The Quiet Damage of QAnon feat. Jesselyn Cook (E288)
The harm of QAnon goes beyond the extremist violence it has inspired. It’s also socially corrosive in ways that are normally invisible. Relationships between siblings, spouses, friends, and parents and children are frequently strained when someone falls too deep down the rabbit hole.
The nature of and consequences of this harm is powerfully illustrated in the new book The Quiet Damage: QAnon And The Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook.
We spoke to Jesselyn about what inspired her to report on this angle of the QAnon phenomenon, the heartbreaking personal stories in the book, and how deeply committed conspiracists have found a better path.
It’s a somber one, folks.
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The Quiet Damage: QAnon And The Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/706443/the-quiet-damage-by-jesselyn-cook/
‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/children-of-qanon-believers_n_601078e9c5b6c5586aa49077
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com)
qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, Episode 288, The Quiet Damage of QAnon, featuring Jessalyn Cook.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky and Travis View.
It's always been difficult to communicate, or even know, how socially corrosive QAnon is.
And this is partly because the majority of QAnon followers don't do anything seriously criminal.
We hear about it when QAnon followers kill a mob boss, or have an armed standoff on the Hoover Dam Bridge, or storm the Capitol.
But most active QAnon promoters online are merely obsessive.
They may wish for violence on their political enemies, but they typically don't commit political violence themselves.
And so the majority of harm comes when online conspiracy theories take priority over one's family, work, These kinds of troubles are usually only known to the close relatives of QAnon followers and so they rarely make the news.
Most people are reluctant to talk about personal family matters publicly, let alone to a reporter.
So back in 2021, I was very excited to see that journalist Jesselyn Cook published a report for Huffington Post which is all about families that were strained by someone obsessing too much with QAnon and other conspiracy theories.
And I was even more excited when I learned that the response to that piece was so massive that she was going to expand it into a book.
Three years later, it's now published and it's called The Quiet Damage, QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family.
It tells five stories of families affected by QAnon obsession.
And the majority of the stories told defy some stereotypes about the kinds of people who fall for QAnon.
While reading it, I learned about QAnon followers who started as an empty nest liberal lawyer, the twin of a Black Lives Matter activist, a devoted Bernie Sanders supporter, a retired baby boomer, and a young family man.
Jessalyn, thank you so much for taking the time to chat about your book today.
Thank you guys so much for having me.
So yeah, congratulations on the book is really, really super fascinating.
Well written.
And I want to start by asking you how you got started on reporting on the personal impact of this QAnon obsession for the Huffington Post article.
Because the majority of reporting on QAnon focuses on stuff like where it came from, who's possibly behind it, what QAnon followers believe, how it affects mainstream politics, the connections to extremist violence, all very important topics.
But there are also topics that can be reported on through conventional reporting techniques like open source investigations, public records requests.
But on the other hand, the only way to cover the personal impact of QAnon is by convincing people to be open and honest about Very painful family fractures, and I think that's much more challenging.
So, I mean, what inspired you to take this angle on QAnon?
You know, even before I wrote that piece for HuffPost about families broken apart by QAnon, I had attended this QAnon rally in August of 2020.
And up until that point, so many people were thinking of QAnon just as something confined to the online fringes, just this scary internet movement that wasn't really worth paying attention to.
But this rally I went to, it was the first time I had really seen QAnon marching down the streets in public.
There were hundreds, maybe a thousand people coming down Hollywood Boulevard, chanting, where we go, when we go, all carrying Pizzagate signs.
And it was stunning.
Even to me, I'd been reporting on this space for years and I had never seen anything like this.
And so I spent a lot of time that day at that rally, talking to people, trying to understand what had brought them out into the streets, why they cared so deeply.
They were baring their faces for a movement.
We had previously thought it was kind of like maybe basement
dwelling lunatics for the most part.
And what really floored me was just these people, aside from their attire and their signs
and kind of the lunacy that they were promoting, they really just seemed like down to earth people
coming out for a cause they believed in.
I spoke to one woman who was a working family therapist in LA with plenty of clients.
And what really was the most jarring for me at that rally was this man who approached me.
He saw the press badge hanging around my neck and he was yelling at me that I was,
you know, as part of the media, I was complicit in this crisis,
the deep state that being.
And he was holding the hand of this little.
Boy, maybe six years old, and this kid had a shirt on.
On the front, it said, I am not for sale.
On the back, it said, adrenochrome, with a big N-O in the middle of adrenochrome.
And I just, you know, I was just looking at this kid and just feeling so sad and wondering what he was going to grow up believing in, what he was hearing at home, what the future of this country would look like when we can't agree on what is true and what is false.
More and more and more.
And so that was really what got me thinking more about this side of the issue and what inspired me to write that piece for HuffPost, which kind of just unraveled this enormous, enormous, as you said, response from hundreds of people all over the country who were going through the same thing.
And even finding sources for that piece for HuffPost was so much easier than I had imagined because it was this kind of unspoken problem that America was grappling with in the shadows.
You know, it's tough because being out in the streets and protesting or demanding for something that, you know, we feel is unfair or, you know, that we want in our lives, this has been an American tradition.
And you bring your families, you know, to show them, you know, the values that are worth fighting for.
And it's crazy to think, what does that look like when, you know, the thing that has gotten you out into the streets is almost entirely made up?
It was stunning.
But it was, you know, I've been to different kinds of protests throughout my life, and it was that same energy, this passion, this sincere belief that they were doing the right thing, that these were values they were imparting to their children.
And, you know, there were a lot of kids there, actually.
And that was really chilling to me.
And, you know, it all did appear to come from a very honest, well-motivated place.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like that echoes a lot of my experiences in reporting on QAnon.
I mean, I personally remember when we went to the very first, like, public QAnon event in Washington, D.C., all the way back in 2019.
And I was floored by some of the same things you did.
