The Account from CNN

2021 was a strange year. For me, it started, and it ended with crowds of people who had gathered together because of things they believed, things that were not true. On January 6th, I was in Washington where I watched people who believed the election was stolen storm the US Capitol.

We will never let our country go to the globalists. George Soros, you can go to hell!

And then, at the end of the year, I reported on a much smaller group of people who believed something even more out there.

Hundreds of QAnon followers from across the country gathered in Dallas to witness John F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. reappear and announce that Donald Trump would be reinstated as president. CNN's Donie O'Sullivan joins us now, and I know there's a tendency, Donie, to laugh at this, but it's terrifying.

Yeah, John. I mean, look, if we didn't laugh at this thing, I guess we would cry, but it is important to remember the sort of wider context, right, that this is all playing out in, is that there's this space online where there is no truth. People are not tethered to reality anymore. And while we have seen...

'I've been covering the world of misinformation in one way or another for more than a decade now. And I've doing it on TV, on CNN since about 2018. And it's not gonna surprise a lot of you that people who are on the fringes of political beliefs in the United States, on the right and on the left, whether they be anti-vax or QAnon believers, they normally don't wanna talk to somebody carrying a CNN microphone.

Y'all with CNN, the Communist News Network?

Are you a CNN fan?

No, I don't watch no news. I watch prophets of God...

They don't want to talk to anyone from what they call the mainstream media. After a while, though, I started to realize that they would talk to me.

I like you, but I don't think CNN is very honest, so.

He's probably more honest than the people on there.

That's why I said, I mean, he's nice. I mean...

Now, I'd like to say their willingness to talk to me was down to my charm and expertise and skills, but I think it's really just down to the fact that I have an Irish accent.

You're from Ireland? Where, where? I'm Irish.

We're originally from Notre Dame University area, which is Irish.

I certainly don't fit the mold of the standard, polished American television correspondent. I'm not what people expect.

'Cause I thought people from CNN wore shirts and ties.

And when they talk to me, sometimes they tell me some pretty crazy things.

How did you feel when you saw the assassination attempt? You initially thought it was staged.

Yep, as we all did.

Do you still believe that?

Yeah.

We don't know...

No, not getting that vaccine. No, no, no, no. They're saying that these people that got the vaccine could die within two years.

Trump got the vaccine, though.

They keep saying that. I don't know that. There's baby doctors telling pregnant women to get it. Do you know that will kill that fetus? It will kill the fetus...

I can't tell you the amount of times in the past few years people have asked me, how do you talk to these people? Why do you talk to these people? And by "these people," they mean people who believe crazy things. And for me, there's a few reasons. First, I think we're all capable of believing crazy things, and I'm not really that interested in what these people believe. I'm a lot more interested in why they believe it. Second, I think it's really important that we try to listen and try to understand. This stuff is having real effects on families, and, for every person that is deep down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, there's usually at least one person who is desperate to try and pull them back out. And then, there's the answer I don't normally give. But it's true. I see a part of myself in a lot of these people. I often think it could very easily be me on the other side of the microphone. And I think, in some ways, there's a part me that thinks I still could be one day, or very easily could be one of my friends or someone in my family who I love. It could be you. Why do we believe crazy shit? And, if somebody you love does, what can you do about it? What can any of us do about it? I'm Donie O'Sullivan, and this is Persuadable. I want to go back to the end of 2021, back to that group in Dallas that was camped out around Dealey Plaza waiting for a Kennedy to show up.

Word on the street is that Junior, JFK Junior, will show up and introduce his parents.

12:29, the same time of day that JFK Senior was shot here in this spot.

Probably the majority of us know that JFK Junior's alive.

Because in a lot of ways, it's that group, it's that gathering that made me make this podcast. I knew I wanted to do a story on these people, on this fringe arm of a fringe group. I mean, even a lot of QAnon believers thought these people were crazy. And there was somebody at the heart of it, in the middle of it all, a kind of cult leader, somebody I ended up spending more than a year following and trying to understand. His name was Michael Protzman.

Negative 48. Do I refer to you as Negative 48?

He went by the online persona "Negative 48."

'48 is evil. E-V-I-L. E is 5, V is 22, I is 9, L is 12. 48.

A name born from his obsession with gematria. It's a practice of assigning a number to letters of the alphabet. It's pretty simple. A equals 1, and Z equals 26. This is Michael talking to a reporter on that day in Dallas.

How much of this gathering here today are you responsible for, or are you just a participant?

98% of it.

