This time we are honoured and delighted to welcome special guest Kelly Weill of The Daily Beast (etc) to talk to us about her new (and excellent) book Off The Edge, a history of Flat Earth, the current state of the Flat Earth movement, and our cultish and conspiratorial times generally. A fun and thoughtful - and sometimes melancholic - discussion. Off The Edge links Off the Edge - Workman Publishing Amazon.com: Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything: 9781643750682: Weill, Kelly: Books Kelly's Twitter @KELLYWEILL Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Hello and welcome to episode 106 of I Don't Speak German.
And a very special episode this time.
So no undignified mucking about from me, just straight on very professional into the episode.
Because we have, well, we have Daniel here, obviously, and myself as usual.
And we also have a very special guest, Kelly Weil of the Daily Beast and other things, of course, here to talk to us very kindly about her new book and related subjects, I'm sure, Off the Edge, Kelly.
Kelly, hi, how are you doing?
Good.
Thank you for having me.
It's our pleasure and honor.
Daniel, are you there, in fact, or is it just Kelly and I?
Well, I'm here.
You know, I was I was exploring the infinite plane outside Antarctica, personally, before we got started here.
And so, you know, it was, you know, just just kind of found my way in and I thought, hey, I might as well record this.
Yes, indeed.
So, wow.
I'm still getting over the fact that you don't sound like the audio book, Kelly, because I experienced your book via via Audible.
And it's very well read, actually.
And it's a really good book.
I really enjoyed it.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, that's the joy of having an audiobook reader is someone with a much more mellifluous voice, who doesn't also have a terrible cold like I have right now.
So yeah, you got the better end of it.
Your cold is barely noticeable.
And by the time I've edited it, nobody will, in fact, I'll take out everything you've just said.
So nobody will ever know.
The level of the level of fidelity to facts that a Flat Earthers would admire, I'm sure.
Yeah.
Oh, yes, indeed.
Yeah.
If the facts disagree with what you know to be true, you just change them.
Surely that's how it's done, isn't it?
It's great seeing how the sausage is made here.
Yeah.
Start some new conspiracy theories about us.
There are plenty.
I think there's one or two of them already.
But yeah, no, yeah.
Thanks for coming on, Kelly.
We definitely appreciate it.
And I think, you know, we both did very much enjoy the book.
I actually read it on paper, like a barbarian, and found it quite enjoyable.
And I guess if we want to get started here, actually, with the content, this is the question everybody asks, but I feel like it really is.
The basic question is, why Flat Earth?
How did you get into Flat Earth?
I got into Flat Earth in a way that I think many listeners of this podcast might be familiar.
I spend a lot of time on extremist forums, just hanging out, just seeing what they're talking about.
And around 2017, I started seeing people post about Flat Earth.
And I thought there was no way they were serious.
I thought maybe this was some kind of You know, in jokes, some weird meme that I'd missed out on.
So I spent a long time digging into it and I found that not only are Flat Earthers completely serious, there's actually a lot of them.
And I thought that was really interesting because, you know, there are a lot of conspiracy theories out there that can coexist reasonably well with reality, but Flat Earth is so extreme.
I thought it was really a case study in how people can believe anything they put their minds to.
No, definitely.
And you were reporting this for the Daily Beast at the time.
I guess it was weird for me that you describe it in some places as like, I was on the flat earth beat for the Daily Beast, which it says something for the Daily Beast that that's a beat you can have, right?
Yeah, no, it does say something.
I mean, this shouldn't be a big enough theory in 2022 or 2018 when I was writing about it that it should constitute a beat.
And yet, once you start looking for them, Flat Earthers are all over the place.
So my coverage of Flat Earthers really coincided with this huge conspiratorial boom in U.S.
politics and generally, you know, our shared sense of sanity.
So I was covering them pretty intensely for a while in a very interesting moment for that movement.
It's very much a phenomenon of the internet age, isn't it?
Obviously, in its current form.
One of the things that interests me about it is how the widespread idea that lots of people have about it is that it's a medieval idea, or it's an ancient idea, or is in fact the ancients were pretty clued up on this, as indeed were many medieval people.
It really is a phenomenon of modernity, Flat Earth.
That's right.
You know, it's funny.
There's this stereotype that medieval peasants thought Earth was flat and that we've believed this until fairly recently and that the globe is a new invention.
And really, it's the other way around.
We don't give our ancestors enough credit.
And we've known that we live in a globe for more than 2,000 years.
It's actually not too hard to prove.
This is something that Greek mathematicians were doing with Very basic observations with shadows and horizon lines.
But flat Earth is a fairly new invention and we see it emerge in the mid-1800s.
It's when we have really one inventor of the theory, a man named Samuel Rawbotham, He was very much a recognizable conspiracy figure these days.
He sold fake miracle cures, he had a failed utopian commune, and he did these experiments that he said showed that Earth was flat.
Now, we know he was wrong or he was lying, but he understood his grift very well and he sold books about flat Earth and pamphlets and lecture tours.
And he started making quite a bit of money and a number of converts to this theory.
And the flat Earth model that we see today is really directly derivative of this model that emerged in the 1800s.
Yeah, the link to utopian socialism was something that was extremely interesting to me when I read your book.
It reminded me of some of the wackier ideas to be found in the output of those thinkers like Fourier and Saint-Simon and people like that.
Some of it gets very strange indeed!
It was funny to me, this figure, Samuel Ralbatham, even though he was operating almost 200 years ago, there was something so modern about the way he worked.
If he were alive today, he would definitely be a YouTuber.
He had all these idealist notions.
He was, you know, selling glorified soda water that he said was a miracle cure.
And yeah, I mean, he was a leader of this failed utopian movement, not unlike some other interesting communes and collectives that have come out of conspiracy movements in recent years, including out of the Flat Earth Movement.
So very interesting to see this kind of figure alive and well 200 years ago.
Yes, indeed.
And the commune that he was the head of, it was specifically Owenite, wasn't it?
To the point where in your book, you talk about him actually writing to Robert Owen to ask him to settle points of doctrine.
And Owen decides not to write back because by then he'd already very much disgraced himself.
