Antiprocess fascinates me. Instead of helping us process new information, antiprocess helps us avoid doing that. And it does so to protect our egos from any challenges to dearly-held beliefs. One story that recently got a lot of attention illustrates how this works on not one but both sides of false beliefs. It shows us a debunker who also holds false beliefs about the supernatural, as well as a conspiracy theory community’s desperate attempts to maintain their own false beliefs in the face of that debunker’s challenges about the shape of the Earth.
Truly, this story has everything.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/28/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: Birds aren’t real; We knew in the 1980s that Wyoming isn’t real; More about Wyoming being fake; Garfield even knows about it.)
Situation Report: Antiprocess hits the flat earth community
In October last year, a YouTuber uploaded a video (archive) about the flat earth community. Someone had offered flat-earthers a free winter trip to Antarctica so they could witness 24-hour sunlight for themselves.
In Antarctica, the sun rises in November and doesn’t set again until February. So this past winter, a Colorado volunteer pastor, Will Duffy, invited some flat-earthers to go with him on a trip to Antarctica. There, they could see for themselves that no evil government agents prevented visits—and that no “ice wall” exists, and that yes, the sun does indeed shine from November to February. He called this trip “The Final Experiment,” implying that it’d be the last “experiment” flat-earthers would ever need to settle the argument forever.
After some time, a few flat-earthers agreed to go with him. They did indeed see a distinct lack of Men in Black preventing access to the Antarctic. They also saw the lack of a solid ice wall at the edge of the world. What they saw instead was 24-hour daylight and endless glaciers and ice with no walls in sight.
So the trip was a resounding success, right?
No. To Duffy’s astonishment, these brave travelers did not all immediately renounce their false beliefs in a flat earth. Some did. But many only drilled down harder on those beliefs. At least one flat-earther has declared that Duffy—again, a volunteer pastor with we’ll discover sounds like a rigidly literalist fundagelical church—must be in league with Satan.
I just don’t know why the trip’s results surprised Duffy—or any other “globers” following news of it.
(Enemies of flat-earthers seem to call them “flatties.” In turn, flat-earthers call their enemies “globers.”)
Everyone, meet the flat earth conspiracy theorists
The flat earth conspiracy theory isn’t new at all. In 2019, CNN ran an article talking about it. But it’s way older than that.
Flat-earthers think the world is flat, not round-ish (for the sake of pedantry, it’s a lumpy oblate spheroid). They think that the glacier ice cover in Antarctica is actually a massive wall of ice standing at the edges of a circular flat world. They think something amazing or horrifying lies beyond that ice, but evil government agents don’t want anyone to know what it is.
Even more than that, they think that evil government agents prevent any normies from traveling there to see this stuff for themselves. After all, they think such a visit would—at the very least—totally destroy the supposedly-false belief that the Earth is round-ish. So the world’s various governments are very dedicated to preventing anyone they don’t control from seeing the truth about the flat earth.
According to flat-earther beliefs, then, 24-hour sunlight should be impossible. But as most of us know, it happens at the poles every year. Alaska is famous for being “the land of the midnight sun” in the summers, with that exact phrase showing up in a song recorded for a 1960 John Wayne movie, North to Alaska.
If the flat earth is a government-led conspiracy, though, it’s centuries older than that movie. It might even be millennia older. Some scholars think that Pytheas, a Greek sailor, described sailing to the Arctic around 325 BCE. In the 800s and 900s, various Europeans traveled around the Arctic Circle. In the 15th and 16th centuries, other Europeans explored it. The Antarctic region took a little while longer to explore, but by the early Renaissance it, too, was seeing regular visits by Europeans.
Either way, nobody needed to visit the polar regions to know the Earth is round-ish. All they needed to do was make a few rudimentary measurements and observations. So at least by 350 BCE, we knew the Earth wasn’t flat. Any sailor and any pilot knows the truth of the Earth’s shape quite well.
