Here’s why “facts can’t fix this.”
The U.S. would arguably be in a very different position were it not for posts made on the website 4Chan on October 28, 2017. That was the day when an anonymous user, who went by the name Q Clearance Patriot, claimed in a series of posts on the message board that he had a high level of security clearance in the U.S. government, and had information that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested — and that other arrests and unrest would follow. That arrest never happened, but the posts sparked a wave of dedicated followers, who soon were spreading all kinds of rumors, like that there existed a snuff video of Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin murdering a child, drinking her blood, and wearing her face as a mask.
That “information” has, to this day, never been proven with any kind of facts, but that didn’t stop scores of people from becoming followers of “Q”. We now recognize them as proponents of the conspiracy theory known as QAnon. These days, QAnon followers basically believe that Donald Trump is a crusader attempting to save Americans from the “Deep State” — a cabal of influential elites who sexually abuse children and drink their blood.
Since its formation, QAnon has gone from a bizarre fringe viewpoint to a movement that even counts adherents who serve in the U.S. government. It’s not known exactly how many QAnon believers there are, but a 2021 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute think tank found that 27% of Americans believe a “storm” is coming (QAnon lingo for an attack on what they call Deep State officials) and 18% either completely or somewhat agree that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.”
For people outside the conspiracy, QAnon might seem unbelievable and ridiculous — but for those with loved ones who’ve fallen victim to these beliefs, the movement can be extremely fraught and painful. Jesselyn Cook is an award-winning investigative reporter and author who’s been covering online conspiracy theories and their impact offline for years. Her new book, The Quiet Damage, is a deeply moving and upsetting look into the destruction QAnon wreaks on families. We spoke to Cook about the unique pain of losing someone to the influence of QAnon, what not to do if a loved one starts spouting these alarming beliefs, and more.
Katie Couric Media: Reading your book felt a lot like going down a disturbing political rabbit hole. What was it like reporting for this book?
Jesselyn Cook: It was a difficult book to report because, one, it’s just such a deeply traumatic thing that’s also so stigmatized. Millions of people are struggling with this right now, but no one really talks about it. We just kind of laugh at QAnon and conspiracy theories and call the people who believe them crazy, stupid, inbreds, and worse. It can be very painful to have someone step into another reality, and as a QAnon believer, [it can be equally hard] to feel like you have the truth and no one else can see it. So I went about it very delicately.
As a member of the media, in the eyes of QAnon believers, I’m part of this corrupt, evil cabal. So it was very difficult to get people to talk to me in some cases, but I really got to come along with these families as their stories unfolded. I got to see some people climb their way back out, and unfortunately, I reported through a lot of really tragic events. There’s a lot of loss as a result of these beliefs. I’ve reported on a lot of vulnerable groups over the past decade, and this was by far the most painful and the most difficult to report.
How did you choose your subjects?
I really wanted to dispel this misconception of the stereotypical conspiracy theorists: People think of them as, generally, a conservative white boomer [who’s] maybe Fox News-addicted. Through my reporting, I found that’s just not the case. There really is no demographic box. People are coming into these beliefs from all different walks of life — all different upbringings, generations, races, and political leanings. So the five families I chose, I wanted to highlight that range and that diversity.
[In the book] we have a woman nearing her 80s, and we have a kid as young as seven. We have a former Bernie Sanders supporter and a MAGA guy, a woman of color and a very privileged white lawyer. I wanted to show all those different paths in, and I also wanted to have a range of different relationships, so you see siblings, mother, son, and spouses. It was a matter of trying to make it as representative as possible. I felt like any less than that wouldn’t really do any justice to the level of nuance and the different ways that people get into this stuff.
Is there any characteristic that QAnon followers have in common?
The assumption that I encounter again and again is low IQ — they’re morons, idiots, whatever. And that’s obviously not true. Emily — the lawyer in the book — is a really brilliant woman. There are a lot of brilliant people who find QAnon. I think, in addition to a sense of powerlessness — whether people have been conditioned to feel that way or they have legitimate reasons for feeling that way — it’s about a lack of fulfillment, some kind of unmet need. They’re not doing well in life. I think the people who are “immune” to this kind of thing are not the smartest people [necessarily]. They’re the people who are very fulfilled, very happy, who feel great purpose and meaning in their lives. Whereas those who don’t have strong community, who don’t feel like they matter, they can find those things in QAnon.