But then it gets sort of taken over by this chap who's more like a very aggressive, almost fascistic theocrat.
What was his name?
Bolivar, Wilbur von Bolivar.
And yeah, a fascistic theocrat is a great way of describing him.
He wouldn't even disagree with the theocrat part.
That's what he called himself.
That's what he named his newspaper.
Basically, in early 1900s, there was a town in Illinois called Zion.
There actually still is a town called Zion.
It's very nice.
But in its early days, it was founded as a religious community, a very fundamentalist religious community where the one founding church could really make its own rules and decide how it was going to run schools and how public lands were managed.
And unfortunately for this community, its leader, Wilbur Glenn Vulova, turned to Flat Earth belief pretty early in the town's existence.
And he really used this theory to rule with a fascistic fervor.
He put Flat Earth in schools.
He had a police force that walked around carrying the Bible in their holsters because they believed that Flat Earth was a biblical belief.
They had these crazy morality rules and you could be You know, just like get your eye punched out for smoking.
I mean, just a really hard line guy who was a militant, militant flat earther.
And there's a chilling direct line really through to, you know, a lot of people today, including people who stormed the Capitol building on January the 6th, who would have very similar attitudes and some of whom apparently flat earthers.
That's true.
You know, there were a number, at least two people who were present at the Capitol on January 6 to have espoused Flat Earth beliefs.
I think only one faced charges.
But, you know, I see This huge conspiracy driven momentum on the right.
And increasingly, I think there is overlap with the flat earth community.
But these conspiracy theories are really becoming so foundational for the far right.
And on January 6, I mean, they were the Excuse for storming that building.
The people who attacked the Capitol were doing so on the false belief that Trump had really won the election.
So these theories, although they're wacky, and I do like to trace their strange origins, they're not without consequence.
They're hugely politically consequential, especially for the right right now.
There's a term that Rob Botham used that comes up a lot in the book that I think is worthy of some examination here in that context.
That's the term zetetic.
Can you describe what that word originally meant?
And well, you know, sort of the Flat Earth community uses it and how you jokingly apply it in the book to great effect.
Sure.
So, Zetetic astronomy was Ralph Botham's model of science.
Basically, what he meant by it was that you should only believe evidence that you can personally confirm, things that you can verify with your own eyes and ears.
And on its face, that sounds kind of nice.
That sounds But it's not a viable science.
And you can find ways that this would fail you in every minute of the day.
An example I use in the book is that I've never been to New Mexico, but I report on New Mexico politics quite a lot.
And I have good reason to believe that New Mexico exists, even though I'm not there constantly confirming its continued existence.
This kind of science doesn't really work as a form of inquiry.
It's just a means of discarding evidence that you don't want to deal with.
You can say, well, I've never been to the moon, so maybe it is fake.
And so this was a logical tactic that was introduced in the 1800s that I think we still see a lot today, even if it's not explicitly called zetetic science.
It's fascinating, isn't it?
It reminds me of that line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead about England, just because they're on the boat to England.
England just being a conspiracy of cartographers.
It's a weird, because it seems like a kind of radical empiricism, but it ends up in Immediately, just complete skepticism to the point where, you know, not sort of sensible skepticism, but because it's not scientific, it's scientism, isn't it?
It's completely liberated from any framework of inquiry.
So it just becomes basically a kind of license to doubt anything you don't like the sound of.
That's exactly it.
And you know, I think that reactionary doubt is a really powerful tool for conspiracy theorists.
It gives them license to discredit absolutely anything unless they are already inclined to.
And I think that has really upsetting consequences for this shared reality that we should all be upholding.
If you're reflexively questioning every piece of evidence, it's not a healthy way to pursue your life and it's not a healthy way to build community.
It's not a healthy way to maintain relationships.
Although, again, it does have that appeal, like a slogan of do your own research.
It's not the way that people are actually proceeding with their lives, and it's not a useful tool of inquiry.
Yeah, it doesn't actually translate into that kind of radical skepticism.
It's very selective, isn't it?
It's a selective skepticism.
Like, as you say, the phrase, do your own research.
It very often, certainly with people like the QAnon contingent, that's a favorite phrase of theirs.
I mean, all across the conspiracy sphere, they say that as, no doubt, you know better than anyone.
But it translates into just read and listen to the other people in the bubble.
Absolutely.
So when I was reporting this book, I actually talked to some psychologists who help people exit cults.
And while I don't think conspiracy theories are exactly like cults, there are some disturbing parallels.
And what one expert told me is that Conspiracy theories and cults operate in a similar way because they encourage people to only take in information from within their bubble and to reflexively shut out information from outside.
And so it reinforces this group And it doesn't allow people to critically engage with other information that might be challenging to them, but is actually a truer model of the world.
Well, I can't imagine that Daniel has any experience with listening to people that do that.
We all do that to a certain extent, don't we?
But I think, yeah, it's ramped up to an extreme, isn't it, in these sorts of communities?
What I find interesting about the zetetic concept is, as the Flat Earthers use it, or as, you know, as it's used in the book is, you know, that, you know, it prioritizes sort of the evidence of one's eyes above, you know, like, much more like validated sources of evidence, right?
Um, and in some cases, like, like, yeah, taking a fresh look at something and, you know, trying to, you know, sort of ask the questions that a five-year-old would ask can lead to interesting conclusions.
I think there's, I think there's value in that, and I think that that should be encouraged.
But it also has to come alongside an understanding that, you know, well, maybe there's a reason that, you know, some of these things are, I mean, you know, look, Jack and I are leftists.
We believe that entire fields of economics are basically bugs.
So, you know, yes, I do.
I do get the I do get the premise.
But I do find, you know, like just kind of coming back to like the January 6th thing and the Stop the Steal movement is that you often find I mean, and this is just an example, you know, People will take the evidence of a five-second grainy video clip of some ballots being moved from one place to another and use that as the pinpoint evidence that the entire election is a fraud, as opposed to all the other things around it.
They will pinpoint various elements of...
You know, mainstream news articles in which a certain word is used, and then that becomes the thing they circle.
