How QAnon Destroys American Families
Q hasn’t posted anything since 2022. But a staggering number of Americans still buy into QAnon, the conspiracy movement steeped in claims that Satan-worshipping pedophiles run the US government. Today on the show, journalist and author Jesselyn Cook on QAnon’s lasting political ramifications and the relationships it destroys.
Leah Feiger is @LeahFeiger. David Gilbert is @DaithaiGilbert. Jesselyn Cook is @JessReports. Write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
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The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family by Jesselyn Cook
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Leah Feiger: This is WIRED Politics Lab, a show about how tech is changing politics. I’m Leah Feiger, the senior politics editor at WIRED. In late 2017, an anonymous user started posting cryptic messages on the online message board 4chan. The user went by Q and claimed to be a government official with access to secrets. The biggest secret of all, the poster wrote, was that the US government is run by a small faction of political elites. Those elites are pedophiles who worship Satan, and they control the Democratic Party and the media. The drops of cryptic, and false, intel that Q left online sparked a movement known as QAnon, and it predicted that some day soon, the deep state would be exposed and the bad actors would be arrested en masse. That day would be known as the Great Awakening, and it would be spearheaded by the president at the time, Donald J. Trump.
Donald Trump [Archival audio]: Well, I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they liked me very much.
Leah Feiger: The conspiracy spread like wildfire. A survey in 2023 found that a quarter of Americans believed that Wall Street, the media, and the government were all run by Satanic pedophiles. WIRED has done a lot of reporting on the tech and political side of QAnon, and some of that has been from David Gilbert, our resident QAnon expert joining me today from Cork, Ireland. We’re going to get into the impact of QAnon on this year’s election. But first, Jesselyn Cook has just published a whole book about the actual people and families impacted by QAnon. It’s called The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family. She joins me and David today from Atlanta. Jess, David, welcome to WIRED Politics Lab.
Jesselyn Cook: Thank you for having me.
David Gilbert: Great to be here.
Leah Feiger: So let’s get right into it. Jess, your book profiles several people whose family members have gone down the QAnon rabbit hole or who have gone down the rabbit hole themselves, but they’re not necessarily the kinds of people you’d expect. And as you were working on this book, what surprised you most about who specifically gets sucked into QAnon?
Jesselyn Cook: I think there’s a natural impulse to assume that QAnon believers in particular, the really extreme conspiracy theorists, are crazy or stupid. You hear those kinds of insults lobbed around a lot. And so what’s been surprising throughout my reporting process, and surprising I think to a lot of people who are starting to read the book, is that really intelligent people, very educated people can become susceptible to QAnon and to really extreme illogical conspiracy theories. And I think there’s a misconception that your level of intelligence or education is what matters here, when in fact, the people who really are drawn to these, in so many cases I found through my reporting, it’s that they have these unmet needs completely separate from their IQ.
Leah Feiger: Huh.
Jesselyn Cook: They have these other kind of holes that are filled by conspiracy theories. And then we’ve seen how algorithms operate to kind of lure you along deeper and deeper into an echo chamber and further and further away from dissent and facts. And it doesn’t happen overnight in most cases, but I think vaccines for a lot of people were kind of the entryway. They started having questions about vaccines; some of them valid, some of them a little ludicrous. But the deeper in you get, the more you’re going to start hearing things at the more extreme end of the spectrum.
David Gilbert: I find that timing is a very important thing as well. Because if you see a video and you are in a stable frame of mind, you might just pass it by and not pay any attention to it. But if you have been let down by something or you feel as if the world has kind of gone against you, and you see that same video, it strikes differently, and therefore you will fall down the rabbit hole. And a lot of the time, I find the people I’m talking to, their family or friends, it’s kind of this one-off thing. And if they see the wrong piece of content at the wrong time, they go down the rabbit hole. I don’t know if you’ve found that as well in your research.
