize the objective damage they’re causing to their life ― the stress, the broken relationships, and so on. 

But I think in both of those approaches, something that was really important was leading with empathy, and letting Alice keep her dignity. It’s so tempting to ridicule these kinds of beliefs, because they’re ridiculous. But this only reinforces the notion that the believer is stupid and bad, and it pushes them further off to the defensive, where logic really stands little chance against anger. If the person doesn’t feel like they can emerge from the rabbit hole still feeling valued and respected, why would they come out?

And I know this is a lot for someone who is reading this and maybe thinking, ‘I want to help my mom,’ or ‘I want to help my brother.’ Everything I’ve just described is so much. It is very taxing, and it can feel overwhelming, and in my book, many of the believers’ loved ones did ultimately decide, ‘I can’t do this, I’m putting myself first. I need to step away, it’s too harmful for me to try to help this person.’

And so I think one thing that made a big difference for Alice’s loved ones was setting boundaries, and not only trying to help her but recognizing that they needed to prioritize their own mental health. Her fiancé gave her an hour every once in a while when they would consume the kind of content together, and look at it together and try to work through it together. But it was not an ongoing conversation. He really put limits on the time that they were allowed to discuss this stuff. And that ended up making a very big difference. 

There are examples in the book ― the majority of the case studies you discussed ― which did not end happily. And no matter how much work loved ones put into trying to get their family members out of these beliefs, there was nothing they could do, or nothing that they did that worked. And at a certain point, like you said, they had to make that decision, ‘I need to look after my own well being and there’s nothing more that I can pursue on this front.’ Can you talk about that decision? 

When people get stuck in these false beliefs, they can become so cruel. So many people I interviewed for this book who have QAnon-believing loved ones, they described to me these scenes where their mom, or aunt, or son, will just say the most horrible, hurtful things to them, and it feels like they’re choosing conspiracy theories over the relationship. In the book, Emily tells her only son to ‘shed my DNA.’ 

When a given belief system goes beyond ideology and becomes central to someone’s identity, and then those beliefs are challenged, the brain actually reacts the same way it would to a physical threat. It’s as if the beliefs are part of the body, almost. So adrenaline will course through the bloodstream, the heart races, and the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s logic center, is functionally compromised. And that’s part of what drives people to be impulsive, irrational, and really wicked, sometimes. And so, understanding that there is some actual brain chemistry to take into consideration might provide some helpful context. 

In the case of Emily’s children, after a lot of painstaking and heartbreaking attempts to bring her back to reality, and bring her back to the mother they knew and loved, they decided that it just hurt them too much and she was beyond saving. And there was a really painful moment for them because their late father was an addict, and there was a parallel there identified by one of the siblings, who felt like walking away from their mom was in many ways like turning away from an addict once again. 

The comparison I hear again and again ― it feels like mourning someone who is still alive, which is something that’s hard to even imagine. But for one of Emily’s children, she just kind of had to accept that her mother was gone and was never coming back, and this new version of her was someone who she could no longer have in her life and no longer have a relationship with. It took a lot of therapy and a lot of support, but eventually she did make peace with that. But in a case like this ― Emily’s children continue to receive YouTube links from her and letters from her, and it just makes the healing process that much harder. 

For people reading this who are fortunate enough not to know what it’s like to have someone you love completely consumed by delusions, it is hard to think of this as a condition comparable to others that take people’s lives, but I guess I can just express the level of heartbreak, in the process of writing this, was something I really couldn’t convey in 100,000 words. It causes so much trauma and so much pain. And I really think, on a grand level, it’s not understood how much damage this is doing behind the scenes, behind closed doors, at kitchen tables. The information is so wild, this is a very stigmatized crisis, and there’s just kind of an incomprehensible level of suffering. It’s very dark.

To that point about it being such a stigmatized crisis, that is something I hadn’t really put together until reading your book. Doris’ husband compared falling into QAnon to an “infection of the mind.” He wouldn’t leave his wife if she had dementia, he reasoned, so he shouldn’t leave her because of QAnon. Reading that, it struck me that cognitive disorders are less stigmatized than some of these conspiracy theory beliefs.

Yeah, he thinks of it as something that has happened to her rather than a decision she has made, or who she is. I think that makes it less painful for him. And that’s something a lot of the characters grappled with. 

This may be a little unrelated, but I think, at the end of the day, a lot of these beliefs are in line with white supremacist views, and can be very homophobic and racist and hateful. And a lot of the characters really grappled with, ‘Is my loved one a victim who was brainwashed, or is this who they are? Were they brainwashed by bad actors on the internet? Or are they now a racist, white supremacist, homophobic person?’ 

They arrive at different conclusions in the book, but it is something that has been an added layer of pain to all of this. It’s not just craziness, but the insidious hatefulness that’s very much present as well.

Do you fall anywhere on that debate? After doing all of this research and all of these interviews, do you assign any sort of moral culpability to people who decide to pursue this as a belief system?

You know, it’s something I struggled with alongside the characters. Obviously, some of the people in the book who I’ve been interviewing got deep into this themselves. I think with Alice, she looks back and she says, ‘It was never about antisemitism or white supremacy to me. I just didn’t think about those things.’ Whereas Matt looks back, and he’s very ashamed. He feels quite disgusted, and he’ll say, ‘I was racist, I was hateful, and I was wrong.’ 

And so it’s a difficult question to answer in a blanket statement, but I think taking accountability was part of the healing process for Matt, and it really made him think about the parts of his brain, his values, that he had to shut off in order to espouse these ideas. And that, I think, was the most disturbing part for him. 

Without giving away too many ‘spoilers,’ one of the most striking parts of the book to me came after Matt’s transformation, after he eventually came to realize that his past beliefs were wrong. At that point, he watches in horror as his wife, Andrea, who’d previously suffered so much because of his QAnon beliefs, started believing anti-vaccine misinformation herself. And it’s sort of a dreadful realization that he has. Can you talk about that transition, from QAnon being sort of a cloistered conspiracy theory movement to being something that’s integrated into American politics that doesn’t necessarily have the label ‘QAnon’?

That was something that was really wild to experience because in the time that I was reporting on this book, when I started, QAnon was still on the fringes. And by the time I’m now publishing, you don’t even hear QAnon mentioned as much, because they’ve kind of gone underground with the branding.

But the beliefs have really been normalized. You don’t hear ‘QAnon,’ but you see, for example, the current anti-pedophile hysteria. By no means am I saying child trafficking is not a very serious issue, but it’s just been weaponized and sensationalized. And it’s one of many issues including the anti-vaccine falsehoods that Matt’s wife Andrea fell into. It’s just kind of crept into our political culture. And it was really unnerving for Matt to climb his way back out of the rabbit hole only to see his wife starting to slip in. 

I see it even in some of my own extended friends. These kind extreme beliefs have been diluted and mainstreamed to the point that they don’t seem so crazy anymore, and that’s maybe the scariest part of all of this.