Leah Fager: Yes Yes.
David Gilbert: It’s a call for armed insurrection. They’re making it very clear what will happen if Trump loses in November. I think we need to pay more attention to this because this is happening constantly, every day, and it could cause big problems. And while it may not be a single coordinated effort like we saw on January 6th, it’s happening in different places across the country, maybe on a smaller scale, but just as frightening.
Leah Fager: David and Jess, thank you so much for being here. Jesslyn Cook is a journalist and author of The Quiet Damage: Qanon and the Destruction of the American Family, out now. Here’s Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome to Conspiracy of the Week. You can share with me your favorite recent conspiracy discoveries and I’ll pick my favorite. The more outlandish, the better. My guest, Jess, please start.
Jesslyn Cook: You’ve probably heard of the flat Earth theory, but have you heard of the hollow Earth theory?
Leah Fager: Wait, what again?
Jesslyn Cook: Yeah. Sadly, in my book, there’s a 7-year-old second-grader who gets very involved in Qanon, and a lot of his journey was through TikTok. And I learned a lot through his story about a lot of the conspiracy theories on TikTok.
Leah Fager: Yes Yes.
Jesslyn Cook: The hollow earth theory, or the idea that there is a civilization inside the Earth, has been around for a long time through ancient myths and legends, but it’s been making a comeback on TikTok. Just search for it on TikTok and you’ll see a lot of young people talking about it.
Leah Fager: It will take about 10 minutes. Yeah.
Jesslyn Cook: So the idea is that there’s a secret society deep under the Earth, a very advanced society that somehow manages to survive without sunlight, oxygen, or anything else we need to live. Some versions of the conspiracy theory say that they’re aliens, others that there’s a society that’s going to show up one day and kill us all. Not a very fun conspiracy theory…
Leah Fager: Oh, never. Sometimes. It’s a weird story. It feels like a real Hunger Games meets Stuart Little/Ratatouille vibe, but with a more globalist centric twist. What do the Hollow Earthers think they’re doing? Are they controlling us, or do they just exist?
Jesslyn Cook: They just exist. Apparently, people who are not happy on normal Earth went there…
Leah Fager: of course.
Jesslyn Cook: …just to have a new life. It’s funny, but when I click on the comments on these videos, I expected to get comments like, “That’s so stupid,” but what’s not so funny is that a lot of kids are like, “NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer,” and they’re stubbornly resisting, and quoting Bible verses that prove the existence of this deep earth. Study after study shows that even though we assume that young people are digital natives and can discern truth from falsehood on the net, that’s not the case. For the most part, these studies show that it’s a really bleak outlook. So this is kind of an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Check it out on TikTok if you like. But it’s pretty wild.
