QAnon fans don't want flat Earth 'conspiracy nutters' to be associated with their movement: new book

QAnon followers might believe that JFK Jr. is going to be resurrected to join Donald Trump on the 2024 presidential ticket, but they really want the crazy flat-Earthers out of their movement.

The Daily Beast's Will Sommer and Asawin Suebsaeng interviewed Kelly Weill about her new book, out this week, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, conspiracy culture, and why people will believe anything. Weill revealed that there is trouble in conspiracy paradise and while it might be perfectly acceptable to wait for the return of JFK Jr., question the validity of the 2020 election, think that the COVID vaccine inserts a tracking chip in your body, or even that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children in a Washington pizza parlor's basement — "the Earth is flat" is too far.

In the podcast "Fever Dreams," Weill brought up the first time she learned about the flat-earth movement and interviewed a man arrested for handing out flat-earth propaganda on a school playground.

She began by explaining that after studying the flat-earth movement for the past two years found that the conspiracy world isn't exactly the most welcoming and "big tent" group.

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Weill explained that a lot of people come to the flat-earth movement but ultimately become more and more engaged, pushing people in their lives away because it becomes an all-encompassing world. Instead of talking about football with family, for example, the flat Earth is all that matters to them.

"I thought flat-earth was an interesting parable about how people can believe anything," she said. There are other conspiracy theories that are more "reality-adjacent" and that it's easy to walk through the path of how someone got to the conclusion, based on their political beliefs. "But flat earth seemed so out there that I wanted to understand it better."

So, those in modern political conspiracies are a lot like the flat-earth movement in that there are people "who feel at odds with the reality that they live in and they want to be able to blame a person or a group for persecuting them. So, in a lot of ways, flat-earth is almost interchangeable with a lot of conspiracy theories that we deal with every day at work."

She went on to explain that there is a lot of overlap in the conspiracy world with flat-earthers and that it has even increased over the years. She cited one Facebook post she saw saying, "Globers = Antifa." Globers are what flat-earthers call those who believe our planet is round.

While at a flat-earth convention she saw two QAnon people selling jewelry who confessed they aren't totally believers in the flat-earth theory, but thought that it would be a receptive community to Q. But flat-earthers conflict with Q because in a Q&A someone asked "just to shut the flat-earthers up is the Earth round?" Q made it clear "of course, the Earth is round. We're not those conspiracy nutters!" The comments were filled with dissenters.

You can access the "Fever Dreams" podcast wherever you get your podcasts and Weill's book is on sale now.