And it's like, oh, well, this is the proof that this giant conspiracy is actually true because, you know, this, that and the other.
And, you know, there's a whole, like, grift ecosystem.
I mean, Tim Pool has built his career on this, right?
You know, and believe me, I could go into, you know, one day we may do an episode about the Paranoimies, which is one of the TRS-affiliated podcasts that is just straight conspiracy all the time.
I'm sure Kelly knows it very well.
But they get into this kind of stuff.
And, you know, it gets, Yeah, no, it's just, it's just like, like, it's not like we're going to take a, like, skeptical approach and, you know, apply the criticisms of, or apply the kind of the premises of the mainstream sources to the same tactics that we apply our own, you know, to ourselves, right?
It's, well, this rando on YouTube is actually more He's actually more authenticated because he's not affiliated with the giant conspiracy because he doesn't have money behind him, right?
And so it doesn't matter kind of what he's saying.
matters, you know, that he's not the establishment and that this kind of mindset is encouraged by certain kinds of, you know, social media strategies and algorithms and that sort of thing.
And I think there's a lot of really meaty material in your book, despite that it's a very easy read, I found like it's a very enjoyable read, but there's a lot of like detail packed into it.
And I find that's something that I really admired about the book.
And, you know, you're right to point out that they will take a sliver of pseudo evidence and spin a whole conspiracy around it.
And And I think this is just really motivated reasoning, right?
Unlike what they claim to be doing, which is looking at all the evidence and coming to a reasonable conclusion, they usually go in with a conclusion first and find little Clues that support it.
So, you know, election fraud conspiracy theorists already wanted to believe that Trump actually won the election.
And so what do they do?
They don't take into account really comprehensive reports on the election.
They crowdsource, you know, chopped up little bits of security footage that don't actually show anything, or they bring in their own You know, conspiracy quote unquote experts who will just grossly misunderstand a local voting process and accuse it of being fraudulent.
So the the belief precedes the evidence in these cases.
And you know, I think it's important to note that conspiracy thinking is something that we all are a little susceptible to.
And when we see people go through these wild processes, they're really just more dramatic versions of thought processes that we all kind of do to a certain degree.
I mean, conspiracy theories happen when we go looking for alternate answers.
It's when we feel like we don't have enough information or we don't like The information that we're confronted with.
So we go looking for a different explanation.
And for many people, that might be a much saner process.
You might have a conspiracy theory about the awful traffic light near you and why it doesn't seem to behave normally.
Oh no, no, no.
That one's real.
It absolutely is.
I don't even know where I left that.
There really is a traffic light.
I'll vouch for you on that.
And that's a perfectly normal thing to do.
It's not necessarily logical, but it's something we all do.
And when you see people completely fly off the handle and apply that kind of logic to an election or to the planet's shape, you have to understand that that is to an extent, you know, just an overreaction of a very familiar thought process to a lot of people.
I myself have, you know, I used to, in my late teens and early 20s, I used to subscribe to something like the Oliver Stone version of the JFK assassination.
Because, I mean, the movie JFK came out when I was 16.
So, you know, perfect.
And I never went quite all the way because I was kind of inoculated against the Um, the idea of Kennedy as being about to end the war because I'd read some Chomsky about Camelot and Kennedy, etc.
You know, there's problems with Chomsky as my grown self knows, etc.
But, you know, um, but I, I, even then I wasn't the sort of person that just believe it based on a film, but I went and read what I took to be the most respectable and serious of the conspiracy books, which was a book by the, by the journalist Anthony Summers.
And I came away with a, with a, With a belief, a provisional belief, but a belief in something like the conspiracy version of the Kennedy assassination.
And I held on to that for a long time, and I let go of it quite gradually.
And it's interesting to me, you know, I now recognize Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but it's something I came to through a process of negotiation with myself and bargaining with myself.
You know, I would retreat from one bit of it and say, well, okay, maybe that bit's not true, but there's still legitimate questions about this, etc.
And so the sections in your book where you're talking about people who freed themselves from Flat Earth, that was, I mean, I really did recognize myself in, you know, in a small degree in some of that stuff.
And also, of course, a lot of this stuff comes from what is in itself a kind of a healthy impulse, which is a distrust of authority.
And, you know, you shouldn't just believe things because the government tells you they're true, etc., obviously, but And we live in a world where a lot of people, sometimes for very, very good reasons, have a lot of distrust of governments and media, etc, etc.
So what you see is kind of with Flat Earth and QAnon and all these things, I feel it's almost a tragic process where impulses that are not inherently condemnable, they're kind of healthy in potentia, they get subject to a runaway process.
Where they end up into something very, very harmful indeed.
It is frustrating, especially because you're right to note that we should be skeptical of quite a lot of things.
It's funny.
I talk to conspiracy theorists quite a lot, obviously.
And I remember being at a Flat Earth conference and, you know, trying to just strike up some conversation and someone saying, well, what conspiracy theories do you believe in?
I'm like, oh, do you want to talk about U.S.
intervention in Latin America?
Which, you know, isn't even a conspiracy theory.
It's genuine conspiracies.
And that's the kind of skepticism that I think we need more of because, frankly, there's not quite enough discussion about that sort of thing, in my opinion.
But what's frustrating is seeing that, I think, natural and even beneficial mistrust redirected into completely wild and inaccurate things.
You know, if I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I'd say it's a distraction.
But it's frustrating to I see often a lack of viable and productive scrutiny and see that those impulses are, yeah, just redirected into very weird and unproductive theories.
And, you know, I think when we talk about getting out of conspiratorial thinking, as you mentioned, It does help to exist in a system that gives you more reason for trust.
I can't really fault people for being suspicious about the U.S.
government because they've, you know, given us reason to doubt time and time again.
But what I think is interesting are systems where people are trusting and where there are fewer conspiracy theories in a context where it's different in the U.S.
One instance I'm thinking of is Brazil right now does not have quite as a robust anti-vax movement as the U.S.
in the COVID context.
And one theory I was reading about that is that Brazil simply has a better healthcare system.
