My stepfather has lost his shit and gone from accountant to flat earther. This has evolved from glass dome above the earth that caused the Challenger explosion to some new shit. Enter the ２０４０ Ｐｈｏｅｎｉｘ Ｅｖｅｎｔ. Every 140 years there's a cataclysmic event which changes the fundamental nature of the planet. This cycle is so powerful that it actually destroyed the Mayan civilisation. In 2040 it's due to happen again and the ONLY place on earth that will be safe is Egypt.
But what was the last thing that happened in 1900, you might ask.
The 1908 Tunguska Event in which an asteroid air burst above Siberia and killed a few reindeer herders.
But 1908 is 8 years after the 140 year cycle and 1900 was pretty uneventful, you might say.
What makes someone believe something so silly with literally no proof or evidence? Like show me a single map that explains the day night cycle and seasons at the same time or a single prediction of weather events that comes true and is contrary to the scientific consensus.
It's part of a pipeline of ur-fascist syncretism. He started out believing in the Wall Street Journal and Tea Party during the 2000/2008 crashes and could only prove his conservative politics through libertarian fantasies. Confirming the bullshit from those could only come from conspiracy theories. The proof of each of those within the wider ecosystem of right-wing conspiracy theorists could only come from confirming every other conspiracy theory. The relief from alienation and intellectual validation he got from chasing one could only be matched by following the more extreme ones that the algorithm and facebook groups were already feeding him. Flat earth shit gives him the same kind of contrarianism and scooby doo mystery that 1990s neoconservativism gave him, and if it's true then everything as/less extreme than it is true.
Yeah, it's true because it has to be true to avoid a painful cognitive dissonance
Like the epistemological walls of one's hole in Amigara fault, ridged so as to only allow progress one way