Like the diversity of the crowd, you know, it wasn't what you expected.
And also, The presence of children.
I remember there was someone who had brought along their child and even wrote QAnon on their child's arm.
It was one of those things that made me realize that these are otherwise working people with families, and this belief system is probably more solid in terms of how long it's going to last.
than many people might realize.
And because of that experience, I always got a little irritated when people tried like
stereotype QAnon followers, especially when they suggested that QAnon followers are all
especially gullible or uneducated, or they're just all like angry white males or gun nuts
or that kind of thing.
Yeah, because like, as I wound up like speaking to like QAnon followers in like five different
states and Washington, D.C.
at that rally, and I know that was just not true.
I just knew that they were just, like I said, a stunningly diverse group of people, at least more diverse than you might expect.
So what did you come to learn about the diversity of devoted QAnon followers while researching this book?
Yeah, I absolutely found the same thing you're describing.
The stereotype just didn't fit, you know, there are no typical demographic boxes when it comes to QAnon believers, conspiracy theory believers.
In my book, we've got, you know, very privileged, upper class white woman, and we've also got a millennial black mother who grew up in extreme poverty and hardship.
There's really quite a range of backgrounds that bring people here.
And, you know, I think, yeah, there's a temptation to Assume that these people are uneducated or stupid or crazy.
But again and again, I spent, as you said, three years reporting this book.
I talked to hundreds of people, not just the five families featured here.
And that's just not true.
And I think what gets overlooked a lot in these kinds of conversations is that at the end of the day, in so many cases, it's not about the information itself.
It's not about these crazy beliefs that consume so much of our attention.
It's about the needs that these beliefs fulfill.
And even very intelligent people can find themselves in vulnerable places,
can find things in a movement like QAnon that they desperately need
and that make them so tempting to cling to.
And that was the case for the characters in my book.
They all had their own reasons for believing.
And at the end of the day, I would say none of them were objectively interested
in the real truth.
Yeah, I mean, this was also like a constant theme about people who find themselves struggling with tragedy
or upheaval or some sort of major change or like a historical event like the pandemic
that no one can possibly control and finding everything that they thought was real
being turned upside down.
It's very disturbing to believe that someone can fall into conspiracy theories just because something bad happened to them, because bad things happen to everyone.
You know, it's an inevitability.
We're all going to befall tragedy sooner or later.
And so something like, you know, a good education or a financially stable home or even like, you know, the right kind of, you know, liberal beliefs aren't, you know, can't prevent you from necessarily from becoming more vulnerable to conspiracy belief.
There's an old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin shows up at the bus stop and he's in a really bad mood and Susie Dirkens is trying to be sweet with him and ask him, you know, what's going on?
And he's really nasty to her.
She gets like a storm cloud over her head and she's in a bad mood too.
And the last panel is Calvin kind of smiling, you know, at the audience or at the reader and saying nothing helps a bad mood like spreading it.
And I think there's this element of QAnon.
People have this anger in their lives, and when they find this community of other people that are also furious, and oftentimes, especially like you see in your article and in the book, it is something that's personal that's going on in their life, something that they can't control.
But finding this community of other people that are focusing their own anger towards a singular enemy can be very, very cathartic.
And it's free.
You know, you don't have to pay for mental health counseling.
You don't have to pay a shrink or go through the process of seeing if your health insurance will cover it.
It's right there.
It's free.
It's open.
I think that, you know, in my experience, it seems like when you have these choices of how you can move forward from Like what Travis was talking about, some upheaval or some sort of major change or a, you know, historical event.
You know, it seems like it's so much easier to pivot to this online community that, you know, has a hundred explanations for what's going on and you can kind of pick and choose which one fits your all, you know, your pre-existing worldview the best, right?
Absolutely.
I think for many people who go down these rabbit holes, QAnon conspiracy theories become like a crutch or a coping mechanism.
You know, one of the families in the book, the mother, Emily, the family goes through a terrible tragedy when her husband takes his own life.
It really devastates Emily, it devastates her children.
And she clings to this anger, tries to bring her children through it, but she really clings to this anger and this trauma.
And when her kids eventually go off to college and leave her at home in this big house.
They live out in the country in like a McMansion.
She's left a kind of stew with this anger that she's been able to distract herself from for so long.
But now she has no more distractions.
And she really, you know, she starts, I guess I would say with Fox News, which really through this like drip
of victim mentality rhetoric gives her an outlet for all this anger she's been holding onto
and all these very difficult feelings.
And then she graduates to QAnon and it puts her right in that victim seat
where she has a reason to be angry at the world.
She has a reason to feel like a victim because all these forces are conspiring
to take away everything she holds dear.
And there are so many different kinds of needs that these belief systems can fulfill,
but you can absolutely see how, you know, some people may turn to other vices
to help them get through challenging times.
Her son, while going through this, gets deeper and deeper into addiction.
But for her, QAnon really was almost like a drug and it just, it gave her something to hold on to and it made that pain go away a little bit.
It distracted her from it.
Yeah, I mean, we've always had these, you know, the government is out to get you, the politicians are corrupt, all these conspiracy theories.
We've been doing this for quite a long time, you know, as a people.
But the difference about QAnon, right off the bat, and I mean, this was apparent when I, you know, when I first stumbled upon it, is that there was a promise of a solution, right?
That all of these enemies and all of the people that are making your life absolute shit, they're going to be punished, maybe even publicly.
You might get to see them Definitely.
You know, and so that added element, I think, is what separates QAnon in a lot of ways.
And what's what makes it so sticky and what makes you want to keep following it is you're
waiting for some kind of justice to take place.
Definitely another one of the characters in the book.
Her name is Alice and she was a diehard Bernie Sanders supporter.
And the reason she loved Bernie so much is that he was going to bring the powers that be to justice and bring about a better world for everyone.
He talked about bringing down these billionaire oligarchs, ending corruption, and she wanted that reality so badly.
