All Gas No Brakes
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2020–2022
8:05 · 7.1M views · Jan 3, 2020
An undercover report from the 2019 Flat Earth Conference by the comedy channel All Gas No Brakes, which interviews attendees on camera.
HN mentions it mostly as an amusing look at flat earthers in their own words, not as a recommendation.
4 comments from Hacker News
>People are much nicer when their reputation is at stake. I think a more accurate statement would be "People are much nicer when their money is at stake." And I don't mean "nicer" as in "genuinely better," it's more "I'll paint on a smile and not say anything bad" (just ask a waiter and they'll have plenty of tales where they had to do this for a tip). Today, there are plenty of online hangouts for people with all sorts of ideas. This is great since people can easily form communities around a TV show, hobby, etc, but it also enables flat earthers and anti-vaxxers, whose views are often rooted in bigotry (see: All Gas No Brakes video on the flat earth convention [0]). Those communities tend to encourage an "us vs them" mentality and to cut out those who seek to "hold them back" (basically modern cults - alienate yourself from your friends and loved ones, we will provide all the community you need). In the past, joining groups like the Klan was a much more difficult endeavor (they tended to operate much more in the shadows), and the groups tended to be on the smaller side. Today, it's just a matter of joining a Facebook group about "race realism", "the truth about George Floyd", or whatever, and bam, you have access to thousands of like-minded individuals to build your own personal echo chamber. The traditional tactics of people avoiding those they dislike IRL don't work so well as a form of collective shaming when you've got someone who is terminally online and has tons of peo
Flat earth started from YouTube recommendations. They had a whole non-annonymous conference where they were happy to talk to the guy from All Gas No Brakes on camera. this video Pizzagate and QAnon started because many people understand something is fucked up but lack the correct tools to understand the systemic problems of society (of which you and I would probably disagree as I blame capitalism and imperialism) so they invent conspiracies to explain the world around them. In many cases, their conservative, libertarian, or liberal ideology does not permit them to critique the systems around them, so they must find some other way to explain the situation, which revolves around (non-system challenging) elite conspiracies. It's difficult to disabuse people of the fake conspiracies because real conspiracies against the public are routine. Some are boring (such as the SV conspiracy to depress software engineer wages). Some are exciting, such as what the CIA is publicly documented to have done overseas by selling cocaine to fund their black operations in the Iran-Contra scandal. Also, there was a kernel of truth to Pizzagate and QAnon. Look at the Clinton's relationship to Jeffery Epstein. However, the right was unable to metabolize real existing issues and started fantasizing about a fascist coup executed by the president (whom they say rejected Epstein after he found out what he was up to... but didn't do anything about it). They make up concepts like he's tagging and bagging holly
The Jews[1], apparently. Somehow when you follow any conspiracy theory for long enough you find antisemitism at the root of it. 1. Flat Earth Conference, All Gas No Breaks: this video
Here's a neat video where flat earthers spout their Truth and reveal themselves to actually be antisemites: this video