By David Futrelle
Roosh V is over the moon. So over it.
Or at least the moon landings. In a post on his Roosh V forums earlier this week, the rapey-pickup-artist-turned-Christian-crackpot announced that he’s become a moon landing denier, citing the powerful evidence of fraud he had found in some random YouTube video on the subject.
“I first had doubts about the moon landing around 2015, but didn’t come to a definitive conclusion,” he wrote.
As the years went on, I was sympathetic to moon deniers because it was clear that those in power are lying about everything. If you catch someone in one lie, such as your wife, it’s natural to evaluate other things they’ve stated to you as fact. I started to believe that it was more likely we didn’t land on the moon than not.
I’m ready now to come out as a moon landing denier.
This is pretty crackpottish in itself, but it’s when he was asked to defend his position that things got really weird.
One of the commenters in the thread tried to appeal to Roosh’s faith in human ingenuity, only to find out he had none.
“Personally I rather believe in the human ingenuity, ” wrote the commenter,
our remarkable ability to accomplish something so challenging when we put our mind into it. This is the same belief and inspiration that we want to instill in our children and the future generations.
In his reply Roosh seemed to suggest that human ingenuity, and perhaps all of science itself, was part of a sneaky gay “secular humanist” revolt against God.
“This is called ‘secular humanism’,” Roosh sneered,
and is what has allowed us to inherit the world we have today. In other words, “human ingenuity” leads to gay pride, feminism, transgender children, deplatforming, fake news, etc. etc.
It’s not clear if Roosh thinks science is itself part of the plot, or if the plot simply involves people saying good things about science. If the former, there’s more than a bit of irony here. Before he became a professional pickup artist, Roosh was a lab technician, who presumably believed in the science underlying his job. When he started making bread in an automatic breadmaker not that long ago he proudly declared himself a “bread scientist.”
And of course he wrote these words on his laptop or a phone to post on the Internet.
Weird how selective science deniers can be in their denials of science. Moon landing deniers have no problem believing in the smart phones they hold in their hands. Flat Earthers have no trouble beliving YouTube is real.
Of course Roosh isn’t the only manosphere crackpot to deny the moon landings happened. Nazi-adjacent fantasy author Vox Day declared earlier this year that the mood landings were “one giant hoax for mankind.”
And in a post on his blog yesterday he seemed to come out as a flat earther.
Notice that ALL of the hemisphere photography we think we’ve seen has turned out to be nonexistent. It’s becoming clear that from the evolution fairy tale to the Blue Marble fraud to the dinosaur fraud and the satellite myth, the world is very, very different than we have been told it is. What is the point? To deceive you into serving Satan rather than God.
Could it be …
The satellite balloon technology also explains how the US can keep putting up satellites despite not having any rockets capable of sending up astronauts. I particularly enjoyed the video of the NASA satellite released by the Space Shuttle that was dangling from a wire.
Yeah, I must have missed that video.
Vox later clarified his remarks in the comments, stating flatly that he wasn’t a flat earther. Apparently he’s just someone who thinks that satellite photos are routinely faked, that satellites themselves are held up in the sky by balloons, and that the moon landing was just the world’s most elaborate hoax. Just normal regular stuff to believe.
I’m not sure what he thinks “dinosaur fraud” is all about. Maybe they go around passing a lot of bad checks?
Hey, that theory makes as much sense as suggesting that satellites are balloon-powered tools of Satan.
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My favourite part of the moon landing conspiracy is that it’s still active. There was a recent Chinese flyby mission that took photographs of the alleged “Apollo landing site”, and the conspirators at NASA expertly planted images of the American flag and the rover tracks in those pictures before anyone saw them.
For a conspiracy that’s been kept going for 60 years, that was also full of whistleblowers who deliberately left clues and hints about the hoax, they sure are competent.
@ Meteor:
I watched a flat-earther video on youtube which included a rocket launch. They used the fact that the rocket didn’t go straight up and eventually curved beyond the horizon as evidence that they never leave the planet… because the creator didn’t understand how gravity and inertia work. They said that to complete the deception, the rockets either crash into the ocean or land in a secret base in Greenland, so nobody ever knows it didn’t go anywhere.
So sadly, taking them to see a launch doesn’t really help.
My favorite NASA hoax-related theory comes from the Janitor:
Minor point but we knew the earth was a sphereoid long, long, long before photos. We know this from such complicated things as ships “sinking” over the horizon and that the shadow on the moon, esp. During lunar eclipeses, be curved.
Isn’t dinosaur fraud when roosters put on their dating profiles that they are really T-Rexes?
@Snowberry:
I think if you strapped them into rockets and sent them off to Mars, they still would think it was fake. They’d find a way. Their identity depends on it.
@Yutolia
Regardless, I still support sending these people to Mars. It gets them out of my life.
Just mentioning you’re a dinosaur would be accurate, but not very impressive to the chicks.
@KnittingCatLady (I think) and relatively off-topic
On your mention, I watched the Netflix flat Earth doc yesterday (think it’s actually BEHIND the Curve). I was fascinated at the mental gymnastics the flat Earthers perform to explain away their OWN experimental data, as they try to prove the flatness.
As a decades-long slash fan, I recognize the sense of finding a community that supports and affirms your odd POV, when you feel isolated from the rest of the world. I only wish the flat Earthers were applying their energy and creativity to something less destructive to the public discourse.
@jeeninsb
After that movie came out other flat earthers started accusing the ones who did appear in it of being NASA/Freemason shills and the whole thing was a false flag to discredit the flat earth.
All these elaborate theories and no-one has ever explained why we would want to fake the moon landings and hide that the earth is flat.
I don’t understand what the government stands to gain by spending billions on faking moon landings. It could just as easily spend billions on an actual moon landing, and it would be a great deal less stressful. For a start you’d never have to disappear someone for finding out The Truth. Same goes for the “earth is flat” theorists. Why would anyone bother hiding this
@Violet
Some flat Earthers call them selves Biblical Earthers and claim the bible says the earth is flat and the idea that it is round is the work of the devil .
@Fabien Torres
But that still raises the question “why bother?” Stuff like “Love Thy Neighbour” or “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” doesn’t depend on the Earth being a specific shape.
I mean, I know there’s a long tradition among fundamentalists of arguing that the Devil forges fossils to tempt humans to believe in evolution, etc – but “tricking them into forming new theories in physics, and then hoping this causes them to *really* throw out the baby with the bathwater and abandon every moral precept they’d previously held” seems like an extremely roundabout way of approaching the end goal of making us do sinful things.
“Oh the Earth is round? Well in that case, why am I fostering these orphans? I’m off to snort cocaine and bed as many people as I possibly can. So long, losers!”
^^
@Moon Custafer, Violet
I’ve heard all kinds of explanations ranging from airline prices to keeping money flowing to the space program (which is actually doing something else because space isn’t real). It’s all BS, but that’s all these folks have.
My guess is a significant number are doing this ironically rather than out of genuine belief.
@Naglfar:
Oh, definitely send them to Mars, I just know that they’re heads are so far up their asses they won’t believe it even as they die because they can’t breathe the air.
As a Freemason, I am tickled to see yet another Nefarious Plot (tee em) pinned on us. It’s remarkable how people like Roosh know more about what we’re up to than *we* do.