Land of Delusion: Deep inside the world of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and radical ideas that are becoming dangerously mainstream

The Tip of the Spear

Chicago

JAMIE LEE WON’T TELL ME when it all began. I’m calling him from a hotel in Chicago, where the TV in my room is muted and the CNN headlines are reporting that Russia has taken control of the strategic railway hub of Lyman, in Ukraine’s Donbas region. I try to ask Lee when he first learned about the Tartarian Empire, but he brushes aside the question as if it’s unimportant. What he will tell me is that in a former life he was a financial analyst on Wall Street but he now lives on a ranch in Northern California. At some point he became aware of their plan and he had to get out. What’s the plan? I ask, but he doesn’t say. He was doing deep research, he says, but he can’t or won’t tell me specifics, and he doesn’t want to get into whatever it was that started it all.

How, I want to know, does one begin down a path that leads to believing that the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was faked, and that photos of the fair are, in fact, evidence of the lost civilization of Tartaria, a utopia that not only was destroyed, but whose very existence was subsequently erased from history? How does one come to believe that a secret Russian empire once ruled the world from San Francisco to Antarctica?

I’d spent the morning at Jackson Park, on the shores of Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. It was early, with barely anyone around—a few joggers, one man asleep on a park bench, another fishing in the lagoon. Across from the lagoon sprawls the Museum of Science and Industry, a massive beaux arts structure that stretches for a city block. Beautifully symmetrical, with colonnades and neoclassical statues adorning its facades, it would, in a few hours, be teeming with children on summer camp field trips. But for now, everything was quiet.

The west side of the lagoon—Bobolink Meadow—is now a rewilded marshland habitat, where native hawthorns and bur oaks caught the light morning breeze. Across from it is the Wooded Island, which boasts a Yoko Ono sculpture and a Japanese garden. At this time of morning, it was almost entirely empty. If you ignored the whizzing traffic from South Stony Island Avenue and the construction cranes in the distance, you could believe that you had somehow stumbled across the site of a lost city—abandoned and overgrown.

When people talk about the Tartarian Empire, they are talking about this place: Jackson Park. In 1893, it was the home of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the international fair held to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in North America. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only building left standing from that time, but this was once—for a brief few months—the site of a gleaming, temporary city. The museum, then called the Palace of Fine Arts, was the northernmost of the great buildings constructed for the fair, a series of epic structures that included the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, one of the largest structures ever built. If it were still standing today, it would rank second in the world in volume and third in footprint.

It’s mostly all gone now. Most of the halls were built using steel frame construction, then fleshed out with wood and covered with staff, an inexpensive material mixed from plaster and jute that is easy to mold but doesn’t last. (The Palace of Fine Arts was an exception; for fire insurance reasons, it was built with brick.) Without constant maintenance, these temporary buildings quickly fell into disrepair after the exposition, and nearly all of them ended up burning in an arsonist’s fire in July of 1894. (There was no regret, the Chicago Tribune remarked of the conflagration, rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbia season.) Lost, too, was Daniel Chester French’s gleaming, sixty-five-foot Statue of the Republic, which overlooked the Court of Honor. Today a twenty-four-foot replica stands on a traffic circle in the park near the golf course, a forgotten and neglected god whose dominion now includes only a handful of cars and a few construction workers fixing potholes.

At least that’s the traditional story. There are some, including Jamie Lee, who don’t buy it at all. There is a community of thousands of believers who congregate in groups on Reddit and Discord and TikTok, exchanging ideas and documents that, they claim, reveal the real history, the one that’s been almost entirely covered up. They look at the photographs of the Court of Honor and see not temporary buildings that were never meant to last, but proof of a hidden conspiracy. They see the city of Chilago, once an outpost of the Tartarian Empire, and in photographs of