She's just such a hopeful person.
She could see it.
She could feel it.
And then, of course, things didn't go that way.
future that she'd been envisioning and dreaming about for herself, for her son, got ripped away
and she felt very powerless. And then, you know, QAnon came into her life at a time when she was
feeling very fearful. The pandemic had just blown into what it was and what it became. And QAnon
promised her a lot of the same. You know, you wouldn't think of Bernie Sanders and QAnon as
really having anything in common, left, far right.
But for Alice, it was, as you said, that kind of that promise of a better world.
They were going to bring down the bad guys.
They were going to transform society into a fair place.
And this kind of silver platter solution, which was it was what kept her hanging on and so desperate to believe.
And the more she wanted it, the more she was willing to kind of turn a blind eye when these dates wouldn't come to fruition.
But it was that That promise and that kind of illusion dangled in front of her that kept her holding on for as long as she did.
I mean, I really loved the story of Alice because I have heard of like instances of people who are very supportive of Bernie Sanders falling to QAnon, but it was a little baffling to me.
Like, how do you go from, you know, wanting like universal health care to fantasizing about like mass arrests and executions?
It seems like quite a dramatic shift.
But in the book, I mean, you know, you really, really show how this kind of warming to QAnon from that position kind of happens gradually.
Oh, like you mentioned, like, yes, it was during the pandemic.
And then a friend sent Alice the video series Fall of the Cabal by Janet Ausubar, this Dutch conspiracy theorist.
And that pro QAnon series argues like for just a ton of conspiracy theories, including the claim that wildfires in California were deliberate and planned.
And the only evidence is showing how how buildings caught on fire more readily than some trees.
But of course, that's just because trees are full of moisture and more fire resistant.
So the book describes how Alice recognized some legitimate issues raised in that video, but then got pulled further into the rabbit hole by the more outrageous claims.
And it's like, Jake, could you read this passage, please?
Some parts left Alice uncomfortably second-guessing her own beliefs, especially when Ossibard acknowledged that she, too, had initially dismissed certain ideas as mere conspiracy theories.
The videos also raised new suspicions surrounding issues that Alice was already familiar with.
Although certain points gave Alice pause, such as when Ossibard emphasized that the French phrase, J'aime les enfants, I love children, was similar to the name of James Alphantis, who owned the pizzeria at the center of the Pizzagate child trafficking rumors, Many of the bombshells were as staggering to her as those unburnt trees.
The deeper into the series she got, the more outrageous the claims became.
But they were stacking in her mind like building blocks.
If this one crazy thing was true, couldn't this other, slightly crazier thing also be true?
I mean it's such a perfect, perfect example of How people get pulled into this stuff and how conspiracy theorists use and influencers, you know, influencers in the conspiracy space use real events to say, well, if this is real, like, you know, they use that as building blocks to say, well, then all of these other things that don't have any evidence, we don't have any evidence for are also real.
I mean, it's a perfect example.
Thank you.
Yeah, I hear a lot of them point to Epstein as an example of that.
Like, well, you would never think that someone like him could get away with this with all these very high-ranking people coming to his home and going all the time.
How did he get away with this for so long?
If that's true, then couldn't this other thing also make sense?
And it, you know, you can understand how it does.
It's like the proverbial frog that slowly unwittingly boils.
It just kind of grows on you slowly and little by little it starts to make More sense, and at the same time, you're getting deeper into this echo chamber where you're further and further away from dissenting voices and facts.
It's me doing this podcast.
The depressing facts are just slowly, slowly cooking me from the inside.
But another thing that I think, you know, that you touch on in this passage is how a lot of these videos, and we've talked about on this show about Fall of the Cabal, Out of Shadows, that these movies are extremely effective in, you know, pilling people who watch them.
and you know one of the things that they that is pretty consistent across the board is that they keep hammering you with one conspiracy after another and then another one and then they build on that one and then they build on that one and you don't have any time to really kind of like check in with yourself and go wait a minute hold on you know there's no time to slow down because they're just they're kind of it's almost like they're using the element of surprise you know keep You know, before you have time to sort of think about one, you're on to the next one, and then you're using that one to prove this new thing, the new theory that you're introducing, and it can be really hectic for people, especially, you know, people who are, you know, our parents' age, who aren't quite as, you know, hey, if the movie's got good production and the narrator sounds all right, I mean, you know, there must be something to it.
Yeah, I think a lot of people, it seems like a large portion of conspiracy theorists and QAnon believers are of an older age.
And you know, that's of the data that we do have, the statistics that we do have, that absolutely seems to be the case.
And you're absolutely right.
It's hard to, it's harder, I think, for so-called digital immigrants to know
when to be trusting and when to be skeptical because a lot of them grew up at a time
when you didn't really have to be.
You know, we didn't have the diversity of voices in media that we do today,
which is good and bad in different ways.
One of the characters in my book, a woman in her late 70s, she grew up,
she was born in the 40s, and there were three big TV networks
And all of them said the same thing, you know, up was up, down was down, didn't matter what kind of household you came from, you heard the same news every single day.
So that she never really grew up with that need to question what she was told or to have that kind of media literacy, digital literacy that is so Imperative now.
And so when she kind of parachuted into social media, uh, decades later, without that built in skepticism that we have, there were so many influencers clawing for her attention with these unchecked narratives, these undisclosed biases, all different kinds of lies and exaggerations and made up events.
And she just didn't understand that she couldn't trust what they were saying.
So she developed these parasocial relationships and they really abused her trust.
Yeah, also back in the day when you were watching, you know, when you were watching one of the three news programs, there wasn't a little, you know, another box on the side of your television that, you know, had a little preview of other content maybe that you're interested in that you could click on and, you know, bring up onto the big screen.
Yeah, the algorithms were not friends to her.
She got pulled into some really dark and weird places online.
