Tag: flat earthers

Sportswear Company Challenges Flat Earthers to Photograph Planet’s Edge

A clever new marketing campaign from sportswear company Columbia offers Flat Earthers a sizeable prize if they can produce a photograph of the edge of the planet. The amusing challenge was reportedly put forward by CEO Tim Boyle in an open letter published in the New York Times and a video released on Monday. “This is a message to Flat Earthers,” he wrote in the missive, “I’ve seen your manifestos, admired your diagrams, watched you stand proudly on your, well, flat ground. So here’s the deal: it’s time to put your map where your mouth is.”

Boyle subsequently announced the launch of what the company has dubbed ‘Expedition Impossible,’ a challenge to the controversial conspiracy theorists to “do what no one in history has ever done: find the edge of the Earth.” Should someone manage to pull off the unfathomable feat, the CEO said, they would receive “everything owned by the company.” To those who might attempt to win the prize, Boyle smartly advised that they make the journey to the frosty ‘forbidden zone’ in Columbia gear because it’s “tough enough for pretty much anything, except maybe falling into the abyss.”

While Boyle’s amusing video shows him promising all manner of materials found at the Columbia headquarters, a disclaimer attached to the contest notes that “the company refers to ‘The Company, LLC’ with assets which are valued at $100,000.” Additionally, to prevent any shenanigans from possible participants, Columbia stressed that “the Edge of the Earth” is a visible, physical end to the planet Earth. We’re talking infinite sheer drop, abyssal void, clouds cascading into infinity.”

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Prominent Flat Earther Admits He Was Wrong

In a surprise conclusion to a project dubbed The Final Experiment, several well-known believers in a non-spherical Earth have had a change of heart

“All right, guys, sometimes, you are wrong in life,” announced Jeran Campanella, a prominent flat-Earth theorist who joined an all-expenses-paid expedition to Antarctica to see the Sun circle the sky for an entire day.

“And I thought that there was no 24-hour Sun, in fact I was pretty sure of it.”

For the past three years a pastor from Denver, Colorado, named Will Duffy has worked to bring together a selection of ‘globist’ and ‘flat-earther’ YouTube content creators to “settle the shape of the Earth” in a single act of observation.

Traveling to Union Glacier Camp – a full-service private facility just 1,138 kilometers (707 miles) from the South Pole – the two ‘teams’ gathered to see with their own eyes whether reports of a non-setting Sun were fabrications of some greater conspiracy, or truthful observations of planetary physics at work.

Throughout history, various cultures have held mixed views on what lies over the horizon, and how the land beneath our feet connects with what we see over our heads.

In a modern sense, flat-Earth beliefs emerged in the 19th century as a counter to scientific fact, often buoyed by religious convictions or aligning with political values in a shared distrust of an academic authority.

Today, social media has given voice and community to a legion of people who doubt what most of us take for granted as a well-supported fact.

“It’s really about the power of knowledge, and that increasing distrust in what we once considered to be the gatekeepers of knowledge – like academics, scientific agencies, or the government,” University of Melbourne communications expert Jennifer Beckett told Anders Furze in a 2019 article on the topic.

Though there’s no agreement on what this non-curving world looks like from afar, most descriptions need to account for what can be experienced as individuals.

Phenomena such as the changing position of the Sun, or differences in the heights of objects as we travel towards a horizon, still need to make sense if Earth is a huge pancake rimmed in Antarctic frosting.

Scientific explanations of the Sun’s seasonal shifts are relatively straight-forward. Perched on opposing ends of a tilted globe, each pole experiences alternating periods of uninterrupted sunlight or endless night as Earth completes laps of the Solar System.

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Trudeau invokes “flat-earthers” and “anti-vaxxers” as he calls for social platforms to be liable for “disinformation”

Canada‘s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked “flat-earthers” and “anti-vaxxers” to call for a crackdown on “disinformation” online. He made the comments during a town hall event in Ottawa last week.

Trudeau began by saying the government should find a balance between censorship and free speech to protect people from disinformation.

“Governments have very limited tools to protect people in an online world, which is a good thing. It allows for a tremendous amount of freedom – freedom of expression, freedom of discovery – no oppressive governments controlling what you see, what you want, but it also opens us up to a tremendous amount of crap, of hate speech, of things that are illegal, but also things that are just going to bring us down roads where we’re going to get lost,” he said.

He then talked about misinformation in terms of anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers.

