For some time now, a new expression has been appearing in the media and, above all, on the Internet and social networks: flat earthers in Spanish and flat earths in English, that is, people who at this point in the game have the guts to deny, against all flags, that the Earth is round.
It is, from the outset, a strongly irrational position, very much in tune with the times, characterized by the denial of scientific evidence and the culture accumulated over centuries in this area by humanity. To try to achieve it, and to add followers, they then appeal to conspiracy theories in order to start from there a process of deconstruction of the truth.
In this sense, flat earthing constitutes, due to its philosophy and its procedures, a particular expression of phenomena such as alt-rightQAnon and lately, the election deniers in the United States, generally made up of dim-witted individuals with a low educational level. In a word, by the very people who support Trumpism and populism.
Its principles are summarized in two or three elements. First of all, that:
a global elite that rules in the shadows has plunged humanity into the deepest ignorance about the world in which we live. Through NASA, the educational system, and the media, we have been led to believe that the Earth is a spinning sphere traveling at enormous speeds through the outer space.
To which they add an affirmation of arms to take: “What they have not told us is that neither the sphericity nor the movement of the Earth has ever been demonstrated”, which takes them back millennia ago by going over the trigonometric calculations by the Greek Eratosthenes (from -276 to -194), the first Western scientist capable of measuring the circumference of the Earth with amazing precision: 39,375 kilometers.
The flat earthers propose us to accept that space exploration is a lie, a great imposture of the space agencies, especially NASA, supposedly associated with Hollywood to digitally retouch satellite images and falsify videos using the special effects of cinema. This formulation is supported by the aforementioned Kennedy assassination and September 11 conspiracy theories, in which a dark hidden power intervened to prevent us from accessing the truth. With the same logic, the moon landing of Apollo 11 (1969) has been denied, despite the material evidence brought to Earth by the astronauts, otherwise fully known by the international scientific community and public.
Second, that “scientism” is part of an agenda designed to distance people from God, an idea that refers to the impacts of fundamentalist religious thought among its membership, and in particular the evangelicalsjust another of the electoral supports of Trumpism.
At the end of 2017 they held the International Conference Flat Earth (FEIC) in Raleigh, North Carolina. The event was organized by Kryptoz Media, a DVD production company and other Christian fundamentalist media, and the Institute for Creation Cosmology, a similar organization. It featured talks titled “NASA and Other Space Lies,” “Awakening to the Lies of Conventional Science,” “The Flat Earth and the Bible,” and “Testing the Globe.” Your organizer, Robert Davidson, of Kryptoz Media, is a Christian fundamentalist ideologue whose work is focused on trying to deconstruct/devalidate Darwin’s evolution and the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. In the blurb of his book Scientism Exposed: Hiding the True Creator of Creation (2018), available on Amazon.com, reads the following:
What if there has been an agenda to lead people away from God’s Truth? What if everything modern science has taught you about your origins is wrong? Not make mistakes; the very basis of all humanity’s knowledge depends on what is believed to be the Truth about the Origin of everything that exists. This book is the long-awaited book built on the two bestselling documentaries Scientism Exposed 1 & 2, uncovering the spiritual agenda and deception in the scientific worldview that many teach today as proven truth and fact and where it all leads.
But now it has been the turn of the congresses for an earth plane of sausage, tambourine and castanets. According to him daily Minorca, on September 18, more than a hundred of its enthusiastic supporters will hold their first meeting in the Balearic Islands. According to Mara Llompart, its organizer, they summon him to share “scientific arguments and philosophical reflections” and, above all, to uncover the “great lie and scam that we live in a balloon, that we go around the Sun and that we are in an infinite space. The goal of the meeting, of course, is “to spread the true shape of the Earth, which is flat.”
Undoubtedly a complete success, even without having started: “we are very happy with the response from the public”, says Llompart. They still have to decide where the event will be held because the space planned at the beginning, he says, “has become too small to receive all the people who will come.” As he announces, flat earthers from Barcelona, Valencia and the Basque Country will attend. “We have mobilized many defenders of the Flat Earth, who will attend the meeting from different parts of Spain.”
The flat earthers Iru Landucci (Argentina), the brothers Jordi and David Barea (Spain) and Martín Rodríguez (Uruguay) are announced. More of the same, although in the periphery, not in the center, the reader will say. Affirmative, but do not be fooled on another point. Neither here nor there are flat earthers a massive phenomenon but just a sneeze – a bit noisy, it’s true – in the networks and placed in one of the most comfortable places of the so-called post-truth. “Our movement has grown a lot since 2016/2017. Today in Brazil there are more than 11 million people who have already understood that the Earth is flat”, he maintains. Anderson Neves, one of its most conspicuous inflators. But there is a hidden detail behind that magic figure, and that is that it represents barely 5% of the country’s total population.
A Trump adviser once claimed in front of TV cameras, also against all empirically verifiable evidence, that there were more people at Trump’s inauguration than at Obama’s – an “alternative fact” (alternative facts), a new category invented by Trumpism to designate lies. Others, perhaps more hallucinated, assured at the time that John F. Kennedy, his eldest son and Jackie Kennedy would return from the dead on March 4, 2021 to support Trump to regain the position he lost in clean elections, possibly the most watched and challenged in history. It was recorded by the press, not without astonishment: “Followers of QAnon meet in Dallas, Texas to watch the Kennedys reinstate Trump as president.”
The same pets, only with different collars.
