The Quiet Damage of QAnon Is Only Now Becoming Clear (2024)

According to some estimates, tens of millions of Americans have bought into QAnon, whether they know it or not: A 2021 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that roughly 30 million Americans believed “a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation” control “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S.” That number grew slightly in 2022, making QAnon as popular as some religions.

We are still in the process of understanding just how much the movement has poisoned our politics. We are still learning the ways in which the beliefs born from an internet movement have reshaped the ways Americans interact with the information they encounter. We are still struggling to understand the disastrous repercussions this movement had in contributing to a mass death event in a global pandemic. But there’s another legacy of QAnon that can be equally hard to account for: the countless private tragedies of loved ones becoming paranoid, obsessive, cruel, and unrecognizable. Parents disowning children, siblings turning on each other, marriages that went cold, and happy families that fell apart.

This is the specific epidemic investigative reporter Jesselyn Cook tackled with her new book, The Quiet Damage. In 2021, Cook wrote an article for HuffPost about the struggles of the children of QAnon believers. In the aftermath, she said, she heard from hundreds of people who reached out with stories of misery and loss, and of suddenly being treated as an enemy in their own home. She dove fully into the topic, and the resulting book tells the story of five families and the desperate efforts to save relationships and pull estranged relatives and partners back to reality.

Cook came out of her reporting with a sense that, more than anything, QAnon—and conspiratorial belief more broadly—is a symptom of difficult times, and that opportunists can successfully push sinister fantasies by capitalizing on all-too-commonplace miseries. Slate spoke with Cook to understand what we can learn from these private stories of damaged lives; how we can better understand the appeal of conspiratorial thinking at a human level; and about who is most at risk of falling victim to it. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Slate: A driving idea of your book is that conspiracy theories should be thought of as emerging from a wellness crisis in America. What do you mean by that?

Jesselyn Cook: As a tech reporter, I went into writing this book looking at this as an information crisis, as a social media crisis. Which I think was, in retrospect, short-sighted of me. That’s not to say that tech platforms aren’t pouring gasoline on an open fire when it comes to the information crisis. But I think I had not considered our society’s collective vulnerability enough. And in chronicling the stories from my book, what really became apparent to me was that this goes deeper than information itself. Conspiracy theories fill a hole: Maybe someone is incredibly isolated and lonely. Or maybe they’ve lost their sense of purpose. Maybe being a digital soldier gives them a reason to get out of bed today. That’s more powerful, I would argue, than the truth. We’ve gone through so much in recent years, and a lot of people are still really suffering from the fallout.

And when we think about the root of this crisis, I think we need to rethink our interventions. I don’t feel that facts can fix this. Debunking tackles the symptom, not the cause. The characters in my book who did manage to climb back out of the rabbit hole did so when their underlying needs were met. That was when the conspiracy theories they’d been clinging to fell away.

How did you end up settling on the five families that you followed?

I wanted to include a diverse group of believers from different walks of life because there’s a tendency to stereotype conspiracy theorists and QAnon believers as conservative white boomers. And that’s very much not true: Anyone can fall into this way of thinking. Conspiracy theories serve different people in different ways. And so when I was deciding who to feature in the book, I wanted to choose people, young and old, rich and poor, from different parts of the country, from different political views. I just wanted to really clearly show that there is no single demographic box when it comes to belief in conspiracy theory. Not race, not class, not income level, education level, the nature of your upbringing. There are very different paths into these delusions.

Two of the stories—those of Alice, a former Bernie Sanders supporter in California, and Matt, a Christian in Missouri—were from the perspective of the QAnon followers themselves, rather than their loved ones. How did those relationship evolve?

I met Alice and Matt on Reddit, and I really got to come along on their journeys as they unfolded. People died. There were two suicide attempts. There were so many twists and turns and tragedies. But for those two in particular, I got to watch what worked and what didn’t as they tried to claw their way out.

What did you observe that worked?

With Alice, we saw her loved ones working to meet those underlying needs that QAnon satisfied, but also trying to restimulate her critical thinking and have her step back and see the big picture.

