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

by Jesselyn Cook

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.