QAnon, Family, and the Fallout: Casey is joined by Jesselyn Cook, author of "The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family", for a deep dive into the conspiracy theory that's fractured families and reshaped politics. From pizza boxes to pandemics, discover why QAnon isn't just a punchline—it's personal. Subscribe and rate MTR on: 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mastering-the-room/id1725338042 🔊 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/30B5HT6QCFnakmtp0MnZoT Or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For comments, bookings or advertising opportunities, hit up: Matt McDermott matt.mcdermott@idfive.com
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Host: Casey Burgat
Guest: Jesselyn Cook
Producers: Matt McDermott, Madison Zuccheri
Recoding & Production: Dan Schepleng
Mastering the Room is brought to you by the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management. Learn more: https://gspm.gwu.edu/
Casey (00:00.27)
because we are. Cool. Anything I should know about you, the publication, anything you want to plug or anything?
Jesselyn Cook (00:01.214)
Okay, great.
Jesselyn Cook (00:10.716)
don't think so. But maybe something will come up later, but no, I don't think so.
Casey (00:14.19)
Okay, promo yourself, who cares? All right.
Casey (00:22.082)
All right, my roommates, are back with another episode of Mastering the Room, and this one ain't like the others. This is a personal interest of mine, and today we talking about QAnon. QAnon and the effects it has not only on our political system, but actually the people involved, and even more downstream, their families, their friends, their social networks.
It's a big, big thing. You've heard about it, but do you know about it? I didn't, and so I brought on an expert. Can we call you that, Jessalyn? Absolutely, we can. The author of The Quiet Damage, QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. We have Jessalyn Cook joining us. Jessalyn, thanks for being here.
Jesselyn Cook (00:59.104)
Sure, I'm flattered, thank you.
Jesselyn Cook (01:10.592)
So glad to be here, thanks.
Casey (01:12.588)
So again, QAnon is something everyone knows. They probably even made fun of it. They maybe even had an experience with it, even if they didn't know that's what it was. Someone they got, they're connected with, caught up in something, disinformation, social media, you know it. But tell us how you got involved in this and then give us the quick pitch on the book of what's in there.
Jesselyn Cook (01:35.062)
Sure, so QAnon, conspiracy theories, weird online corners. I'd spent a lot of time reporting on all sorts of odd stuff found online. I think my beat for a while as a reporter was just online harm, so I was writing about all kinds of weird stuff. And conspiracy theories were coming up a lot. I was doing a lot of reporting around this leading into the 2020 election cycle and...
I found myself at a QAnon rally in Hollywood in August of 2020, actually. I had heard, I had just moved to the area and I had heard that there was a QAnon rally that would be taking place on Hollywood Boulevard. And I was intrigued because up until that point, QAnon, we had seen a few QAnon signs at Trump rallies and we were seeing a little more activity offline, but for the most part, it was an online movement. A lot of people who...
endorsed these beliefs didn't necessarily want their face associated with them. So they were, you know, anonymous online accounts. So I went to this rally not really knowing what to expect, maybe a dozen, a couple dozen people. And instead I found a thousand people marching through Hollywood and waving all kinds of wild signs. I met a lady who had literally taped a pizza box to herself and she had written on it, pizza gate is real, which is of course
one of the many conspiracy theories kind of making up this web of madness. And I was just blown away by what I was seeing because I had been reporting on this stuff for so long and I had been doing so much of this reporting just primarily online. And so getting a chance to go out and talk to people and understand where they were finding their information, how it was impacting them offline was really fascinating. And one of the interactions I had that day that really stuck with me was
I was wearing a press badge around my neck as a journalist and this man called out to me. He was angry. In QAnon's mythology, journalists are part of the deep state. We're part of this enemy group that is working against the interests of the American people and democracy. And so this man was yelling at me. He was saying that as part of the media, I was evil. But what was startling to me was he was holding the hand of this little kid, like this boy who was maybe six.
Jesselyn Cook (03:52.246)
And this boy was wearing a shirt that in all caps letters had adrenochrome written across it and with the N and the O in the middle and extra large letters saying no to adrenochrome. And adrenochrome is this QAnon theory that essentially liberal elites, the most powerful people in the world are kidnapping and torturing kids to terrify them to produce more adrenochrome chemical in their blood and then
drinking their blood as an immortality elixir, a really, really wild theory in the QAnon realm. And I just remember looking at this kid and kind of really wondering what he was hearing at home, what he was being told was true, and how was that affecting him at school? How was that affecting his relationship with his peers? And it just was this moment. I mean, if you think back to 2020, it was a really wild time. were in the early stages of a wild pandemic.
We were having a really hard time as a country parsing real from fake. something about that kid just really kind of haunted me. And so I ended up, after this rally, going on to write a big feature story about children of Cuban nonbelievers, young people, young adults, teens, kids who were on their own trying to figure out how to de-radicalize their own parents, teach them true from false, right from wrong. This article really, was a big...