Jesselyn Cook: Absolutely. It really does come down to timing. And a lot of the characters in my book got in in very vulnerable moments in their lives. One character in my book, Matt, he’d always been a little curious about conspiracy theories. Mostly to laugh at them. He didn’t really ever feel drawn in by them. And so for many years he had kind of observed the Alex Jones type conspiracy theories and thought they were silly. And then eventually it worked on him. And it wasn’t that his critical thinking suddenly just went out the window. It was that he was at a very vulnerable part of his life. He had just suffered a pretty debilitating injury and he was spending a lot of time sitting in a chair feeling like he had been stripped of his purpose. He couldn’t be there for his children and his wife in the ways he always had, and he wanted to feel that meaning again. And QAnon gave it to him. He got to show up online every day as a digital soldier. And so I think because he was in that kind of compromised place, he had a really badly diminished sense of self-worth. That is why it was a little more enticing to him than all the previous years of his life when he’d been able to look and say, “That’s silly.” So I completely agree with your observation.
Leah Feiger: I’d love to hear from you a little bit about the effect that this had on people’s relationships. You do such a good job in your book of talking about these beautiful, complicated, destructive relationships. There’s a lot there. I’d love to hear a little bit about that from you.
Jesselyn Cook: Trying to capture that level of pain was maybe one of the hardest parts about writing this book. Because in my time as a reporter, I’ve written about a lot of vulnerable groups, a lot of groups who have suffered immensely, and somehow this reporting was the most heartbreaking of my career. I think it’s just a level of pain that’s hard to describe, because in many cases, to lose a loved one to something like QAnon feels like you’re grieving someone who’s still alive. And that’s very difficult to do, especially when they’ve gone into a belief system that much of the rest of the world points out as insane and evil and stupid. And so in one case, Adam is this young man who has lost his father to suicide and then he eventually loses his mother to Qanon. And he just can’t let her go. He desperately wants to save her. To use his words, he wants to save her, bring her back because she’s the only parent he has left. And so the toll that it takes on his life, trying to drag her out of the rabbit hole is almost as devastating as what QAnon does to her life, you know?
Leah Feiger: Right.
Jesselyn Cook: He’s letting go of friendships, he’s slacking at work, he’s not taking good care of himself. He’s just obsessed. And he’s kind of going undercover in these online communities where she’s sinking deeper and deeper, and he’s trying to study it and learn it and find the cure. And he kind of slips into a really bad gambling spiral because he’s trying to cope in his own way. And it’s just really devastating. All the relationships in the book kind of show the toll, not only on the believer, but their loved ones as well.
David Gilbert: The idea that someone has lost someone or is grieving the death of someone in the family, even though they’re seeing them maybe on a daily basis, is really hard for people to get their heads around. I know I struggled to get my head around it when I first started hearing it from family members of QAnon victims, I suppose. Do you think that people just outside of the world of Qanon, who have been affected by it don’t really get still how bad and how damaging this conspiracy movement can be?
Jesselyn Cook: Absolutely. I think it’s hard for people who don’t have a loved one going through this to understand what that feels like. In Adam’s case, he tried to talk to his friends about it, he tried to seek support, and they would just kind of shrug it off, like, “Boomers on the internet, man. They’re crazy.” They didn’t understand that it has just become his mother’s identity. And the comparison I hear again and again and again in my interviews is that it feels like watching someone you love turn into a stranger.
David Gilbert: Mm-hmm.
Jesselyn Cook: And they’re not just embracing crazy things, they’re often embracing hateful things, even when you know them to be a kind and decent person. I’m fortunate not to have had anyone that I love go down this rabbit hole, but in listening to these stories, so many of them, I’ve really come to witness the damage it can do. And it’s not just painful. It can be maddening trying to convince someone you know to be sane and rational of very basic truths, and they won’t hear it, they dig their heels in, they just keep hitting you up with these crazier and crazier YouTube videos. It absolutely takes a toll and can be deeply traumatizing for loved ones on the outside trying to pull their family members back to reality.
