QAnon Is Still Ripping Families Apart
A new book counts the cost of the lingering delusion.
The Quiet Damage
QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family
by Jesselyn Cook
Crown, 272 pp., $30
EMILY HAD SOME TOUGH BREAKS IN LIFE but she was strong, smart, and resilient. When her husband took his own life, leaving her with three children to raise, the Tennessee resident launched a new career by going to law school. Her youngest son, Adam, then in grade school, tagged along to some of her night classes and watched amazed as she stood there “brilliant and fearless, dazzling her law instructors.” She graduated with top honors and was hired by a large law firm, later going into solo practice.
And then her life and her connection to her children was destroyed by madness.
It began with the daily dosings of Fox News that got Emily, formerly a committed Democrat and “progressive beacon,” to rethink her political allegiances. By 2016, she was an all-in Trump supporter. In time, instructed by message boards and slickly produced videos, she found her way into QAnon, a network of people who believe the world is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who drink the blood of babies and children, Bill Gates is putting microchips in vaccines, Mike Pence was cloned in a test tube, and Michelle Obama is a man.
Emily’s two older children gave up on her long before Adam did. He threw himself into trying to ease her back to reality, upending his life and jeopardizing his own law career. At one point Adam texted Emily: “I know who you are. You’re educated, you’re smart, you’re successful, you’re accomplished. But mom, you’ve been brainwashed by propaganda designed to manipulate and deceive you.” Adam watched as the three dots flickered, indicating that she was typing a reply, and then a message appeared: “I feel the same of you.”
The story of Emily and Adam is one of five family dramas tracked in a new book, The Quiet Damage, by journalist Jesselyn Cook. Each is tragic and heartbreaking in its own way. All feel highly pertinent to the political realities of the moment, where great masses of people share beliefs that are demonstrably untrue. Cook is a longtime investigative journalist and first-time author. Her character’s names are pseudonyms, but their stories are real.
We also meet Doris, who had shared a life with Dale for five decades before the Alabama couple’s “shared reality began to fracture” when she was sucked into the QAnon abyss. And Matt, a “God-fearing Republican” in Missouri who worked for a Christian radio station and was pulled into the vortex, spending “some eight hours a day mainlining QAnon content” and making his wife and two children an afterthought. Alice of California was once an ardent supporter of Bernie Sanders; one morning after being up all night on the internet, she announced to her fiancé, Christopher, that she was wrong in having hated Donald Trump, who she now realized, as Cook phrases it, “was secretly saving humanity from dark and powerful forces.”
Finally, there’s Kendra, who like her sister Tayshia lived on the north side of Milwaukee but ended up being in a different world. Tayshia, a social justice activist and member of Black Lives Matter, watches in shocked silence as Kendra and her friends pass around their phones, excitedly sharing QAnon truths: “Joe Biden rapes and eats children. Covid-19 isn’t real. The Jews control the media. George Floyd’s killing was a hoax. Trump is a savior for Black people. A war is coming.”
At one point Kendra’s young son, Jonah, who lives in terror after being told by his mother that the world is ruled by people who “eat kids,” angrily lashes out at his aunt Tayshia following the heart-attack death of her husband, Buck, whom they both loved. It was all her fault, Jonah tells Tayshia, for letting Buck be vaccinated. “You killed him,” Jonah cries out. “Mom told me.”
Cook’s book relates many such cruelties, as QAnon creates a divide between family members that turns love to anger. None is more awful than when Adam, venting anger after his more patient efforts have failed, hits “send” on an email to his mother in December 2020: “So long as you continue to live in your internet fantasyland of propaganda, misinformation and lies, you are not my mother. You would cause us all far less trauma and pain if you kept to yourself. I want absolutely nothing to do with you.”
Emily responds in kind. “PAIN IS COMING FOR YOU,” she writes to Adam, “AND YOUR BELOVED CHINA JOE, FRAUD OBAMA AND HIS MAN WIFE MICHAEL.” She calls her son a “monster,” a “huge disappointment,” an “utter embarrassment,” and a “spoiled evil brat” who deserved to suffer for his choices. “Shed my DNA,” she tells him. “I am DONE WITH YOU.”
This would not be the last time Adam reached out to Emily, or the last time he found her unreachable.
THE QUIET DAMAGE GRAPPLES with two large questions. The first: How is it that people come to believe ridiculous things for which there is no evidence? The second: What, if anything, can be done about it?
QAnon conspiracy theories are embraced by millions of people. A survey last fall by the Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with the Brookings Institution found that 25 percent of the American public believes that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.” That’s up from 15 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, there has been a decline in QAnon rejecters, from 40 percent to 29 percent, among all groups. Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to be QAnon believers (29 percent versus 14 percent) and three times less likely to be QAnon rejecters (14 percent versus 43 percent). But it’s worth noting that the percentage of Democrats who reported believing in QAnon doubled from 2021 to 2023.