It was Michael Protzman who had convinced all these people to show up in Dallas that day. They were his followers. They listened to him talk for hours on an online app called Telegram, where he spun up wild theories about how Trump was actually a Kennedy, and JFK Jr. and JFK were coming back to help Trump defeat the deep state.

The family tree goes like this: John John and Trump are cousins. Trump's uncle is JFK Senior. Trump's father is General George Patton, and his brother is Mussolini, Il Duce, that's why he's...

This was the end of 2021. Trump had lost the White House, and the mysterious Q persona who was behind QAnon had stopped posting messages online. People were looking for a leader, for somebody to guide them. And Michael, with his sermons on Telegram, seemed to be sort of stepping into that space. He had tens of thousands of followers, and some people were so moved by his words that they left their families and followed him to Dallas that November.

It is almost 12:29.

Kennedy did not show up.

Any minute now.

There were some bemused news headlines, and it was all perfect fodder for late night comics.

Shockingly, JFK Jr. did not show up in Dallas yesterday afternoon due to his chronic case of not alive.

This is like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin but without the charm. It's crazy.

'People quickly forgot about us, and most of the people who followed Michael to Dallas that day went home. But some stayed. And that made me wonder, who are these people? And where are their families, and where are they loved ones, and what do they think of all of this? To me, Michael Protzman seemed like a very successful, very pandemic-era con artist. And a few years ago, we decided to make a whole CNN television documentary about him.

So what is the significance of 115?

You'll find out, 174.

What's my number?

Trust the plan, 174.

Are you a con man?

No.

But the problem was, nobody really knew who this guy was. So we went to Seattle. That's where Michael's family was, and I was able to track down his mom, Colleen. And she eventually agreed to talk to us because she wanted to get her son home. She wanted to pull him out of this world that he was living in. We shot the interview with Colleen with her face in shadow. She was worried that, in some way, by showing her face on television, that that might upset Michael.

It's very hard to see him portrayed the way he is being portrayed right now compared to, you know, the person that we knew for the first 50 years of his life.

And what Colleen told us about Michael changed everything. There was more to him than the manipulative cult leader we might have thought he was.

He just always wanted to help people. It was nothing for him to pull out a $20 bill and give to somebody that he saw was struggling. And this was somebody that didn't have money to waste, but that's the kind of person he was.

And, over time, you saw him change?

Mhmm. Yeah.

'Colleen said that 2008-2009, around the time of the financial crash, was a very tough time for Michael. He started looking into investing in precious metals, gold, silver, and started doing research online.

'People need to get into silver and gold now. It is an absolute no-brainer of all the moves. Gold and silver are all you can rely on. Folks, please, I beg of you, listen to what Alex Jones is saying. You must take action immediately, or your children and your grandchildren will forever be slaves to the elite...

And whatever Michael saw on there, it sucked him in. He came to believe that the government were manipulating the currency, that the world market was gonna crash, that the dollar was gonna fail, that there was this cabal of some sort running everything. And he couldn't stop talking about it.

'He just was so adamant about the fact that his family was going to be left without if we didn't all understand that this was going happen. It evolved into Alex Jones and Infowars and Sandy Hook and the conspiracy of 9-11, and he became more isolated. And the more isolated he became, the more he needed his family to agree with him, to believe everything that he believed. And we didn't. He came to feel betrayed by us, you know, the people that he loved. If we didn't support him, what did he have?

'He had less and less. He pulled away from family, lost friends, lost his marriage, lost his construction business. In a lot of ways, Michael Protzman was primed for QAnon. And when those first Q drops came in 2017, he found like-minded people on QAnon forums, people who believed what he believed, people who understood it all in a way that his family could not. He developed theories of his own and started spending hours every day talking about them on Telegram.

I remember him telling his friends, like, I'm on Telegram, and all of a sudden I have these followers, you know, because he was putting his thoughts out there, you know, how he felt and whatnot. He says all of a sudden he had all these followers.

That's when Michael became Negative 48. And that's when Colleen says his family lost him. When I met Colleen, it had been years since she had talked to her son.

I think that this has given him a worth that he felt that he had lost when he lost his family. He just so believes this. I don't know whether he will ever come out of that. Maybe he thinks he doesn't have anything to come back to, which he's wrong. I just, you know, you always hope, and I'm sure these other families hope that they'll get their loved one back. And I know that we'll never give up. You know, that's why we try and stay connected and let him know that we're here. But I don't know.

Colleen never got to speak to her son again. In the short time between our interview with her and when the documentary was supposed to air, Michael was in an accident on a motocross course. He died not long after. We pushed the air date of our documentary, and I eventually flew back to Seattle to talk to Colleen again. This time, she was okay with us showing her face. There wasn't any reason to worry about upsetting Michael. He wasn't coming back.