A lot of work went into it. was a really big reporting piece. And it ultimately ended up going a little bit viral. And that is what led some literary agents to reach out and ultimately what steered me out of the path of writing the book.
Casey (05:29.14)
Awesome. And so a lot here. I mean, we already got to the blood drinking part of it, which I assume is what everyone wants to talk about. But I want to talk about the book because I really appreciate how you went about it. That it's not about QAnon specifically, like the full, the web that you called it, but more about the families, the destruction that this type of, even if well intentioned type of belief system.
really just is something that a lot of families I think could kind of nod their way through and see like, man, this my mom, this my uncle, this is my friend from high school, someone that is connected to them. And it really just paints a picture of like the destruction, the victim isn't the actual person who is susceptible to these beliefs or believes them to their core, but actually the victims are the people that are left or surrounding them trying to pull them back from this type of behavior. talk about how you found these stories.
And what got left out? Because I can't imagine these are the only five you've found.
Jesselyn Cook (06:29.374)
Yeah, after that feature story I had written, it went a little viral online and I ended up just hearing from hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people reaching out to me with their own stories of losing a parent or a sibling or a neighbor or a friend or a niece or nephew into the QAnon rabbit hole. And the stories, they were so different in so many ways, different paths into these belief systems, different types of people, different forms of belief, different theories. But
The really similar thing was all these loved ones of human unbelievers and conspiracy theorists were telling me it felt like watching someone they knew so well, someone they loved and maybe had known since they were little kid kind of transform into a stranger before their eyes. Not only were they adopting delusional beliefs, sometimes they were adopting really hateful beliefs as well and just becoming really, really difficult to be around, really combative and...
their relationship was just really struggling. And so I wrote back to everyone I heard from. Once I was approached to start writing a book, I reached out to all the people who I thought might be interested in taking part in a bigger project. And I wanted to challenge the assumption that QAnon believers and conspiracy theorists more broadly are idiots, especially at this time.
QAnon was kind of blowing up in the media. We were starting to see it mentioned on late night talk shows. It was always a punchline. It was always, these are idiots. And what I was hearing and what I was discovering in my reporting was there were a lot of really intelligent people who were pulled into these spaces. And so when I was choosing the storylines that I, the subjects, the people I wanted to include in the book, I really wanted to represent the diverse range of people who do fall into these belief systems. And so.
Casey (07:58.734)
Exactly.
Jesselyn Cook (08:20.214)
That was how I met a lot of the people. Some of them I found through my own separate reporting. I went to lot of QAnon rallies while writing this book, but a lot of the reporting kind of did come to me as a result of that first article.
Casey (08:33.62)
Awesome. so here's where I think it's helpful because I knew about QAnon. I had only heard about it, referred to it, probably even was subject to this too of using it as a punchline and doing just like you mentioned of these are just misguided folks. These are the radical of the right there. This is a radical movement and these are just certain amount of a certain population is susceptible to this stuff. Just like there's been conspiracies forever.
And this is kind of a bigger one and exacerbated one, a faster one. But there's a certain population for this. But what your book says is that there isn't and it's more widespread. I mean, the numbers you throw in here, which gets me to the original question of what is QAnon? Like what do QAnon believers believe? What is the canon of QAnon?
Jesselyn Cook (09:24.118)
Cuneon, it started out as this far-right fringe movement and the whole central idea was that Donald Trump had come to power to save humanity, basically, against the so-called deep state. This cabal of evil elites, the most powerful people in the world, we're talking from the royal family to democratic leaders to Hollywood celebrities, powerful athletes, all liberal folks who were
working together in secret to control the world. And the belief was that this system of power, this secret system of power had been in place for decades and everyone who had tried to challenge it so far had been unsuccessful. Former presidents had been assassinated and such. And so Donald Trump was finally the man who was gonna change that. He was gonna bring the deep state to its knees and kind of return power to the people. And the evils of the deep state manifest in different ways according to the lore. You know, they're poisoning our.
They're poisoning our skies with chemtrails. There is a huge underground sex trafficking ring of children. Really, the interesting thing about QAnon is that it kind of contorts to absorb every wild conspiracy theory you can think of from anti-vaccine stuff to, yes, chemtrails to really any kind of anti-establishment belief system can be adopted into QAnon. And so...
Casey (10:48.278)
Including the weather, by the way, right? For some.