And meanwhile, her husband, also of that age, when they would both go onto Facebook,
they were in completely different worlds.
He was looking at cat videos and BuzzFeed listicles, and she was looking at like Pizzagate and babies being
drained for their blood and just all kinds of really dark stuff.
And you would never know because they didn't grow up in a place where you could have two different realities
just side by side like that.
Yeah, you don't surf the internet together.
You know that it is a very isolating and solo endeavor.
You know, it's very rare that you have two people sitting in front of one screen.
Fighting for the attention of the mouse, right?
This is just something that, you know, people go into their own rabbit holes miles apart from one another while sitting in the same room.
Exactly.
That is exactly what happened with them.
And it really, it wasn't apparent to Dale, the husband, that Doris was kind of traversing this entirely different universe just a few feet away from home until she was so deep in, it felt like past the point of no return for her.
Yeah.
I mean, I have to, I have to imagine that it's like how difficult it would be for me.
It's like, if I lived with decades believing that, you know, if I saw a video of a person who was like well-groomed and well-lit on a screen, that meant that at the very least, when they spoke, they had the reputation of a multi-million dollar business on the line, right?
It's like, at the very least, they have a team behind them making sure they don't get something catastrophically wrong that might harm the reputation of a major media brand.
And so you just sort of like, you know, default to thinking that anything that has that appearance is more or less trustworthy.
But all of a sudden we entered in this new age where anyone can get a camera and some nice lights and film themselves being a talking head, but you can say anything.
You don't have like, you know, a major brand that's worth protecting necessarily.
And so you can just say anything.
Yeah, that's just an incredibly radical shift in like how you consume media.
That, yeah, it's just very, very difficult.
Well, and I think, Jessalyn, you made a really interesting point.
You know, in the older days of news and media that our parents were used to, you know, there weren't a hundred different people fighting for your attention.
You know, they were paid a salary.
Everybody who worked at a news station, they were paid a salary to go up and prevent the information as it came in.
You would get a left perspective, a right perspective, and some sort of moderator, usually.
But now, people are competing for clicks.
You aren't making any money unless people are clicking and staying and watching your content.
So the, the whole goal, you know, to capture an audience has completely shifted.
And these influencers and even, you know, some larger, you know, larger, uh, you
know, corporate media sites who have online outlets, they need you to click
and they have an incentive to create headlines and stories, uh, that inspire
people to stay on their channel.
It's just a completely different way to go about looking at, at how to cultivate
an audience and what information even is.
Exactly.
Doris did not have this understanding.
As studies have shown, many seniors don't really understand how these platforms work and how they incentivize, in some cases, straight-up misinformation.
For a time, you could go wildly, wildly viral on YouTube spewing the craziest shit you wanted to and YouTube would cut you a
check for part of that ad revenue you generated. You know, it really was like disinformation
industrialized and without that knowledge of how these platforms operate and how influencers, content
creators are incentivized, you just don't know how little of what you may be consuming is factual or
doesn't have an agenda for profit Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I also really love the way you discuss the role of influencers in bringing people into this conspiracy theories.
I mean, we mentioned Janet Alcibard, but in the book you also discuss the impact of other QAnon influencers that we've discussed on the show.
Like Joe M, who is the creator of the Plan to Save the World video.
There's David Hayes, a.k.a.
Praying Medic.
There's also the streaming channel Patriot Soapbox, which was very instrumental in popularizing QAnon in its early days.
You realize, man, it's like all of these, this massive network of people who spew crazy things for attention and money are pretty effective in getting people to go down the rabbit hole with them.
Truly.
You know, I really enjoyed your guys' episodes on all of those influencers and learned a lot about them and their backgrounds and...
Praying Medic was really fascinating to me, in particular Dave Hayes, because he has shifted his content over the years.
He used to be a faith healer and so he would put out these videos trying to apparently teach people how they could, you know, if they just believed hard enough and like communicated with God, they could heal anyone.
And so really kind of just your average grifter pushing whatever he could to get people's attention and get them to spend money on his kits.
But he found a whole new audience through QAnon and you know his story is that God came to him in a dream one night and told him to become a decoder in the QAnon movement and what he was selling was no longer just you know trying to get people's attention he was really what he did for so many of his audience members was he gave them this sense of purpose that's what he did for Matt in my book but he he made them feel you know now it's not just that you can cure the incurable you can be a digital soldier in this movement that is going to save the world you can be on the side of good
Versus evil, you can be on the side of God.
And with these tools that I'm giving you, we can make history together.
And so for Matt, in my book, religious dad who ended up suffering a disability, which really just decimated his sense of self, his sense of purpose.
He was spending most of his time in a recliner because he couldn't walk very easily anymore.
He couldn't be there for his children or his wife.
He was at a moment in his life where he really needed that restored sense of purpose.
He was feeling so down and pragmatic, kind of like reached through the screen and said,
"Here you go. Here, join this movement.
I'm going to teach you how to be part of this digital army and be someone who matters again."
And that was exactly what he needed to hear at that time.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, I liked you talking about like the way it gives people a sense of purpose,
because I think people generally get confused when learning about like, why is it someone like with
like a job and a family, like real world responsibilities could fall into QAnon?
How do you have the time, honestly?
And I think it was really interesting when you were talking about Matt, how when he got into QAnon, he didn't see like these kinds of topics as like a distraction from his responsibilities as a father and a husband.
He saw that as like actually an important part of fulfilling his responsibilities.
I mean, Jake, could you could you read this section about about Matt, please?
Every minute spent away from his research felt like time wasted.
His idea of being there for his family, of being a man, had come to mean keeping them safe from ever-imminent danger.
As the storm loomed and the cabal panicked, Prang Medic and other decoders regularly implored Anons to prepare for power grid failures, economic shutdowns, and worse, appealing to patriarchal masculine ideals of heroism and protector roles.
Matt felt like he was privy to potentially life-saving intel that few others on the planet even knew to look for.