People have less reason to distrust public health measures, whereas in the U.S., even if you have decent employer-provided insurance, You know that it's shit and it's really you don't trust your provider, you don't trust the government to intervene on your behalf.
So I think these issues of mistrust and conspiracy theories often work in tandem.
People who've been burned are more likely to look for new reasons to distrust and they'll probably find it.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
It's almost as if there's a material basis for a piece or something.
Well, sometimes.
That's certainly not something that we come back to over and over again.
Sometimes with conspiracy theories, often there is a very, as is clear from your own book, Kelly, there is a very almost crude material basis, which is that there are just a hell of a lot of people out there who are prepared and very Eager and ready and willing to monetize this stuff and spread these beliefs and latch on to people who have them for very direct material gain.
And then they're none too idealistic about how they do it as well.
Oh, absolutely.
Cough Temple, Cough Temple.
It is absolutely wild to see, although there obviously are conspiracy theorists who fully believe their own bullshit, there are a number of influencers who understand that conspiracy theories are profitable.
You'll see this evolution in their content over the course of years.
People who start off maybe a little bit more centrist or a little bit more reality-based who, as they understand where their payday is coming from, they understand that it's coming from a certain conspiracy or political sphere, they just shift in that direction.
And they give the people what they want.
And they're soon they're fully part of this economy, even if they don't fully believe in the theories they're espousing.
So many cough coughs we could do here.
But I think I think that gag is I think I think the audience gets the point on that.
This is actually I don't mean to hug the conversation, but this is really something that fascinates me.
The question of sincerity versus cynicism in extremism and cult-like thinking and conspiracy theory, etc.
This is something that we run up against again and again and again, whether we're talking about the outright Nazis or the alt-right types or the, you know, in other spheres as well, right through to conspiracy theorist types, you know.
The extent to which any one figure quote-unquote really believes this, or whether they're a grifter or whatever, and sometimes you get a very strong impression about one person one way or the other, but it can be very hard to tell.
And the temptation for me is always to say it's a false dichotomy.
But that really does beg the question.
It doesn't answer it, it just restates it, you know?
I really do find this fascinating.
I don't have a pat answer to give.
This is just something that I think about a lot, sadly.
I think James Lindsay is a really clear... Sorry not to get on our hobby horse here, Kelly, but I think James Lindsay is a very clear example of this, in which he was always this kind of reactionary figure who kind of got involved with
You know, his current his current employer, and just sort of like shifted more and more and as he's ensconced within the bubble, regardless of how much it was sort of an alliance of, you know, sort of an uneasy alliance to begin with, as he gets further and further into it, whether there's he's just doing this for financial incentive, or whether he really believes it.
Really?
You know, I really doesn't much matter because his effects are so large.
But also, but also, I think I think at a certain point, it really does like it just started to eat his brain.
And he just he just could not get out of it anymore.
And obviously, that's a much more like toxic example than you know, than the most of the ones that are in that are in the book about Flat Earth.
But But I think that's really kind of the dynamic that people run into is that, you know, A, you're surrounded by, you know, people who believe this thing that you do.
So there's like social support.
You are attacked from the outside, you know, rightly or wrongly, you're attacked from the outside.
And it's easy to build in-group dynamics that way.
And then you have a, you know, someone like James Lindsay has a financial incentive.
And certainly there are people in the Flat Earth community who, you know, they're doing You know, they're doing conferences, they're selling books, they're monetizing their YouTube streams or whatever.
There's clearly money to be made here.
Selling t-shirts, for that matter.
Yeah, no, I mean, there's a, again, I feel like it is kind of like it's not one or the other thing.
It is this conflict.
And I think, again, James, just a clear example in my mind, given the groomer school stuff that has been just dominating everywhere.
Disgusting.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
You know, yeah, yeah.
And I mean, I think to that point, you're right.
It doesn't really matter how sincere they are in their beliefs, because they are putting out in that last example, just this openly homophobic, just as cynical as you could possibly devise talking points that are then being weaponized against marginalized communities.
I mean, it is just the most cynical stuff.
And, you know, I've seen possible versions of this within Flat Earth where someone may not have been completely sincere in getting into the movement, but soon kind of got one over just by their own acclaim within it.
Not to compare this person to James Lindsay, because I think James Lindsay is appalling and this person is someone I like, but I spent a chapter on the legacy of a man named Mike Hughes.
He was for several years- I really wanted to get into this.
Yes, please.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Mike, for several years, was one of the most Prominent flat earthers in the US, and he was so well known because he had this idea that he was going to build a rocket ship and he was going to launch himself into kind of the upper atmosphere and take a picture that would show the curvature lack thereof.
I have to just make a plug here.
Like this is someone I talked to for a year and a half.
I genuinely liked.
Yeah.
So no, no shade by comparing him to James Lindsay, but in February, 2020, one of his rocket launches went terribly wrong and he died on impact.
And after his death, there was a lot of discussion about the sincerity of his flat earth belief.
His publicist said that, no, he was not actually a flat earther.
And his friends that I talked to said, what are you talking about?
He was absolutely a flat earther.
We're not even flat earthers and we couldn't get him to stop talking about this.
And so I sat with that tension for a while trying to figure out exactly what it was he believed.
And one of his friends told me what sounds like the most plausible explanation.
And they said, You know, Mike was always curious about Flat Earth.
He thought it was really interesting.
I know for a fact that Mike was a conspiracy theorist about other things.
And this friend said, you know, Mike thought that Flat Earth would be a good idea.
For publicity for his rocket launch, but as he spent time with this movement, he began to fully believe it.
He did fully convert.
And so my takeaway from that is that he really went native with his flat earth belief.
He got in on the movement and even if he maybe harbored some doubts, he was all in on flat earth until the very end and it played a large role in his death.
Yes, indeed.
That's fascinating.
One of the things about that chapter was that the publicist who, after his death, claimed that he wasn't really a flat earther.
I believe I'm right in remembering that that guy was a Trump supporter, whereas Mike himself definitely was not.
Am I right about that?
That's right.
Yeah.
So they had some some differences of opinion.
This is secondhand, according to Mike's best friend, who I spoke to a bit after Mike's death.
