It has been, I confess, a bracing season for the human mind.
At long last—after centuries of being gently herded by men in white coats, men in darker coats, and men in fleece vests with lanyards—we have begun to revisit the sacred dictums that once ruled our breakfast tables, our school auditoriums, and our very sense of what is “normal.”
Vaccines, we were informed, were “protective” and “did not cause autism,” as though Nature herself was required to submit her work to a peer-review committee with a grant deadline and a conscience shaped like a conference badge. Climate change, we were told, was a serious matter, and that seriousness—like a priest’s collar—necessitated our surrender of important creature comforts: the SUV, the V8, and especially the Hummer, which rightly proclaimed our dominance as a species. We were scolded about plastic straws as if sea turtles were sitting at the table. We were advised to trust institutions whose favorite lullaby was “Just Comply; It’s for Your Own Good.”
And then there were the other popular lullabies, sung by our age with a straight face and a trembling finger: that the deep state did not really exist (though it maintained office hours), that elections were always pristine, that 5G was merely “faster internet,” that chemtrails were only condensation, and that your neighbor’s electric car was progress and not a moral lecture on wheels.
Thankfully, the pendulum has swung back toward the patient, and the grand corrective spirit of our time—a renewed willingness to question everything—has been a breath of fresh air. Not fresh in the meadow sense. More like fresh from a basement that has been locked since 1974 and smells faintly of mothballs, tinfoil, and righteous certainty. But fresh enough.
Yet it pains me to report that this invigorating campaign of common sense—this glorious rummaging through the attic of received nonsense—has somehow neglected one of the oldest, fattest, most well-upholstered indoctrinations in the history of mankind:
The notion that the Earth is round.
Round! How did we miss this?
This is a claim so brazen that, were it delivered today by a man on a podcast holding a microphone like a scepter, it would be laughed out of the room—unless he had a sponsorship code and a neon sign behind him.
And still, the notion of roundness persists. It sits in textbooks like a smug landlord. It hovers in classroom posters where continents are flattened into a cheerful lie and children are told to “imagine” the planet—always the planet—like a marble. A marble. As if God made the universe and then, for whimsy, rolled a ball under the couch.
I have long suspected that mankind’s overactive imagination is less a gift than a disease. Give a man a telescope and he will not merely look at the stars; he will invent a story about them, and then charge admission. Give a man a graph and he will discover impending doom in a line that could also be a printer error. Give a man a committee and he will invent a crisis so that the committee may continue existing.
Thus, I applaud our new era of questioning.
But I cannot applaud it selectively. That would be hypocrisy, which I despise unless it pays well.
So let us, at last, apply common sense to the round Earth doctrine. Let us do what the ancients did: think. Let us do what the moderns do: think while filming ourselves thinking.
Of the Absurdities That Necessarily Follow from Roundness
I begin with a point so obvious that it embarrasses me to write it, but we live in an age where obviousness must be printed in twenty-point font and stapled to the forehead.
If the Earth is round, then there are people on the underside of it.
The underside.
Now, I ask you: Have you ever walked on a ceiling? Have you ever sat calmly on the underside of your dining room table and eaten soup without incident? Have you ever watched a toddler attempt gravity’s defiance and thought, Yes, that seems stable and natural?
And yet we are told—without laughter, without blushing—that in Australia there are men drinking coffee while being upside down.
Upside down! With hot liquid! In cups that do not fall! With spoons that do not become tiny missiles of truth!
This is the first insult of roundness: that it requires us to accept that gravity is not a dignified force but a kind of universal cling wrap, keeping everybody pasted onto the surface like refrigerator magnets.
To which I reply: If gravity is so strong, why do my socks disappear in the laundry?
If gravity is so consistent, why does a paper towel roll fall off the counter only after I have walked away?
If gravity can hold Australians upside down, why can it not hold my willpower inside a grocery store?
These questions are not merely rhetorical. They are scientific, which is to say they are annoying.
The second insult is this: If the Earth is round and spinning, we should feel it.