Jesselyn Cook (10:50.076)
Yes, geoengineering the weather, really any kind of evil, real or perceived, can be attributed to the deep state. And I think it's also important to acknowledge, we don't hear the word QAnon as much anymore. There are lots of reasons for that. But what's been interesting to observe in the years that I've been reporting on this topic and watching our culture shifts is QAnon really hasn't
disappeared, it's just blended in. We don't use the label as much. We don't have the most extreme theories as present in our discourse anymore, but it's really been normalized. And I think part of it is just this pitchfork populism. A lot of people, for good reasons as well, have a lot of doubt and skepticism about our establishments of power. But even some of the anti-transgender sentiment and some of the
just various forms of conspiracy theory ideology have been repeated by some of our elected leaders and kind of normalized in a way that has made them more acceptable to as many people would perceive. And I'd say that Overton window has shifted a lot so that we don't necessarily think of things that were once extreme to be so extreme anymore.
Casey (12:07.062)
And so you mentioned that there were former saviors. So I'm curious about like the impetus for it to be a theory. We've had conspiracy theories forever, right? I mean, the Salem witch trials was a form of this that caught fire in a particular time, in a particular place. People suffered. This is different. This is big. And so I'm curious, like, when was, when did it come about? From where? Do we know these answers? And then what was like the catalyst? What actually became like, it went from
being this thing that existed to being pervasive.
Jesselyn Cook (12:41.302)
QAnon, the first Q drop, which is just kind of a post by Q, who's the shadowy anonymous leader at the center of this movement, supposedly. The first communication from QAnon was in October of 2017 on 4chan. And since then, QAnon has migrated from platform to platform. But what really brought QAnon from the fringes into the mainstream was this perfect storm of conditions that created the
breeding ground for conspiracy theories to take over. The pandemic was a huge one. People were afraid, they were locked down, they felt like their power and a lot of their normal lives were being upended and taken away from them. And so one thing that QAnon does really well is it provides answers. If you think early in the pandemic, before we knew where the virus came from, before we knew
how it could be addressed. There were so many questions people had and scientists were working really, really hard to deliver answers, but this was a novel thing and QAnon didn't have to wait for facts to emerge. could kind of fill these information voids with its own twisted version of events. And so when people are afraid, they want answers immediately and conspiracy theorists can deliver them, whether they're true or false. And people are a lot more vulnerable to falsehoods and fear when
there's uncertainty. We didn't know what was going to happen with the pandemic. We didn't know what the next day would hold even. so QAnon gave people a sense of certainty, a sense of comfort. And there was just a lot of things. We had a very politically chaotic situation in the States at the time, I'm sure you remember. And so all these conditions were in place that not only made people more susceptible to falsehoods, it also made groups like QAnon a lot more.
Casey (14:20.046)
I remember. I do.
Jesselyn Cook (14:30.614)
powerful and that's a really dangerous combination. And so it really took off and we also saw some of, you know, there were elements of the Trump campaign that seemed to kind of embrace or at least wink and nod tacitly endorsing some of the QAnon conspiracy theories because QAnon really held Trump to be a God, you know, he was at the center of this movement that was going to save humanity. so rather than discredit QAnon or disavow QAnon, Trump was given multiple chances to do this.
He never really did and so that gave them a lot of legitimacy and kind of inserted them into the conversation in a really major way.
Casey (15:07.296)
And so let's go back to the who these folks are, right? Because we've mentioned Trump, he's purported to be the savior of this, so you can obviously see a connection to the right. But as your book points out, it ain't just the right, right? There's actually so people that loop back around. So is there an average QAnon member, an average QAnon supporter? Who's the modal person here?
Jesselyn Cook (15:29.91)
You know, there's really, there's no one demographic box for a QAnon believer. And I think people really wanted there to be. They really jumped to the assumption that QAnon believers were stupid, were just low IQ folks, were Republicans, were probably white Trump supporters and maybe older folks. mean, there's a lot of data suggesting that older folks can be more susceptible to misinformation online. But what I found was the common denominator from all these different people I interviewed,
You know, in the book we've got a mother of color. We've got a very educated white lawyer, a very privileged. We've got elderly folks. We have a child. Really runs the gamut. And I think what made all of them susceptible was not a low IQ necessarily. was, there was something that left them feeling unfulfilled in their life. There was some kind of human need they had that was not being met. And QAnon filled that void in a really powerful way.
whether that was a sense of belonging, of purpose, of community, of meaning, it's a very participatory movement and you're not just a passive observer, you're really an active digital soldier is what members like to call themselves. And that comes with a lot of emotional benefits for people who might otherwise feel unsatisfied in their lives.
Casey (16:49.984)
It's such an important point that the validation and the community that it builds, it makes sense on a human, like we can talk about it and say, yes, you can go find community here. But a common thread throughout is that there was, I don't want to say trauma, but there was some sort of, some event or combination of events that left them mad, even if they couldn't register it as anger, but left them distrustful.
