Persuadable: Back Up the Rabbit Hole – The Account from CNN

So I press play on this video at like 11 at night, and this is the video series that caused this paradigm shift in the way I was viewing the world.

I probably fell asleep at about 10 o’clock, and I woke up at maybe five, and she’s still on her computer. But it was clear that she was operating at a level of energy that I hadn’t seen before, and it was a different energy. There was something going on here that I wasn’t aware of.

The mental flip that I had was so significant. I was shaking both with that enthusiasm, but also with like, wow, 99% of everyone I know would flip out.

Yeah.

What do I do with this? I can’t deny it now. This is in my being.

‘This is the beginning of what is becoming an all-too-familiar story. Someone sees something online. It can be pretty mundane. It can even be factual, something about political corruption, or abuse, or a corporation doing a bad thing. But then, it gets more elaborate. A video explains how everything is connected, and everything is evil. There’s a top-secret cabal running it all. That video leads to another, and another, and another. You’ve probably heard a story like this already. You might even know someone who’s fallen down one of these internet rabbit holes. But what if that person is the person you are closest to in the world? What if it’s your life partner? And what if their beliefs and values and convictions just seem to change overnight? What would you do?

The second night, I started to go to bed in our bed, and I just said, I can’t do this. Even though she wasn’t doing anything, energetically, I just felt this frenetic thing that I just said, like, I got to get away from this. So I went and slept in the living room that night. And it was that sort of thing that I was seeing, hearing, feeling things that didn’t feel like the woman that I had been living with. I asked her a question because I said, I really don’t recognize who you are right now. You wouldn’t hurt me in my sleep, would you?

I’m Donie O’Sullivan, and this is Persuadable.

Hi Katrina, Stephen, how are you?

Wonderful, how are you?

I’m doing well.

Very good, thank you so much for doing this, I appreciate it.

‘Katrina Vaillancourt and Stephen Ghiglieri live in El Sabrante, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Katrina and Stephen are a bit of an opposites attract kind of couple. She’s a life coach and non-violent communication trainer. He’s a veteran C-suite executive. He describes himself as a realist; she’s an idealist.

On my birthday, you know, make a wish, blow out the candle, and Stephen’s like, did you just wish for world peace again? Of course. You know, what else could be my highest wish? You know, when Stephen met me, I was posting Bernie Sanders on Facebook five times a day. I was handing out flyers. I was talking to everyone. This is how we’re going to save the world.

‘But by 2020, her idealism had hit some roadblocks. The world was on lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and she felt disillusioned by politics after twice seeing Bernie fail to get the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. And, like a lot of us, she felt isolated and confused.

The lockdown had a very large impact on Katrina, less so for me, I’m much more an introvert, but for her it was like being in a prison. So there was a bit of internal panic that I felt in her.

Life is not okay. I’m not seeing hope for the future. There’s tension in our home. I don’t see when this is gonna end. I don’ know if people are gonna die. I don’t know if I’ll see them again.

It was in that state of anxiety and uncertainty that Katrina clicked play on a video called “Fall of the Cabal.”

This particular night, I couldn’t sleep. And it just so happens that I had been in touch with a friend who said, you know, there’s this really strange documentary. Would you please watch it?

That video is infamous now. It was made in 2019 by a Dutch conspiracy theorist, and it’s a dark and brooding mashup of all kinds of intertwined conspiracy theories. Most of them echo QAnon lore.

The world as we know it is crumbling before our very eyes, and the majority of the world population is not aware of it.

‘They play on old antisemitic tropes, claim that the Pope and Oprah and lots of others are part of an evil cabal, and they theorize that Donald Trump and a group of so-called “white hats” are trying to stop the evildoers.

Are you ready? Join me on a journey down the rabbit hole.

Katrina watched it all in one night and, by morning, she felt like she had entered a new reality.

Oh my god, I hadn’t seen it, but Donald Trump and Q and the white hats actually see the problem in a deeper way than Bernie ever did, and they’re already working to solve it. They’ve been working for decades, and they brought Trump onto this team, and they’re going to solve this problem. We’re actually gonna have a world that works for everyone. So that dream that I had that was mapped onto Bernie got mapped onto this new narrative. And that state of fear that I had that was so intense, that stress, that fear, when my mind adapted this narrative, all of the fear was gone.

Was it, I mean, was it as dramatic as a sort of overnight transformation in terms of what you could notice about Katrina’s outlook?

