Carter Chill 2019

The 2019 Flat Earth International Conference in Dallas is filling up. Only 100 VIP tickets are left at $399.00 each. Shelly Lewis will be speaking. She is a certified lymphologist. Nothing says credibility like a certified lymphologist.

What is really exciting is that you can find the FEIC folks at the next Conspiracy Con. If you go by the Protocols of Zion booth, you can find the Flat Earthers down the aisle near the wall by the food court.  Of course, the FEIC is not affiliated with the Original Flat Earth Society. Or the Judean People’s Front. Or the People’s Front of Judea.

Let me be the first to congratulate the Earthers for this milestone on the journey to mainstream acceptance. They are now firmly embedded in the pantheon of movements under the “Conspiracy Theory” umbrella.  The two movements may seem to have widely divergent elements, but they are now theoretical brothers in the same Universe, assuming the Universe is a holographic projection generated by NASA scientists deep underground in Area 51. 

That doesn’t mean that all conspiracy theorists believe that the Earth is Flat. Of course not. You have to be bat shit crazy to believe that the Earth is flat. However, Conspiracy Theorists are an extremely inclusionary bunch, and what is at issue is the right to be bat shit crazy. In that, they share firm common (flat) ground.

This “come one, come all” approach is the PT Barnum tactic of cramming everything into the big top. Lion Tamers may be different than Sword Swallowers, but it’s still one big circus.  Conspiracy Theory has now morphed from a loose collection of wild eyed speculation, into an tent larger than the sum of its parts.

It’s a thing.

You Tube is filled with conspiratorial rants, from the Anti-Christ to the Zombie Apocalypse.  Amazon and Netflix continually stream a library of Conspiracy based documentaries. Wikipedia has an exhaustive entry that catalogs the entire vocabulary of Conspiracy Theories. Sports stars like Kyrie Irving openly espouse their doubts regarding a spherical Earth during post game interviews.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a skeptic by nature.  I was the first kid on my block to expose Santa Claus as a global charade perpetrated by parents, the mercantile cabal, and NORAD.  I challenged the premise that Captain Kangaroo’s Grandfather Clock would wake up by me yelling at the TV. I broke the Cooties barrier by holding hands with Ann Henry in the third grade. I stand opposed to the accusation that no one will get obscure Baby Boom references.

I predicted Watergate was a White House Op.  I was an early critic of the Domino Theory .  I saw a bootleg copy of the Zapruder film five years before it was shown by Geraldo Rivera. I was the first to confirm that Mindy Kaplan wore a padded bra.

I questioned the evidential veracity of several major religions and found them wanting. The truth will set you free, which is what my Sunday morning schedule has been since then.  Yes, my immortal soul is at risk. That’s the price of real skepticism. It’s one thing to speculate about Alien Reptilicants taking human form. I’m out there battling Satan.

I’ve had my doubts about a lot of things. JFK’s assassination was always murky. Oswald’s time in Russia was nagging, but it was Jack Ruby’s loose ties to the Mob that really troubled me.  But it turns out that Ruby was on the scene that morning not on orders from the Mafia, but because he owned a titty bar. Naturally, no one would think twice if he showed up at the Dallas City Jail to witness the transport of possibly the most heinous criminal in American history, because, like I said, he owned a titty bar. He wasn’t a cop or a member of the press. But he did own a titty bar.  I’m not sure I’m being clear. You see,  in a situation like transporting the most heinous criminal in American history, the security protocol is pretty rigid. The police establish an airtight policy regarding the credentials required to be at the scene of a high profile event like transporting the most heinous criminal in American history.  In that kind of rigorous security, for example, a police officer would have to have a badge, a member of the media would have a have press pass, and a titty bar owner would have to have a working Pez dispenser.  

Watergate was different. It walked like a duck, and quacked like a duck, but I couldn’t imagine even Nixon and his band of Bozos would risk an entire administration for the sake of a little dirt on the hapless DNC. Watergate wasn’t just a conspiracy. It was the worst conspiracy in the history of conspiracies. If the Watergate conspiracy was a horse, they would have taken it out behind the barn and shot it.  Not only that, it was a conspiracy that somebody decided was a good idea to tape record. Believe you me, I can assure you the Illmunati is not making taped transcripts of their New World Order agenda.

Conspiracies do exist. 44 BC the Liberatores plot the assassination of Caesar. 1898 The Dreyfuss Affair. 1987 Iran-Contra. 2016 Deflate Gate. Those are the ones we know about. The world is full of people looking to pull one over. The truth of the matter is that believing in a conspiracy theory may well be an example of critical thinking.

Believing in ALL of them is a hobby.

I’ll give you Yeti and a Freemason. Or one Denver Airport and half a false flag op. But if you can pivot from the Deep State to Sutherland Springs to Vaccination in one conversation, you’re trading baseball cards. You’ve abandoned all interest in truth for the sake of blog clicks. You’ve surrounded yourself with like minded virtual sycophants that you can chat with at all hours, making that basement seem just a little less soul crushing. 

