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.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@fabe —
Heh. Trust me, you kind of need to watch a couple of the originals to really understand the level of lunacy they’re capable of spouting– and why they are able to freely reject anything resembling rationality. Some are even fun to watch.
Then again, maybe you shouldn’t, because there are also some which will have you wondering why the hell the nukes haven’t been dropped yet so that there will no longer be anyone to breed this level of dumb.
@Robert Haynie
Sometimes I have trouble handling their stupidity even when filtered through debunkers. Don’t think I could handle them raw and unfiltered .
@ Knitting Cat Lady
I honestly would love to take one of my slippers and if anyone says that gravity is a hoax: I tell them: “Oh is it now? Well; let’s test that.” And than proceed to take my slipper in both hands, both arms extended in front of me and above my head… and just drop the slipper…. and than pick it up and do it again…. and again….and again…. and again.
“I’m not sure what he thinks “dinosaur fraud” is all about. Maybe they go around passing a lot of bad checks?”
You call yourself a gamer but didn’t know that Yoshi committed tax fraud?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yoshi-committed-tax-fraud
Roosh is now a much less endearing version of the It’s All Sunny in Philadelphia cast during that whole ‘Science is a liar sometimes’ segment.
In the case of Vox Day, bear in mind he does not actually believe the Earth is flat and that space travel is a hoax. His intended ‘point’ is (probably) “don’t believe everything you’re told”, and that his followers should apply this to things Vox dislikes, like evolution science and news media for example, rather than things he favours, like Biblical literalism and Donald Trump.
His actual point is to say something extremely obtuse, then, after being called out on it, make like “Of course I don’t actually believe this just because I wrote it. It’s no wonder that you can’t understand, because I’m so much more intelligent than you.” Which is pretty much what Vox Day does all the time.
Take this man to a NASA launch and have him watch it.
Then ask him where he thinks they went.
The dinosaur fraud is the ongoing coverup to pretend dinosaurs have gone extinct, while actually the government knows that the dinosaurs are living it up on the inside of the Hollow Earth (yes, the earth is Hollow and Flat; all conspiracy theories are compatible) and they will one day come through the hole in the North Pole and conquer Canada.
Crank magnetism at work. Once you’ve opened your mind enough to let your brains fall off, anything goes.
Then there’s the conspiratorial mindset of “everything the gubmint and the media I don’t trust says is a lie regardless of how self evident or easy to verify it is. If CNN tells me the sky is blue, that means there’s a conspiracy hiding that it’s actually red.”
@Meteor
To the land of the secret dinosaur fraud?
@Amtep
I thought the dinosaur fraud was the creationist belief that dinosaurs never existed and their fossils are fake. This theory is certainly more…creative.
My favorite part of the flat Earth conspiracy theories is when they try to make up a reason why some group (their scapegoat varies, but Jews, Freemasons, NASA, and others are popular) would a) go through so much effort to make the Earth look round and b) have been doing this for the last 2500 years without stopping.
For example, they say it’s about airline prices, but there were no airliners when the Greeks discovered that the Earth was round in the 6th century BCE. Or they say it’s to keep people from falling off of Antarctica, but nobody went to Antarctica until the 19th century.
@vaiyt
Well, with President Orange Shitstain in office, I typically assume that everything he says is a lie until proven otherwise, because that’s more likely than the alternative.
Somehow Roosh got even weirder.
It seems cranks always get crankier over time.
@Citerior Motive and harder to bear.
Years ago, I saw a book on (I think) a Jehovah’s Witnesses booth at the county fair about dinosaurs, amongst other ancient critters. The book claimed that dinosaurs did exist, but lived at the same time as the cavemen did.
It claimed that carbon dating wasn’t an accurate measure of telling how old an ancient thing was because you need a piece of pure carbon to compare the dinosaur isotopes to, and no human has ever found that pure piece for comparison purposes. Kinda regret not picking up a copy while I had the chance to see it what other gems it had between the covers.
And all this talk of dinosaurs and flat earths is reminding me of an old episode of the Dinosaurs sitcom, where the valley girl teen was put on trial for spreading the word that the earth was actually round instead of flat like everyone else said. Since in that society the guilty had the right to choose the method of their deaths, she chose to be executed by getting thrown off the edge of the earth. Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way.
@Naglfar
I did the same with the brothers Ford back when Rob was mayor and I was watching local news on the CRT that was too big for its own good. I don’t even bother listening to people like that anymore. I skip clips of them in comedy shows.
