251. Kelly Weill on Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2022

⏱️ 103 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to theurmer Show.
0:19.5	Welcome to the Michael Schurmer Show. I'm your host Michael Schurmer. My guest today is Kelly Weil. Her new book is Off The Edge.
0:28.0	Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and why people will believe anything. That subtitle tells you that it's not just about Flat Earthers, in fact it's about 9-11 truthers and
0:35.1	Q-Anon and rigged election conspiracy theories and an asthmatic conspiracy theories and
0:40.7	the whole going down the rabbit hole approach and that's the nature of the conversation
0:46.4	we deal with the flat earth through who they are. Kelly is a journalist for the Daily Beast and so she's attended these conferences.
0:54.8	So really interesting stories about the people that she met there, what they're like,
0:59.5	what they believe, who they are, what their political beliefs are, their religious beliefs, and what
1:04.4	they the correlates are of these other foundational beliefs that lie beneath flat eartherism.
1:10.6	So don't think of this as a you you know, conversation about some weird fringe idea that no one cares about.
1:15.6	In fact, it's really a gateway drug, as it were, into these deeper, darker conspiracy theories.
1:21.6	And so we discussed that and all the related ones
1:25.8	including sovereign citizens which have had personal experiences with and so we
1:30.4	talk about that a bit as well.
1:32.5	So if you enjoy this conversation,
1:34.0	please support the podcast at skeptic.com
1:37.0	slash donate.
1:38.4	That your donation goes to the 501c3 nonprofit skeptic society and therefore it's tax deductible and the
1:45.2	support gives support for not just the podcast but also Skeptic magazine and
1:50.8	other other activities. I am very excited to tell you about a new sponsor for
1:55.5	our podcast. It's another podcast. It's called The Lost Debate. It's not only a
2:01.5	podcast, also a YouTube show for political eclectics who want to escape
	...

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