You’re really hammering some nails here, Colin. Excellent points.

Just to take the politics out of it, I spent several months working hard to debunk the flat Earth conspiracy. A brother of my business partner had fallen for it, and he led us into a deep dive of YouTube videos made by really smart people who apparently really believe the Earth is flat instead of spheroid.

My friend and I broke out our college physics and engineering training to conduct a series of experiments that demonstrate the spherical shape of the Earth.

We walked his brother through the math a step at a time after he participated with us conducting the observations. We wrote up our findings and even posted them on the Internet a little bit.

Wow look at us, we thought. We’ve just definitively debunked a conspiracy theory that cannot hold water.

But you know what we didn’t do? We didn’t convince his brother. He still believes the Earth is flat.

We didn’t convince anybody else either. Along the way, we found our own efforts were rather naive compared to some really professional YouTube channels by people much more highly trained in physics and engineering than us.

They debunk the flat Earth conspiracy much better than we had, but they rarely change anybody’s minds.

People who are invested in the conspiracy theory evidently feel really good about believing that science and mathematics themselves are wrong, and they’re among the few in on the secret.

You just can’t debunk that mindset with facts.