Who knows why somebody falls for some of this? Who knows what it is that they're looking for? Who knows why somebody believed that Sandy Hook didn't happen just because Alex Jones says it doesn't? You know, who knows why people believe that stuff? But people do. And that has just caused so much pain, and it's caused me to lose my son. And it's caused those other people to lose their family members. And that makes me really angry. But there's nothing I can do about it.

Colleen, in her grief, made it clear that Michael might have looked like a villain. But she said that he really believed this stuff, and in some ways he was a victim, as well. Like so many people I've met who are down rabbit holes, Michael suffered trauma. And look, most of us have messed up things that happen in our lives, but we don't start believing that JFK is still alive. But this got me thinking about how we process trauma. A lot of people like Michael seem to externalize it. They find the why for their pain in the world around them. It's a cabal, or it's Democrats, or it's migrants, or whatever. I've found myself in rabbit holes of my own. And while I can't really empathize with Michael's beliefs, I can empathize with his pain. But instead of externalizing it, I tend to turn it inward; I internalize it. I have depression and anxiety, and I have something called pure OCD. And sometimes when a change happens, sometimes it's big, sometimes its small, something like a friend or a loved one getting sick, something that just provokes uncertainty. Whatever it is, and when there's no seemingly rational reason for why something might have happened, that's when my irrationality kicks in. And my mind will want to blame me. And I know it's getting bad when the thoughts just won't go away, and they just keep on coming and coming. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because when I'm in a hole of depression and anxiety and having these thoughts, there's just no talking myself out of it. There's no amount of rational information that I can present to myself to tell me that I'm a good person or that I am not to blame for whatever is going on. And I think it's the same with a lot of these conspiracy theories and the people who believe them. Telling someone they're wrong, usually just makes them dig deeper, regardless of the evidence you have to show them. There's just no amount of pictures or videos that you can bring to a person who believes that JFK is alive to convince him that he's actually dead. You have to just stop talking about JFK. And you have figure out what else is going on in that person's mind because it's not about JFK. And a lot of you out there are in the same situation with loved ones. You are rational me right now, arguing with irrational, depressed, anxious me. And you have no idea what to do. So if rationality and facts and evidence don't work, what does? How do we really figure out what's going on under our beliefs?

Human beings are not really convinced by facts. They're convinced by emotions, they're convinced by values, they're convinced by trust.

Dr. Sam Veissiere — he says I can call him Sam — is a cognitive scientist at McGill University in Montreal. He's also a therapist who works on a team that does crisis intervention with people who hold extreme beliefs. Sam deals with some pretty dark stuff. He counsels school shooters, incels, white supremacists. There were a lot of things I wanted to talk to Sam about, but we started with what makes people fall down rabbit holes of conspiracy theory belief in the first place.

'There's really no single one profile. Contrary to portrayal in at least, you know, some part of the media where we would like to think of them as just toothless, neckbearded, people with intellectual deficiencies, is that most of these people, I would say, are of above-average intelligence. They're very curious. They want to solve life's fundamental challenges. They're looking for answers, meaning, purpose, belonging, community, sacrifice. And most, if not all of them, I would say, have altruistic motives. They want to protect their loved ones from some perceived threat.

Sam is also an anthropologist. He studies how our origins as a species impact how we think, how we learn and what we decide to believe.

Human intelligence is collective intelligence. We learn everything from others, everything from how to walk to how to talk, how to feed ourselves. So, in order to learn anything, we need to find a community of people we feel safe with, but we seem to have great difficulty feeling altruism in connection with very large groups. And it may be because for the longest part of human evolutionary history, we lived in small bands. So there's been tons of studies looking at even, you know, the amount of actual people that an average human mind can entertain meaningful connections with. It's about 200. After that, you know, it becomes a little bit abstract. In moments of increased uncertainty, like natural disasters, wars, pandemics, polarization happens more, and we tend to other people more. And during the pandemic, larger and larger chunks of society lost trust in institutions because they were confused, and they started believing increasingly, well, you know, some could say crazy stuff.

You mentioned that there isn't one specific profile of a person that makes them more likely to fall for a conspiracy theory. But can you talk us a little bit through like what have you seen? What are some of the traits or life experiences or station in society that pushes people to this?