Oh, yes. Because it was really like I was living with a stranger. That question of, would you hurt me in my sleep, somehow got converted in Katrina to a threat.

I was afraid it might be a projection.

Katrina, in fear, moved out of the house. The way she ended up moving out of a house was…

Shocking for you.

Shocking, yeah. I was actually in my office upstairs, looking at videos that she had sent to me to try to understand what she was going through, and I hear other men’s voices in the house, and I come out and say, what’s going on? And she’s enlisted two of our neighbors to help her move out of the house, and it’s like, what the hell’s going on here? She just left.

For Stephen, Katrina’s sudden transformation was a bit of an oh shit moment. At that point, they’d been together for four years, they were engaged, and while they’d always been very different people, Stephen had seen that as a strength of their relationship. They brought out the best in each other. But now, he was questioning everything. He started looking for help, talking to his therapist, Katrina’s family, their mutual friends.

I was reaching out saying, you’re not gonna believe this and I need your help. There’s something intrinsically wrong here, and I need support from you guys to help me kind of navigate this and bring her back. And they were saying, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Stephen. She seems to be really happy. She seems have all of her shit together, all this stuff, and it’s like, but she’s not telling you the truth.

Yeah.

She’s not tell you what’s really going on here. And it was just, it really put me in a hard spot.

‘It was heartbreaking for me to care so much about the people around me, to want to do whatever I could to protect them from the dangerous future that I saw right around the corner. I was trying to figure out, how can I talk around the periphery? What are things I can post on Facebook? So there were people on Facebook who very quickly like day one, day two, they’re like, ah, you’re not falling for right-wing extremism, QAnon. You’re starting to sound like a racist, fascist, homophobic, transphobic, delusional, antisemitic — like those names specifically.

Did that push you further, do you think?

Eventually it did. In the beginning, it was just stunning, like, can’t you see me clearly? Some of these people, they’d known me for over a decade. And so it was stunning, perplexing, disheartening, definitely generated stress. And over time it was, I recognized like, wow, you really can’t see me. And then I did want to gravitate towards people who could. I started to be able to identify other people who had seen the same narrative that I had seen. I needed a community, I needed a support system. I needed other people who could see what I was seeing. It was enlivening for me, too. It fit with the QAnon narrative that there’s a great awakening happening. Like, wow, look at how many other people have woken up already.

Katrina and Stephen lived in different homes for a couple of weeks. Really, they were living in different worlds. But neither of them were ready to cut the other off entirely. They just couldn’t bring themselves to pull the plug on this relationship. And this is where this story goes from terrible and terribly familiar, if you know someone who’s gone down the rabbit hole and their family has lost them, to something different, something hopeful. Katrina and Stephen moved back in together, to a neutral venue as it were, a rented house in the Arizona desert, itself a world away from their old life in San Francisco. Now what Stephen hadn’t told Katrina at this point was that he was going to give this six months. Six months for Katrina to come around, for them to find a way to live together. Or he was gonna walk.

I had agreed with my therapist and my family that I was gonna give it to the end of the year and see how it played out. So we were trying to find, is there common ground that we can comfortably live in and enjoy each other and our lives while still honoring differences of beliefs.

He made a commitment to stop trying to change my beliefs and to really go into radical acceptance of my beliefs.

Stephen knew they couldn’t not talk about Katrina’s new beliefs, because every day she had a new piece of information, a new revelation that she believed was important for him to know about. But Stephen also knew that they couldn’t get through this if they talked about it all the time. So, they developed a bit of a system.

We said, time out, this isn’t working. So let’s agree on a couple hours a week where you can bring your ideas to me, and I promise you, in that time, I will be open and curious. At the same time, if I’m gonna be open and curious to what is going on for you, can you commit to me that you’ll at least leave room in your mind for what you’re believing may not actually be true.

He said, I’m willing to be wrong. It’s possible there’s things I believe that are untrue. He then said, would you be willing to do the same thing? And I was like, sure, I feel like I’m open to that ,and I can really say with my integrity, yes, I’m willing to do that, too.

Katrina soon learned where I would question things.

How he would fact check.

Yeah, how I would fact check things. And so she started doing that herself before bringing things to me. And, in that process, she started to see cracks in the foundation.

I also just saw where information was not solid enough that it would make any difference whatsoever. However, there were also times I would fact check it, and I’m like, oh, I’m so glad I didn’t show him that one. And while it didn’t debunk everything I was seeing, it did impact some of the things I was seeing, which was part of the cracks that began to form in my sense of certainty.