9/11 seems to be the tipping point that coalesced the conspiracy movement. 9/11 is conspiracy fodder for everybody. The Far Left is convinced that Bush orchestrated the plot to get his hands on Middle East Oil. The Far Right sees the fingerprints of New World Order Globalism with a hint of Zionism and a smoky aftertaste that can be paired nicely with aged Brie at the next KKK rally.  The Far Out maintain it never really happened at all, because the holes in the Twin Towers didn’t match the profile predicted by the Wile E Coyote Law of Silhouettes Made Running Into A Wall.

We are in an age where seeing it on TV doesn’t make it so. The Moon landings were faked according to one theory. All seven of them. I wasn’t there, but I am enough of a nerd to have read some of the mission transcripts. Hours and days and thousands of pages of techno-engineering shop talk, with the occasional zero gravity potty joke thrown in.

Houston: “Uhhh Apollo, Houston , on page 2 routine sub 5 through 18, we want to configure Omni Bravo to aft on that platform, and reset breakers two and nine to auto and aux flow preset to barber pole, and send us character niner foxtrot for the gimbal values config.”

Apollo: “Roger Copy.”

Shakespeare couldn’t make that up.

So, who’s buying?  61% believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK.  5% believe that the government planned 9/11 and a whopping 26% think they knew about it ahead of time.  5% believe the Moon Landings were faked. 24% believe Obama’s birth certificate was faked and you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who thinks UFOs are real.

There is a percentage of those numbers that may not really, REALLY believe. Promoting Conspiracy Theories has become a cottage industry, and if bringing home the bacon means throwing a few whoppers on an DVD, and selling them on Amazon for $19.95 a pop, then believing is easy. Rush Limbaugh figured out a long time ago that nothing lights up that phone line likea few hysterical rants right before the break.  One of Trump’s key constituencies is the coveted tin foil hat demographic.

The bulk of the Conspiracy Theory movement, however, are true believers. Argue with one and see what I mean. While they were once reclusive and wary of strangers and sudden movements, they are now evangelical and bolstered by a tidal wave of slobbering chuckleheads on the web describing the melting point of steel. They are extremely prepared.  The burden of truth has shifted.  Look at that video. Now pause it. SEE THAT? See the control pod on the 737? See it. That’s a remote control pod. Can’t you SEE THAT. It’s OBVIOUS

WAKE UP PEOPLE!!

In my more compassionate moments, I can imagine a psychology that is recoiling from the complexity and opaque technology of the times.  Somebody in Silicon Valley knows what an algorithm and how to make it give you directions to Poughkeepsie. The rest of us just ask Siri. Doctors use high tech robots to remove tumors, and the rest of us sleep through it. The economy is based on Fiat currency but the rest of us would never drive one.

It is understandable that modern citizens yearn for some control of the social narrative. So they invent their own. Hey, if it wasn’t for the New World Order agenda keeping me down, I could afford a new bass boat. I don’t accept that a punk like Oswald could actually change history, so I’m going to cobble together something a little more sinister.

But the real draw is the affirmational bonding that comes with commiserating with like minded people. There is something warm and nurturing about sharing the glaring inconsistencies of NASA’s lunar photos with an online family of believers. It’s kind of like chimps grooming each other.  LOOK, that shadow faces towards the LEM!! You’re right, let’s send this to Dave and Molly.

It’s not all warm and fuzzy. Ask the parents of the Sandy Hook victims. Or the owner of the Pizza Shop accused of being a front for Clinton’s child trafficking.  Or Buzz Aldrin.

That’s really the question. What’s the harm in propagating alternative explanations for events that seem straightforward.  After all it’s a free country. There have always been speculative beliefs passionately held by segments of the population. They’re called religions. No one is fact checking them.

It might be best to ask the question a few years down the road when our great grandkids are living in their attics to escape coastline flooding, sick with chicken pox.  Sorry about that kiddos, we might have been wrong about a few things back in the day, but hey, they’re growing corn in Death Valley, and I’ll bet Autism rates would be really low if there was anyone around to measure them.

And finally, consider this. Let’s say the Valiums of Xanax 4 are planning an invasion of Earth. They are wary of launching this invasion until they can evaluate Earth’s defensive capabilities. So they send a probe to gather intelligence, and just before it crash lands in Roswell, it beams back to the Valiums a You Tube video of some dweeb explaining that the Earth is actually flat.

By the way, I don’t know why all UFOs end up crashing in Area 51. How a civilization with the ability to traverse millions of light years to find the Earth can’t seem to locate the landing pattern at O’Hare is beyond me. But I digest.

Anyway, the probe sends the transmission back to Xanax. Upon viewing it, the Valium military caution gives way to the notion that, given Earth’s primitive intelligence, not only could they successfully invade, but they ought to.