Yeah. So first, let me talk about the uneasy link between psychiatry and conspiracy theories, because what I do not want to convey is that extremism and conspiracy theories are just a form of mental illness. So in terms of psychopathology, in terms of mental disorders, for example, there's absolutely no one mental disorder that will make people believe in conspiracy theories. Most schizophrenics are not conspiracy theorists, for example. I think there is, however, a very high prevalence of distress, of mental distress. This does not mean that a mental illness causes the belief. It means that often these are people who, for complicated reasons, have had difficult lives, have experienced significant loss, have gone through trauma, and they're looking for, again, answers, you know, meaning, purpose and a community. Adopting, quote unquote, conspiracy beliefs, there's a sense of agency. So the idea that you can act on the world. You know something that others don't know. It's often a, you know, a kind of a, it confers a sense, rightly or not, of actually being able to do something about an otherwise unbearable situation.

It's almost as if, as humans, we feel more comfort in believing there is some force, even if it be an evil one, than for something to just be random and totally out of control.

Absolutely. One hallmark of all conspiracy theories is that they're simple, they're catchy. You can explain the gist of it in a sentence or two, and then you can elaborate. But it's very simple. And, all of a sudden, you understand the world. You have meaning, you know what to do, you know whom to avoid, you know who the enemies are. You have purpose, you have community. It's really great. Whereas on the other hand, as you point out, the actual truth, whatever it is, was infinitely more terrifying.

Like just, when it comes to certainty, is there an evolutionary path or story there, or reason that we just, we like that?

Yeah, I mean we need to be a little bit paranoid at baseline. We need to be able to identify threats, and it's better to have false positives, meaning when we think something is a threat and it's not. So we have minds that work like an overactive smoke detector. And in moments of increased threats, in moments when everything that people take for granted as true and good in the world kind of collapses, so a war, a pandemic, you know any massive change to the world, then we become more paranoid, then we become more obsessed with, you know, identifying with certainty what the threat is. And this is what we saw with the pandemic.

This makes a lot of sense to me. 2020 and its panic, its isolation, its uncertainty, it was all only five years ago. I don't think any of us were the best versions of ourselves during those years. And I don't think any us came out of COVID unscathed. I know I didn't. In 2021, I had a bit of a mental breakdown and kind of fell into a pit of depression and anxiety and what I now know is kind of pure OCD, like intrusive thoughts about myself, not about the world around me, but really, you know, reasons I should hate myself and really just messed up stuff, really irrational stuff. You know, it was kind of through that that I really started to realize, like, you do not have to be crazy to believe crazy shit. Right?

Absolutely.

When I'm in that space as this is why I am bad. This is why I'm not deserving of anything. And there's no amount of reasoning or rationalization I can do to make me stop believing the thing I believe. And I know because I've tried to rationalize it with myself for hundreds and thousands of hours on some of this stuff, and what I've learned over time is, if I really want to get out of that belief system, it has nothing at all to do with the beliefs. It's all the stuff that's happening around me. And I think that's kind of what you're also saying about getting a person out of a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. It's not the conspiracy theories you need to be talking about.

Absolutely. Thank you for compellingly sharing this. And I also suspect that, without knowing anything about your life history, that, you know, if you were able to restore or harmonize social and family connections, find yourself in a place, you know, where you're validated, where you're recognized, where you're loved. I imagine that that helped you get better. As an anthropologist, I actually have great, great faith in humanity's capacity for empathy.

I know what some of you are thinking, listening to this. How? How do you get past the substance of the beliefs when the beliefs sound completely crazy? Like, dangerously crazy. How do you have empathy for somebody who's sitting across the kitchen table from you, insisting that Hillary Clinton is responsible for the ritualistic murder of children or that Donald Trump staged his own assassination attempt? And if you don't correct them on that and call that out as crazy, are you not just letting them off the hook? I know it's hard, because I have been there myself, trying to get past rationalizing with myself to figure out really what's going on underneath and to find out the real source of my pain. And look, there are no easy answers here. But the stakes are really high. It's too late for Colleen Protzman, someone who was grieving her son before he was gone because she felt like she'd lost him a long time ago. But despite all of this, there is some reason for hope. So please stay with us.

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 come back into a community that thinks you're batshit crazy.

There are so many times I broke down in tears of gratitude that he stayed by my side. I don't know where I'd be today if he hadn't made that choice.

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, Ken Shiffman, Susan Chun, Jim Murphy, Logan Whiteside, Robert Mathers, Dan Bloom, Grace Walker, Jesse Remedios, Kyra Dahring, Alex Manasseri and Jamus Andrest. A special thank you to Patricia DiCarlo and Wendy Brundige. Thank you for listening. We'll be back with another episode next week.