WINOOSKI – If you ask Lou Minotti whether he believes that Vermont’s green mountains are real, he’ll sigh and look up at you with sad eyes before launching into a defense of his once-radical views that are now gaining some traction in the state. The “Flat Vermont Society,” based out of Minotti’s Winooski home, now boasts over 300 members, close to 40% of the state’s population according to the group, and they aren’t going to sit quietly and listen to the lies of the mainstream media or their own eyes.
“Look, I see the mountains too,” Minotti admits. “We all see the mountains. But how do we know that they’re real? I’ve never been up one. Most people I know have never been up one. And all these photoshopped pictures of people ‘hiking’ and ‘climbing,’ it just doesn’t add up.”
It was three years ago when Minotti says he first had the realization that everyone and everything was lying to him. The 2016 election had a huge impact on his worldview, along with a Flat Earther conference he attended that summer in Arizona.
“I heard what the president was saying, and I sat there in Arizona looking around at the vast, flat landscape, and it just made sense to me, you know? Like, this is how the world is. There are no mountains. So I set out to find proof that mountains are real, and so far I haven’t found anything that’s convinced me. It really blew my mind.”
Scientific experts in the state have dismissed the groups claims as “not even worth debating,” and there are, pardon the pun, mountains of evidence available online, anecdotally, or just outside almost any window in the state that confirm the existence of the green mountains. Nevertheless, the FVS continues to attract members.
“First of all, don’t you never believe nothing that no scientist don’t not tell you,” says recent member Crystal Matthews. “If you heard it on the TV news, it’s a lie. That’s the first rule. You gotta open your mind to the truth. There ain’t no mountains. There ain’t no moon. There ain’t no such place as ‘Europe.’ It’s all faked to control us. Unless I see it myself, I don’t believe it. Even then, you still can’t be sure. They’re puttin’ drugs in the water. Bad drugs. That’s why I don’t never drink no water, and I only make my own drugs. They’re trying to kill us all! I don’t wanna wake up one morning and find out I’ve been murdered.”
Minotti says his beliefs have cost him relationships with family and friends, many of whom have tried to convince him that his new beliefs are incorrect.
“I don’t know who got to them exactly, but everybody I once trusted is suddenly showing me pictures of them up on the ‘mountains.’ It’s terrifying really. Somebody up there is scared of me, and the lengths they’re willing to go to, it’s sickening. My own parents showed up one day with some sort of deep fake video of them on ‘Mount Mansfield.’ Not sure who did that video, because I know they don’t have the skills. They had to have had help with that thing, it looked so real. It just goes to show, you really can’t trust anyone, or anything you see. At this point I just have to trust myself. And I guess that’s maybe what their whole goal is. To separate us. Turn us against each other. So I’ll just keep fighting them as long as I can, and someday I hope the whole state will see that those digitally projected mountains were put there to keep us apart. But I’m here to bring us together.”
Image Credits: DailyInvention.
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