How QAnon is destroying American families

Lea Feiger: Mm-hmm.

David Gilbert: The calls to arms, you know? They’re very explicit about what’s going to happen if Trump loses in November. And I think that needs to be paid more attention to because it’s constant, it’s every day, and it can cause big problems. And maybe not in a single coordinated effort like we saw on January 6th, but in many different locations around the country on maybe a smaller scale, but no less frightening.

Lea Feiger: David and Jess, thanks for joining us. Jesselyn Cook is a journalist and the author of The Quiet Damage: Qanon and the Destruction of the American Family, out now. We’ll be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to Conspiracy of the Week, where you show 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: You know what the flat earthers are, but have you ever heard of the hollow earthers?

Lea Feiger: Wait. Al, what? No.

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

Lea Feiger: Mm-hmm.

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

Lea Feiger: I’m gonna do it in, like, 10 minutes. Yeah.

Jesselyn Cook: So the idea is that deep beneath the surface of the earth there is a secret society, a very advanced society that somehow lives and survives there without sunlight, without oxygen, without all the things that we need to live. Some versions of the conspiracy theory are that they are aliens, and some versions are just that there is a society that is going to show up one day and kill us all. So not a very nice conspiracy theory, but…

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

Jesselyn Cook: They just exist. Some people who are not happy on the regular Earth apparently went there…

Lea Feiger: Certainly.

Jesselyn Cook: …To just start a new life for themselves. And it’s funny, but what’s not so funny is when you click on the comments on these videos and you expect people to be like, “This is stupid,” but there are a lot of kids who are like, “NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer,” and just dig in their heels and quote Bible verses that supposedly prove the existence of this deeper earth. Study after study shows that, despite what we assume as digital natives, young people can actually tell the real from the fake online, they don’t. Most of the time, these studies show that it’s a really bleak outlook. And so it’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Check it out on TikTok if you want. But it’s pretty wild.