“I remember a few years ago before the pandemic, getting really fascinated by flat-earthers, and trying to understand – sort of – the thinking behind them, of people who decided actively to create an identity for themselves that was to just clearly reject what science settled thousands of years ago with the ancient Greeks and that there’s no real contrast to,” he explained.

“It’s more of an identity thing rather than a reasoning thing, and to have people sucked into that, it was fascinating to try and see what it was all about.

“And of course, we went on to understand the phenomenon of anti-vaxxers and anti-science, anti-skeptics, and this rise in these echo chambers that are validating this kind of thinking in ways that have real consequences.

“There are people in Canada who died surrounded by their families because they truly and genuinely believed that the vaccine was more dangerous than the virus, and it killed them.”

The PM then argued that online platforms should be held responsible for the content they host.

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The Flat Earth Psyops

Never in my wildest dreams before joining the Freedom Movement, did I think I would be debating with people who sincerely believe the Earth is a motionless flat disc, floating in space. Discussing this topic is uncomfortable for many people in the movement, and understandably, they distance themselves from it, claiming it does not matter if the Earth is round or flat.

Yet, we call ourselves truthers. The truth about 9/11 is very important to our community; the truth about the pandemic, the PCR test, and the mRNA injections are also critically important. Should we waste time fighting over issues that only divide us?

Yet, the fervent and repeated promotion of the Flat Earth theory is a constant on social media, especially on Facebook. The Flat Earth followers are aggressive and generally derogatory towards the “globies” — who in their view are brainwashed by NASA and the media. The secondary conspiracy theory, (and let’s call a spade a spade, it is a conspiracy theory), that NASA faked the Apollo missions, is always part of the Flat Earth theory. In fact, the two theories can be said to be one.

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Flat Earther Busted in Freemason Arson Spree

Less than an hour after three Masonic lodges burned in Vancouver, Canada, a suspect appeared to take credit for the blazes.

“I just cleaned 3 satanic club houses and nobody could do anything,” Ben Kohlman posted on Facebook on Tuesday morning.

Kohlman, 42, has been charged with arson in one of the three blazes, and is expected to face similar charges in the attacks on the other two buildings, the Vancouver Sun reported. And although police have not announced a motive in the arsons, Kohlman’s Facebook page contains anti-Freemason attacks that he shared from conspiracy pages, particularly pages about flat earth theory.

The incident wouldn’t even be the first time in recent years that a flat earther attempted to burn down a Masonic lodge. An Australian flat earth convention went off the rails in 2018 when an organizer was accused of the same crime.

Flat earthers believe—wrongly—that the planet is shaped like a disk and that malevolent figures are trying to trick people into believing they live on a globe. But the conspiracy movement has not reached a consensus about who, exactly, is behind the nefarious plot. While some flat earthers blame the government or invoke anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, others falsely accuse the Freemasons (a fraternal society) of concealing the earth’s true shape.

Conspiracy theories about groups like Freemasons are not without consequence. The group has been falsely accused of secretive schemes, leading to Freemasons’ persecution by the Nazi regime, during which fascists linked the fraternity to Judaism in order to allege a “Jewish-Masonic” plot.

Mark Sargent, a prominent flat earther who does not advocate arson, told The Daily Beast that Freemasons had attracted some flat earthers’ attention because the group had the reputation of being a secret society, while still maintaining a public presence.

“A large section of Flat Earth members are grounded in the general conspiracy world, which means they are always aware of different societies that have been accused of keeping world secrets,” Sargent told The Daily Beast via email. “I feel bad for the Masons because they are by far the most public of the secret societies. The lodges in the U.S., for example are usually large, stone, easy to spot buildings, and are in just about every town you can think of.”

Also easy to spot were the three buildings around Vancouver, all of which burned in the early hours of March 30. Although no one was injured, one building was completely destroyed. Approximately 40 minutes after the last fire, Kohlman wrote his Facebook post bragging about “cleaning satanic club houses,” CTV News first reported.

It was unclear on Thursday whether Kohlman, who was arrested in Burnaby, has a lawyer.

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Wisconsin Vaccine Saboteur Steven Brandenburg Is a Flat-Earther, FBI Document Reveals

The Wisconsin pharmacist who intentionally sabotaged hundreds of doses of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine because he thought COVID-19 was a hoax, also believes the earth is flat and the sky is actually a “shield put up by the Government to prevent individuals from seeing God.”

That’s according to a newly-unsealed FBI search warrant application obtained by The Daily Beast, which the bureau filed earlier this month requesting permission to analyze an iPhone, a laptop, and a thumb drive seized from Steven Brandenburg when he was arrested in late December.

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