The Flat Earth Society

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I find it fascinating, becausei i am a lufty groups holda strong in my heart, but the inn fighting is just wild. And there are warring groups, sometimes over theory, but often just over a personality clashes. The flat earth society, which it, it used to be very serious,. Now i i suspect that of its louder voices are kind of joking. But they they offer a fairly comprehensive theory of flat earth. Unfortunately, it is not the theory favored by people at the flat earth international conference, for example.

Since 2015, there has been a spectacular boom in a nearly 200-year-old delusion — the idea that we all live on a flat plane, under a solid dome, ringed by an impossible wall of ice. It is the ultimate in conspiracy theories, a wholesale rejection of everything we know to be true about the world in which we live. Where did this idea come from

Michael Shermer speaks with journalist Kelly Weill whose work covers extremism, disinformation, and online conspiracy theories in current affairs. The conversation is based on her book Off the Edgewhich tells a powerful story about belief, polarized realities, and what needs to happen so that we might all return to the same spinning globe.

Shermer and Weill discuss: the binary/black-and-white thinking of conspiracy theorists; how Flat-Earthism is ultimately a conspiracy theory about how NASA and the government are covering up the biggest secret in history; how Flat-Earthism is a proxy for other conspiracy theories (i.e., 9/11 truth, QAnon, and anti-Semitic beliefs about nefarious Jewish organizations conspiring to achieve world domination); and the role of social media in propagating conspiracy theories.