The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

by Jesselyn Cook

The havoc that QAnon and similar conspiracy theories have wrought on American democracy and public health is well documented. Less acknowledged is the crippling devastation that they unleash inside the home, behind closed doors and out of public view.

Under QAnon’s expansive umbrella are two camps of people; combined, they double the population of Texas. In the first are the true believers, who think Donald Trump and a mysterious government insider known as “Q” are (perpetually) in the final stages of a treacherous, unseen battle to liberate humanity from “the Deep State,” a satanic cabal of globalist elites who rule the world from the shadows while buying and selling children to rape, mutilate, and eat. (One such believer was elected—and twice reelected—as House representative of Georgia’s Fourteenth Congressional District; several have proven violent, even murderous.) And in the second, much larger camp, which emerged over the pandemic as QAnon ideology blended insidiously into mainstream discourse, are those who embrace some or all of the core conspiracy theories but don’t identify with the movement. Since then, as QAnon’s branding has faded from public view, its ideas have been diluted and normalized, and this group has swelled.

are plenty of intelligent, seemingly normal individuals who have come to see the world through a distorted lens of conspiracy theory—especially as real injustices and breaches of public trust have hardened healthy skepticism into reflexive suspicion. Broadly speaking, QAnon is now a collective of Baby Boomers, young people, ruralites, urbanites, white supremacists, people of color, right-wing extremists—even progressives. For many, the allure is less about what it makes them think than how it makes them feel.

To try—in spite of their horrifying, often unacceptable beliefs—to return some sense of personhood and dignity to them, so that we might see them not as lunatics and lost causes, but as people we know: friends, family, colleagues, whose circumstances and choices have led them down a dark path. Without this baseline recognition of their fundamental humanness, despite the humanity their beliefs sometimes deny to others, it’s impossible to truly consider what real solutions could look like.

what’s clear to me is this: Worthy interventions like fact-checking labels and tech regulations and media literacy trainings will never be enough. This goes deeper than true versus false, and information itself. We need to confront the roots of our collective vulnerability. Because none of us are as immune as we’d like to think.

Parts of the video seemed to confirm things that he already suspected on some level.

There was no sales pitch, no catch; it just seemed like an earnest message for anyone open-minded enough to listen.

Belying the sheer absurdity of QAnon as a whole, it swept viewers into a gripping tale of conspiracy theories built around nuggets of truth, while saying nothing of baby-eating, faked deaths, or clones.

desperate to preserve in his mind the parent he used to know.

It was rich listening to him—Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, a multimillionaire, prep school–educated, carefully coiffed trust fund baby who summered in Maine—position himself squarely among the downtrodden, shoulder to shoulder with his viewers, decrying plots by “the elites” against “the rest of us plebes.”

Adam was right to worry that a sustained and strictly partisan media diet could have an effect similar to brainwashing, or could radically alter the way that people like his mom thought. A pair of political scientists would later attempt to reverse-engineer this effect by paying hundreds of Fox News watchers to switch to CNN for a month. By the end, the participants’ opinions on hot-button issues, from racial justice to voting by mail, had shifted significantly.

It was far easier to believe in antiestablishment conspiracy theories after being conditioned to identify as a victim of the establishment.

most people—including him, until now—looked at QAnon adherents en masse as certifiably insane. It was a temptingly simple explanation for a deeply complex phenomenon. Media coverage was partly responsible for this unevidenced perception: It tended to spotlight QAnon’s most gobsmacking beliefs, leaving people mystified as to how any sane individual could fall for something so crazy. But that obscured the process. Believers weren’t drawn to QAnon through lurid tales of cannibalism, infanticide, or satanic sex abuse rituals. They started out consuming lighter, more digestible conspiracy theory hors d’oeuvres with kernels of truth baked in, like rumors about corrupt elites, then gradually developed an appetite for wilder and wilder claims.

It was possible, Nita suggested, that Fox News, and now QAnon, supplied Emily with external grievances through which to channel her internal anger and sadness. Those grievances, like supposed threats to finances and freedoms, could be highly gripping for her in particular.

A third of “digital immigrants” over sixty-five believed that the news articles in their Facebook feeds were selected by a group of company employees, just as a team of editors would decide which stories to put in the Times. Only 18 percent were aware that it was done by machine-learning programs curating posts specifically for them.

In many cases, though, he detected a mix of both: a foundational conviction that some form of malevolence had occurred, and an increasing willingness to hyperbolize, fabricate, and lie as money flowed in.

It wasn’t clear what, exactly, she was implying; however, a quick Google search would have surfaced news articles with the hardly extraordinary truth:

(A little research into her, too, might have raised some cause for skepticism:

Against the backdrop of an exceptionally contentious presidential election season, Americans faced the deadliest public health catastrophe in a century, the most dire recession since the Great Depression, the worst California wildfires in recorded history, and a nationwide uprising for racial justice that exploded to the fore of the culture wars. This perfect storm of chaos did two things: It made everyday people like Alice more vulnerable—and it made disinformation peddlers like QAnon more powerful.

With QAnon, they didn’t have to wait. It had an explanation for everything.

Their appeal, in turn, generally hinged upon their status as dissenters rather than the legitimacy of their dissent,

The allure of conspiracy theories transcended race and other demographic boxes: At a basic level, they appealed to people with a sense of powerlessness—perceived or valid.

Tayshia saw two women consumed by conspiracy theories: one cooking them up while becoming wealthy and powerful, the other devouring them whole while becoming angry and hateful.

Extremist groups, cults, and many a religious grifter were masters in making their followers feel righteous and special. Conspiracy theories could do the same: By identifying villains to unite against, they gave believers a chance to feel like they were on the right side of history.

