QAMom: A Q&A with 'The Quiet Damage' Author Jesselyn Cook

What do conspiracy theories do to families? A new book follows believers and their loved ones down the rabbit hole and back.

Political conspiracy theories like QAnon draw the most attention when believers storm the U.S. Capitol or shoot up a pizzeria. But behind the headline-grabbing acts of violence is the slower, messier, damage wrought on families when members subscribe to hurtful and baseless beliefs.

NBC News journalist Jesselyn Cook has spent years reporting on conspiracy movements like QAnon, with a special focus on how those fringe beliefs affect families. Cook’s new book The Quiet Damage follows a diverse cast of conspiracy believers and their loved ones as they grapple with their diverging realities.

I spoke this week with Cook about how—and if—family members can pull each other from conspiracy rabbit holes. (This interview has been lightly edited for length.)

Kelly: There’s been so much coverage of QAnon, but what led you to write a book specifically about QAnon and families?

Jesselyn: I really got into reporting on this human side after attending a QAnon rally in 2020. I’d been reporting on mis- and disinformation for a while, but this rally was the first time I really saw it come to life. The rally was in Hollywood, and I wasn’t expecting a ton of people to show up because until that point, it had mostly been confined to the online fringes. But at this rally there were hundreds of people marching down Hollywood Boulevard and waving Pizzagate signs and QAnon banners. It felt so real. 

What struck me at the rally was the people, themselves. I spent a lot of time talking to them and trying to understand how they had come to their convictions. It was a big range of people, not  your stereotypical tinfoil hat-wearing, basement-dwelling conspiracy theorists, but families. There were couples. There were a really disturbing number of children wearing QAnon apparel. I was wondering, what are these kids hearing at home? What are they going to grow up believing? And so that inspired me to do more reporting on that side of it: not just the harm that these theories do to our democracy and to our public health, which I think is very well documented, but the damage that goes on behind closed doors and out of view.

These are such intimate family portraits in your book. I’m wondering how you went about finding your sources and reporting out the years of damage that these people experienced.

Finding sources was actually much easier than you might expect, which I think speaks to the magnitude of this crisis. I had written an article at HuffPost, where I was reporting at the time before going to NBC. I was writing about what it’s like to be a child of a QAnon believer and the experience of trying to teach your own parent right from wrong, true from false. That piece got such an overwhelming response from readers all over the country and far beyond wanting to share their own stories of losing loved ones—not just parents, but siblings, friends, and their own children—to this kind of alternate reality. So I had tons of conversations with people experiencing this from both sides. I also talked to current and former believers, so in a way a lot of the sources came to me. That’s how I met some of the characters in this book, but not all of them.

In terms of reporting their stories, this stuff is deeply traumatizing. A lot of them—not only the believers but the loved ones of the believers—have experienced so much pain going through this that I didn’t want to restimulate any of that. But interestingly, in having conversations with them, multiple people told me that talking about their stories was actually quite liberating because there’s so much stigma and shame associated with these views that they really didn’t feel like they could talk to anyone. Some said that, for example, when they tried to tell a friend ‘my mom thinks Hillary Clinton eats babies,’ the friend would just kind of laugh and say ‘boomers on the internet, right? They’re crazy.’ But they didn’t understand the heartache. And so fortunately, for my experience of reporting, we did get to have those deeper conversations where they felt safe talking to me. They were able to really open up and I traveled all over the country to get the level of detail to do the narrative nonfiction writing that I needed.

You mentioned that when you went to that rally in L.A. that there were lots of attendees with children. I’m wondering how QAnon and related conspiracy theories make a specific pitch to parents or people who feel like they need to protect children.

It’s a powerful message and it gave rise to the term ‘QAMom’ because so many mothers, and I think specifically millennial mothers, were being drawn to this movement that, on its face, seems like it would be completely the opposite of what a parent would want to endorse. But it has this very enticing, emotionally compelling message of ‘save the children, save our children.’ I think it plays deeply into maternal instincts to want to protect children from harm, beyond just wanting to save kids. 