We should wake each morning with the sensation of being flung through space like a sock in a dryer. We should get out of bed and immediately slide toward the east like pancakes on a tilted griddle. We should pour coffee and watch it curve elegantly into the sink.
But no. We stand. We stroll. We aimlessly check our phones in perfect stillness, as if the universe is not allegedly operating a 24-hour amusement ride beneath our feet.
“Ah,” say the round-earthers, “the motion is constant, so you don’t feel it.”
This is the most suspect sentence in the English language. It is the same sentence used by every institution that wishes you not to notice what it is doing.
You don’t feel it because it’s constant.
Tell that to a man in a divorce. Tell that to a woman whose mortgage rate changed. Tell that to your lower back after fifty.
Constant things are precisely the things we feel. Ask the sunburn. Ask the tinnitus. Ask regret.
Third: If the Earth is round, water should not behave as it does.
Water, in its charming simplicity, insists upon leveling itself. It is the world’s most stubborn democrat. It seeks equality. It will not tolerate hills. It mocks your landscaping. It rejects your spiritual aspirations and returns everything to the same humble plane.
And yet we are asked to believe that oceans—oceans!—cling to a globe like frosting on a basketball.
Have you ever frosted a basketball? I have not, because I am a grown man. But I have frosted a cake. And I can report that frosting, like water, has opinions. It droops. It slides. It seeks the truth of down.
The ocean does not droop. The ocean does not slide off the planet. Therefore, the planet is either not round, or the ocean is secretly complicit.
I leave it to the reader to decide which is more likely.
Fourth: If the Earth is round, then lines should behave oddly.
A ship on the horizon, we are told, “disappears hull-first” due to curvature. But I have watched many ships disappear, and they vanish in the same manner as my youth: gradually, without explanation, and often in fog.
Furthermore, if the Earth curves away, then a man with strong binoculars should be able to watch the ship reappear—like a magician’s trick—over the curve.
But the ship does not reappear. The ship merely leaves, as ships do, uninterested in our debates.
Fifth: If the Earth is round, then maps are lies.
This is, ironically, true. Round-earthers admit it openly, and yet remain round-earthers. They say, “All maps distort.” Then they continue using maps to find brunch.
If your theory of the world requires every representation of the world to be distorted, what you have is not science. It is modern art.
And modern art, as we know, is a tax shelter with captions.
A Brief History of How to Sound Smart While Saying Something Stupid
The round Earth doctrine is not content to sit quietly in the corner like a harmless superstition. It arrives with a parade of “proofs,” each delivered with the solemnity of a judge and the charm of a parking ticket.
We are told that the Greeks noticed the Earth’s shadow on the moon during eclipses and inferred a sphere. A shadow! As if shadows are not among the most deceptive things in creation. Shadows make small dogs look like wolves. Shadows make coat racks look like burglars. Shadows make your own past look heroic.
We are told that a fellow named Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth using sticks and sunlight. Sticks. Sunlight. This is the same equipment used by children to pretend they are wizards.
We are told that sailors have circumnavigated the globe. But sailors, with respect, are known to exaggerate. They return from a week at sea and speak of storms that “would’ve killed a lesser man,” which is a sentence that means nothing because the lesser man has already been defined out of existence.
We are told, in our modern age, to trust photographs from space. Photographs! The same medium that can remove wrinkles, add abs, and turn a man’s vacation into a lifestyle brand.
And so, roundness is maintained by a chain of authority that is, I admit, impressive: First the ancients, then the navigators, then the astronomers, then the engineers, then the agencies, then the spokespeople, then the animated explainer videos, then the fact-checkers, then the moderators, then the “community guidelines.”
At each step, the claim becomes less debatable—not because it is more true, but because it is more social.
This, I argue, is the real engine of the hoax: not geometry, but etiquette.
But let us not be held hostage by etiquette, which must be subordinated to truth. That’s why I argue that it is long past time to hold the round-earthers up to the same level of suspicion that has allowed us to free ourselves from the tyranny of vaccine peddlers, “climate change” quacks, deep state deniers, and the legions of other so-called intellectuals that perverted our societies and cultures almost beyond recognition.
My friends, for the sake of all that is good and true and just, let us begin.