QAnon, for many, was a journey to self-actualization through collective action, not unlike standing up to legitimate abusers of power.

there was no such thing as coincidences. Everything had meaning; some things just required a little more creativity to comprehend. What had felt to Matt like an epiphany, however, was in fact an apophany: a Rorschachian conclusion drawn from dots that have no business being connected. Apophenia is a natural phenomenon; the human brain is hardwired to scan for patterns, even where they don’t exist. It’s also a bedrock of conspiracy theory thinking, wherein illusory patterns perceived in random noise are held up as evidence of nefarious activity.

QAnon was a microcosm of the Trumpian Right: a more extreme and insular product of harmonized lies from right-wing politicians, media figures, and influencers, which were repeated until they sounded believable—a phenomenon known as the “validity effect.” Inside their at-times cult-like ideological echo chamber, they, and they alone, dictated what was true. Loyalty trumped logic, while an entrenched with-us-or-against-us mentality cast outsiders as enemies:

Standing with the tribe was more important than standing for the truth when one’s ideology became their identity.

when people’s firmly held beliefs are challenged—particularly those tied to their sense of self—the brain reacts the same way it would to a physical threat, ready to defend those beliefs as if they were part of the body.

Research suggests that harboring grievances—whether they stem from real or perceived offenses—actually makes people feel good. Brain-imaging studies have revealed that feeling aggrieved, and in turn, desiring retribution, stimulates the same neural reward-processing circuitry as narcotics. Such desire could manifest in a retaliatory act as simple as Emily rage-tweeting at Biden, or as extreme as laying siege to the U.S. Capitol. But feeling wronged and merely thinking about that release of revenge, perhaps by fantasizing about the Storm, can trigger an intoxicating rush of dopamine—which, incidentally, can make people more prone to seeing illusory patterns, a cornerstone of conspiracy theory thinking.

As Doris had slipped into QAnon, so too had many other seniors. One in every five Americans who agreed with its core conspiracy theories was over sixty-five years old. For some, anxious about the ways in which society was changing and nostalgic for a distant past, QAnon was a track back to traditional conservative values—a participatory way to help Make America Great Again. After living through decades of state and institutional breaches of public trust, from Watergate to the Iran-Contra scandal to the global financial crisis of 2008, traversing a complex social media landscape with limited digital literacy skills only greased the wheels. But what all elderly QAnon believers shared, by virtue of their age, was a natural vulnerability to a diminishing sense of “mattering” as their social roles changed.

Matt’s faith gave him answers where there were none to be found and hope when all was lost. When Matt discovered QAnon, the allure was obvious. It was, in so many ways, familiar to what he’d known all his life: a tale of a biblical battle between good and evil that was prophesied to culminate in an apocalyptic day of reckoning. A mission to save the children, drive out satanism, and restore traditional values to society.

French polymath Gustave Le Bon had argued in his 1895 treatise on herd dynamics that when uniting around an ideology or belief in pursuit of a shared cause, people could come under an almost “hypnotic” influence, freeing them “from the sense of their insignificance and powerlessness” while also making them intellectually weak, impulsive, and gullible.

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste,” he wrote. “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”

A moment of raw human connection had just accomplished for Matt what no amount of fact-checking or debunking ever could: It started to shake his faith in the lies he’d been sold.

Whether they made sense to him or not, her QAnon-related fears, anxieties, and hopes were entirely real to her.

If Christopher continued to criticize Alice and her beliefs, reinforcing the notion that she was wrong and bad, it would only back her further onto the defensive, where logic stood little chance against anger. Unless he allowed her to keep her dignity, showing her that she could emerge from QAnon still feeling loved, appreciated, and respected, then why would she ever come out? Inside its walls, she belonged to a community that valued her deeply.

QAnon was poisoning her already-frightened mind with crackpot paranoia and then dangling silver-platter solutions before her eyes. Watching her light up as she spoke passionately of the brighter days ahead, he was reminded that she used to talk about the Bernie Revolution in the same way: It gave her hope in the face of a scary, unknown future.

The parallels between QAnon lore and The Protocols—which fabricated a secret scheme by a cabal of wealthy Jewish elites “to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media, and fostering religious conflict,” according to the site—were undeniable. Alice’s heart started racing. She clicked another page about blood libel, and another about Nazis’ propaganda techniques, and another, and another, and another…It was all the same…from the gory, specific details, like the ritualistic consumption of children’s blood, to the broader themes, like a singular enemy group standing between the people and prosperity, and the promise of a just and unified society once it was exterminated…

“With this QAnon stuff…Why do you care? And is it worth it?” He truly wanted to know. Even if there really was a demonic cabal of elites secretly controlling the world, what could she meaningfully do about it? What did her “research” or Facebook posts really accomplish at the end of the day? This wasn’t an election; her “activism” wouldn’t help win votes for the good guy. Wrapping herself up in these things, be they true or false, added no net benefit to her life. The destruction it caused, however, was staggering:

QAnon, for Emily, wasn’t really about the claims themselves, her daughters had realized, even if she had come to genuinely believe them. It was a Band-Aid on a wound that had been festering for more than two decades. Worse, it was a drug numbing her pain while satisfying her human desire to hurt others as she had been hurt, and she was addicted.

Conspiracy theories may cast someone as a digital soldier or a patriot or a righteous activist—a fantastical narrative that the reality of their ordinary life likely just can’t compete with. The process, therefore, involves gently chipping away at the fantasy while helping the person reach a point at which they can begin to rewrite their story in real life.