Intelligence really isn’t part of the equation. People who derive a great sense of purpose by being a digital soldier in QAnon, even if there’s a part of their brain that knows it’s nonsense, [are being driven by] the desire to feel good and wanting to be part of this greater cause that’s more powerful than any allegiance we have to the truth. That’s why we see so many normal, smart people falling in during vulnerable periods of their life.
If you have a loved one who starts falling for QAnon, what should you do?
A big thing is to have compassion, but I understand that can be really difficult, because some people who get deep into QAnon become really cruel and spew vitriol. But if you have a loved one who has transformed into a stranger before you and is latching onto these wild conspiracy theories, and you decide you want to help, I think the most important thing you can do is allow them to keep their dignity. What I mean by that is resisting the urge to ridicule and shame, and tell them they’re wrong and bad and stupid. I know how tempting that can be, even if it’s done in a way that feels productive, like, “You’re smarter than this, like you’re not stupid, you should know better.” That’s so harmful, because even if this person reaches a point at which they realize, OK, none of this is true, they have to be able to see a path back out. And if you’ve made them feel like they’re dumb and bad, why would they come out?
They have to be able to feel like, I can leave this behind, and I will emerge feeling loved and respected and valued. A more productive route is saying to them, “I don’t agree with you. I don’t accept the things you’re saying. However, I know that you’re smart, I know that you’re a good person, and if and when you leave this behind, I will be there for you, and I will love you still.” That leaves that door open. But if they feel that you’ve already written them off as a moron for having accepted this in the first place, then it’s easier to just dig in deeper and kind of have that cognitive dissonance, even if they know that they’ve been duped, why would they come out if they feel like no one’s going to look at them the same ever again?
Should you try to fact-check them?
Facts can’t fix this, though I totally get the impulse to want to correct falsehoods with facts. But again, I think what draws people into these movements is so rarely the desire to be informed. These people, even though they call themselves truth seekers, often are not really in pursuit of truth. They just want to feel good. It makes them have purpose or community or belonging.
So when you’re trying to help someone get out of QAnon, you can’t debunk their delusions, because that’s very surface-level. It’s tackling the symptom, not the cause. The big picture is trying to put aside the lunacy and focus on the why. Why are they actually drawn to these theories in the first place? What need is that satisfying? That’s not always easy to understand, but I think if you’re able to accomplish that, the best thing you can do for someone is try to help them meet that need outside of QAnon. Maybe that’s getting them engaged in a hobby or volunteering, or welcoming them into a different community.
Once you can satisfy that need in a productive, healthy way, their desire to latch onto these wild falsehoods will start to weaken, because they just won’t need them anymore. In the book I get into some specific deprogramming strategies that are recommended by experts and that I have seen be effective, but the big picture is just putting aside the need to debunk and fact-check, and instead dive into what’s going on underneath and try to address that in a healthy way.
Can you tell us about a few of those techniques?
The two that are recommended to me again and again and that work quite well together are the Socratic questioning method and motivational interviewing. But what was more surprising, and what had a big impact, was setting boundaries.
A lot of the time, people will give up on the QAnon believer in their life, because it’s just too hard. They’re spamming you with YouTube videos and blogs and nonsense nonstop every single day, and it’s just overwhelming to try to sit and work with them. One character in the book tries to support his fiancé by sitting and listening to her information. But it’s becoming overwhelming, and his therapist suggests to limit her to once a week. So he says to her, “Thursday evenings, I will sit with you, and we can go through every piece of QAnon content that you want to.”
At first it’s very frustrating for her, but in a surprising turn of events for everyone, including the therapist, it ended up having a huge impact on loosening her grasp on this. Once she had his full attention for one night a week, instead of just shouting information at him, he was fully engaged with her. She felt like he was hearing her, and they could become partners in finding the truth, instead of trying to shove it down each other’s throats. And because she had such a limited amount of time to bring things to him, she became a little more discerning about what content she showed him. So instead of the most extreme blood-drinking theories, she would try to bring him stuff that’s a little more digestible and a little tamer.
She also would anticipate that he was going to try to poke holes in her ideas and find inconsistencies. So she started pre-debunking it herself, because she wanted to spend this precious time not debating, but assessing. So it gradually re-stimulated her critical thinking skills in the process, and it allowed her to be a bit more analytical about her own material and information. That was an unexpected thing. I watched them go through that, and it was interesting to see how effective it was.