But even as those cracks were forming, Katrina was waiting. Waiting for one of the prophecies from the world of QAnon to turn out to be true. Waiting for Hillary Clinton to be arrested. Or waiting for JFK Jr. to show up and reveal he’s not dead after all. Something like that would convince Stephen, she thought. It would prove to him that she was right. But the prophecies never became reality. And the more time that went by, the bigger the cracks in her confidence in QAnon became.

‘And I start to struggle with going back and forth of, it’s real, oh, maybe it’s not, it’s real. And so the wobble is happening, and the cracks are growing until I come to a point of recognizing I’m only engaging in an online addiction that’s not good for my mental and emotional well-being and could end my relationship.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s the thing about conspiracy theory beliefs. Most of us actually have them, and we can show you. You might wanna grab a pen or open the calculator on your phone for this next part. This is not gonna be hard math, I promise. There’s a test in psychology called the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire. There are various tests like this, but this one is said to be particularly good at predicting people’s susceptibility to conspiracy ideology, as it’s called. There’s five statements that you assign a number value to. If you think the statement is totally true, give us a hundred, because in your mind it’s a hundred percent true. If you it’s only half true, fifty percent, give it fifty. You get the idea. I took it, and so did a bunch of the people who were working on this show. And you can take it right now, too. Ready?

Statement number one: Many very important things happen in the world which the public is never informed about. Okay, well that I definitely think happens. I’m gonna say very likely for that, so 80 percent.

I mean that’s just true. 100 percent? 100 percent.

Yeah, 60 or 70 percent.

Number two, politicians usually do not tell us the true motives for their decisions. I mean, 90 percent, extremely likely, yes.

I’m going to say 60 percent, somewhat likely.

I’m gonna go lower on that, I’m going to say right around 40 percent.

Government agencies closely monitor all citizens. Um…60.

I’m not a big believer that we’re being closely monitored. I’m gonna say 20 percent.

I think 80 percent very likely. Oh God. I’m starting to feel like maybe I’m prone to conspiracies.

Events which superficially seem to lack a connection are often the result of secret activities. I can’t say anything with complete certainty, so I won’t be at 0 percent, but yeah, I’m gonna stick with 10 percent.

I’m going to say 40 percent. That’s somewhat unlikely.

I’m gonna say 30 percent on that one.

There are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions. We’ll call it 40 percent.

All the organizations are kind of secret in some way. So sure, let’s go with 70 on that.

I’m going to say 60 percent for that one.

Now add up the numbers and divide by 5. This was difficult for some of us.

Journalists are not good at math.

I’m actually not sure if I put the right numbers in.

54.

I did my math wrong, but it’s very close. It’s 48 and not 44.

So my score is 38. So definitely not zero.

Not zero. And to me, that’s important. We’re all a bunch of skeptical reporters, and when this test was developed in 2013, the average score in the US and the UK was 63, and we all scored at or below that. But we all felt at least one of those statements was probably or definitely true.

Too often we think, oh, well, this person’s uneducated or they’re crazy or this is mass delusion. I don’t think that’s the best way to understand what we’re dealing with.

Dr. Joseph Pierre is a professor and clinical psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco. He treats people with psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, but he’s also carved out an expertise in a very specific area of psychology, one that looks at beliefs like Katrina’s — like a lot of people’s. Beliefs that we might call crazy, even though the people who believe them are, by Dr. Pierre’s standards, not crazy. And so much of what he has studied and written about is useful for people who are in the situation Stephen and Katrina found themselves in. People who are asking, why does this person I love suddenly believe all of this stuff? How am I supposed to reason with them? And how do I not go crazy myself in the process? And first, he says, it helps to think about a spectrum of false beliefs, which are exactly that: a belief in something that is not true. On the one end of the spectrum, there are the kinds of false belief that we all have.

‘I think it’s easy for us to appreciate just how common it is for everyone to have false beliefs. We sort of engage in self-deception that makes us feel better about ourselves. Sometimes we just have the facts wrong. You know, I think, it would be sort of the extreme of arrogance if we were to say, well, I don’t have any false beliefs. Everything I believe is right, right? So we can understand pretty easily that this is common.

And then on the other end are the kind of beliefs that you do need psychiatric help for: delusions.

‘For example, someone might believe that they’re the second coming of Christ, or they might believe that the FBI has implanted radio chips, you know, in their brain to monitor them. And often the evidence for that belief, the rationale for why someone has that belief is often based on some sort of internal or subjective experience. So, for example, you might believe that you’re the second-coming of Christ because you heard a voice that you attributed to God that told you so.

