On Tuesday, someone set fire to three Masonic lodges in Vancouver, Canada. Shortly after the fires began, a flat-Earther named Ben Kohlman, 42, posted the following to social media: "I just cleaned 3 satanic club houses and nobody could do anything." Police have charged Kohlman over one of the fires, and arson charges for the others are likely forthcoming. From the Daily Beast:
…Although police have not announced a motive in the arsons, Kohlman's Facebook page contains anti-Freemason attacks that he shared from conspiracy pages, particularly pages about flat earth theory.
The incident wouldn't even be the first time in recent years that a flat earther attempted to burn down a Masonic lodge. An Australian flat earth convention went off the rails in 2018 when an organizer was accused of the same crime.
Flat earthers believe—wrongly—that the planet is shaped like a disk and that malevolent figures are trying to trick people into believing they live on a globe. But the conspiracy movement has not reached a consensus about who, exactly, is behind the nefarious plot. While some flat earthers blame the government or invoke anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, others falsely accuse the Freemasons (a fraternal society) of concealing the earth's true shape.
image: Orlando Ferguson, 1893 (public domain)