The Quiet Damage talks about why older folks are particularly vulnerable to this conspiracy — can you explain why?
I think it’s well understood that boomers and older people are susceptible to false information because they’re digital immigrants. They just don’t have the same level of skepticism of online content [since] they were parachuted into social media, not understanding that they can’t trust everyone who’s on there. For many of them, growing up, they had only a few dependable faces delivering the news every day, whereas now there are a million influencers out there fighting and clawing for your attention with their undisclosed narratives and interests.
But the factor that I think has been excluded from this conversation — when we look at boomers spreading fake news — again, comes down to those underlying needs. We do have an epidemic of loneliness among American seniors and seniors elsewhere around the world. Getting older comes with challenges. Many of the seniors I talked to described just feeling like society did not need them anymore. But QAnon is accessible to everyone. Conspiracy theories are in so many ways similar to activism, because there’s some “evil” and you can be part of this movement to take down. So it can be like a self-appointed job in retirement for a lot of older folks, who get to sign onto Facebook and scream about poisonous vaccines that are killing us all, or chemtrails that are destroying the skies.
It’s not that they’re dumb or that cognitive aging issues are causing them to be more gullible. It makes them feel like they’re doing something important again, and they’re contributing to society, and helping others, and they’re shoulder to shoulder with young people online who are also in this cause. It’s just heartbreaking.
Do you think there will be a time when QAnon is a thing of the past?
I think the branding of QAnon has really faded, and the conspiracy theories have been so effectively diluted and normalized that they don’t even seem that outrageous anymore. For example, it feels like everyone is just screaming at each other, calling each other pedophiles, with no basis in reality or evidence of harm to children. It just feels like a political tactic now to paint your opponent as a child abuser. So when I look at our election season, I see QAnon-originated disinformation everywhere, but you just don’t see people recognizing it as QAnon because you just don’t hear that word as much anymore. People aren’t openly identifying as QAnon believers; they may be embracing the theories without even knowing where they came from. That’s what’s really disturbing: The Overton window has shifted so far that our new normal is just really fucking gross, to put it bluntly.
How can we stop it?
There’s a lot more that big tech can do — they have such a large role in incentivizing disinformation. On so many of these platforms, you can earn a cut of the ad revenue you generate. So there’s an incentive to go viral at any cost necessary, including by spreading crazy shit that you know is going to get a lot of eyes. Some steps have been put in place to stop that direct chain of profiting off of conspiracy theories — YouTube took some action a few years back in response to public outcry — but X or Twitter is just an absolute shit show right now, and people are going wild with it.
But I think on a grand scale, it’s helpful to not just look at this as an information crisis, with these big tech platforms being the big problem — but also to look at it as a wellness crisis. I think a lot of people are turning to conspiracy theories as a crutch, the same way we’ve seen people turn to drugs, alcohol, gambling. People are not doing well right now — America is not doing well. In so many ways, Covid played a big role. The world that we returned to post-Covid was in many ways worse than the one we left behind. There are still people suffering from great financial loss, school shootings are spiking, the climate is in a terrible state, and the A.I. boom is causing a lot of anxiety around job security and other issues. There’s a lot of reasons to feel afraid right now. And so I think investing in mental health resources for people is going to do a lot more than playing Whack-a-Mole with disinformation online. The tech is always going to evolve faster than the methods to fact-check.
Is there any reason to have hope?
A couple people do climb out of the rabbit hole in the book, and we follow them along that journey, and we see what works, what doesn’t, and why. And I think the reason for hope is what I was alluding to earlier. If we just look at this as an information crisis or as a tech problem, there’s really no reason to feel good, because this thing is just spiraling out of control. If the only answer is, “We need to rein in big tech,” I wouldn’t say there’s really any reason for optimism there, because there’s just no putting the genie back in the bottle.
But if we shift our approach and look at this as a wellness crisis, there are things we can do. There are ways that we can intervene and support people and try to foster a healthier society. It’s still a tall order to say, like, “Let’s improve America’s mental health system, and let’s try to get people into a better space.” That’s a big, big ask, but I think it’s reason for hope and reason for optimism, because it is something we can accomplish.