Conspiracy theory beliefs fall into a gray area, somewhere in the middle of this false spectrum.

Conspiracy theories are mostly about external events that are happening in the world or historical events, not so much the believer. And the evidence isn’t that I heard a voice or I had a bodily sensation that made me feel a certain way. The evidence is some information that we find out there in the world, whether it’s people tell us or we go online and we find it there. On the surface, it looks like something very similar to what I would treat in my job as a psychiatrist. But if you look at surveys of how many people on the planet believe in conspiracy theories, surveys consistently find that well over half of the population believes in at least one.

Yeah.

I think in the US those surveys usually find that the number is around 70 percent of the population believes and at least one. You know, unless we start radically changing what we think about mental illness and claiming that everyone has mental illness, we have to sort of shift and have a different concept.

This is something we’ve come back to a lot making this show, this idea that believing in conspiracy theories, even ones that sound completely unbelievable, doesn’t mean that somebody is mentally ill, but it also doesn’t that they’re mentally healthy. Often people who are in deep holes of conspiracy belief are struggling, just like Katrina was in 2020. All of this is very helpful for getting to a place where you can have some empathy for somebody who believes things that you don’t, which is great. But how do you take that next step to have an effective conversation with somebody who is assuring you, and correctly most likely, that they are not crazy while they’re also telling you things that sound completely crazy?

‘In my experience as a clinician through the years has taught me that you start from a non-judgmental, genuine desire to understand where the person’s coming from. People ask me all the time, how should I approach a conversation with my loved one about QAnon or whatever conspiracy theory belief that they have. And I’ll say, well, what’s your goal? What’s your agenda? And oftentimes the agenda is, how can I talk them out of this crazy belief?

Yeah.

And if you start from that perspective, then you’re done because we’re all, I think, kind of primed to defend our beliefs and particularly when those beliefs become integrated or fused with our identities. Because when that happens, and this is true oftentimes of religious beliefs or ideological beliefs, or in some cases like with QAnon conspiracy theory beliefs, if I’m going to concede, oh my gosh, I’m wrong. You know, what does that mean? It means that not only is my belief wrong, but because it’s become fused with my identity, I’m sort of fundamentally wrong. Or what I’ve been doing for the past five years as I’ve been immersed in this subculture, that’s been a waste of time. And that’s, you know, people aren’t likely to just give that up right away. You can’t start off the bat with, let’s talk about how you’re wrong, right? You have to start with the understanding part and kind of mapping out the belief and why do you believe that? And that then opens up an opportunity to then have a dialogue about it and potentially to challenge the belief, but that’s going to take some time.

Dr. Pierre acknowledges that this is not easy. It’s not quick, and it’s not always gonna work. In some ways, he says it’s easier for him to deal with his regular patients than it is to deal with someone who is down the rabbit hole. Because, unlike most of his patients, believers in conspiracy theories don’t want to be convinced that they’re wrong. But he says that sometimes you can convince them that their beliefs are causing them enough pain that they should at least hear you out.

People believe all sorts of things that are either untrue or sort of fringe or things that people are going to disagree with us about. That’s not a big deal. But when they become sort of absorbing, and we’re spending all of our time revolved around this belief, that’s where things can be more difficult.

And that’s where Katrina had found herself, struggling under the weight of a lot of fear and starting to recognize the damage her beliefs were doing to her relationships. She said she had to get there herself, but she was only able to do it because Stephen gave her the time to get to there. And he loved her throughout.

It’s very easy to get distracted by things that are happening out there in the world that we really have no personal ability to impact or change. And I can remember having conversations with Katrina, just really pleading with her to just, let’s focus on what’s beautiful in our lives here in front of us, things that we can touch and feel and smell and see. There’s a lot here, and there’s family, and there’s friends, and there’s…

Let’s go with what is objectively true, which is right here in our lives. That we can fact check and validate.

Yeah, it’s not a truth unless you can touch it, feel it, see it, because everything else is subject to messaging and manipulation. We don’t know. So I get that you believe that, but don’t come to me and tell me that’s capital T truth.

I accept now that uncertainty exists, and I stopped trying to be certain of the things I’m uncertain of. Uncertainty will always be here, it’s not something to solve or fix. And I came to recognize that my anxiety was not driven by the things that are happening out there. It’s driven by the thoughts that I’m entertaining in my mind over and over again.

