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Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here. More recently he claimed to have been mauled by a demon in his sleep, which resulted in physical marks (more probable culprit - one of four dogs in the room?). His suspected demonic activity today - the invention of nuclear weapons:
Why are apparently kooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right? Cadence Owens also came out as dinosaur truther and flat-earth curious.
Is Tucker trying to become the next Alex Jones? Is this part of an op to associate historical revisionism and opposition to the ruling regime with insanity?
I think these people have been in the spotlight for so long, mouthing other peoples opinions or regurgitating talking points, that when they are finally allowed to be themselves they don't know where and when to stop. They already stepped over the line to follow their convictions. That line was much clearer and held more immediate consequences than belief in flat earth Satan bigfoot or whatever.
If everyone gave an earnest list of views they hold or are curious about or share any sort of odd thing that gave them an emotion that they felt was worth exploring the umpteenth time they have to fill 30 minutes of dead air I think there is not a single interesting person left that doesn't hold to some odd belief. Hell, most people are so uninteresting that they would never get to a point of being a political talking head in the first place.
On the flipside, the lunacy people believe on 'the left' is no different. As an example: most people believe in a theory of human evolution that's much dumber, consequential and more immediately and obviously wrong than flat earth.
But more directly to Tucker, it feels like he's throwing away a sort of sacred status he built for himself. He could always present himself as kind of untouchable. From a persona perspective it's like he decided to give himself a weakspot. Feels like an odd thing to do for a man like him but, barring it being a conspiracy by TPTB to weaken a persona that's becoming too powerful, it's just a whatever.
I get that its fashionable in this space to dunk on the "blank slatists" but this is a pretty dumb take that seriously oversells the rigor or "hardness" of fields like psychology and anthropology while underselling the significance of things like basic navigation, land surveys, and wireless communications to modern society, or the disciplines of physics and astronomy historically.
The spherical nature of the Earth along with its approximate circumference has been widely known in the western world since classical antiquity, and to the degree that flat-eartherism exists today outside of a "birds aren't real"-esque joke it seems most prevalent amongst PMC types who, interacting with the world chiefly through screens, seem to have difficulty thinking in three dimensions.
Contra the popular meme, 15th century sceptics weren't expecting Columbus to literally "sail off the edge of the earth" they were expecting him to run out of food and potable water before he even got a third of the way as the approximate latitude and longitude of the spice islands he was trying to reach had already been well established. Furthermore the sceptics were entirely correct in that it was essentially blind luck that Columbus stumbled upon the hear-to undiscovered island chain of the Bahamas just as his supplies were running low.
This is not my experience at all. Aside from the vanishingly small minority that is flat-earth for religious reasons, most of the flat earth people very much do not seem like PMC types, they're fiercely independent, self-reliant men with libertarian leanings who don't like appeals to authority and believe in seeing things for themselves before they're satisfied.
In other words, I think it's much more likely we'd see a flat earther here on the motte than in any PMC office, even if everyone made their beliefs completely transparent.
In my experience unironic flat-earthers fall into two broad catagories,
schitzophrenicnuerologically-diverse lumpenprole, and upper-middle class contrarians who latched onto it as a part of a part wider suite of conspiracy theories and new age woo. Astrology, Homeopathy, Crystal Healing, Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll, Q-Anon, etc...Meanwhile I've found that most of the "fiercely independent libertarians who believe in seeing things for themselves" who aren't also well to the left of Charles Murray's bell curve tend to work it out on thier own as they also tend to be travelers and consequentially end up having ties to the crunchier sides of the hiking, sailing, and general aviation communities.
In any case i think my point stands, as concepts go a flat vs spherical Earth has far more wide-reaching, and immediately observiable consequences than evolution vs young earth creationism, and that's well before we begin to consider specific claims about aryans' and indo-europeans' role in the bronze age collapse.
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Agreed. The typical flat earth believer is very low in socioeconomic status, bordering on underclass, doesn’t believe what he’s told just in general, and winds up with a web or conspiracy theories which might contradict each other. He(and it’s a he) is about equally likely to be white or black(I’m not sure if this means blacks are overrepresented once you adjust for the very low socioeconomic status involved) and whether or not he claims to be a believer he never goes to church or prays, nor does he let Christianity influence his ethics or spirituality if he even has any. He’s deeply cynical about human relationships- in every sense of the term- and might use this to justify some mildly unethical behavior. He didn’t do well in school, even when you adjust for IQ, for the same reason his boss doesn’t like him now, and he tends to go from job to job without settling in a career. He believes a complex and often contradictory tangle of health/scientific, historical, economic, and possibly legal and supernatural-ish woo woo crap, but it’s not all natural or traditional. He might be a bit racist, but he hates rich people and authorities more. The police are out to get him(and it’s possible that they actually are), and he doesn’t connect this to his own bad behavior. He doesn’t vote, doesn’t know who he would vote for, and is mad at both parties when he thinks about politics.
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