Conspiracy theories fill different holes and different needs for different people. I became a mother while writing this book and my experience of that and of many young moms I’ve talked to is that motherhood can be very isolating and lonely, especially in the early years. You’re stepping away, in many cases, from your career and maybe your in-person hobbies, and you’re spending a lot of time with this little person who you can’t communicate with. For a lot of moms I’ve spoken with, who didn’t all make it into the book, there comes this feeling of loss of purpose, and maybe loss part of your identity. QAnon and other conspiracy theories give that back to people. You get to show up online and preach about the harms of poisonous vaccines, or chemtrails, or whatever it may be. You get to feel like you matter again. You get to feel like you’re part of a community again, and that you’re doing something bigger than yourself, which for a lot of young moms especially, I think holds a lot of power.

I was going to ask you about that, because several of your characters found QAnon in moments when it seemed like they weren’t getting what they wanted from their community.  I’m thinking of your character Emily who got really into conspiracy theories because she was so isolated raising three children. Have you found that isolation plays a role in conspiracy beliefs?

It absolutely does. For several of the characters in my book, it was when they started experiencing prolonged isolation that conspiracy theories drew them in. It gave them a sense of belonging and community. When you’re alone, I think people spend a lot more time online. We definitely saw that over the pandemic, and online is where conspiracy theories really thrive and flourish. We have a lot of algorithms that amplify not necessarily the most trustworthy information, but often the most incendiary. It can pull people into these echo chambers where they’re hearing all these wild ideas being reinforced and exaggerated. At the same time, they’re being lured further and further away from dissent and facts. And so isolation can make people very vulnerable. It can also lead to depression and anxiety, which can feed into conspiracy belief as well. So there are a lot of different factors among isolated people that makes them more susceptible. 

One narrative I really liked in this book was one of the most hopeful. You described how Christopher [not a QAnon believer] was trying to lean into cooperation, not conflict, in talking to Alice [his QAnon-believing fiance] about why she believed what she did. How can people help meet a loved one’s underlying needs when they get drawn into conspiracy beliefs like Alice did?

It’s super difficult. Many of the people I’ve spoken to who have tried to help their conspiracy theory-believing loved ones have tried being rational and calm, to teach them true from false. It has quickly escalated into shouting matches because conspiracy theorists can be extremely defensive. And so when I tell people to lead with compassion, I often get eyerolls because it’s like ‘how can I be compassionate to someone who is calling me evil or a pedophile sympathizer?’ I get that many characters in my book felt that the right choice for them was to walk away from their conspiracy theorist loved one and to say ‘I have to prioritize my own wellbeing. I can’t compromise my own mental health to try to save this person who may be beyond saving.’

But for those like Alice’s family members who do devote themselves to pulling her out, they start by letting go of this compulsion to prove her wrong. So Alice’s fiance and her father take two different approaches that work in tandem quite nicely. Her fiancé uses the Socratic questioning method, and her father uses motivational interviewing. These two strategies, which have been repeatedly recommended to me by experts, are trying to get the believer to patiently and critically assess their own beliefs and look at the potential contradictions, or to try to understand their own biases. The believer and the loved one become partners in uncovering the truth, rather than adversaries trying to force it on each other. 

What that looks like in practice for Alice is her fiancé spent a lot of time just listening to her conspiracy theories and very calmly saying ‘okay, let's think about the claim and how can we try to corroborate some of them?’ Really doing it from a place of no judgment. And again, I’m sure many people reading this have tried that and said ‘this gets nowhere.’ And it is a long road and the most important part is just trying to show compassion and to celebrate any common ground unearthed in the process. Motivational interviewing, on the other hand, is about, in this context, getting the believer to step back and look at the big picture and try to understand whether it’s worth holding onto all these convictions; even if there is some Deep State cabal running the world, what does your involvement in it accomplish, other than damaging your own life? With Alice, she lost friendships, she lost loved ones. She had a lot of people looking at her like she was crazy and hateful. So her father very delicately got her to say ‘maybe it doesn’t matter if this is true or false. Is it worth what it’s doing to me?’ Those two methods together gave her the support and clarity she needed to eventually say ‘if this just isn’t good for me, I need to let go and focus on myself instead of things I can’t control.’

You describe some adult children who are put into the interesting position of sort of parenting their parents. There are also minor kids who maybe don’t have as solid a framework to assess what their parents are saying. Can you explain a little about how these fringe beliefs might affect someone’s young children?