Was there a moment for you, Stephen, that you thought, okay, I think I have Katrina back here as you went through this process?

It was gradual. She was struggling a lot with, how do I come back? How do I reintroduce myself in my community? That’s an important part in the whole both process of, I’ll use the word indoctrination, but getting deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole, but also the ability to come back out. So your original community thinks you’ve now gone crazy…

To the dark side.

And now you’ve converted to this dark side and meanwhile, this other community is very embracing and warm and inviting, and you’re all thinking the same way and feeling the same away. And so it becomes very attractive. And what I learned is how important it is for there to be a safe landing zone back in the old community. Because, absent that, it’s too damn hard to leave a community that is thinking the same way and embracing you and try to come back into a community that thinks you’re batshit crazy.

After pulling myself out of the QAnon trance that I had come into and coming to recognize the toll it had taken on so many people, most especially Stephen, there are so many times I broke down in tears of gratitude that he stayed by my side. That’s nothing to be taken lightly. It’s not to be expected. And I don’t know where I’d be today if he hadn’t made that choice.

You know, there’s a perception, at least at the moment, that conspiracy theories are everywhere, that we’re in a golden age of conspiracy theories. Is there evidence for that? And I mean, why does it feel so dire right now.

I think there’s reasonable evidence that the kinds of conspiracy theories that people believe are more consequential. They matter. It’s not just about JFK being assassinated. Now it’s about climate change being a hoax or vaccines don’t work. They cause more disease than they cure. Those are really more concerning beliefs that can have a clear negative impact on both individuals, but also the fate of society. Maybe we’re not living in a golden age of conspiracy theories in terms of them being more prolific, but perhaps you could make an argument that we’re living in dark age of conspiracy theories because they’re more imminently consequential and have more of a potentially negative impact.

How do you see this all panning out? Are we on the way to a bad place?

Yeah, it’s an excellent question. It’s the million dollar question. I really am quite concerned and not so optimistic about this topic because I don’t think we have moved in a positive direction. I think there’s a solution. I think there’s ways that we can dig ourselves out. But now I think it will be harder to do so. And mostly the writing on the wall that I see is really headed in an opposite direction. So I’m not feeling particularly optimistic at the moment.

I think Dr. Pierre is probably right. A lot of people do lose the ones they love to this stuff. Colleen Protzman, who we met in Episode 1, never got her son Michael back. And I’ve met a lot more Colleen Protzmans than I’ve meet Katrina and Stephen. Stephen and Katrina are now married, but what worked for them isn’t going to work for everybody. They had a lot working in their favor. They had the time and the literal space to figure out a way to coexist. Katrina had trained in coaching people to get through conflict and that, in a way, allowed her to step outside of her own beliefs and see things from Stephen’s perspective. And then there’s the fact that, however much Stephen might have disagreed with Katrina, even found the beliefs she held for a while abhorrent, none of them were targeted at him. And I realize as I talk to you about approaching people and ideas with empathy that that is a very difficult ask if you yourself and your family and the people you love are the target of the hate that is so often tied up in conspiracy theory belief. But one thing I would say is that I’ve met a lot of people who go down these rabbit holes, and they’re not going in there as homophobic people, as extremely racist people or going in there with a lot of hate. So many of them go into these rabbit holes out of fear. And so maybe some of these people aren’t as lost to us as we might think. As bad as things are, or at least as they seem to be, as Dr. Pierre says, there are some things we can all do to help dig ourselves and each other out of this. Because even if, so far, you feel like you can’t relate, you haven’t had a loved one fall down a conspiracy rabbit hole and feel like you could never fall down one yourself, you’re not off the hook yet. Because this does affect all of us.

There’s kind of a cult for everyone. If anger, for instance, is the main thing you feel, then you might be drawn to a hate group because it gives you an enemy, and it gives someone to blame.

‘People have a community-sized hole in their heart, they have a meaning hole in their heart, and something’s going to fill it.

I’m Donie O’Sullivan, and this is Persuadable. Our producers are Graelyn Brashear and Emily Williams. Haley Thomas is our Senior Producer. Dan Dzula is our Technical Director, and Steve Lickteig is Executive Producer of CNN Audio. With support from Sean Clark, Logan Whiteside, Robert Mathers, Dan Bloom, Grace Walker, Jesse Remedios, Kyra Dahring, Alex Manasseri and Jamus Andrest. A special thank you to Jesselyn Cook, Patricia DiCarlo and Wendy Brundige. Thank you for listening. We’ll be back with our third episode next week.