As some of you have surely noticed, the flat Earth idea has gotten a lot of attention recently. It kind of came out of nowhere and got big fast. Why? I have a theory for this, and it involves a government conspiracy. Flat Earth is one of those things that immediately screams, "I'm an idiot and a lunatic". What better thing to use as a discrediting tool in a psy-op? It's just like how the term "UFO" has become synonymous with "alien space ship", so anyone who witnesses secret military aircraft (which are UFOs by definition) is immediately labeled a nutcase. By the same token, I have seen flat Earth be applied to unrelated ideas, to smear those ideas through association. Here is an example: Notice that the title says "flat Earth" (you may have to go direct to YouTube to see the full title), but the video never mentions FE and clearly uses a standard heliocentric model. The video simply presents an unorthodox idea of quantum physics, and FE is used to smear it. A fairly recent example of a high ranking government official using flat Earth to discredit an unrelated topic: John Kerry associates sceptics of AGW science with Flat Earth Society. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/kerry-slams-climate-change-deniers http://nypost.com/2014/02/16/climate-change-deniers-are-the-new-flat-earth-society-kerry/ So are all promoters of flat Earth government disinformation agents? No. Many if not most are simply useful idiots. But flat Earth's sudden rise to prominence is, I believe, better explained as a psy-op than as merely a sudden spike in retardation.
I think you are right about this because I feel like has all come out of nearly no where and people seem to be trying really hard to tie it into things that little to nothing to do with the idea that the earth is flat.
