The Painful Reality of Loving a Conspiracy Theorist

Before everything changed, Emily Porter was a successful lawyer. She was an outspoken progressive living in deep-red Tennessee. Perhaps above all, she was an intensely loving single mother to her three kids. She had a special bond with Adam, her youngest: When his older sisters moved out, the two of them would care for the animals on their small farm, watch Jeopardy and Lost, and, once a month, treat themselves to dinner at a fancy restaurant, where they’d try everything on the tasting menu. Adam decided that he, too, would go into law; he called Emily his “hero.”

Just a handful of years later, she was emailing him demanding that he “shed my DNA” and warning: “PAIN IS COMING FOR YOU, AND YOUR BELOVED CHINA JOE, FRAUD OBAMA AND HIS MAN WIFE MICHAEL.”

What happened to Emily is, in some sense, no puzzle. As the tech reporter Jesselyn Cook describes in her new book, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family, Emily (a pseudonym, like all the names Cook uses) tumbled deep into QAnon, a sprawling set of far-right conspiracy theories embraced by some 20 percent of Americans. At the center of this dark universe is “Q,” a mysterious online-forum poster claiming to be a government official in cahoots with Donald Trump; together, Q suggests, they’re working to defeat a diabolical echelon of global elites. QAnon posits that those powerful politicians and celebrities are abusing children—trafficking them for sex, eating them, harvesting their blood—and propagating the idea of COVID-19 (a myth, in this view) to harm everyday people with dangerous vaccines.

[Read: The prophecies of Q]

How Emily and so many others could be taken in by these claims, though, is a great mystery—one that Cook doesn’t pretend she can solve. The Quiet Damage never made me feel that I could understand the people falling for QAnon. But I don’t think the book is meant to make conspiracy thinking clearly legible; it’s not really about the Emilys of the world at all. It’s about the Adams: the ones left peering over the precipice when their family members teeter into the abyss. Cook illuminates vividly the experience of loving someone in crisis—a crisis you can’t fully understand and definitely didn’t anticipate—and the impossible question of how long to stand by them.

People aren’t drawn to QAnon just because they’re ill-informed, or because they clicked a link that skewed their algorithm. Cook shows how the conspiracy theory also preys, specifically, on vulnerable people. Following five different American families, she unpacks her subjects’ “unmet needs”—the particular ways they were aching, betrayed by individuals or society or just the random cruelties of life. Emily, for instance, was left to raise three young children by herself after her husband died by suicide, then she fell into intense isolation when they moved out for college. But of course, many people have harrowing traumas, and not all of them retreat into a world of right-wing delusions. The loved ones in this book don’t know why their person did; neither does the reader. What’s clear is that these adherents wanted to believe in something. What, exactly, they came to believe was somewhat beside the point.

In this sense, QAnon isn’t really the main focus of The Quiet Damage. Cook occasionally zooms out to explain how the conspiracy network capitalized on loneliness and anxiety in the early days of the pandemic, or how it exploits real injustices, such as systemic racism, to further seed paranoia. But mostly, she draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with her subjects and their friends and family, immersing the reader in her characters’ interpersonal dynamics and recounting memorable human anecdotes, as in a movie, complete with rising action and cliff-hangers. The stories are gripping not just because QAnon is so bewilderingly strange but also because the idea of a person you love disappearing before your eyes is so terrible—and perhaps for many readers, relatable. Swap in another conspiracy theory—or cult, or addiction—and you’d likely find similar stories of hurt people who have lost themselves to some compelling and sinister force.

In fact, the QAnon believers aren’t the only ones in Cook’s book grasping for a light in the dark. While another subject, Matt, prepares for “the Storm” (a term often used for Trump’s supposedly imminent military takeover) by using half of his family’s annual income on silver and gold coins—better for bargaining in the coming new world, where U.S. currency will apparently be worthless—Andrea, the wife he’s effectively abandoned, has turned to the multilevel-marketing firm LuLaRoe. She spends thousands to buy in and purchase clothes to resell—which she then fails to do, like most people lured in by the company’s promise of financial agency and psychological freedom. Cook skillfully shows how eerily Andrea’s story mirrors Matt’s. “The vision she’d been sold never came to fruition,” she writes of Andrea. “In its place, racks of unpurchased pink, purple, and orange garments lined the basement next to Matt’s dust-­coated emergency supplies endlessly awaiting the Storm.”

Cook also makes clear that family members such as Andrea have no easy way forward; the people she follows make different choices, all difficult, about how—and for how long—to try bringing their loved one back to reality. One family, after several weeks of careful effort, does have some success: When a former Bernie Sanders supporter called Alice descends rapidly into the depths of QAnon (after watching a single YouTube “docuseries”), her partner, Christopher, and her father, Ted, gently chip away at her beliefs: Rather than critiquing Alice’s claims, they ask her earnest questions about them, as if out of curiosity, or draw attention to how her allegiance is making her life harder. At one point, Alice rails against Bill Gates, saying that he has admitted to earning a “20-to-one” return on his foundation’s investment into vaccines. Christopher agrees that they should be skeptical of people in power but notes that he heard something different in the video she’s referring to: Gates mentions a 20-to-one return for the world. Together, they find the full interview, and Alice sees that she was wrong; her mind cracks just slightly further open. At this point, the book feels briefly hopeful. With patience and empathy, it seems to suggest, you can reach someone who once felt very, very far away.  

[Read: When your friends fall of the edge of the earth]

But Cook is careful not to imply that every relative has an obligation to stick around forever. Adam, for instance, is driven to the brink of suicide trying to get his mother back: He starts obsessively researching QAnon instead of studying for the bar exam, thinking he can counter its claims factually—but when he calmly pushes against Emily’s assumptions, she sends him hateful emails. He begins to lose large sums to sports gambling and slack at his job, and his descent ends only when he finally accepts that his mom is lost to him forever. Cook casts it as a moment of victory, however tragic. “He was done fighting for Emily,” she writes. “It was time to fight for Adam.”     

The book’s other stories, if more subtly, also ask: When might giving up mean that you can save yourself—or help someone else? Take Tayshia, a racial-justice activist who moves away from her sister Kendra—an ardent QAnon devotee—and fears she’s abandoning Kendra’s two sons, the younger of whom is terrified by his mom’s tales of bloodthirsty celebrities and already losing friends over the conspiracy theories he’s bringing to school. Tayshia starts working at a halfway house in her new town, and there she’s able to connect with a struggling teenager, Bailey. She prints Bailey a Maya Angelou poem: Just like moons and like suns, / With the certainty of tides, / Just like hopes springing high, / Still, I’ll rise. It’s a message of persistence—perhaps not just for Bailey but for Tayshia, who hasn’t stopped supporting other people even if she has stopped, for the moment, trying to save her family. We all make choices, not about whether but how to expend our love. This is Tayshia’s choice.

Cook isn’t saying that QAnon followers are beyond the pale. Rather, she’s painting a picture of how QAnon has warped society by shattering relationships—a ripple effect of hurt and loneliness that reverberates far beyond each individual. And her book shows that when any such obsession takes hold of someone, getting through to them is far thornier than it might seem from the outside. Even Alice, at the end of the book, is tempted to return to Q despite her family’s gentle guidance—and despite her acknowledgment that this worldview, which cost her many friends and nearly destroyed her relationship, was a hoax. If QAnon’s power feels mysterious, it’s because human beings are. Even the ones we love.