But, you know, it was very difficult to disentangle Mike's beliefs because, again, he was legitimately a conspiracy theorist.
He was very interested in sovereign citizen legal theory.
He actually went to jail for a little while because he was trying these sovereign citizen tactics in court.
And that's not something someone does if they're just idly trying to play the conspiracy theorist role.
That's someone who's all in.
His friend also told me that Mike did a whole bunch of flat earth stuff that he didn't publicize.
He did experiments.
I know that he hosted a flat earth conference that his friend said actually put him in debt.
So I do believe he was at least deeply invested in this theory.
That's certainly how it read to me.
I mean, you know, this is me saying this, not you.
I'm just speculating, but it feels to me like the publicist is a Trumpist who's trying to kind of, you know, claim Mike for Trumpism in a sense, and, you know, clean him of the disreputable accusation of having been a flat earther, which is ironic when you consider the nature of Trumpism now.
But it's, you know, it's a weird position it puts you in because you're certainly reading the chapter, which is very movingly written in parts.
I certainly felt much more sympathetic towards Mike, you know, who holds a belief system that I dislike and disagree with and disapprove of, etc.
As opposed to this other person who I certainly interpreted as cynical and ideologically motivated.
And what you were talking about, Mike, damaging his own life in many respects through conviction.
There is something kind of admirable about that, even by comparison anyway, even if the ideals that are motivating him are not ideals we subscribe to.
And thinking about people damaging themselves, people People have damaged themselves enormously for Flat Earth and Trumpism and all these things.
And this is why I do have this sense of this whole thing as kind of tragic or tragicomic.
Absolutely.
You know, one thing that I ran into time and time again with Flat Earthers is that almost all of them are carrying this damage that the theory has caused them.
You know, so many of them have become alienated from friends or family or Even jobs, because of this belief.
And I think that's one of the more harmful elements of Flat Earth.
Compared to other conspiracy theories out there, the pure facts of Flat Earth are less harmful than, I'm going to say, some medical conspiracy theories or election hoax conspiracy theories.
But because Flat Earth is so out there, it's very hard To hold that belief and still coexist with other people and in regular social settings.
And so when people get into flat earth, they will often become very passionate about it.
They'll talk about it way too much and their family and friends start to say, you know, enough already.
And when people lose touch with those real world connections, which I think are very stabilizing and grounding connections for people, they go and they try and replace those ties Elsewhere.
And often they find that new community in Flat Earth and it actually pulls them further into this community.
It makes them less inclined to leave.
It forces them to believe a little bit more because they don't want all of this loss to have been for nothing.
So that's one of the real risks that I see in Flat Earth is often just to the believers themselves.
Yeah, not to stan Penn and Teller on this podcast or anything, but I think we've all at least had some familiarity with the Bullshit program that they did, and the friendship that they had with James Randi.
And I remember on the DVD set of the first season of Bullshit, they did an interview with Randi, and we were sitting and talking about You know, some of the kooky things that people believe and, you know, recurring theme is like, you can't blame the victim of this stuff.
You can't blame the people who, because as we've said before, you know, all of us are susceptible to some degree to falling in with some bullshit.
You know, I could talk about my own history with the JFK assassination, which was much more involved than Well, actually, talking to you about it is what finally sort of tipped me over to, yeah, no, it was just Oswald, wasn't it?
A topic for another day.
Not when Kelly is here to listen to us, you know, mitigate our early 2000s experience of the JFK assassination.
But I do think that there is a sense in which someone like Mike Hughes, which in that chapter is, I found it heartbreaking, honestly, because he's like, I don't agree with his politics.
I don't agree with him on a lot of things.
But he was a genuine human being, clearly, who really believed this thing and who was like compelled to take it to the extreme level to either prove it or disprove it.
Right.
You know, and he died in the process because he honestly was just wasn't very good at it.
And that's a tragedy because it seems like I probably would have enjoyed having a beer with Mike.
You know what I mean?
And Yeah, I mean, it's just it details the human cost of how these movements like psych people into them in a way that I don't see reflected in some of the more some of the other discussion about this, you know, in which, you know, it is just kind of this like almost classist mockery of like, dumb fucks believe in, you know, flat earth or whatever.
When that's, that's just not the dynamic.
And that's part, we don't do a lot of that here, but it is something that I feel like is part of something that we try to explore is like, these people aren't dumb.
They're not, you know, these people believe things for what they feel to be very good reasons.
And we should really be like talking more about those reasons.
And I think, again, that's something that the book does very well is to, is to treat these people as human beings.
Well, thank you.
It's interesting.
The book has been out for just over a month now, and it's been out there long enough that readers are starting to write to me.
And one thing that comes up over and over are people saying, thanks for putting it this way, because I have these believers in my life, and people keep linking me to the Reddit QAnon casualties, which is for people who, yeah, it's a Grim, grim subreddit, but it's for people who have effectively lost people in their lives to conspiracy theories.
And you realize that this is a really widespread phenomena where people have loved ones who come completely under the thrall of this kind of thinking, who become very difficult to access.
You know, this happens in families.
It comes between spouses.
People find it hard to talk to very often their older parents because people buy fully into this completely false reality.
And so I think when we, or at least some people, mock conspiracy theorists as dumb or You know, uneducated.
You're really talking about a lot of people there.
And certainly I'm not going to make too many defenses for a QAnon believer or someone who believes in a, you know, very anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, anything like that.
But I think fully grappling with this issue does require us to take into account just how many people are conspiracy theorists and really the fallout of this belief it affects.
More people than I think we're willing to give it credit for.
Yeah, I often feel that we have something like the political and social equivalent of a public health emergency just when it comes to the kind of political disorientation and lack of understanding, to be frank, that can lead people to, as you describe actually in your book,
...repeat things that are very explicitly anti-semitic conspiracy theory images and slogans etc without necessarily even realizing that they're doing it or consciously being anti-semitic at all and then of course when they suffer the social consequences of that.
Social consequences by the way that I don't necessarily disapprove of because you know people should suffer consequences for spreading anti-semitic conspiracy theories around but that people are Surprised, and they feel persecuted because what did I do?