QAnon adherents believe they are being entrusted with a responsibility to fight evil and save the world. They think that by keeping the faith and spreading the word, they can help bring about what’s known as the “Great Awakening,” when the sinister people in power will be exposed and they’ll all be arrested.
Backing up these fantastical notions are high-quality videos full of shocking revelations and “Q Drops” of wisdom that periodically appear on select websites, saying things like “The TRUTH is right in front of you,” FAKE NEWS/HWOOD PUPPETS LOST CONTROL,” and, without a trace of irony, “Think for Yourself.”
Cook describes the thought process that played out in Matt’s head:
It felt special—exciting, somehow, like he was in on a secret. He couldn’t think of any reason why the video’s creator would lie. What could they stand to gain from making all of this up? There was no sales pitch, no catch; it just seemed like an earnest message for anyone open-minded enough to listen.
QAnon is formidable, and its approach to recruitment is ingenious. As Cook relates, it doesn’t start with “lurid tales of cannibalism, infanticide, or satanic sex abuse rituals,” but with “lighter, more digestible conspiracy theory hors d’oeuvres with kernels of truth baked in.” First it’s about corrupt elites, later the global child sex trafficking. Cook describes how this played out for Alice: “If this one crazy thing was true, couldn’t this other, slightly crazier thing also be true?”
The QAnon ethos puts a high value on recruiting new members, and the group even offers advice on how to do so. The figure who posts as Q offered this advice to adherents in a drop: “Do not force those not yet ready. The FAKE NEWS narrative (make-believe) has been ingrained for a long time. Do not isolate yourself within your own family . . .”
INDEED, THE QUIET DAMAGE IS never more poignant than when it attests to how those who fall under the QAnon spell want to draw others in—because they love them. Alice, for instance, tried to win over Christopher, and when that failed, she focused on her friends.
“Alice had a mission,” explains Cook. “Whether she liked it or not, she believed that it was incumbent upon her to awaken her friends. Withholding a truth this monumental would feel like lying, and to her, the most important part of any relationship was a foundation of trust.”
But when Alice posted some of her QAnon truths on Facebook, her friends blew a gasket. “Nooooo not you too,” wrote one person. “For fuck sake, knock it off,” said another. A third relayed: “You are being willfully ignorant.”
Met with anger and rejection, Alice fell deeper in the QAnon fold, where acceptance and affirmation awaits.
And so the first rule about trying to break the QAnon spell—which Christopher adopted for Alice at the advice of his therapist—is to respond not with hostility but a sense of curiosity, even if it’s feigned. Don’t tell believers they’re wrong; ask them to discuss what they believe and why. “The truth is that the truth is almost beside the point,” Cook explains. “Facts alone won’t fix this; to get bogged down in debunking falsehoods is to tackle the symptom, not the cause.” The cause is that people are hurting, and believing that they are helping save the world helps.
In Alice’s case, both Christopher and her father invested countless hours in discussion and online communication, seeking out areas of agreement upon which to build. Through this process Alice was ultimately able to conclude that while Bill Gates was certainly a “shady” character, he might not actually be using vaccines to implant secret microchips in people’s bodies. Her breakthrough admission: “I guess it’s possible that some of the things I’ve seen about him aren’t 100 percent true.”
The book also advises trying to get QAnon proponents thinking about other things besides the blood-drinking murderous pedophiles who run everything. This works to some extent with Doris, who comes slowly back into Dale’s world after a long-festering open sore on her arm causes such unbearable pain that she can no longer refuse appropriate medical care. But in the couples’ final appearance in the book, Doris is still urging Dale to watch some disturbing video she just found on the internet; he wearily begs off to go to bed, alone.
Alice, too, finds herself at risk of being drawn back into QAnon after her attempt to connect with members of QAnonCasualties, a Reddit support group for loved ones of QAnon believers, was angrily rebuffed.1 (“You’re an asshole, and an idiot for seeking comfort from people who are being traumatized by people like YOU every day,” said one.) Kendra is never extricated from the group’s grasp. And Emily’s final effort to reconnect with Adam apparently comes too late. She emails him: “I love you my beautiful boy, and pray this day and my email greets you with all the love it intends and opens a dialogue for you and I being ‘us’ again. Until such time, I will wait, patiently.” Notes Cook, “He never responded.”
Only Matt seems able to put QAnon behind him, after it has destroyed his marriage and upended his life. He came to realize, Cook writes, that he “just needed to be a good parent, a good partner, and a good person. That was enough.”
But the quiet damage, to his life and others, has already been done.
This sentence has been slightly reworded following a contact from the person whom Cook dubs “Alice.” She wrote to emphasize that she did not fall back into QAnon, and that she has “chosen to maintain equanimity and respectful interactions with people across the political spectrum” so that she can focus on “help[ing] people learn how to treat each other with care, compassion and respect regardless of differences in beliefs.”
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