Leah Feiger: And pulling people back to reality isn’t that easy. I mean, Covid made us all familiar with the backfire effect. When you try and challenge someone’s belief system, even when it seems to be easily debunked, it doesn’t always work. You wrote about a woman named Alice who did kind of escape QAnon a bit with the help of her fiance and her father. Can you talk about how they helped her and what worked specifically there?
Jesselyn Cook: Yeah. Alice was very fortunate because she had a very devoted support network that just did not give up on her. And in many cases, that’s not what happens, especially when believers become extremely defensive, and in some cases cruel. It’s easy, sometimes best, to walk away from them for loved ones. But in Alice’s case, her fiancé and her father just stuck by her side and were extremely patient and empathetic and compassionate with her. And I think the big picture is that they came to realize that it wasn’t really about the information itself. It wasn’t really about these conspiracy theories she was latching onto. There was a deeper need there. And so when they were able to put aside the “what” of belief and look past the lunacy, and really try to focus on the why. Why did she cling to these convictions so intensely?Tthey were able to address that underlying need. And by focusing there, her desperation to believe started to fall away. But also, they applied two strategies that have been recommended to me time and again by experts. And I think there’s a greater hope for success when they’re applied in tandem. And so one is the Socratic method and the other is motivational interviewing. On the whole, they’re trying to get the believer to try to step back, take a look at their own belief systems critically, to understand their own biases. Really, it comes down to being partners and finding the truth with the believer. So instead of trying to force facts down their throat, you just kind of listen and understand what they’re looking at and try to understand what the greater message is that they’re trying to take away from it. Maybe it’s hope, maybe it’s validating their understanding that there is real corruption out there. It takes a lot of patience. And I understand a Socratic questioning method is not something that works for everyone, because it does really require a long-term commitment. But motivational interviewing, which is what Alice’s father applied, was really trying to get her to look at the big picture. Like, “Forget about the true and the false for a second, and just look at what this is doing to your life. Even if there really is some deep state cabal out there doing all these wicked things, what is your involvement accomplishing really, other than destroying your friendships, pushing away your loved ones, causing you a great deal of humiliation online? Let’s just try to focus on you and take stock of the harm this is causing to your life.” And in the end, Alice comes out, but she doesn’t necessarily disavow everything she once believed in. She just says, “This is toxic. I can’t do this anymore.” She becomes very apolitical. And for her, that is part of healing. It’s just saying, “I don’t know if it’s true. I don’t know if it’s false. I don’t know if I will ever know, but I can see what it’s doing to me and what it’s doing to the people I care about, so I need to step back.”
David Gilbert: I was speaking recently to someone who had been a friend of someone who fell down the QAnon rabbit hole, and in the last couple of years they’d stopped posting about it and it seemed as if they were coming out of it. But then the attempted assassination on Trump a couple of weeks ago, they just fell straight back into it and started posting incessantly about it. And she said to me that what she did was she sent a message to her friend and said, “Look, even though we’ll argue about this, you’re still my friend.” And what she said is that she wanted to provide a soft landing for when this person eventually did come out of the QAnon; when she realized that she had been wrong all along, that there was somewhere where she could go to admit that to a friend. Because I think that’s important, that if you’ve spent six months or three years in this rabbit hole, even if you realize that you’ve been wrong, saying that is so difficult. And if you can have one person who has provided that kind of place where you know, no matter what you’ve done, they’ll listen to you, then that’s very important for people who may potentially come out of QAnon as well.
Leah Feiger: I think that even just talking about the assassination a little bit, so much of this is also triggered by real-world massive events. Jess, you wrote a lot in your book about how a lot of people mistrusted the medical establishment already and influencers were blending health content and conspiracy content well before Covid hit, and then 2020 happened. Can you talk about the conditions kind of leading up to that, and that then Covid perhaps exacerbated even more?
