On Jan. 6, 2021, author and ethnographer Noelle Cook drove to Washington, D.C. On Capitol Hill, she was shocked to come upon a scene of people smashed against the walls of Congress and emergency responders taking away the body of Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran who was shot dead by police as she attempted to crawl through a broken window and into the Speaker’s Lobby, outside the House chamber.
Cook had not shown up to take part in the “Stop the Steal” rally, which ended in the storming of the U.S. Capitol by rioters who believed Donald Trump’s lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election.
As a researcher and amateur photographer, Cook thought the rally might inspire a project.
It did. On Tuesday, the fifth anniversary of January 6, Cook will publish The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging, a book focused on the rise of women’s extremism that culminated in the attack on Congress. She also produced a film of the same name.
“I had never done anything MAGA before, so I thought I would just go down and take photographs of the ‘Stop the Steal’ rally because the signs and stuff are always visually interesting,” Cook told Raw Story, of that day now five years gone.
“It was very surreal. It was almost like this sinister carnival, where there was celebratory activity, and also I heard so much violent rhetoric everywhere — people talking about hanging people.”
After Cook returned home to Maryland, she spent three weeks processing images. Then she decided to follow the first 100 women who were arrested for their actions on January 6.
Scouring court records, news reports and social media, Cook looked for patterns.
What she discovered was that many of these women, like herself, had entered middle age.
Cook immersed herself in the stories of two such women, Yvonne St. Cyr and Tammy Butry.
To Cook, the two women embraced “conspirituality,” a term scholars use to describe a quickly growing ideology that blends New Age spirituality, anti-vaccination advocacy, anti-government extremism and conspiracy theories.
A potent mix, it ultimately brought St. Cyr and Butry to the Capitol on January 6.
“I had no intention of studying QAnon or conspiracies or anything, but I kind of followed these women where they led me, which was straight into conspiracies,” Cook said.
‘They get their community online’
St. Cyr and Butry were both in the mob that forced its way into the Capitol.
St. Cyr led a crowd through the tunnels below the main corridors and chambers, coaching rioters in a collective push to open the doors.
Butry, wearing a blue Trump flag as a cape, marched around inside the Capitol, taking selfies and a swig of Jack Daniel’s, Cook writes.
The Conspiracists (image provided by Broadleaf Books)
The riot failed to stop certification of the election. Biden became president. St. Cyr would be sentenced to 30 months in prison, Butry to 20 days.
On the page, Cook examines how a combination of personal trauma and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic made women like St. Cyr and Butry more susceptible to conspiracy theories, as they were exposed to more and more online.
“Most of these women that I talk to, middle-aged women, don’t have that much opportunity to socialize anymore, and they get their community online,” Cook said.
During the pandemic, such women found themselves with little time to leave their homes, especially while caring for children or aging parents or both. Turning to Facebook groups and other online communities, they found guidance and community.
“I think conspiracies serve as a coping mechanism for many people,” Cook said.
‘Validated and vindicated’
In interviewing participants in the Jan. 6 riot, Cook said, she has “not talked to anybody personally who regrets that day.”
Noelle Cook (photo provided by Broadleaf Books)
Last January, on his first day back in office, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6th defendants. That, Cook said, provided a corroboration of many conspiracists’ beliefs.
“It’s worse because Trump pardoned all of them, and so they all feel validated and vindicated,” Cook said.
“I keep getting told, ‘See, I told you, this is going to come true.’”
The same goes for Trump’s appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Known before entering office for campaigning against vaccines, Kennedy has used his position to roll back vaccine guidance — actions conspiracists frequently support.
“They’re going to celebrate until the kids all start dying of some preventable disease,” Cook said.
Conspiracists continue to look to the Trump administration for what they see as validation of their beliefs, Cook said, particularly adherents of QAnon, the far-right movement whose premise involves Trump waging war on Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles, among supposed Democratic elites in Hollywood and the federal government.
“It’s a wink and a nod all the time, and that keeps people energized,” Cook said.
“For so long as people with authority continue to stoke the fire and continue to throw out the little crumbs here and there to keep people invested, I don’t know how it does change, because I feel like everyone was more emboldened and felt a lot more empowered when Trump was reelected this time.”
‘Facts don’t really matter’
Cook did not try to convince St. Cyr or Butry their beliefs were wrong. Rather, she observed and listened.
“That’s the problem here with conspiracists, facts don’t really matter much,” Cook said. “It’s feelings.
“What you’re asking people to do [by asking them to change] is take away their daily purpose, their sense of belonging and their sense of community, which is a really hard thing to do.”
Conspiracists don’t typically change beliefs until it affects them personally, Cook said — as in the case of Erica Roach, a one-time QAnon and anti-vaccine adherent who left Trump’s MAGA movement after January 6, as Raw Story recently reported.
“There’s nothing really anyone can do, I don’t think, to extract people until they have a reason to see it themselves,” Cook said.
“When you’re dealing with such outrageous, outlandish myths and stories and fabrications, it’s really hard to convince people otherwise.”
- The Conspiracists is published on Tuesday.
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