Because there is such a level of political disorientation that they can buy into what is essentially a restatement of medieval anti-Semitic propaganda.
And in some, not all of course, being very careful, but in some cases not actually know they're doing it.
That's absolutely right.
You know, conspiracy tropes are always useful in an us versus them context.
And so they've always been useful in, I don't know, denigrating minorities.
They've been phenomenally useful at persecuting the Jews over years.
And those tropes have really stayed with us.
Infrastructure of some of those older conspiracy theories are still very alive and well, but maybe they've swapped out Jews for New World Order, you know, very Control-F and find and replace, all that sort of thing.
There are literal examples of that happening, by the way.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, the research for this book was in that one particular chapter I have on antisemitism was pretty jaw-dropping how explicit it was and some of the things I found.
But yeah, you're right that some of the people who reference this don't fully understand what they're saying.
And you know, when I was reporting this book, I didn't spend too much time trying to insert myself in conversations.
I was I was interested in listening, but I wasn't going to try and debate Flat Earthers.
I wasn't going to try and talk any of them out of it.
But where I did occasionally start to push back was when people who I thought were being accidentally anti-Semitic started invoking those tropes.
And one thing that I would say is, you know, hey, you know, I'm not personally Jewish, but one side of my family is.
It's something I have a tie to.
And when you say this, it has these implications for me.
And hearing people who didn't really understand exactly what they were saying, being like, oh, no, no, no, no, I don't mean you.
I mean, you know, these people.
And it was interesting, right, to see people try and retool this argument for some imagined other.
They couldn't really make it work in a face-to-face conversation because, at a certain degree, they trusted or liked me.
Those abstract beliefs didn't really map onto the person that they were talking to.
It was a very interesting process, very strange navigating.
How exactly people could reconcile those hateful beliefs and also their perception of themselves as not hateful people.
As I said earlier, I listened to your book in audiobook form, and I finished listening to it yesterday, and there was a section which actually, as I was going about my business listening to it in my earphones, it actually sort of shocked me and upset me to the point where I, you know, in a good way, because that's what you want from a good book of this sort, To the point where I had to actually sort of stop and almost hold my head for a minute.
And it was referring to what you were saying earlier about people harming themselves through conspiracy theories.
It was the section when you were at a Flat Earth conference and you were talking to a a member of the organization.
I'm afraid I can't remember off the top of my head which organization it was or the person's name.
But this was a person who was himself Jewish.
And you were stood outside the main conference room.
And in the main room, Owen Benjamin, the comedian, is in there doing just outrageously, disgustingly anti-Semitic routine.
And this guy you're talking to, he's kind of doing mental gymnastics as he talks to you to say, no, I don't think it's anti-Semitic.
It, you know, somatically affected me that bit.
I was kind of knocked sideways with horror.
And it takes a lot for a host of I Don't Speak German to get to that place, you know?
I am honored in that case.
No, you know, earlier we were talking about how these beliefs let people chuck out any information that they don't want to To accept.
And I think that's true of people's personal relationships, too.
If they don't want to believe that one of their leading flat-earth celebrities is a raging anti-Semite, well, they can make excuses for that.
Or they can even, you know, sublimate parts of their identity to be like, well, he doesn't mean me, you know, I'm his buddy.
Um, and I just think that's, it's massively misguided.
I think it's a weird way, kind of naively optimistic because these hateful beliefs do mean even, you know, even the favored Jewish members of the community.
These are harmful beliefs to everyone who, um, It fits that description.
So it's very interesting to see that that zetetic thinking come into personal relationships and people say, well, he hasn't been personally mean to me as a Jew, so therefore he can't be an anti-Semite.
And you say, oh, yes, he can.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And what a demonstration of, you know, zetetic thinking is kind of this built-in subjectivity, you know.
It sounds, again, it sounds like radical empiricism, but because it's see for yourself, it's always got that built-in personal subjectivity that allows you to just spin what you can see any way you like, yeah.
No, absolutely.
Man, there's so many places we could go there!
Um, you know, I, I connect that like my immediate thought is to the sort of like the, the, um, the anti-woke, uh, movement in general and sense-making.
We're just going to, we're just going to try to examine things on a rational basis.
It's going to be polite to endeavor, you know, and, and every single one has a, well, he has a black friend.
And so therefore what he's saying can't be racist, you know, like, and it always works that way, you know.
Yeah, these arguments rely on sort of personal anecdotes and not an examination of, you know, structural ills.
So you can have Proud Boys saying, we're not racist because Enrique Tarrio was our leader.
Well, Enrique Tarrio went to jail for burning a church's Black Lives Matter flag.
You know, I would argue that that act is more demonstrative of the Proud Boys' overall views than And also, all you have to do is look into Proud Boys' private chats when they're not looking.
Oh, absolutely.
All you have to do is look into Proud Boys' private chance when they're not looking at it.
Oh, absolutely.
No, I mean, that's just to be clear about this, you know.
Yeah.
If I were to engage in a good faith argument about their beliefs, that's what I'd say.
If I were to be a lot blunter and frankly more honest, I would just say, yeah, just look at what they say in private because it's just nakedly racist.
Yeah.
Sorry not to not to rob you of your journalistic objectivity here at all.
No, I don't pretend to be objective when it comes to the Proud Boys.
I have a I have a strong perspective and it's the correct perspective and I will tell people what it is.
Yeah, I, this is, sorry, this might be a little bit bigger topic than we have time to chew on at this point, but like, I've always really liked, I was, my origin story is I was an active participant in the Talk Origins news group between 2003 and 2005, which was the place where I first ran into Flat Earthers, ironically, you know?
Who, I remember I saw their website and this might have been one of the parody websites.
I will never find this link, you know, 20 years, almost 20 years later.
But I found the website and literally they were doing some like geometry and they mistook the two of the sides of a right triangle and did the math wrong that way and suddenly got some absurd answer.
And so therefore the earth was flat.
And all you have to do is like sketch it out and then go like, no, you're using the adjacent as opposed to the hypotenuse.
You just, you just did it wrong.