Jesselyn Cook: So in the US, we were hearing a lot of this pitchfork populism even before Covid, just trying to rile people up about the establishment, the people in power working against their interests. And that was really intoxicating to people. Obviously there’s a long history of this throughout the US, but certainly around the 2016 election and going forward. And so I think there was already a lot of distrust and even healthy skepticism bleeding into reactive suspicion, a reflexive suspicion. And so leading into Covid, there were already people kind of primed to not believe what they were told even from credible sources. But when Covid hit, we were all in a compromised situation. We didn’t get to see our loved ones. Some of us lost jobs, some of us lost family members. And so we were all lesser versions of ourselves, at least for a while, and we were also stuck online for hours.
Leah Feiger: Terminally online. Yes. Of course,
Jesselyn Cook: Yeah. Absolutely. Not only did it make all of us more vulnerable, it also made grifters and opportunists and bad actors more powerful. There were these huge information voids. Covid spread so rapidly, scientists were scrambling to study a mutating coronavirus never seen before in humans. And you don’t get those facts overnight. But these bad actors can provide people who are desperate for answers with information right away. And so QAnon especially really seized that opportunity and just seeded these wild ideas that people latched onto before the facts could emerge. And so I think that’s why we really saw QAnon rise from the fringes over the pandemic and kind of morph into what it is today, which I would say it’s just normalized and blended into our mainstream. And you hear diluted versions of these theories from our elected leaders all the time.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm. And we’re definitely going to be getting into that in a bit. Your book though is coming out at such a good time, especially ahead of the election, and almost especially because Q hasn’t actually posted anything in years. How has that impacted, would you say, the movement or specifically the people in your book, that there has actually been such a lag between these Q drops and where we are now going into 2024?
Jesselyn Cook: A thing you’ll hear from QAnon believers now is that there is no QAnon, which is really interesting. And I think before Q went dark, he put out this message basically telling followers to shed the branding; “Don’t speak of QAnon, don’t speak of Q.” And so the people who embrace those ideas are not necessarily going around saying, “I am a QAnon believer.”
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
Jesselyn Cook: But this is part of that mainstreaming, right? They recognize that QAnon is looked at very negatively on the wide scale, even by people who do hold those ideas and would not consider themselves to be QAnon believers. And so that’s been one of the most remarkable things to witness. And maybe, David, you’ve observed the same in reporting on this for as long as you have. The labels have gone underground, but the theories have just kept simmering to the top.
David Gilbert: Absolutely. The ability for it to sustain itself in the absence of Q … Like the amount of people who believe it now is greater probably than it’s ever been in the core conspiracies. And it has seeped into large parts of US society; from the Republican Party, where it’s kind of become orthodoxy in a lot of places, and also in kind of evangelical churches, where the ideas behind it are espoused from the pulpit, which is … It’s truly incredible how much it has been able to sustain itself despite the fact that Q no longer posts.
Leah Feiger: On that note, we’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, more with David Gilbert and Jesselyn Cook on how QAnon grew with the help of the GOP.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. So Jess and David, since the very early days, there have been obvious ties between people deeply steeped in the QAnon movement, conservative media and the Republican Party, especially Donald Trump. Within a few months of Q’s first post, Trump was referencing and/or sharing various QAnon influencers. What was the role of the GOP in QAnon’s growth?
Jesselyn Cook: So Donald Trump was eventually asked by a reporter about QAnon. And of course, he initially tried to say, “I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
Jesselyn Cook: But he did eventually tacitly endorse QAnon and its followers. He called them “people who love our country.” And so you could kind of see, he obviously understood that QAnon believers worship him. They make up a portion of his base, and he didn’t want to insult them or dissuade them from supporting him. And so you can see how, again and again, even long before QAnon, the GOP has kind of either refused to disavow or has kind of nodded and winked at these really toxic conspiracy theories. I mean, even going back, Eisenhower did not openly disavow this red baiting that was going on. He saw how it galvanized voters. He saw what happened to people who dared publicly oppose Joseph McCarthy. And so I think the legacy of McCarthyism is just this kind of willingness by the GOP to legitimize conspiracy theories for its own political gain implicitly or explicitly. And so we’ve seen this iteration after iteration after iteration of these wild, false and openly harmful ideologies kind of not only not being swatted down or stopped in their tracks, but kind of welcomed very subtly. And that’s what brings them into the mainstream and gives them the kind of oxygen they need to evolve and become worse.