Like one of your examples that you had that fell to QAnon was a misdiagnosis of cancer, which then just leads to this. I mean, there's a widespread skepticism of big pharma and that the incentive structure for the healthcare system is to keep you sick, which a lot of well-educated, non-conspiratorial folks, including many of my students, that was one of the main things they said like, yeah, I don't trust them. And then, so you start having like these, really like.
matchstick moments where the fire is lit and then all of sudden we're in rabbit holes and we're in a completely different place. So can you talk about the slippery slope of this type of stuff of there's always been anti-establishment sentiment, there's always anti-Hollywood, there's always anti-there's this some greater force that I am not a part of and I don't like them, they're controlling things all the way through the weather I guess now to extremities. But that's a widespread phenomenon that crosses
ideological spectrums and ages and demographics. And it leads to, is it that combination of this distrust that's kind of with on all of us and then some sort of a catalyst event that makes us sink?
Jesselyn Cook (18:30.612)
Yeah, it's a good question because you're right, we have had conspiracy theories sort of ebbing and flowing throughout our history going back centuries. what was different for QAnon and what really allowed it to flourish was social media. mean, social media is not the whole puzzle. There's a lot that goes on there. But in the case of the woman you mentioned, Doris, she, an elderly lady, has a cancer misdiagnosis and
this really terrifies her and enrages her. She's very angry with her doctor. She feels that he was trying to prey on her. She goes online. She finds an entire community on Facebook of people who also have this deep seated distrust of the medical establishment. when you spend enough time in these online groups, we've seen a lot of studies showing how the algorithmic recommendation engines can kind of nudge people along into increasingly extreme spaces. And so for this woman,
She started out in kind of alternative wellness spaces, which led all the way, slippery slope, to QAnon. But she had grown up in a world where she didn't necessarily have to be super skeptical of the information she was presented with. She grew up in a time decades ago where there were three major news sources and there were only a few trusted faces delivering her the news every day. She really was hearing the same.
version of story from all of them. And she was parachuted into this online world, the social media world, where she didn't understand the incentive structures that big tech companies operate on that are really prioritizing profit. And they will show you things that are false and show you things that are extreme if it's going to keep you clicking and scrolling. And so her world online was being distorted in a way she didn't understand. And it really shaped the way she started to see things offline. this was true not only of the older folks in the book, but really
A lot of characters, a lot of subjects of the book found themselves in these echo chambers where they were seeing really warped versions of reality and not understanding that everyone else wasn't seeing the same thing. They were all in their different silos. So this is why conspiracy theories, it feels like they've really got a lot more power in today's day and age.
Casey (20:43.534)
And backup or cherry pick data to fit a narrative, right? To speak to your earlier point of trying to connect dots that simply can't be connected until you really, really want them to be, or your identity now depends on it. And so here's what scares the hell out of me, or at least one of the things from your book is, and I find this in politics too, is that it's really like, if you got a hundred QAnon, even just believers, I think there's a lot more, they won't say they're,
supporters of QAnon, but they support pieces of QAnon, right? The theory, even if they don't even know it's attributable to it. That the fact that there's the extremes within this group, so like let's say the child blood drinking set, right? That's one feature of believing this whole web of theories behind QAnon. And the fact that they can point to that extreme version allows them to say, I'm not that.
Right? They're able to distance themselves from that where there's a lot of overlap between what they do believe. So when they're their friends or families that are trying to pull them back from this saying what you're thinking is delusional, look all this, and they can at least point and say, yeah, but I'm not that like those are the crazy people. What I believe is true. You what you believe in is conspiracy. Mine are just supported by facts.
And that number to me, I mean, we can only quote what people identify as, right? That number to me is probably much, much higher going back again to these fundamental connections between societies of like fundamental distrust and skepticism of someone more powerful, more rich, access to power, that type of stuff. Like there's a skepticism here where people are able to, because I'm not the most extreme means I'm not one of them and I'm still right.
Jesselyn Cook (22:30.986)
Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons we don't hear as much about QAnon anymore is because Q, this figure at the center of the movement, working supposedly with Donald Trump, actually said in a Q drop to kind of shed the branding, stop using the label QAnon. The media has tainted it. the idea is that the media has associated QAnon with the really, really extreme beliefs, which has led people to discredit the rest of them. And so people have kind of left the label of QAnon behind. But this, again, a lot of people
who I've reported on have kind of adopted some of these beliefs without even recognizing that they necessarily came from QAnon. And so it really blends in. And even in one of the storylines in the book, we have one man who met a father of two kids who goes deep down the rabbit hole, absorbs a bunch of QAnon ideology, ends up climbing back out only to find out that his now ex-wife has started adopting some of this stuff. And more of the conspiracy theory hors d'oeuvres, not the really extreme stuff, but she's
Casey (23:05.304)
Exactly.
Jesselyn Cook (23:29.354)
convinced about some really kind of ludicrous ideas about the vaccine. You know, there are some reasons to be, it started out, think, with healthy skepticism and wanting to do some research to make sure it was safe for her kids, but it ended up with her believing the COVID vaccine would make you magnetic and had microchips and all the stuff that is kind of really beyond the pale. And so it is interesting how there's been a bit of that detachment, as you said, between the really extreme kind of point and laugh kind of conspiracy theories that so many people have ridiculed and the ones that
now feel a little more digestible.
