Trigger warning for a depiction of attempted suicide.
I’ve listened to the QAA podcast (formerly QAnon Anonymous) for years now. This podcast has always been my best source for at least knowing what QAnon and its companion conspiracies are. I can’t say that I understand people’s belief in QAnon but I am at least conversant in some of its tenets. My other source of information about QAnon is the heartbreaking subreddit forum, QAnon Casualties. In QAnon Casualties, people share their stories of family members, friends, and spouses becoming lost to conspiracy theories and conspiracy thinking. They ask each other for advice—mostly about how to get their loved ones back—and find community. I’m glad I had both of these resources to lean on as I listened to Jesselyn Cook’s new book, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. This book is a deep dive into the human costs of belief in the QAnon conspiracies. Cook interviews members of five families to examine the cost of losing a relative to what seems, from the outside, an entirely different reality.
The lost ones all came to QAnon through different paths. For one, it was a medical mistake that caused a profound distrust in Western medicine that sent them searching for alternatives online. That search led to anti-vax influencers and dropped this lost one into QAnon territory. For another, it was loneliness and algorithm-generated recommendations that send them into darker corners of the internet. A third was recommended a well-produced QAnon video by a relative that got them to start asking questions. A fourth lost one, psychologically battered by years of racism, sought out reasons why Black people like her were always poor and sick. The fifth lost one is a spiritual seeker who felt the appeal of the conspiracy theory community and its all-encompassing explanations for everything.
Cook spoke mostly to the non-QAnon members of the family. (Conspiracy theorists and those lost to conspiracy are very skittish around writers and journalists for a variety of reasons and, further, some of the people discussed in this book are still lost to QAnon.) The stories Cook’s subjects tell all reflect the confusion felt by people outside of the conspiracies. When the lost ones try to explain they sound, frankly, insane. So many conversations with the lost ones turn into arguments and, in some cases, complete estrangement, because the two sides can’t find shared ground anymore. I would argue that the two sides don’t have a shared reality anymore. The lost ones get their information from completely different sources: 8kun, YouTube videos that haven’t been taken down yet, and social media. They have been conditioned to not trust anything that comes from traditional (mainstream) media. Meanwhile, their family members are utterly baffled that anyone can believe any of QAnon’s tenets, i.e. Pizzagate, murderous vaccines, the Storm, etc.
The Quiet Damage is not a book of answers about how to “deprogram” believers. Confronting someone’s deeply held beliefs with conflicting evidence usually causes the believer to double down and, often, stop talking to their interlocutor. Those lost ones who started to come back only did so on their own because the cognitive dissonance was too much to handle and their own beliefs unraveled around them. What I’ve learned from podcasts and reading about people who came back from conspiracy theories is that friends and family should do their best to stay in touch so that, when the unraveling happens, they can help their lost ones pick up the pieces of their imploded lives. This has its own psychological toll; the waiting family members may be pushed to their breaking points by the anger and vitriol of their lost ones.
And yet, Cook’s subjects all hope that someday they might be reconciled to their lost ones. I think I hope so, too, because even though I haven’t lost anyone to QAnon, I work as an information professional and I am scared shitless at how powerful conspiracy theories have become in the United States and the United Kingdom. If lost ones can come back, maybe there is hope that QAnon and its conspiracies will finally fade away.