I have seen “Socratic questioning” and “motivational interviewing” be effective, especially when they’re applied together. Socratic questioning comes down to asking open questions to encourage believers to think through and assess the validity of their own ideas, while at the same time very carefully and mindfully challenging their biases and their blind spots—and doing it from a place of curiosity rather than criticism, and from a mindset of cooperation instead of conflict. Alice and her fiancé became partners in finding the truth. Whenever she would bring him some outlandish conspiracy theory saying that Bill Gates was the devil, they would look at the videos Alice presented, and he would ask questions about them, and try to confirm little details. It’s a long process, to be sure. Socratic questioning can really wear loved ones down because it really takes patience and compassion. And that can be hard when someone is delusional and sometimes cruel, aggressive, and reactive. But for Alice, it opened her mind enough to allow that tiny bit of doubt to seep in.

And at the same time, her father was using motivational interviewing. The goal there is to get the believer to want to put aside their conspiracy theories. So, rather than getting caught up in what was true and what was false, Alice’s dad got her to step back and look at what was happening to her life on a grand scale. Her friendships were falling apart, people were calling her stupid and hateful and cruel, and she was so stressed out all the time. He would ask her, Even if this is all true, how do you benefit from involving yourself so deeply? He was trying to get her to recognize that it was toxic to her.

Those two approaches—one, getting her to gently question her convictions, and the other, getting her to look at the toll they were taking on her in the grand scheme of things—got her to take a step back.

How common is it for someone to find their way out of QAnon?

I definitely don’t think even 2 out of every 5 believers finds a way back out. Matt’s journey out of QAnon is maybe the most remarkable, because he lost everyone who cared about him, his family fell apart, there was no one left around him to pull him back out. He managed to do it by himself after a failed suicide attempt, to start over with a clean slate, which is not a common path, or obviously not one that I would recommend. It is rare to do that—people often break through with the devoted support of a network of people who love them.

And Alice didn’t have a clean break from QAnon. There was always a temptation to go back. She has kind of teetered a bit. But we had many conversations as she was trying to find her footing in reality about her challenges and the allure of QAnon and how it called to her in many ways.

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QAnon was centered around cryptic posts on message boards from a mysterious figure called Q, who claimed to have insider information from his high-level government clearance and predicted that Trump would defeat a cabal of satanic child sex traffickers operating among the world’s powerful elites. After Trump lost the 2020 election and the promises of a “Storm” didn’t materialize, Q got a lot quieter. There haven’t been any Q drops in a couple years now. You wrote a book about the grip of QAnon on people’s lives—what about now? How do you still see it as relevant?

Honestly, these days, QAnon has really just blended into the mainstream. I wouldn’t even think of it as a specific movement, or as just people who identify as QAnon followers. It’s a broader populace that subscribes to these views, even without using the label. The QAnon fixation on pedophilia and child trafficking is a serious and very real issue: We’ve seen it distorted and weaponized into something where calling someone a pedophile has become a go-to political attack for some of our elected leaders.

And with the election around the corner, and especially with all the unprecedented events that have occurred in the past month, disinformation is just blowing up, out of control. Q may be gone for now. And while QAnon, officially, as a movement, has gone underground, the damage is done. We see it every single day. I mean, even just on Twitter last night, I opened the app, and one of the main curated stories by the platform was about how Biden was on his deathbed. There was one suggesting that he had been cloned, or Kamala had killed him. It’s no wonder this stuff has become so widely embraced. It’s so normalized.

Do the intervention tactics you discuss in your book apply to people who are not part of a tight group of conspiracy believers but simply picking up conspiracies permeating the broader information ecosystem?