Casey (24:01.164)
Yeah, so let's talk, let's be explicit about these hors d'oeuvres as you call them so people can kind of check their beliefs or even like, where are my circle here of people that are, you know, the, let's say the outside the box thinkers, the questioners, right? The documents type, I saw a study type people. Like what are the hors d'oeuvres that people won't associate with QAnon but are like the slippery slope type stuff of like you are, let's just say you're more in the circle than out of it.
Jesselyn Cook (24:28.372)
You know, I think we see the most examples of that territory in maybe the wellness space. The wellness space is a really interesting pipeline into QAnon type beliefs. there's a lot of, you know, Doris in the book, the one who had the cancer misdiagnosis, she had a lot of reasons to be skeptical of the medical system. We have seen time and again, how some of the really big pharmaceutical companies have clearly prioritized profits over people and have put their own
customers essentially at risk. But she starts absorbing some of this stuff basically saying that all doctors are part of this establishment and are all trying to maybe endanger their patients to profit off of them. And it's interesting, even just a lot of the moms in this space, in the wellness space, who I've reported on, they are becoming anti-vaccine for reasons in interviews with them.
necessarily been able to articulate to me very well. They don't necessarily understand why they're anti-vaccine other than this idea that it comes from the medical establishment, as they call it, which they can't trust. And so it takes a lot of work to actually understand the science and the research and to try to even debunk some of the wild stuff you see online. And not everyone has the time, energy, or desire to do that work. But once you start kind of using this broad brush to paint off
trusted establishments and even journalists in the media and experts as suspicious, where can you turn for your information then? It's really difficult to trust anyone if you're gonna be that kind of dubious all the time. And I should say this is true increasingly on the left as well. It really, QAnon started out and conspiracy theories I think are generally thought of as a really right-wing issue, but even
some of the maybe more digestible theories in the wake of the first assassination attempt of Donald Trump. know, a lot of people said that was staged and I understand people's reasons for being skeptical. Donald Trump has been caught repeating lies many, many times and that has weakened people's trust in him. But there was photo evidence that came out. There were New York Times photos that literally showed the bullet whipping behind his head and nicking his ear. And people would still, you know, some of the
Jesselyn Cook (26:56.106)
conspiracy theories I saw suggesting, God, I can't even remember. There was something about Elon Musk's Starlink being involved. It got pretty wild and it was, you know, not from the people. It was the people who had been making fun of QAnon believers for refusing to accept evidence now kind of doing the same.
Casey (27:13.462)
Yeah, but that leads to the struggle I have with this is that people see that other people are susceptible to conspiratorial beliefs. What I believe is just I see it with my own eyes and your information is wrong. which leads to a really important part of your book and how we deal with this in our everyday lives is how do you approach someone who has fallen maybe not to the extremes down the rabbit hole, but someone doing
What I think is healthy, the healthy skepticism of huge institutions with some sometimes outright perverse incentive structures. We've been shown time and again that government has lies, that tobacco companies have lies. Like we've had enough evidence to point to saying, maybe we shouldn't trust these guys. And so that's something, that's one thing, but to go down the very, very extremes of now the sudden that you have microchips in your arms, that's, I'm talking about the people in the middle. How do we approach this knowing that debunking
It doesn't work. There's just a, there's so much information. You can find whatever information you want. And then even if you do debunk A, there's B, C, D, all the way through infinity. And you're never going to get to a place where people just say, yep, your information is right. Mine was wrong. I'm sorry for the pain I've caused. So how do we approach these types of folks in a healthy way?
Jesselyn Cook (28:35.862)
That's the big question. so many of the people in my book really did try to come at it as a true false thing. They saw someone they loved spewing what seemed to be false information. And they were determined to convince them, you are wrong. I am right. I'm going to bring you facts, evidence, just inundate you with as much information debunking your false belief as I possibly can. And as you said, that really goes nowhere. And I think what I discovered in my reporting time and time again is that
The reason that is ineffective in these cases is because it's really treating the symptom, not the cause. At the end of the day, a lot of these people don't necessarily care about true and false. They don't necessarily care to even verify that what they're repeating is true. A lot of it, I think, comes down to tribal epistemology. It's a phrase that essentially means people want to believe they belong to a tribe. Maybe that's
MAGA, maybe that's being part of the Bernie movement, whatever it may be, some kind of movement you feel that you belong to, and you absorb the belief system that that group has. so what I think is important when trying to help people out of these belief systems is first to not get too hung up on the what of the conspiracy theory, not the substance, the actual theory itself, but more importantly, the why. Why is this person believing this stuff?
or seeking it out in the first place. And that's not always easy to do, but again and again, as I was reporting it, there was something going on underneath a few layers down for this older woman you mentioned who had the cancer misdiagnosis. That was kind of what tripped her into the rabbit hole, so to speak. But really, I mean, she and her husband were both older. They were both spending a ton of time on Facebook. They both could have encountered a ton of misinformation.