David Gilbert: Conversely, we’ve also seen figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene emerge from the kind of QAnon, toxic—
Jesselyn Cook: Right.
David Gilbert: She was one of the first people to post a video online talking about Q drops in late 2017, which is like weeks after the first Q drop when no one was paying attention to it. And she kind of rode that wave of infamy within the conspiracy movement to become a lawmaker in DC. And we’ve seen many other GOP lawmakers embrace QAnon and not suffer consequences at the ballot box as a result. So this conspiracy has helped promote people from the bottom up as well who are now major figures within the GOP as a result.
Leah Feiger: Well, I mean, believers have become like a wing of the base.
David Gilbert: They have. And I think the Venn diagram of people who believe in QAnon and who vote for Trump is a circle effectively. Because even people I’ve spoken to who are Bernie supporters or who were before QAnon, they’ve become convinced that Trump is this hero. So they’re going to vote for Trump because they believe he is working with the white hats and he’s going to save America. So that’s why, as Jess said, he does not want to annoy his base. That’s why he retweets their stuff on Truth Social constantly. He wants those votes. He does not want to annoy them because they are 100 percent going to vote for him no matter what he does.
Leah Feiger: Yeah. Let’s talk about the election right now. Obviously we are in less than a hundred days, which is all sorts of wild. How could QAnon and the QAnon belief system, QAnon influencers, QAnon Grifters, how could they impact the election now? And how have they already?
Jesselyn Cook: I think a lot of the really popular Trumpian influencers we’re seeing right now are spewing QAnon conspiracy theories quite openly. One that comes to mind is known as DC Draino.
Leah Feiger: Hmm.
Jesselyn Cook: He has over a million, maybe 2 million followers on Instagram and another million on Twitter, X. And this stuff he’s saying, which goes viral, is straight QAnon rhetoric. He would not call himself a QAnon believer, but he’s been to the White House, he’s taken lots of pictures with Donald Trump. He’s claiming that the assassination attempt on Trump was an inside job ordered by the Democrats. He’s posting a lot of things that he poses them as questions just to put it out there without openly saying, “This is what happened.” But you see it … He’s one example, but you see it all over the place, especially on X.
David Gilbert: Mm-hmm.
Jesselyn Cook: And I think a lot of people who are voting in this election are parasocially attached to these figures and really trust what they’re saying, and look to them for guidance and to kind of translate the chaos storm that is our news cycle into digestible chunks of information. And so when it goes through that filtered wall of just nonsense and kind of fear mongering and distortions of reality, of course that has the ability to sway votes. And so it feels like we’re really building up to something a little unnerving, to put it lightly.
Leah Feiger: And your point about X is spot on. I mean, that feels like the core of where just so much of this posting is happening right now. David, you’ve done reporting about Elon Musk himself also promulgating QAnon conspiracies and lending tacit support to the movement as well. Talk to us a little bit about that.
David Gilbert: Yeah. X has become … You know, the movement was for a long time kind of consigned to Telegram channels and more fringe platforms because they’d been kicked off X. But since Musk came back, pretty much every single QAnon influencer is back on the platform. They’re all trying to make money off it because that’s the way he’s configured the platform, to make the most engaged content earn money, no matter how wild or conspiracy filled it is. But you see it every day. You see posts by figures like DC Draino, as Jess said, Matt Walsh, or others who are kind of these right-wing commentators. But what I think they’re doing is they’re stoking fear. They’re not trying to defend Trump on his policies or on his personality, but what they’re doing is stoking fears around child sex trafficking, or this evil cabal that’s going to take over the country, or anti-trans opinions. And the reason they’re doing that is that people will be fearful that Kamala Harris will not tackle these problems, and the only solution to the problems is Donald Trump.