But flat-earthers persist. In 1997, Eugenie Scott wrote about them in a paper about Creationism. In her diagram, they show up as an extremist end-run product of Biblical literalism:

Indeed, in a minute we’ll encounter some Young-Earth Creationists who think flat-earthers are going way too far. Of the flat earthers in the above diagram, though, Scott writes:
The earth is shaped like a coin, not a ball. The International Flat Earth Society has only about 200 members (Schadewald 1980) and is insignificant in the antievolution movement. It is an example, however, of extreme Biblical-literalist theology: The earth is flat because the Bible says it is flat, regardless of what science tells us.
Of interest, though, it seems like many flat-earthers don’t use overtly religious language to describe their beliefs. They tend to use cargo-cult pseudoscientific language instead. I didn’t lump them in with Creationists for a very long time. Like anti-abortion activists did years ago, they’ve either dropped overtly religious language or disconnected their views from any specific religious beliefs. And in just a moment, we’ll see an interesting crossover with that culture war!
The Flat Earth Society has had a fairly active forum for some years now (current active link). There, we can see them letting down their hair, so to speak—and revealing that their flat-earth beliefs are part and parcel of their overall extremist evangelical theological beliefs. As one of them wrote just a week ago:
[The Bible] gives clear descriptions of a flat Earth or of things which would only be possible on a flat Earth, which if you don’t try to manipulate it into not contradicting reality clearly indicate Earth is flat. However, not the modern FE models, but the ancient FE models.
The entire thread is quite a read—for reasons we’ll be discussing in a bit here today.
Everyone, meet Will Duffy
Will Duffy is a hardline literalist evangelical who holds Creationist and anti-abortion beliefs. According to one news report about his Antarctica trip, Duffy leads Agape Kingdom Fellowship, on a volunteer basis. I can’t tell if this is because the church doesn’t want a dedicated pastor or if they’re between pastors right now. Its official website doesn’t appear to list any leaders. Nor does it list any specific denominational or creed-based loyalties.
We can make some guesses about Agape, though, and about Duffy himself. He shows up as a Bible study teacher for a very fundamentalist Denver-area evangelical church.
Additionally, a March 2024 news story about abortion legislation also lists him as the leader of Colorado Right to Life. In that story, Duffy compares his culture-war enemies to “the same people who would have supported the Holocaust and slavery.” Though he has no education or training in any medical field, he also incorrectly argued that therapeutic abortions, which are performed as a medical necessity to spare women’s lives, are “never necessary.”
Duffy has been accused of stealing church funds to make the Antarctica trip happen. He’s also been sued by some customers of a secular investment business he runs on the side. Those customers claimed he recommended high-risk bonds that turned out to be offered by a fraudulent company. Duffy settled two of the five lawsuits out of court. His investment-advisor license expired last year and he hasn’t seemed interested in going back to that field of work.
Really, reading too much about Will Duffy will give you your big mad of the year—and it’s only January. But it does show us that Duffy himself holds a great many false beliefs. He’s not alone in this state, either. Some Alabama pastor, Dean Odle (misspelled “Olde” in links about Duffy’s story), took to YouTube to “debunk” Duffy’s “experiment.” In a lot of ways, Odle is Duffy’s evil twin brother Skippy—except they’re both evil.
One of the funniest parts of Odle’s sermon is him insinuating at around 9 minutes in that Lucifer would be acting as “the angelic light in the sky” to trick the travelers—since of course the sun wouldn’t be shining 24/7, because the sun can’t possibly do that if the earth is flat. (Eugenie Scott is vindicated! Her diagram has support from real-world observations!)
The only mystery here is why Duffy was even surprised that the flat-earthers didn’t change their beliefs in the face of reality. Just like Dean Odle, he’s managed to maintain his own false beliefs just fine in the face of an entire lifetime of contradictions to those beliefs from reality.
The solution to that mystery involves antiprocess.
