And it doesn’t help, Saunders said, that sometimes there actually are conspiracies working against regular people. They want to see that one thing logically and fairly follows another.īut when life begins to feel outside of your control and cruel for no reason, one way to rationalize that is through a conspiracy theory. Everybody wants to understand the world in a way that makes sense to them. Conspiracy theories, Saunders said, are in some ways a response to stress. Our widening economic disparities might only fuel that search. “If you go out on the internet, you can find reasoning or evidence or at least an argument for your side. “We’re in an era now where you can always find information to validate even the most outlandish of perspectives,” said Kyle Saunders, a political science professor at Colorado State University who studies conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, there has never been more opportunity for people who share off-the-beaten-path beliefs to connect. Trust in government, trust in the media, trust in academia and trust in other traditional sources of information is near an all-time low. Twenty-eight percent said they believe that secretive groups are conspiring to create an authoritarian world government. In a different PPP poll last year, 37 percent of people said they believe global warming is a hoax, while 20 percent said they believe there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism - both of which are denied by the vast majority of scientists. But that makes a conference of flat-Earth believers a rather exaggerated lens through which to view a much more mainstream trend.Īcross the country, established authorities are losing their influence. There is no credible scientific debate over whether the Earth is flat. So, flat Earth thus far remains on the fringes, with every major university, scientific group, company and research agency not only firmly in the Earth-is-round camp but also using that assumption to create the technologies that undergird our daily lives - from tracking the weather, to pinpointing our locations via GPS, to beaming us television. (The remaining participants either said they didn’t know or were wavering on their belief in a round Earth.) But a closer examination of the poll shows that 4 percent of those ages 18-24 who responded said they believe the Earth is flat, while another 5 percent said they had always thought it was flat but are now having doubts. (People who voted in 2016 for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, though, were more likely to say they believe in a flat Earth.)Īn online pollster earlier this year made waves when it announced that only two-thirds of young millennials believe the Earth is round. Statistically, there was no difference between women and men, Republicans and Democrats, Trump voters and Hillary Clinton voters. Last year, a poll from Public Policy Polling found a mere 1 percent of people in America believe the Earth is flat. “It’s getting bigger and growing larger every day.” “It’s not going away,” says Robbie Davidson, the conference’s organizer. Millions of people have viewed flat-Earth videos on YouTube. This is the largest crowd yet for the conference - 650 people from across the world are registered, almost 50 percent more than last year’s conference. (John Leyba, Special to The Colorado Sun)įrom the conference’s main stage, the speakers talk in superlatives. Robbie Davidson, the organizer of the 2018 Flat Earth International Conference, walks through the exhibit hall in the Crowne Plaza Denver Airport Convention Center.
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