Like you fundamentally made a mistake that like any 12 year old taking basic geometry would not make, you know?
And so, yeah, you're just wrong on this, you know?
But yeah, I got started, I got started there.
And one of the things that I run into in terms of thinking about Flat Earth is that Flat earth is often something that feels like it comes like adjacent to sort of other far-right movements.
Like there's sort of a sprinkling of flat earth kind of all over the place and then some like kind of concentrated groups but like there are a ton of people in these kind of like conspiracist far-right quote-unquote extremist spaces who Even if they're not full on Flat Earth, they'll sort of take some of the logic, they'll take some of the stuff, they'll take some of it and it's almost like a spicy seasoning on top of far right.
And that's what I found really fascinating about, one of the things that I found fascinating about the book was to look at these groups that I know very well through the lens of Flat Earth and kind of seeing Through that lens, you know, kind of how, how this kind of affects things.
And I, and I don't know, I'm going to definitely need to reread it for sure.
But I really want like every chapter to be a full book.
So Kelly, if you could get on that, that would be great for me.
All right.
Yeah.
If I'll just forward you to my publisher and I'm sure we'll work something out.
No, I always think about that probably apocryphal Voltaire quote.
The person that can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities is probably not actually Voltaire.
I sometimes wonder if Voltaire ever actually said anything because everything that's attributed to him, he seems to have not said.
A new conspiracy theory, Voltaire did not exist.
Voltaire didn't exist.
Yeah, there you go.
That's a winner.
That'll rake in the dollars, I'm sure.
No, what I was going to say was, it does seem sometimes like a power move.
When you talk about the cynical actors, it seems like the more absurd a proposition they can get people to accede to, then the more power they wield over them.
I don't know, because one thing I wonder, certainly, I mean, in your book, Kelly, you talk about the similarities and even the links between Flat Earth and QAnon.
And QAnon has been said by many people to be a kind of an umbrella conspiracy, you know, a kind of syncretic mechanism whereby loads of conspiracies can be linked up together under one umbrella.
And there's something Flat Earth kind of Sometimes does the same thing, certainly the way you describe it, because you describe in a very detailed way the way in which the Flat Earth umbrella contains people that go into all sorts of other conspiracies as well.
But I do wonder why QAnon took off in a way that Flat Earth didn't, you know?
I don't know.
Maybe it's because QAnon is just newer.
Maybe it's just the charm of novelty.
I don't know.
Flat Earth comes with lots of, it comes with two centuries now of snide remarks and so on, which is another interesting thing in your book about the way in which official mockery and media mockery has kind of helped it grow.
You know, with QAnon, I think there's a lot more political urgency for its believers.
They can always spin it into something that has a tie-in to the day's events.
Hillary Clinton is always about to be arrested.
I spent my Tuesday in a QAnon channel where they were convinced that Biden was about to be arrested on air any minute now.
And it was just fascinating to watch them process This, you know, imminent prophecy and for nothing to happen.
And they just went on with their day.
There was no reflection about what had just happened or failed to happen.
They just moved on.
And I think although Flat Earth works like an umbrella theory because it is such a literally worldwide theory, it suggests such a broad cover-up that people can smuggle a lot of other beliefs in.
I don't think it has the political immediacy As a QAnon or as election fraud conspiracy theories, which are part and parcel of QAnon at this point.
So I think these wide ranging conspiracy theories are useful because they can allow people to believe anything.
I liked the point you were making about if you can convince someone to believe a really out there conspiracy theory, you almost have more power over them.
And I think that's true of Flat Earth.
I think it allows people to accept very radical propositions, but it hasn't filled in That information void in such a toxic way as QAnon has, where QAnon will completely dismantle people's trust in a political system and turn it into, you need to take action now against pedophiles.
You need to shoot up a pizzeria.
You need to go and harass people at your local polling place.
So I think that immediacy is what makes a theory like QAnon a bit more politically potent right now.
Yeah, and I think just to add on to that, not to disagree, I think that one of the things with QAnon and Pizzagate before that, which was sort of the gestation phase of QAnon, is that it was explicitly partisan.
While there were Republican targets of this conspiracy, it was like every Democrat is out to eat your children and half the Republican Party.
And Donald Trump is coming to save us all, so says Q, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And that means that every news story that comes through your feed today, it feeds into that basic narrative.
Whereas I feel like with Flat Earth, it's It's not like the Democrats are coming to prove to you that the Flat Earth is wrong.
It's the whole system.
The more universal it is, the less it plugs into something that can really be weaponized in the same way, unless it's some kind of global anti-Semitic.
No, I think that is a really cogent point because so many conspiracy theories get their momentum from this idea of conflict, conflict between the believers and the rest of the world.
And if they feel especially persecuted, they, I think, become more politically active.
And Flat Earth suggests such a widespread conspiracy theory that unless people hitch that belief onto certain political theories, which many do, people will make it about politics or about something anti-Semitic, it's a little bit harder to get riled up about.
And so that's why occasionally you do have Flat Earthers who are pretty mellow, who really just do believe Earth is flat and they want to Make some songs about it on YouTube.
But what worries me is that crossover, and I think it's an increasing crossover, with more hateful and more political conspiracies.
One of the things that I find fascinating about the book, and again, this shouldn't be taken as criticism, is that COVID-19, while mentioned a few times, does not become a meme at any time, which I'm sure is based on the time of your reporting, etc.
But I'm wondering if you could expand on what you think these sorts of political movements, like those that are exhibited in Flat Earth communities, Yeah, you know, if I were writing this book slightly later, COVID would play a much larger role.
The ivermectin thing feels very akin to Flat Earth and the way that it spread and the way that it was kind of used politically.
Yeah.
You know, if I were writing this book slightly later, COVID would play a much larger role.
I had to file July 1st, 2020.
So it was...
So you're most of the way there and then the world goes to shit and it's like, oh my God, do I have time to revise this?
So it's in there.
It's not in there for the entirety.
But, you know, to speak more academically about the world going to shit, I think this COVID-19 was obviously a massively destabilizing event and continues to be.
And conspiracy theories thrive in moments of destabilization.