What antiprocess is and how it operates
If humans process information to form beliefs about reality, then antiprocess helps us avoid taking in that information. First described in 2003 by Timothy Campbell, antiprocess helps people hold onto cherished beliefs. In terms of the Faith Pool, antiprocess is the hand that physically covers the handles of the taps feeding a pool of belief, thus preventing them from being turned off. Here’s how Campbell explained the term:
Antiprocess is the preemptive recognition and marginalization of undesired information by the synergistic interplay of high-priority acquired mental defense mechanisms.
Antiprocess works because our minds are first of all lazy, so they don’t like to absorb and synthesize challenging information, and second protective of our egos. Nobody likes to feel stupid, after all, and the more authoritarian someone is, the scarier it feels to be wrong about anything.
I conceptualize antiprocess as a big impenetrable shield that slams down on a person’s mind the second their subconscious recognizes a real challenge to their beliefs. It’s like the city shield that Emperor Ming’s lieutenant orders up in Flash Gordon.

Once that shield is up, nothing is getting past it. The beliefs the shield protects remain safe and secure—even in the face of the most dramatic contradictions imaginable of those beliefs.
Both Will Duffy and his Antarctica flat-earthers use antiprocess shields. That doesn’t make them weird or even evil in and of itself. Every one of us also uses antiprocess to avoid similar contradictions. It’s just a lot easier to discern the antiprocess of people who hold startlingly different beliefs—especially people we don’t like!
Antiprocess operates in some key ways:
- preventing us from even consciously recognizing contradictory material
- demonizing the sources of contradictory material
- teaching us a number of (usually fallacy-laden or biased) arguments against contradictory material
- making up ad hoc explanations for contradictory material
Keep these methods in mind as we talk about those with false beliefs.
The principles of antiprocess
When we talk about antiprocess, as well, it’s important to remember a few important principles of the beastie:
- We all employ antiprocess. Yes, all of us. We use it to maintain every single belief that’s important to us.
- Antiprocess doesn’t make anyone a bad person. Trying to be more aware of antiprocess is good, but most of us will fail to do this consistently. Rather, antiprocess makes us human.
- The largely-subconscious operation of antiprocess makes it very hard for anyone to detect it in themselves. It’s far more easily discerned in others’ beliefs, especially if those beliefs are markedly different or unpalatable.
- Almost everyone—and I’m being generous with that almost—thinks their beliefs are rationally-derived and fully supported by reality, while those who differ in beliefs are stupid, gullible, delusional, misguided, deliberately grifting, or even in league with demons.
- Almost everyone—and again, I’m being generous here—thinks they are 100% open to changing their beliefs if reality presents contradictions to them. And they are almost all wrong.
- In confronting contradictory material, almost all of us use antiprocess while at that moment thinking we’re engaging with it in good faith. And we are almost all wrong.
- It takes a lot of conscious effort to defeat antiprocess—and defeating it also requires the ability to admit we’re wrong even about our most important beliefs.
- Changing one important belief doesn’t mean all our other beliefs are safely based on reality. Someone can make one correct change while leaving all the other false beliefs intact. Almost every time, they’ll think those other beliefs were also challenged in similar ways, when they were not.
- Once the antiprocess shields slam into place, all meaningful engagement is ended.
So if you finish debating or arguing with someone and feel like they totally didn’t get what you were saying, you can thank antiprocess. If someone complains that you’re not getting what they’re saying, you’re probably falling victim to antiprocess yourself. And even if you get over the antiprocess hurdle with one belief, you might not notice it at all with another.
