Like a short “Black Mirror” episode, but rooted in actual facts the 2024 election, this film, an entrant at the Toronto International Film festival, fictionalizes the very real phenomena of foreign influence operations using social media to influence American politics.
Often, with the willing participation of American politicians.
It’s hard to find a flat Earther who doesn’t believe most other conspiracies under the sun; a flat-Earth conference is invariably also a gathering of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers and Illuminati subscribers, to name a few.
It’s that hyper-skeptical mindset that helps flat earthers answer the big questions – like who’s hiding the true shape of the planet from us?
“The ruling elite, from the royal family to the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds … all of those groups that run the world, they’re in on it,” says Weiss.
But “once you get into flat earth, the other (conspiracy theories) get knocked down into another tier,” says Mark Sargent, a filmmaker and stalwart of the movement who was featured in the 2018 Netflix documentary “Behind the Curve.”
“Everybody here, they’ve got their top 20 conspiracies – and you could walk around door to door and those top 20 would differ from person to person. But everybody’s number one is always flat Earth,” he tells CNN.
It helps that the group has a mutual target. “Most of our ire is pointed towards NASA. That’s our bread and butter,” Sargent says of the agency flat Earthers believe is ultimately behind the conspiracy.