But things changed quickly, and he couldn't keep his loved ones out of harm's way if he wasn't constantly in the know.
He started tuning into Patriot Soapbox, a 24-7 QAnon network live-streamed on YouTube that visually and otherwise was pure chaos.
In the middle of the screen was a fevered rotation of talking heads trying to fill the round-the-clock broadcast On the bottom right was a running display of Trump's newest tweets.
On the bottom left were the most recent Q-drops.
On the top left was a live chat log whipping through comments from any number of the channel's roughly 50,000 subscribers in real time.
And along the very bottom was a scrolling news banner and a clock.
Patriot Soapbox both satisfied and intensified Matt's budding FOMO.
At work, when he wasn't on air, he kept it playing in a small window on his computer screen just to stay in the loop.
The show also replaced his go-to video game podcast he listened to while sitting bumper-to-bumper in the school pickup line waiting for Abby and Hayden.
It engrossed him so deeply that every time the car door swung open and they tossed their backpacks inside, he jumped to turn it off.
Yeah, he's got a new video game.
A new video game in real life where he's the main character.
Yeah, pretty much exactly.
I mean, I really like this passage because it illustrated the way in which QAnon and conspiracy theories generally can fulfill just basic human needs.
Needs for purpose and direction, a sense of place, and even a sense of responsibility to your family and your country, you know?
And the problem is that such is this pre-packaged thing.
It's like, if you just consume all this content constantly, then you can get all of these important emotional needs met.
I mean, it's like, it's really no wonder it's so attractive to so many people.
Yeah, who doesn't like feeling like they have secret knowledge?
You know, it's it's people feel increasingly helpless.
I think I think in our lives and to be able to go, you know, to start your day feeling like you have insider knowledge that you're going to be where everyone else is going to fall short.
You're gonna stand up and and your family is going to appreciate that so much.
Oh my gosh.
We're so happy that dad was listening to Patriot Soapbox 24-7 because he knew that insert event was coming and you know we were prepared.
It's it sounds ridiculous but it is so easy to It is so easy to fall into.
I remember before, before COVID, I was just by nature of reporting on these conspiracy theories and reading about what people were doing, you know, and looking at the posts on the chans that were coming out of China, you know, right at the very beginning, or at least, you know, purported to be coming out of China.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, you know, I, I went and I stocked up on hand sanitizer and you know, all of these other things and people, you know, thought I was crazy.
But then during the pandemic, they were asking, you know, Hey, can we get an extra bottle of hand sanitizer?
Do you have any left?
And it felt amazing.
It felt like I was some sort of, uh, you know, super spy or some, some sort of, uh, you know, Intel agent that I had, you know, that I had somehow.
Caught wind before everybody else, and it's so effective, you know, for people, especially somebody who is, you know, maybe caught up in just the sort of mundaneness of adult American life, you know, to feel like you are getting secret broadcasts that are going to put you and your family ahead of the curve.
It opens up the door for you to believe anything else that is coming from this source as well.
Yeah, for Matt he really he got so pulled into it as you described and he he felt like it was his duty.
He felt like he was being the best husband and father he could be by sitting in his basement watching these videos day and night and he was waiting and waiting and waiting for this moment of vindication.
The Great Awakening would happen.
His wife, his children would be so thankful that they had him there to protect them and prepare them.
There's even times where he's in couples counseling because as he gets into QAnon,
his marriage is just falling apart.
And as his wife is sitting there sobbing, saying she feels like a single mother,
in his head he's just like, "I should be at home listening.
I could be missing important intel right now.
And you know, she wants me to be a good husband, but how can I be there for her if I'm not in the know?"
It really engrossed him because in this place of diminished self-worth that he was at with his disability,
you know, this was what got him out of bed every morning.
He felt like part of this collective David to the deep states Goliath.
Like he was on the right side of history and that was intoxicating for him
after years of feeling really shitty about himself.
This is what really picked him back up and he was just blind to the damage he was doing to his life and his loved ones in the process.
Yeah, like you mentioned.
Just to give you a sense of the intimate spaces we're brought into in this book.
The first chapter opens with a contentious moment in the middle of marriage counseling, which is very, very Difficult to get anyone to talk to, to a close friend, let alone a reporter.
So yeah, it was, it was, I don't know.
So, I mean, lots of these really incredible, intimate, personal moments about, you know, how people are feeling and the really difficult moments of conflict and coming apart, I think, really makes this book very powerful.
Thank you so much.
It was, as you said, it was difficult and painful to report because the situations that these families are finding themselves in are so complicated and difficult to communicate.
And I think, uh, for some of the families I was speaking to over time, the relationship almost became a little bit like I was a therapist.
I was just listening, but you know, it's, it's such a stigmatized thing that it's hard to have anyone to talk about.
Cause how do you say to a friend or whoever, like, how are you doing?
Well, I'm okay.
But my dad thinks Biden needs babies.
Like, you know, it's a hard conversation to have.
And so like being steeped in this world as I am, I have that background knowledge.
And so I was able to really get deep into the reporting.
And many of these situations unfolded during the process of my book writing, you know, the tragedies, the Totally!
deaths during the time I was reporting. There's a suicide attempt.
There was a lot of pain and challenges.
And I'm so endlessly grateful to the families in this, in this book for bringing me along and trusting me with
their stories.
Totally. It's like, you have to be, it's crazy. Cause like, I was just thinking while you were talking, you know, but
yeah. How, how do you admit to somebody that, you know, your parent,
admit to somebody that, you know, your parent, yeah, believes that the Democrats are
yeah.
Believes that the Democrats are harvesting adrenochrome and underground tunnels,
harvesting adrenochrome in underground tunnels, especially because a lot of the conversation
especially because a lot of the conversation around QAnon and
around QAnon and QAnon believers, and I think we touched on this sort of towards the beginning of the
QAnon believers.