I think they do, because I don’t think it’s just QAnon that satisfies people’s emotional needs. A lot of people I interviewed believed that vaccines were going to kill us all. Signing on to Facebook every day and posting about these killer COVID shots gave them a sense of fulfillment and made them feel like they were important. That they were standing up for what was right and that they were providing a service. And for people who really need that, it’s hard to let go of. Doris, in my book, would not have called herself a QAnon believer. She was mostly sucked in by public health–related myths and disinformation. Doris is quite elderly, and she was mostly stuck at home because she had lost her mobility. She just didn’t have as much in her life that made her feel good anymore. And conspiracy theories gave that to her. She got to be a whistleblower and an investigative journalist and someone who mattered again. So even as QAnon the “brand” fades away, the underlying needs that these conspiracy theories serve are still very much a driving factor.

A sense of belonging is a big motivator, then. In your book, though, you discussed the link between conspiracy theory belief and depression; religious belief; situation- and personality-based anxiety; narcissism; and a longing for a higher calling. That’s a lot of factors. Is there one here you think is most important?

There are a lot of different pathways into this mindset, but I think the common throughline is a sense of powerlessness. Whether it’s perceived or it’s valid, conspiracy theories demand a sort of victim mentality. What conspiracy theorists have in common, at least to some degree, is that they feel that they’ve been wronged and they feel that there is some entity out there that has undue power over them. You are victimized by your oppressors, whoever they may be. Many people have very legitimate reasons to feel that way.

In your book, you tell the story of Kendra, a Black woman whose childhood was defined by desperate poverty, violence, occasional homelessness, and racism. You wrote that Black and Hispanic people are overrepresented among QAnon followers, and that they were also targeted by disinformation campaigns.

You see minority groups that in some ways are both victimized and villainized by the conspiracy theories QAnon espouses. I think that can be really puzzling to people on a surface level, but if you consider what conspiracy theory beliefs offer to people, it becomes a little easier to digest. Kendra comes from a remarkably disadvantaged background, and when [her sister] pointed out to her that this is essentially a white supremacist movement, Kendra just couldn’t hear it. Her antiestablishment conspiracy theories really validated this distrust she had in the system. And that made her feel good.

One of the saddest stories of the book, in my opinion, is that of Kendra’s 7-year-old son, Jonah. Jonah buys into his mother’s conspiracy theories and is terrified by them—they’re all about torturing or trafficking children, after all. You wrote that that kind of constant exposure to QAnon could amount to a kind of “toxic stress” that could permanently alter the formation of the preadolescent brain. Do you know of other stories of children being traumatized by QAnon?

The data that exists suggests millions, even tens of millions, of people believe that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles. You can only imagine how many kids have heard this stuff at home—especially over the pandemic, when we were all locked down inside and kids were home all the time. We don’t have a good figure of how many children believe in conspiracy theories, so it’s hard to grasp the scope of this. But BuzzFeed News put out a survey a few years ago asking teachers how often they were hearing conspiracy theories in the classroom. And the response was really devastating—just teachers from all over the country saying they were overwhelmed by the stuff they were hearing at school.

And so I do think we have kind of a subcrisis brewing here. People seem to think that as digital natives, young people are just born with the skills to navigate their complex information ecosystem. But they aren’t, of course. Kids are getting online younger than ever before and spending more time online than ever before. And they’re not equipped to understand deep fakes or reality-distorting algorithms or to understand how disinformation is incentivized on some of our biggest tech platforms. And it feels to me like a disaster in the making.

Do you have a message for people who have damaged relationships with loved ones sucked in by conspiracy theory beliefs?

I think one piece of advice that may be helpful to anyone who has lost a parent or a sibling or a child or a friend to conspiracy theories is that, as challenging as it might be when you’re dealing with the delusion and defensiveness and anger and worse, it’s so important to try to leave open a pathway out. That urge we have to ridicule and fact-check and tell someone they’re wrong and bad makes it so much harder for them to get out. Because even if they do get to a place where they realize that their beliefs are untrue, if they feel that they can’t emerge as someone who is still loved, respected, and valued by the people around them, they’re not going to come out. Conspiracy theory networks are communities. They do offer support and validation. Conspiracy theorists are there for each other. So you really need to let them know, however you can, that if and when they’re ready to come out, you will be there for them, and you will still love them.