Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family
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QAnon beliefs and adjacent conspiracy theories have had devastating political consequences as they’ve exploded in popularity. What’s often overlooked is the lasting havoc they wreak on our society at its most basic and intimate level — the family.
In The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family (Crown, 2024), reporter Jesselyn Cook paints a harrowing portrait of the vulnerabilities that have left so many of us susceptible to outrageous falsehoods promising order, purpose, and control.
Braided throughout are the stories of five American families: an elderly couple whose fifty-year romance takes a heartbreaking turn; millennial sisters of color who grew up in dire poverty — one to become a Black Lives Matter activist, the other, a hardcore conspiracy theorist pulling her little boy down the rabbit hole with her; a Bay Area hippie-type and her business-executive fiancé, who must decide whether to stay with her as she turns into a stranger before his eyes; evangelical parents whose simple life in a sleepy suburb spirals into delusion-fueled chaos; and a rural mother-son duo who, after carrying each other through unspeakable tragedy, stop speaking at all as ludicrous untruths shatter a bond long thought unbreakable.
Charting the arc of each believer’s path from their first intersection with conspiracy theories to the depths of their cultish conviction, to — in some cases — their rejection of disinformation and the mending of fractured relationships, Cook offers an intimate look into the psychology of how and why ordinary people come to believe the unbelievable.
Content retrieved from: https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2024/08/quiet-damage-qanon-american-family/.
