How QAnon Destroys American Families

Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.

David Gilbert: The calls to arms, you know? They’re being very explicit about what is going to happen should Trump lose in November. And I think more attention needs to be paid to it, because it’s constant, it’s every day, and it could spell major trouble. And maybe not in one single coordinated effort like we saw on January 6th, but in lots of different locations around the country on maybe a smaller scale, but no less frightening.

Leah Feiger: David and Jess, thanks so much for coming on. Jesselyn Cook is a journalist and author of The Quiet Damage: Qanon and the Destruction of the American Family, which is out now. We’ll be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to Conspiracy of the Week, where you guys bring me your favorite conspiracies that you’ve come across recently, and I pick my favorite. The wilder, the better. Jess, as our guest, please go first.

Jesselyn Cook: So you know about flat earthers, but have you heard of hollow earthers?

Leah Feiger: Wait. Already, what? No.

Jesselyn Cook: Yeah. Tragically in my book, there is a seven-year-old, a second-grader who gets really deeply into Qanon, and his journey, a lot of it was through TikTok. And so I learned a lot about a lot of conspiracy theories on TikTok through his story.

Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.

Jesselyn Cook: The Hollow Earth Theory, this idea of an inner earth civilization, it’s been around for a long time, kind of through various ancient myths and legends, but it has made a resurgence on TikTok. A lot of young people you will see, if you look this up on TikTok, are talking-

Leah Feiger: I’m going to in like, truly, 10 minutes. Yeah.

Jesselyn Cook: So the idea is that deep below the Earth’s surface, there is a secret society, a very advanced society that lives down there somehow surviving without sunlight, without oxygen, without all the things we need to live. Some versions of the conspiracy theory are that they are aliens, and others are just there’s this society that’s going to emerge one day and kill us all. So not quite a fun conspiracy theory, but …

Leah Feiger: Oh, they never are. Sometimes. That’s a weird one. That’s like a real Hunger Games meets Stuart Little/Ratatouille vibes in a more globalist centric way. What do people think that the hollow earthers are doing? Are they controlling us or are they just existing?

Jesselyn Cook: They’re just existing. Some people who are not happy on regular Earth have gone down there apparently…

Leah Feiger: Sure.

Jesselyn Cook: …To just make a new life for themselves. And it’s funny, but then what’s less funny is when you click on the comments on these videos and you’re expecting people to be like, “This is dumb,” but there are a lot of kids in there saying, “NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer,” and just digging their heels in and citing Bible verses that supposedly prove the existence of this deeper earth. Study after study is showing that even though we assume digital natives, young people are able to parse real from fake online, that is not the case. Most of the time, these studies are showing that it’s really a grim outlook. And so it’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Check it out if you want on TikTok. But it’s pretty wild.