And I think we touched on this sort of towards the thinking while you were talking, you know, yeah, how do you
episode, is, you know, that they're idiots, that they're morons.
Who would believe something like this?
You know, you have horrible phrases like "Q-tards" going around, and in a lot of ways QAnon became
the focus of, you know, people who were anti-MAGA or who were, you know, liberals online posting.
QAnon became, you know, this thing that will always separate us from you.
You know, there was, it was, it was such an easy target to point to, to show, oh, look at the kind of people that, you know, Donald Trump inspires.
Look at the people that follow him.
So even if you are a conservative, you know, and, and you're, but you know, when one of your parents has fallen down into this, I would be so uncomfortable to bring this up, uh, you know, to talk about it with family, friends, a doctor, a therapist, let alone, let alone a reporter, because there is so much stigma attached to it.
And, and it's like, you know, you said in the, in the HuffPo article, You know, that it wasn't until, you know, they had stumbled upon this kind of obscure Reddit group that only had a handful of members at the beginning that's now spiraled to, you know, hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
But that's where people were finding that they could talk about it.
I mean, it's really, it's really sad.
You know, it's sad how, you know, out of control this spiraled because I'm sure in a lot of ways there was, like you said, there wasn't a lot of eyes on it until it was too late in some regards.
Yeah it you know so much of this has been going on behind closed doors and it's it's really festered and gotten worse and many people there there is so little support for the people who need it and we do still as a society as a society you laugh and point and ridicule and you know you hear people calling QAnon believers inbreds and morons and as you said worse and so it's hard to talk about it's hard to have a national conversation about how we can look at this and deal with it.
And so a lot of families have just kind of fallen apart.
And that's the end of their story.
It's just it's too hard to find a way forward.
There are some, I guess I'll say lightly happy endings in the book.
There are some families who do find a way back to each other and do apply some strategies that prove very effective.
But in so many cases, without a really concerted effort and support system, it almost feels impossible.
Yeah, I mean, like the subtitle of your book says, like it deals like primarily with the destruction of families because of QAnon.
And, you know, the tensions caused by this QAnon belief, like they grow just as gradually as the QAnon belief itself.
And I was personally shocked by the story of the couple you were talking about earlier, Dale and Doris.
They're just lifelong marriage partners, they're retirees.
And in the book, you describe how they met, this storybook romance from this bygone America, and this leads to this decades-long partnership.
It's like, oh, it makes your heart swell.
It's so nice.
But all that was threatened when Doris became obsessed with QAnon and Dale didn't like it and I thought there's one moment that the book describes where the situation came to a head.
Their marriage had always been one of compromise and understanding.
Of, you're right, I'm sorry dear, in both directions.
But when it came to true and false, there was no room to budge.
For days that stretched miserably into weeks, the tension between them just wasn't diffusing.
Dale returned home from the pool one afternoon to find Doris sitting in the living room, waiting for him.
They needed to talk, she said.
The solemn expression on her face worried him.
She gestured for him to take a seat in the armchair across from her.
So he did.
Is everything alright?
I need you to listen to me, Dora said.
Don't interrupt.
Oh.
Okay.
I just feel that you don't respect me and you don't respect my thinking, she intoned.
Then, she broke his heart.
I just feel that you're being verbally abusive.
In all Dale's years, that was the most hurtful thing anyone had ever said to him.
Verbally abusive?
Doris was still talking, but he could no longer hear her.
Did she really believe that?
He had never felt so disconnected from her.
Where were they supposed to go from here?
Apparently, she'd already thought about that.
If this continues, Doris went on, well, I don't know what we'll do about it.
Dale sat there, slack-jawed, trying to process what she'd said and the cautionary tone with which she'd said it.
She was studying his reaction as if to make sure he understood.
He did.
His beloved wife of 50 years, his best friend, was threatening to leave him for discounting the claims of a group on the internet called QAnon.
Ah, heartbreaking stuff.
I mean, it's just, I think it also just illustrates that the ways in which these things become so important, they become part of a person's identity.
And this such strong identification with the conspiracy belief is, I think, probably one of the main reasons why it's so corrosive to families.
Well, it's like, you know, it's like if literally your internet friends are more important than the people you know in the real world, you know, that's, there's only one direction to go there.
Dale is such a lovely, sweet, amazing man.
The pain that he experienced trying to pull his wife out of this, I had a hard time even describing it in the book.
She's his best friend.
together for half a century and she just transforms into a stranger before his eyes and her accusation
that he's being verbally abusive, you know, it's hard to even fathom this man saying a curse word.
He's just this lovely, lovely guy. And so for Doris, the reason that QAnon was able to put a
wedge between her and her soulmate was, again, it comes down to those underlying needs. You know,
Dale in retirement still has a booming social life. He goes to the pool, he has friends. Doris
has always been a little quieter, a little more to herself.
She likes solo hobbies and she has limited mobility, so she doesn't get out a lot.
And in retirement, she's just found less and less to preoccupy herself with.
She's found less purpose in her daily life.
Um, she did take a lot of pride in her career.
She was working at a time when not many women were.
And as that went on in her life, QAnon just kind of extended a hand to her and said, you know, here is a job you can have in retirement at your desk, where you can feel like you are contributing to something bigger than yourself every single day.
And her online community cheered her on.
They embraced her.
They made her feel like one of them, like these young people, these people from all different walks of life are coming together.
And to be part of that, to feel like she belonged again, this feeling that had been fading for the latter part of her life, that was just something she couldn't turn away from.
And that was what got in between her and her husband.
And the fallout is devastating.
Yeah, I mean, the story sometimes made me feel like perhaps actually the most effective way to combat the spread of QAnon is to improve volunteer programs.
You know, just if you give people an opportunity to like be part of something and make their community better, they wouldn't seek it, you know, in other places online in less productive ways.