How the Antarctica trip went down (under)
Been in the woods for a week. Are Flatties still fighting for their lives after “The Final Experiment”? [Official Flat Earth Discussion group, January 12, 2025]
According to an article from Baptist News Global—and yes, the name is funny when we consider the topic today—Will Duffy at first got no takers at all. Eventually, though, a couple of prominent, high-profile flat-earthers agreed to take the trip to Antarctica. They are:
- Jeran Campanella, who runs a flat-earth-dedicated YouTube channel called “Jeranism,” which he defines as “the opposite of mainstream”
- Austin Whittsitt, who runs another channel called “Witsit Gets It” that’s more general and covers all of the various right-wing science conspiracy theories
Immediately, of course, other flat-earthers denounced both these guys. Apparently all high-profile flat-earthers are really government plants. So Duffy convinced a much lower-profile movement member, Lisbeth Acosta, to come along. He hoped her presence would defuse those objections.
Duffy has a lot of stories about all the hoops that flat-earthers tried to impose on “The Final Experiment.” Apparently, flat-earthers claimed evil government agents would:
- Create cloud cover to hide the sun
- Fake the trip by pre-recording one that they’d set up themselves
- Manipulate time zones so the travelers would mistake daylight hours for nighttime ones
- Somehow confuse, drug, coerce, or bribe the travelers to say that the trip happened for real when it was all obviously CGI
(Conspiracy theorists have a lot more confidence in governments around the world than I do.)
And how antiprocess influenced the results of “The Final Experiment”
After that trip, apparently Whitsitt recanted at least some of his flat-earth beliefs. His community, accordingly, has made him Public Enemy #1, if his latest video’s YouTube comments are anything to go by. Apparently, he’s hoping his community’s biggest minds can devise a flat-earth model that allows for 24-hour daylight at its edges.
Acosta’s faith was shaken, though she’s not yet ready to examine her beliefs more closely.
Jeran’s recent videos indicate a change of mind, but he clearly can’t yet engage meaningfully with all of his flat-earth delusions being untrue.
I get it. I was like that too for a long, long time after deconversion. It really does take time to begin unpacking beliefs that are especially important—especially if we don’t quite connect them to the beliefs we’ve already examined and discarded as based on false claims.
However, the flat-earther community has not changed their minds even one bit. As we see with one flat-earth blogger, their antiprocess shields are working at RED HOT MAXIMUM OVERLOAD to reconcile “The Final Experiment” with their beliefs—if not negate the entire trip. In that blogger’s post, you can see every single antiprocess technique I described earlier. In comments on YouTube videos about the trip, you can see all of the techniques as well, all deployed by a lot of very, very angry flat-earthers who feel betrayed and belittled.
Antiprocess, man. It’s a helluva drug.
Antiprocess: One, but not the other belief
It’s not at all uncommon for a religious person to change one belief—but then drill down harder on their other beliefs. For years, I’ve felt sad that the guy who created the authoritative 3-hour-long debunk video about Ancient Aliens is an evangelical Christian who refuses to use the same critical thinking skills on his religious beliefs.
In the same way, I’ve noticed a lot of Christian infighting over this entire “Final Experiment” thing. Many have noticed that two guys with Answers in Genesis (AIG), a Young-Earth Creationist group, have criticized their movement. Flat-earthers seem really upset by that. Our one blogger gal (whose very own husband is apparently one of the evil “globers”) considers AIG and Will Duffy himself “controlled opposition.” That means she thinks they are being controlled by Satan/evil government agents and tricking everyone into thinking the world is round-ish for, um, PROFIT.

Confusingly, she even concedes that Satan apparently doesn’t care about the Earth being round-ish or flat. (Goodness! She knows a whole lot about Satan, doesn’t she? All of these folks seem to be on a first-name basis with him and to have full access to his Google Calendar.) What she thinks Satan wants is for humans to sin and go to Hell—for, um, PROFIT, I guess. But she finishes her post by declaring that Yahweh definitely thinks flat-earth beliefs are super-duper-mega important to modern Christianity.
Frankly, I think they’re important too.
If Christians can’t even accept reality about something as basic as the very shape of the Earth, then I don’t grant excessive trust to anything else they have to say about the truth of anything.
NEXT UP: Science denial and distrust of modern medicine leads to a heartbreaking and ferocious resurgence of a deadly disease in Kansas. See you next time!
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