She went into the rabbit hole, he didn't. And the difference I think is her husband had this really vibrant community around him. He was going out, he was interacting with people every day. She had kind of slipped away from that. She wasn't as physically able anymore. She was staying home and alone a lot. And so for her, QAnon really did give her a sense of community and purpose. And so rather than trying to debunk all of her misinformation, what would have been more helpful in supporting her?
Jesselyn Cook (30:56.306)
is trying to actually meet those underlying needs. Like how can we find you community and purpose offline? How can we pull you out of this web and maybe get you involved in volunteering or some kind of hobby or something that is gonna meet those needs in a healthy way?
Casey (31:09.302)
And importantly, probably to enter in those communities that will not, not, not reinforce the beliefs, right? We always want to join communities that make us feel the most comfortable. And for these folks, they went into comfort in that these people see the world the way I do, and that's just self-reinforcing. Look how many millions of us we call can't be wrong. And so reintroducing them to folks who don't share those beliefs is exactly the point in a lot of these instances.
including political ones. But one thing in this conversation of what to do with our loved ones, because you don't want to just give up, right? Like that's the last thing you want to do, is that something that stuck with me incredibly was that one of the therapists that was approached about how do I deal with this, they talked through theories, I need to bring this person back in my life, I'm not willing to give up with them, that therapist outright said, I got some tactics for you, but you need to accept before you even have your first conversation.
you're unlikely to get this person back. And so talk to folks who are trying to make the calculation of for my own personal health, my own personal mental health or how it will affect my new family, my husband, my kids, how much human cost am I willing to give this person knowing that this is probably an uphill battle at this point.
Jesselyn Cook (32:30.878)
Yeah, Christopher, one of the subjects in the book, it was his fiance, Alice, the former Bernie supporter who wanted to cue in on who got really, really deep into this and kind of spiraled into someone Christopher could no longer recognize. And so he talks to his therapist, he asked for advice and the therapist says to him, know, if she never comes out, are you still going to love her? Will this relationship still be worth it to you? And that wasn't an easy question for him to answer. You know, he did love her, but could he continue to be with someone who
viewed the world so fundamentally differently and in a way that was really kind of devastating to him. And this is not always an easy thing to wrestle with. Some of the loved ones in the book for different storylines were, they just did not give up. They decided it was worth the battle. They desperately wanted to bring the person they loved back to reality. Others realized it wasn't worth the immense pain and stress it was causing them.
One woman, she went deep into conspiracy theories and QAnon, her two daughters backed away. was too painful to try to deal with this version of her and her son stuck around for much longer, but ultimately stepped back too. And their story was really painful to even chronicle because, I mean, if you haven't been through this, if you don't know what it's like to have the person you love most in the world starts just spewing absolute nonsense and being really vicious and cruel with you.
like a stranger, you just don't know how painful it is. it completely unraveled this guy's life, this young man who was trying to bring his mother back from the brink, essentially. He had lost one parent to suicide and another to QAnon. And in some ways, he said, QAnon, was more painful because it felt like she was making a choice. And he had to live with that every day. And he would spend hours and hours and hours trying to break through to her.
what he would get back was just more and more venom from her. She really felt like he wasn't just attacking her beliefs, he was attacking her because they had really wolfed themselves into the fiber of her identity. And so it was a really painful route for him, but he eventually realized, I just can't do it, it's too painful.
Casey (34:41.422)
And so I'm gonna backtrack on the question about who these folks are, because they're more widespread than we think and more average than the media would have us believe, or even you want to believe, probably yourself, that this is a pervasive thought system, even if it's not, people don't subscribe to being QAnon supporters. And so one of my probably unfair questions to you is like, is there just a certain segment of population that is susceptible to conspiratorial beliefs, right? Like is QAnon,
their first one? Or is this a gateway? They have gateway drugs where all of a sudden they're hopped up on sugar, then they try a different drug and all of sudden we're doing crack now. how does it, what's the, is there a common thread and Q is just the be all end all of a conspiratorial movement.