I can tell you from personal experience as a, you know, as a recovering conspiracy theorist that there's always a little piece of you, a tiny little piece, because none of the things that you read online or on the forums or whatever, whatever message board you're on, you know, you never see it become widely accepted as true.
It's widely accepted amongst the community that you're in, but there isn't, you know, the big CNN report, you know, Biden taken to Gitmo.
You don't have this kind of mainstream acknowledgement of these theories that you read online.
And what happens is, is there's like a little piece of you inside that's like, is it true?
Like, am I wasting my time?
Is all of this bullshit and made up?
there's a little piece always that I think questions, and it's part of the same gene that makes you question
the establishment or the government or whatever it is in the first place.
You use that to question some of these theories 'cause you're like, I don't know who's posting.
Patriot, Soapbox, who are these guys?
They're in hats.
Do they really know what's going on?
I don't know.
And so when people challenge you or they say, when they say, it hurts even more
because it strikes that tiny little piece of your own self that you're kind of suppressing,
that's also wondering if I'm wasting my time all this.
So when you have people who are close to you that are trying maybe to indulge that part of,
that's very small part of your belief system, in my experience,
And it can make people really angry and defensive and, you know, feel like you're being attacked.
And I definitely, just in that passage and in this story, I recognized a little bit of some of those emotions.
So I wonder if it's, you know, a similar case there.
Definitely.
These people who have gotten really deep into movements like QAnon, they have sacrificed a lot along the way.
Many of them have sacrificed relationships.
Dignity in some cases, sometimes their careers.
Many of them have been grifted out of a lot of money.
And so to admit that you're wrong is to say, I've lost all of this for nothing.
I've done all of this.
I've caused so much damage to my life.
And it was all a joke, a lie.
I mean, in the book, Matt, who does hit rock bottom of the rabbit hole, that is the most painful moment to him is looking back and surveying all the harm he's done to himself and to his loved ones and having to say, I was fooled.
And I feel like a fool and I now have to rebuild all the harm I've done.
It's a lot easier to maintain that cognitive dissonance and just get defensive and I cannot accept that this isn't true because look at what I've done to myself to get here.
But I find in most cases your family is more than willing to forgive you.
For the people who do get out, it's in many cases, their families have maintained a path for them to do so.
You know, when you tell someone you're stupid, you're wrong, this is dumb, how can they get into a mindset where they can emerge from QAnon still feeling valued and respected?
It's the people who have a support system who say, like, don't agree with you.
I don't believe this to be true, whatever it may be, but I still love you.
And when you do come out of this, I will be there for you, you know, leaving them that I really appreciate it in the book.
You include some dialogue between the QAnon believers and, you know, family or friends who are trying to reason with them, trying to find that little crack of doubt and kind of opening it a bit.
And I thought that was kind of, I don't know, really interesting, and sort of giving some real world examples of how you can sort of like take someone who is very deep down the rabbit hole and perhaps insert little seeds of doubt in a very, you know, kind way.
We really see in the book and Across the country, different approaches have different outcomes.
You know, that kind of trying to debunk someone out of their delusions is just so rarely effective because I think focusing on the facts and the lies is addressing the symptom, not the cause.
You know, it's at the end of the day, you're never going to change someone's mind when these beliefs are basically part of who they are.
You really need to look at not the what of what they're believing, but the why.
Why did they believe it?
What is going on here on a deeper level?
And so the storylines that you see in the book where we do watch people lime claw back out of the rabbit hole. It's when they are
reckoning with these underlying needs that have gone unfulfilled. You know, in Matt's case, when
he manages to get back out after tragedy and hardship and a lot of terrible things happening,
it's not because he finally, it finally sinks into his brain, oh, all these things are
false. And here's the truth. It's because he manages to rebuild his sense of purpose. And
then these lies he's been clinging to, he just doesn't need them anymore, because they're not
fulfilling that need for him that he was using them for. So the dialogue, the exchanges that I have in the
book, I do show.
What works and what doesn't and how it kind of gives you a rare insight into the minds of people who have gone down the rabbit hole and come back out to understand how they're interpreting these different approaches and how they made them feel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like you mentioned, like, like these are definitely like heartbreaking, difficult stories.
You're dealing with like a familial conflict, mental health struggles, like financial disaster.
But you, I really appreciate it.
I felt like at the last third of the book, I felt like I was throwing the lifeline a bit.
And offer some some rays of hope, because you discuss people who, you know, who are able to find a better path out of like, even even after very horrible circumstances caused by their QAnon obsession, like you mentioned, Matt, like he loses everything he was trying to protect, right?
And it was really, really awful.
But you you write about how Matt developed a new perspective after these disasters, thanks to a combination of like self determination and therapy.
All Matt could do was focus on starting anew.
It was time for a hard reset.
Between scouring online for jobs and apartments, he made a deliberate effort to do what once had been unthinkable.
He tried honestly to investigate and understand the liberal perspective.
It wasn't his idea, but that of his therapist, Ralph, a kindly older man with a white goatee.
Matt's continuing treatment plan after leaving the hospital included weekly therapy and new medications to improve his mental health.
The antidepressants he'd been taking, he learned, had been overstimulating him, contributing to his compulsive behaviors.
When Matt explained that he wanted to rediscover who he was, Ralph pointed out that he'd been deeply embedded in a groupthink echo chamber for a long time.
It could be worth exploring alternative viewpoints to broaden his perspective, he said.
Then he suggested with a smile that Matt do, quote, his own research, unwittingly echoing a common QAnon refrain.
Matt could only laugh.
He went back down to his neatly staged basement and into his office, the place where it all began.
Yeah, you also go on to describe how Matt became disillusioned with QAnon after watching the Cullen-Hoback documentary Q Into the Storm and discovering, you know, people like the Watkins were very much involved in making QAnon happen.
It really made him feel so stupid.