The version of Dinosaur Fraud I heard was that dinosaurs were invented out of whole cloth by someone (usually the Jews, of course), in order to sell toys to children.
I’ve always liked the argument that, really, we didn’t have the special effects technology at the time to fake the moon landing: just look at actual movies from around then. Literally, it would have been easier to go to the moon than it would have been to fake the video with the tools available at the time.
Granted, it’s not as in-your-face obvious as the ‘why did the Russians go along with losing’ or the ‘why hasn’t NASA faked any other great successes’ arguments.
It’s like these sorts of people bind themselves in an eternal ‘now’ and refuse to think about how things have changed even over the course of their lifetimes.
(I suspect the counter-argument to mine about the technology would be to pull in the ‘transistors were reverse-engineered from the crashed alien spacecraft at Roswell’ conspiracy theory and say that the government did have the technology, they just hadn’t shared it yet. Which makes no sense for other reasons.)
Sometimes it does seem like a lot of people essentially believe that God created the world in 1950. Or possibly 1980. Or maybe it’s Jesus that happened in 1980.
Was the Cold War real?
If so, the moon landing was as well. Because, as mentioned earlier, perpetuating the hoax would require collusion between the US and the USSR, which they sure as hell wouldn’t be doing if the Cold War was real.But that means that other events in history pertaining to the Cold War would also have to be hoaxes, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the division and reunification of Germany. Frankly, it’d be easier to actually go to the moon than it would be to fake all that. That;s the thing about conspiracy theories: the bigger they get, the more implausible they become.
Going along with the cartoon, if NASA had faked the moon landing, doesn’t it make sense that they would fake the Mars rover being functional as well?
I like the joke that NASA hired Stanley Kubrick to fake moon-landing footage (which I gather was an early version of the conspiracy theory, sparked by the believeability of the SFX in 2001), but that Kubrick was so committed to realism he insisted on filming on the actual moon.
My favorite bit of flat-Eartherism was their solution to the fact that the Earth looks clearly round when you can see from horizon to horizon.
This was to create a model of the earth where there is a peak in the center, that descends outward and then rises up in a bowl at the edges.
In other words, the flat-Earthers “proved” that the Earth is too flat… by claiming that it isn’t actually flat.
@Allandrel
Ask them how come it looks round no matter where you are. If it were the shape they describe, there would be places you could stand where it would be concave.
Flat Earthers are kinda fun… All of their arguements actively deny Scientific Principles and most of them are stuck at a level of Personal Science around the 1600s. They refuse to go beyond the Philosophy of first principles… Yet they use things that they know nothing about, that required science to go so beyond First Principles all the time. I mean, First Principles dont work in the quantum realm… And we use quantum physics to power so many things… Moon hoaxers are just so 1990s though… I mean, I’m not perfect when it comes to conspiracy theories, I believe in actual conspiracies like the G7 summit and rich people and collusion and other stuff, and then I have my fondness for human origins stuff, namely that we are missing a huge amount of human prehistory.(This being confirmed for the earliest dates of Australlian Aborigines being somewhere in the 80,000 BCE time period, and the fact archeologists have found construction sites dating to 50,000 to 60,000 BCE.)… That’s more because how Science works. It’s never 100% settled. And that’s why I love Science. You can study something your entire life, and it’s almost guaranteed that something will have changed what we know about it. It’s just that alot of conspiracy theories are made up by people without any facts or interesting hypothesis… I like to keep my brain open enough for change. And to be able to hold a couple of contradicting hypothesizes in my head at the same time…
One of the sillier piece of “evidence” that the Moon landings were faked is Diamonds Are Forever. One of the sequences in the film has James Bond searching a facility owned by Willard Whyte, a very obvious Howard Hughes expy. Security chases Bond, and one of the places Bond is chased through is an area that looks like the surface of the Moon, and includes men in space suits with a moon buggy, which he steals. Some people believe this is intended as a hint the landings were faked.
Bond films executive producer Cubby Broccoli was a friend of Hughes, and people who know him claimed Broccoli got the idea for the film’s missing billionaire plot from a dream of Hughes being missing. Ironically Hughes actually did disappear from public view, being seen by only a few close associates in the last years of his life.
It’s amazing the kind nonsense people will believe. You can find videos on YouTube who believe that stage magicians like David Blaine have demonic help to perform their illusions.