It was so sad reporting this part of my book. There’s seven-year-old Jonah who goes right down the QAnon rabbit hole with his mother. For him, conspiracy theories are just a path into her arms. She spends all day sitting on the couch watching these wild YouTube videos, and he just wants to feel close to her. So he sits with her and watches them, and his world becomes scarier and scarier. QAnon, in particular, really centers children as the victims of these grizzly, horrific crimes. So Jonah comes to believe that lurking around every corner there are bad guys who want to mutilate and eat and sexually abuse little kids like him. For someone his age, this is especially harmful. Kids are very credulous, especially when listening to information presented by a grownup. Mom and Dad know everything, right?

So for Jonah, his aunt who’s trying to pull him away from this sees him being traumatized—not just frightened but traumatized. And the science here is really depressing. It suggests that when kids suffer something called toxic stress, which is prolonged exposure and frequent exposure to long-term stress, it can literally reshape their rapidly developing brains, altering the physical architecture in lifelong ways. This can set them up to suffer from mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, PTSD, impaired memory function, and concentration difficulties. It’s so scary to think about. And when you look at the data we have, polling shows as many as one in five Americans believe some of the core QAnon beliefs. You can only imagine how many kids are hearing this at home and just feeling frightened. It feels like a crisis that’s brewing unnoticed.

I was really taken by part of [married couple] Matt and Andrea’s story. Matt was the QAnon believer in their household and was really into stockpiling. He was investing in precious metals, which he thought would bring the family prosperity after a great collapse. But Andrea was doing something different: she was getting really into multi-level marketing. Something I’ve explored in this blog before is the way that multi-level marketing schemes often prey on young moms who maybe have a tenuous tie to the paid workforce. Could you unpack the parallels between Matt’s more conspiracy-driven purchases, and his wife’s attempts to sell LuLaRoe?

Yeah, that parallel there was kind of striking and very sad. As you said, as Matt is getting pulled deeper into QAnon, his wife is starting to experience the secondhand effects of his identity crisis. He’s trying to find meaning as a digital soldier. She became a young, Christian mom at an early age, and she’s always been his wife but she feels like she’s losing him and part of herself. LuLaRoe and other MLMs often draw in young moms with this promise of creating your own financial freedom, being a provider for your family. They sell them this dream that if you invest your time and money into this, we will give you the power to create a better life for your family. So Andrea does that. She puts thousands of dollars into a lot of LuLaRoe inventory, buying all these colorful leggings and pieces of clothing. Of course, the more she gives to this, she’s still not seeing any results. Her basement is filling up with all this unmovable inventory. 

And at the same time, next to all her leggings, Matt has these end-of-the-world supplies that he’s stockpiling because QAnon keeps telling him he needs to provide for his family. It’s just a very sad scene. But what both of them were deriving from their respective movements was a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, and feeling like they were part of something bigger than themselves. In the end, they both just experienced unrelenting disappointment. 

Most of the subjects in your book are adults, but I’m wondering if you see children approaching their own conspiracy theories online, or whether kids are maybe a little more hip to disinfo.

I think a lot of us would like to believe that kids are a little savvier in this space, especially as digital natives. We would like to think that they could navigate this crisis better than, say, digital immigrants. But study after study is showing that’s just not the case. Kids are having a really hard time parsing real from fake online. It’s a grim outlook, but kids are getting online earlier than ever before. They’re spending more time online than ever before. They’re traversing the most complex information landscape in our history, and I think it’s kind of silly to assume that they’re showing up with the skills they need to understand deep fakes or to understand the economic incentives that compel people to churn out disinformation, or even just how algorithms can pull them into a different version of reality.

This is actually an issue that I’m going to go on to study at Harvard in the coming months as a Nieman Fellow: looking at how children are consuming and even spreading mis- and disinformation. It’s really a crisis that I’d say is not getting the attention it needs. Media literacy is a great start. We’re seeing more schools do that, but I feel strongly that it needs to start early on, like kindergarten level as some schools are doing. That makes a lot of sense because kids are getting smartphones in first and second grades, and the damage can be done so quickly if they don’t have some sort of teaching on how to be skeptical and how to understand how reality can be distorted. 

And so to answer your question, I have a two-year-old and I worry a lot about the world he’s gonna grow up in; the online world that he’s gonna come into when it comes time for him to be part of that. I wish I could have more optimism right now, but just feels hard when you go on TikTok and you can spend an hour scrolling through lie after lie churned out by click-chasing hucksters who understand how easy it is to monetize misinformation.