Leah Feiger: Yeah, let’s talk about that for a moment. The QAnon movement has had some truly violent effects; key part of January 6, the man who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband was a follower. The list is long. You talk about this being an unnerving moment. And David, you’re talking about this ramping up. Where do you see this heading?
Jesselyn Cook: I’m hopeful we don’t see another January 6, but I mean, the conditions that gave rise to January 6, they’re present now, maybe even in some ways more so. And I think if Trump does lose, there’s going to be proclivity toward violence among some of his most extreme supporters, for sure. They will absolutely see this as a stolen election again. You already hear that rhetoric ringing out online. So I do worry about seeing more violence. I do worry about what that outcome will be when we already even see some threats of that online and almost calls for a civil war in some cases.
Leah Feiger: Yeah.
Jesselyn Cook: People who seem to believe that they have this righteous anger and that war would be the right thing to do to stand up for our constitution and to stand up for our democracy. People really believe this stuff, and they really look at themselves as martyrs. And so that is where things get scary.
Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.
David Gilbert: You know, we’ve talked really about how militias are recruiting on Facebook openly.
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 6, 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.
[Break]
Leah Feiger: 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 7-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.
Leah Feiger: That is so heartbreaking. I will be checking it out truly in T minus five. Will let you know my thoughts. Thanks, Jess. David, what do you have for us? And is it more fun, less fun? Less sad?
David Gilbert: Probably less sad. It depends on where you’re coming from. So where … It’s Olympics time at the moment.
Leah Feiger: Oh, thank goodness. Yes. I was hoping for an Olympics conspiracy.
David Gilbert: And so I hope everyone watched the Opening Ceremony from the Olympics last Friday night from Paris, because it was raining, but it was amazing, it was crazy. But as I was watching it, I was going, “Oh no.” Immediately people started coming up with conspiracy theories. So one of the parts of the Opening Ceremony was a celebration of Dionysus because the Greek god of feasting and because of the Greek link to Olympics, but also because of French tradition of feasting and rituals. But that’s not what a lot of people took away from it. Immediately, people believed that there was a link to the Last Supper and Jesus Christ, and that they were mocking Christianity and mocking the traditional family values because they had people representing the LGBTQ+ community, and therefore this was debasing humanity effectively. So immediately that spread everywhere, that Jesus Christ is about to return as a result of this, that this is a signal that that’s going to happen. But my favorite comparison was one person compared this Olympics to the Olympics in 2014 in Sochi, the Winter Olympics, when the Russians put on this traditional Christian display of male and female roles. And that is what these people want to go back to. They want to go to Russia in 2014.
Leah Feiger: Ending with “Olympics are woke now” is the natural conclusion here—
David Gilbert: Of course.
Leah Feiger: … Obviously.
David Gilbert: Yeah.
Leah Feiger: That’s a pretty good one. All right. These are both really good, but I’m going to have to give it to Jess. You’re not just our guest, but hollow earthers … I mean, I’m about to spend the afternoon diving into this. So thank you and rude for doing that to me. But really, really good ones, guys. Thank you both so much for joining us this week. Really, really appreciate you coming on.
Jesselyn Cook: Thank you. This was a blast. Thanks for having me.
David Gilbert: Yeah, it’s been great.
Leah Feiger: Thanks for listening to WIRED Politics Lab. If you like what you heard today, make sure to follow the show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. We also have a newsletter, which Makena Kelly writes each week. The link to the newsletter and the WIRED reporting we mentioned today are in the show notes. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please, please write to us at politicslab@WIRED.com. That’s politicslab@WIRED.com. We’re so excited to hear from you. WIRED Politics Lab is produced by Jake Harper. Pran Bandi is our studio engineer. Amar Lal mixed this episode. Stephanie Kariuki is our executive producer. Chris Bannon is Global Head of Audio at Conde Nast. And I’m your host, Leah Feiger. We’ll be back in your feeds with a new episode next week.