Jesselyn Cook (35:26.464)
There is some research showing that certain types of people are more susceptible. One example is narcissists, interestingly. Narcissism is one of the few markers that researchers can point to and say this really predisposes someone. for narcissists, conspiracy theories are really vindicating. They prove that people have it in for them. Conspiracy theories kind of show them as a contrarian, as a different thinker. It makes them special, unique, all these things that
can kind of feed into their narcissism. And this is true of collective narcissism too, which is kind of this, when you're part of a community and you're convinced that your community is under threat from other groups. it's interesting because a lot of the people who I've written about who have gone down the rabbit hole really don't necessarily meet any of these markers that maybe make them more susceptible, but you know.
it's people who have grievances. Conspiracy theories demand victim mentality. The whole system is based around the idea that some powerful person or group or community is out to get you. Anti-establishment conspiracy theories really feed into this idea that you are under threat in some way. And so these belief systems can be reinforced on Fox News, on social media, by our president. And so
that can really prime people. When you believe that you're a victim of the establishment, it becomes much easier to buy into anti-establishment conspiracy theories. But there were also people who, for decades, had never really entertained conspiracy theories, maybe thought they were kind of silly, and then went through some kind of traumatic or life-altering event that created some kind of void in them that conspiracy theories suddenly filled. And so...
Really, I believe that no one is entirely immune, no matter how smart you are, no matter how great your life is right now. We saw this really educated lawyer kind of go right down the rabbit hole herself.
Casey (37:27.702)
All right, the final line of questioning, it's been mentioned several times and a lot of people are going to outright say the number one reason we have this is social media. That it is a through line through a lot of your stories, Facebook in particular, but you mentioned already the algorithms, that there is a profit motive incentive to keep you clicking even if they know, they have no allegiance to the truth, it is all about the attention economy. Right, so where do you put the?
Again, an unfair question. If you had a pie of blame here, how big a slice does social media get for the pervasiveness of QAnon?
Jesselyn Cook (38:04.544)
It's hard to quantify exactly, I mean, okay. Well, I think social media has really accelerated this process. has exposed a lot more people to these extreme ideologies. I'm going to put it at more than 50%. And I will note again that, you know, conspiracy theories predate social media. They predate the internet. We know that, but...
Casey (38:06.54)
You have to.
Jesselyn Cook (38:31.73)
it really is just throwing gasoline on the fire and it's become a really effective way to create and disseminate and target this propaganda. And we've seen it weaponized by foreign governments. We've seen it weaponized by opportunistic influencers trying to make quick money on their videos. It's kind of just industrialized disinformation in a way that we hadn't seen before. So it just makes it a lot more accessible. So I mean, there are a lot of factors, but it's even hard to
pull them apart because even part of our political system we've seen political leaders weaponize conspiracy theories but they do so through social media so I'll put it at 75.
Casey (39:11.854)
75 and I appreciated your your Epilogue where you're talking about that the word victim was a common thing Who's the victim here? Is that the person who was fed this information or even then you start questioning you draw that back a little bit like it didn't just show up on their doorstep there was something that Whether they clicked or were shared with or sought out search for themselves that maybe they didn't start jumping into the
the pool of crazy conspiracy theories of, of magnet chips and, and, and child blood, that type of stuff. But they made some first effort where the algorithm was like, Ooh, got one. And then it started churning. there was, there's a, there's agency in people at the beginning stages of this. And so talk about like the, this everyone wants the silver bullet solution, right? Like if we just had better data literacy, if we just had better media literacy, if everyone just got off social media.
You were honest in your ending of like, if you're asking for a silver bullet, you're gonna be waiting forever. So what's the holistic picture look like for people and where does people's agency come into blame where you gotta check yourself of like, you're choosing a lot of this stuff. Algorithms don't lie, they're not random. In fact, they're exactly not random.
Jesselyn Cook (40:30.414)
This was a question that was really difficult for a lot of the loved ones in the book to grapple with. A lot of them started out wanting to view the QAnon believer in their life, their parent or whoever it was, as a victim of brainwashing, someone who got sucked into the social media machine they were taken advantage of by all of these malicious influencers who were selling them nonsense and profiting off that. And they really wanted to just victimize or...
portray their loved one as a victim who really had no agency in this situation. But as they discovered and as was very painful for them to grapple with, that's not the whole picture. And a lot of these people who went into weird places of QAnon didn't just pick up misinformation, they picked up anti-Semitism, white supremacy. They were starting to repeat really racist and anti-immigrant things. And so that was really painful for them to see. And in the...
the case of the lawyer whose three children eventually backed away from her. That was what did it. They, they realized, you you have been taken advantage of. are certainly to an extent a victim of propaganda and brainwashing, but you also made a choice. made a series of choices that got you here. And I don't recognize that person anymore. I can't be part of your life. And that's a really painful thing to come to terms with. others in the book never really make it to that place. They continue to,
view this as kind of something that's being done to their loved one, not done by their loved one. But as you said, algorithms don't just feed you extremist nonsense out of nowhere. You're not going to go from getting cat memes to QAnon. And so you do have to indicate some level of interest along the way, and then your world will reshape itself online, and you'll be kind of immersed into this echo chamber deeper and deeper. But
Casey (42:11.502)
You
Jesselyn Cook (42:23.22)
You know, in terms of a solution, I do think there's a lot of value in media literacy. Yes, I do think there's value in fact checking, but none of these things will ever be enough. Tech regulation, tech reform will never be enough. I think one thing that's really important to recognize in this whole situation, and that isn't maybe talked about enough, that there is a lot of very real.
corruption out there, there are a lot of families just struggling to get by. so this victim mentality that you need in order to be a conspiracy theorist, a lot of people come by it for very valid reasons. They are working full-time jobs, sometimes multiple jobs, they're doing everything they're supposed to do, and they're still not getting ahead because we do have a lot of powers in place that are, we have some very, very, very powerful institutions or.
