Jesselyn Cook > Quotes

“The truth is that the truth is almost beside the point.”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“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.”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“It would seem entirely logical to fight fiction with fact. But therein lies a fraught assumption. Beneath these kinds of delusional beliefs, in many instances, is not a desire to be accurately informed, but a need to be internally comforted.”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“the French philosopher Voltaire, who warned of the perils of worrying about things beyond one’s control. Rather than fret over the state of the world and the many issues plaguing mankind, which would only lead to endless despair, Voltaire argued, people ought to focus on their own lives, or tend to their own gardens. That was the way to find true peace of mind.”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“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.”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“The deeper into the series she got, the more outrageous the claims became, but they were stacking in her mind like building blocks: If this one crazy thing was true, couldn’t this other, slightly crazier thing also be true?”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“Religious belief was significantly positively correlated with conspiracy theory belief, attributed by experts to the service of common psychological needs (certainty, purpose, community) and shared underlying elements (grand narratives, a righteous mission, conviction in the unseen). And while believers of QAnon theories represented only a small minority of Christians overall, they accounted for nearly one in four white Evangelicals; the majority, also, were supporters of Christian nationalism.”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

“Q: Into the Storm laid bare in visceral detail the extraordinary harm that QAnon had wrought on American democracy. But missing from the film’s six hours—and from the roaring national discourse surrounding the movement—was the quiet damage to families”
― Jesselyn Cook, The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family