Off the Edge Quotes

“Flat Earth is best understood not as a viable science with meaningful specifics but as the ultimate incarnation of conspiratorial thinking. Members of the movement believe governments and scientists are actively peddling a “globe lie” in order to control the world by tarnishing religious teachings or by making people feel insignificant next to the great expanse of outer space.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“Flat Earth is best understood not as a viable science with meaningful specifics but as the ultimate incarnation of conspiratorial thinking.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“By definition, conspiracy theories imply a coordinated plot by a hostile group. But the most successful conspiracy theories also imply the existence of another group: victims. Theorists become more devout when they identify as part of population under attack, the researchers noted. The more a person identifies with a persecuted "ingroup," the more likely they are to suspect evil deeds by a threatening "outgroup" with which they do not identify. In a 2015 study, for example, Indonesian students were more likely to believe conspiracy theories about Western countries staging terror attacks if researchers first emphasized the students' Muslim faith and described the West as a threat to Muslims.

Americans are no more immune than Indonesians. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union's KGB spread rumors throughout the United States that the CIA had engineered the HIV virus to wipe out the country's Black and gay populations. Often, groups that have been dealt a bad hand can be more likely to perceive the world in a conspiratorial light due to past suffering, be it the result of a deliberate conspiracy or passive societal failings. So while the anti-Black HIV rumors were false, the theory took off with some Black Americans who remembered the country's history of documented medical plots against people of color.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“Modern medicine finds that today’s consumers likely ingest too much phosphoric acid, often from soft drinks; if Rowbotham’s miracle cure worked, much of the United States would be experiencing pleasant indestructibility. Unfortunately, you can’t Mountain Dew yourself to eternal life—you can only increase your soda-based risk of osteoporosis, like many modern consumers.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“In order to bring believers back from the edge, maybe we need to approach debunking less like a debate and more like holding a friend's hand as they leave a terrible, dependent relationship.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“Healthy skepticism allows for doubt without making doubt one's default position.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“Conspiracy theories preach suspicion and prey on our fears. Inherently divisive, they thrive when we mistrust others and wall ourselves behind our personal paranoias. Fittingly, one of the best ways out of conspiratorial thinking can be to place our faith in others.”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

“This was the world according to Adams’s panic-mongering website Y2K Newswire, which, in the final months of 1999, promoted headlines about the so-called Y2K bug, a mythic computer error that would allegedly send the world”
― Kelly Weill, Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything