Leah Feiger: Mmmmm.
David Gilbert: The calls to arms, you know? They’re being very explicit about what’s going to happen if Trump loses in November. And I think it needs to be given more attention, because it’s constant, it’s happening every day, and it could mean big trouble. And maybe not in one coordinated effort like we saw on January 6th, but in many different places across the country, maybe on a smaller scale, but no less scary.
Leah Feiger: David and Jess, thanks so much for coming. Jesselyn Cook is a journalist and the 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 bring me your favorite conspiracies that you’ve recently encountered and I pick my favorite. The crazier the better. Jess, as our guest, please go first.
Jesselyn Cook: So you already know about flat-earthers, but have you heard of flat-earthers?
Leah Feiger: Wait. What now? No.
Jesselyn Cook: Yes. Tragically, in my book there’s a seven-year-old boy, a second grader, who gets very deep into Qanon, and a lot of his journey happened through TikTok. So I learned a lot about a lot of conspiracy theories on TikTok through his story.
Leah Feiger: Mmmmm.
Jesselyn Cook: The Hollow Earth theory, this idea of a civilization inside the Earth, has been around for a long time, through various ancient myths and legends, but it has resurfaced on TikTok. If you search for information about this on TikTok, you’ll see that a lot of young people are talking about…
Leah Feiger: I’ll do it in about 10 minutes, seriously. Yes.
Jesselyn Cook: The idea is that deep beneath the surface of the Earth there is a secret society, a very advanced society that lives there and somehow survives without sunlight, without oxygen, without all the things that we need to live. Some versions of the conspiracy theory hold that they are aliens, and others hold that there is a society that will emerge one day and kill us all. It’s not a very fun conspiracy theory, but…
Leah Feiger: Oh, they never are. Sometimes. It’s a weird case. It’s like a mix of The Hunger Games and Stuart Little and Ratatouille combined in a more globalist style. What do people think 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 ordinary Earth have apparently descended there…
Leah Feiger: Sure.
Jesselyn Cook: …To start a new life. And it’s funny, but what’s less funny is when you click on the comments on these videos and you expect people to be like, “This is nonsense,” but there are a lot of kids who are like, “NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer,” and they stand their ground and quote Bible verses that supposedly prove the existence of this deeper earth. Study after study shows that even though we assume they’re digital natives, young people are able to tell the real from the fake online, that’s not the case. More often than not, these studies show that it’s really a bleak picture. So it’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Check it out if you want on TikTok. But it’s pretty wild.