They're the times when people are looking for alternate answers or comforting information, leaders who can tell them what's going on.
And I think a lot of extremist movements, far-right movements, movements that run contrary to Truth saw that and they exploited that, often very cynically.
So of course, you know, we had the anti-vaccine movement exploded during this time, but we saw far-right movements mobilize around anti-lockdown protests.
Even when said lockdowns really don't exist, there was that trucker convoy that was in protest of absolutely nothing.
Although it failed, I think it was a probably useful networking event for the right.
And I'm glad you brought up ivermectin because I think that shows the flexibility of COVID conspiracy theories.
It doesn't need to be entirely for Um, far right wing nuts who are gonna drive a convoy to DC.
Ivermectin had a lot of support among, oh, maybe more highbrow right, right wing types.
People with the substacks who weren't necessarily saying that ivermectin was a miracle cure, but they're saying, why doesn't the media want us to investigate whether ivermectin is a miracle cure?
And, you know, as we know from multiple studies now, it does nothing better than a placebo.
But in bringing in those talking points, a lot of people were able to play up narratives of doubt when those were very profitable and convenient narratives for them.
Alternate media types who wanted to argue that they were more trustworthy or more inquisitive than the mainstream media were able to tap into those narratives and present themselves as a more honest news source.
So, I think a lot of far-right movements have really cannily understood that COVID was a recruiting vector.
And that they could use it in a whole host of ways to reach people who were previously outside their reach.
Another strand in your book that I briefly mentioned before that I found particularly interesting was the dialectic of mockery and assistance that Flat Earth has had from the media.
Because it really does seem at various points throughout its history that it has grown through the The very derogatory attention that it's received from the media, like at very key points, it has received huge boosts through overtly antagonistic media coverage and mocking media coverage.
And that culminates in a section towards the end of your book where one of the One of the Flat Earthers talks about, yeah, it doesn't matter what they say as long as they say those two words, Flat Earth, that's fine for us.
And just that bringing it into the conversation has helped this thing grow and survive.
And the section when you talk about the Facebook algorithm, I mean, this is a subject that you That is quite well understood, I think.
But I've never really read a clearer capsule description of what the problem was and what the problem still is, I think, than I read in the latter section of your book.
Again, another blood-curdling section!
Yeah, absolutely.
Flat-earthers and conspiracy theorists do rely on attention and they rely on a certain antagonism from the outside.
Conspiracy theorists like to believe that they are fighting the good fight against Nebulous forces that want to keep them down.
And they don't respond very well to mockery because no one likes to be made fun of.
So in fact, things like making jokes about flat earthers or bullying flat earthers who might work with you tend to drive people further into the theory.
They double down because this belief has become part of their identity and they don't want to give it up and they see you as the enemy.
That has definitely happened to an extent with media coverage.
This goes back to the 1800s.
When Samuel Robb Otham, the Flat Earth founder, was doing his lecture tours, local newspapers would go and they'd write articles just taking the piss and making fun of him.
But those articles inadvertently advertised his next stop and more people would show up at his next stop and Although some people go to try and debate him, they might end up converted.
So yes, Flat Earth and conspiracy theories in general do thrive on oxygen.
And that was something that was difficult to navigate with this book.
Because while I do understand that they like coverage and they certainly brag that coverage helps them, I think we also need to shine a light on them and to understand how conspiracy theories work and how We and people we love might be susceptible to them.
So that was a large motivating factor in my attempt to write about flat earthers without mocking them.
And in Showing their humanity because I think this is, you know, a belief that needs to be understood more than it needs to be mocked.
It's already inherently.
And, you know, to your other point about Facebook, they understand very well the networking ability that they have online and that, you know, they can Reach other communities algorithmically, they can, if people are looking for 9-11 conspiracy theories that they might get pulled into Flat Earth and that even though Flat Earth is, again, it's kind of loony, it's something that you want to laugh at.
That curiosity factor is often a big gift to it and the joke factor of Flat Earth is what's leading people to click on those videos at two in the morning when they're popping up in their YouTube recommendations and that Does, unfortunately, make them more likely to show up in YouTube recommendations because they're a very clickable, almost funny topic.
So, either by deliberate media choices or later by impersonal algorithms, the somewhat humor of Flat Earth has kind of helped it and has brought it to more people's attention.
And it feels often, reading the words of the Flat Earthers in your book, as though there is something, I don't know if I want to use the word perverse, that seems a little too mean spirited, but there is something, there's a kind of recurve effect where there's a
I mean I'm sort of psychoanalyzing strangers here so you know take this with a huge pinch of salt but it felt to me certainly like there is a degree of reward in that sometimes in the separation and the mockery like it becomes a kind of validation in itself and that that's I mean I think that's again that's something we can relate to a lot of us can relate to like you know confirmation bias and motivated reasoning and all these things are all very human Yeah, I think that's probably true.
And not to mock people like I just said I wouldn't do, but it reminds me a bit of dealing with young children where any attention is worthwhile for them.
It's like, dude, why are you taking your shoes off and like running around the airport, you know, and like licking strangers?
And they don't really care that it's wrong.
It's funny because people are paying attention.
And that is, I think sometimes a factor for conspiracy theorists.
Often, these are people who weren't having great things going on in their lives before.
They didn't feel important.
They didn't feel central.
And now that they have a YouTube channel that has, you know, a couple thousand subscribers, there's somebody now, you know?
And even if a lot of their attention is people calling them crazy, well, it doesn't quite matter because they're getting that attention, whereas previously there was none at all.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Kelly, please come back anytime and talk about anything you want.
We would love to have you.
You've been a great guest.
And again, you wrote a really amazing book.
And I very much enjoyed your reporting on these and similar topics in the Daily Beast over these.
So, yeah, that's kind of, you know, go buy the book.
There's a link in there.
There's a link in the show notes, I'm sure.
So, yeah.
Thank you guys so much.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Okay.
That was Kelly Weil, everybody.
And thank you for tuning in to listen.
Genuinely is a really good book.
I strongly recommend it.
And this is also an extremely good podcast.
I strongly recommend this as well.
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That was I Don't Speak German.
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