Know Your Meme editor Matt Schimkowitz told me there’s a rhythm to the growth of theories like flat Earth.

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But in recent years, thanks to the advent of social media, Flat Earth theory has gained increasing prominence, and has even been espoused by prominent figures like NBA star Kyrie Irving. He is a really interesting figure, a former leader of this failed socialist commune that didn’t work out. Why would anyone even take this much time out of their lives to try educate these idiots who are just playing people. In September, Kyrie Irving told Boston radio host Rich Shertenlieb he was just kidding about being a flat Earther.

David Covucci is the senior politics and technology editor at the Daily Dot, covering the nexus between Washington and Silicon Valley. Because this canal was super long and straight, it really did sort of look like a Flat earth if you were only observing that with the naked eye. And I was really surprised because even looking up just the hashtag flat-Earth, it doesn’t seem like TikTok is really making any effort to censor the hashtag at all. And then I dug in and I found out that they were extremely serious, and there was this whole burgeoning community that thought Earth was absolutely flat.

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Over the past few years, particularly with the Trump administration and the pandemic, conspiracy theories in general have gotten a lot more mainstream. He just wanted to have an “open conversation” and prove a point: “[If] I believe that the world is flat, and you believe that the world is round, does that knock my intellectual capacity, or the fact that I can think different things than you can? The few times people have actually tried to make a tall building like the World Trade Centre, it is destroyed by the government. The United States has been “crazy with conspiracy theories” since before the Revolutionary War, Fenster says; the percentage of Americans who believe in some conspiracy or another around the JFK assassination has hovered between 60 and 80 percent for the last 50 years.The internet is unmatched when it comes to public discussions of the wackier ideas and what better way is there to express these beliefs than memes? And in light of the pandemic, which has led to a proliferation of conspiratorial thinking in general, there’s growing concern among those who study extremism and misinformation that believing in Flat Earth theory can lead one down even darker rabbit holes. There are hundreds of memes making fun of flat Earth by feigning a devout belief in it, and a lot of them are pretty entertaining. This clearly isn’t happening, even if you do ignore the nonsense that is rising sea levels due to global warming.