Even Apple pays next to nothing in taxes, they get tax refund. And meanwhile, you have other families, like one of the characters in the book, who's drowning, just trying to get by. And so until we kind of see a shift in our systems that are actually working for people, of course, people are going to continue to have healthy skepticism bleed into this kind of endless suspicion because they have a right to be suspicious. so part of it is on us. Part of it is on us to, you know, do our due diligence, check our facts.
double check the things we encounter online. But part of us is just, need a system that works for people and actually gives us a real shot to prosper.
Casey (43:50.794)
Amen. Quick, lightning round here.
Jesselyn Cook (43:54.4)
So.
Casey (43:56.588)
When you reported this out or were collecting stories and started to realize what people genuinely believe to their bone marrow, was there an instance of like, shit, I think I've thought that.
Jesselyn Cook (44:06.774)
You know, I didn't get red-pilled myself. People love to ask me this, but I will say I spent, I was really interested in the anti-vaccine sentiment and where it came from. And I did start to, so often with these really extreme belief systems, there's very real fear behind them. Right. There's a nugget of truth and there's real fear behind fake and sane things. And I started to really understand the fear that a lot of parents had that their kids were going to be.
Casey (44:22.808)
There's a nugget.
Jesselyn Cook (44:36.458)
horribly harmed by vaccines. And I started to understand, you know, it's not just that you're buying into nonsense online, you're trying to be a good parent. And so I think it instilled more empathy in me throughout this reporting process. I there are so I mean, yeah, I'm also skeptical of our systems. I'm an investigative reporter. So it's my job to not trust everything I'm told either. But unfortunately, in the case of QAnon, it just gets twisted and weaponized and distorted.
to really an extreme degree.
Casey (45:07.66)
was there just as a reporter and a human at the same time. And given the number of stories, were you surprised by the number of stories or how maybe pervasive it was when you had maybe previously thought about it as just this wild sect that maybe has a 1 % of the population, but 1 % of the population is 3.5 million people, right? Like there's genuine numbers there. Were you surprised at the widespreadness of even just the thoughts if it wasn't the full outright support of QAnon?
Jesselyn Cook (45:34.974)
I was, I was stunned. mean, back to that rally, even in Hollywood, of all places, I was shocked at the number of people who came out that day and the number of people who were not only willing to say, believe this stuff, but I believe it with my real name and my face attached. know, like it's really shifted from the fringes to, I don't know, the mainstream in a way that's been really unsettling. And I think, you know, the anti-establishment sentiment behind it, some of it comes from
Casey (45:47.149)
Yeah.
Jesselyn Cook (46:02.868)
really understandable place. And some of it is just really extreme. And it was and continues to be alarming to me how many people lean into the really wild stuff.
Casey (46:14.528)
And I can only imagine as you report these very real stories, like this isn't just stats, you forgot to know families, you got to know kids, you got to know like failed marriages. Was there a human component of like, I don't want to do this anymore, this sucks.
Jesselyn Cook (46:31.808)
yeah, you know, was such a, it was so depressing to report. It was already really devastating topic, know, families being torn apart, but a lot of crises unfolded while I was reporting. Buck died. One of the people I was reporting on died while I was reporting. We had a couple other people have close encounters with death, I'll say, and I didn't know if they were going to survive. And we had suicide attempts. We had people.
I don't even know if this all made it into the book, but in and out of psychiatric wards, it was just a lot of real-time trauma that these people were suffering through. And it's difficult as a journalist to balance necessary journalistic rigor and fact-checking with basic human compassion, because you kind of have to press where it hurts, and you want to really be gentle and mindful. And that's a difficult dance to do sometimes. So it took a toll on me for sure. And if I write another book, it'll be something much lighter.
Casey (47:31.854)
Well, I look forward to that one, but I'm glad that you got this one. It's an important story to tell. Again, this is something whether you know it's Q based or not, you know someone who believes some of this stuff and it never just ends on that one thing, Conspiracies lead to conspiracies and they never get softer. They never get like more loving or warming. It's always more distrustful and dangerous. So I appreciate your work. I appreciate the book.
Jessalyn Cook, the author of The Quiet Damage, QAnon, and the Destruction of the American Family. Thanks for your time.
Jesselyn Cook (48:04.608)
Thanks so much, Casey.