The scenes with Ron Watkins, like, watching porn on his dashboard. It just made him feel like he'd been trolled,
which he had. And for Matt, there was so much of his life that fell apart. His marriage,
he starts to question his faith in God through this process. He questions his politics. And
in his case, his recovery, I'll call it, is remarkably extraordinary because he does
it on his own.
He kind of pushes everyone away, breaks all of his relationships and has to claw himself back out.
And for him, what inspires him to do that is a failed suicide attempt.
I don't know that he would have gotten to that point if he hadn't just decided, well, I'm still alive.
I can either try to start my life over with a fresh perspective or, you know, I don't know what the point is.
And so in other stories, you see a much more of like a family support network, helping someone through this, helping to pull them back to reality.
But for Matt, he just, he felt like I'm still here.
So maybe I'll, he went through a psychiatric program at the hospital.
They hooked him up with a therapist.
The therapist gave him advice and he decided, okay, I'm going to take it.
And, uh, the remarkable thing is he, Once he gets out of the rabbit hole, he sees his soon-to-be ex-wife starting to slip in herself.
And it really illustrated how, in this period, QAnon slipped from the fringes, where Matt started out, to the mainstream, where even his partner started to go in.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing to how just a couple days or hours or, you know, however long he was in the hospital, away from that kind of content, you know, it doesn't have a ton of staying power.
If you can remove yourself and, you know, focus on what we've just seen anecdotally, you know, focus on, you know, touch grass, as they say, it doesn't stay, you know, it doesn't stay with you.
As long as you are not online constantly getting new information, constantly getting new theories, constantly getting new bakes.
Algorithm is pushing this new influencer on you.
So I'm so happy for Matt.
He really did have to reinvent himself.
And I think it, he did, even if you talk to him today, he'll look back at that part of his life and just, he feels deep shame.
Not everyone who comes out of this does kind of.
There's a lot of tension, I guess, in the families I speak to who are grappling with, like, is this something that my loved one did or is it something that happened to them?
Were they brainwashed or was this a choice?
And I get mixed answers to that, but Matt will tell you this was a choice.
I went down a rabbit hole full of white supremacist, racist, anti-semitic conspiracy theories.
I consumed them wholeheartedly.
I embraced them and I'm disgusted by myself and I don't want to be that person anymore.
And so while it was A very gruesome path for him, a very tragic path, and not one that's necessarily teachable.
His suicide attempt kind of was a restart for him, and in the grand scheme of things, he is grateful for his second chance, and he actually considers himself center-left now, so quite a shift.
Well, Matt, if you're listening, don't feel ashamed, man.
We all believe in crazy.
Our brains are constantly pumped from every angle.
We are at the mercy, in a lot of ways, of these little screens that have taken over our society.
Don't be ashamed.
Be proud that you were able to admit It's okay to admit that you've wasted four years of your life.
That's fine.
Who cares?
People waste their lives in other ways, you know, other than QAnon.
There's plenty of ways that people waste their time, waste their lives, waste their energy.
The important thing is that you don't continue to waste.
And so shame and humiliation, I think, are two of the strongest human emotions.
And it drives people to do, you know, a lot of hurtful things, both to other people and themselves.
So, you know, it's worthwhile to always remember, give yourself a little bit of a break.
Nobody's perfect.
We are susceptible, soft, squishy beings, especially as the news gets worse and more relentless in terms of how it is delivered to us.
So, you know, take it easy and, you know, don't blame yourself too much.
He has a listener, so I'm sure he will hear this and appreciate it.
We've been talking to Jessalyn Cook.
The book is The Quiet Damage, QAnon, and the Destruction of the American Family.
It is on sale right now.
We're going to put a link in the show notes.
It's also available as an audiobook if you prefer listening to it.
And I'm going to say a couple of final things.
Number one, I know that a lot of people have come to find our podcast because a family member fell down the QAnon rabbit hole and they wanted to learn more about the movement.
And if that is you, then this is really the ideal book for you, because at the very least, it lets you know that you aren't alone and possibly your situation isn't as bad as it could be.
And also, in addition to that, it provides, like I said, some rays of hope, some sort of understanding of the ways in which things can get better.
The other thing I'll say is that I'm someone who really enjoys reading academic literature on why people believe in conspiracy theories and these kinds of things.
I think those can be very illuminating.
But what I loved about this book is that the narratives in this book I felt like were able to show how people fall down the rabbit hole in a lot more like naturalistic narrative way than some of the dry academic literature on the subject.
So it is very, very accessible and helping people and helping you understand how this kind of thing can happen.
Jessalyn, so where can people find more of your work?
I'm actually headed to Harvard for a Nieman Fellowship for the next year, so I won't be doing a ton of my typical reporting.
I'll be back to that at the end of the academic year.
But, you know, I'm on Twitter.
I'm around, so I would love to connect with listeners wherever.
All right.
Congratulations on that, and pick up the book and help Jessalyn in her journey to Harvard.
Thank you guys so much for having me.
This was a great conversation, and thank you for reading the book.
I really appreciate it.
Our pleasure.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for $5 a month to get a whole second episode every single week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
For everything else, we've got a website, qaapodcast.com.
Listener until next week.
May the deep dish bless you and keep you.
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Today, my friend and I are cleaning the car that I share with my QAnon moms.
Some of you have seen my videos with her, so you know what she's like.
If not, you can go watch them.
But either way, my friend was like, I think someone keyed your car, your mom's car, and I was like, well, that doesn't surprise me because she has all these bumper stickers about the Second Amendment and Infowars and the American flag.
Disgusting.
But anyway, I was looking at the Car key stuff and I was like oh I know what it is.
So I was looking at it and it says hoax.
I feel like an archaeologist getting into the hieroglyphs of an ancient disgusting society and it says hoax and I know it said hoax because on the other side I remembered my mom keyed in if you can read it says virus hoax because my mom thinks the virus that killed and infected millions of people from the last three years is a say it with me hoax.
