There are two distinct “global elite manipulating everything” theories.
In one, “global elite” is a codeword for Jews and it makes as much sense as flat eartherism.
The other involves no shadowy cabals or secrets. It doesn’t even involved any questioning of the facts as delivered on the nightly news.
It is not clear whether de Selby had heard of this but he suggests (Garcia, p. i2) that night, far from being caused by the commonly accepted theory of planetary movements, was due to accumulations of black air’ produced by certain volcanic activities of which he does not treat in detail.
(Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman)
He claims that he “has friends who are PhDs” who tell him that the non-Flat Earthers have “too much to lose”, and that’s why he encounters no resistance. I doubt he has any PhD friends. And no PhD would ever say what he claims they say. He has folie à plusieurs.
I like how one of his points of evidence is the absence of “blue marble” photographs of Earth (what he would he claim would be fabricated anyway). Somehow, the laziness of NASA in producing these “false” photographs from the Moon is evidence that the whole space program was a hoax.
He also claims that there are no time-lapse photographs showing a rotating Earth along with Earth’s weather patterns, because it would be too expensive to fabricate (which, nevertheless, do exist). Yet if you showed these actual videos to him, he’d just say they were fabricated.
There is literally no piece of evidence you can show him because everything you show him could have been (and, to him, was) fabricated.
I’m amazed how articulate he is. I usually associate his views with someone who has an accent other than broadcast standard US English.
[Favorite part: where his illogic leads him to pronounce that all families/friends of those involved in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters are also complicit in a coverup, since he alleges that “manned” spaceshots are never manned.]
Counterpoint: you’re fake news, you’re in on the conspiracy. You’re a liar, and don’t understand anything. I don’t believe you. You can’t change my mind.
I have a strong feeling they’d point you to a coin or other disc-shaped object and ask you why that wasn’t collapsing into a sphere. It doesn’t really matter that there is a good answer to this counterpoint, most people intuit how objects behave based on their experience with close-to-person-sized objects that they are familiar with.
I mean, think about how people reason that since ants can lift many times their own weight, a giant ant would be very strong. The reality is that a giant ant’s respiratory and motor systems wouldn’t function on a larger scale and it would probably barely be able to lift itself up as it suffocated in minutes.
The forces that work on an object the size of earth would be utterly alien to most round-earthers, let alone flat-earthers.
