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fellow

2025-08-08 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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fellow
Votey panel for fellow
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Explanation

This comic satirizes the state of conspiratorial thinking in modern politics. Two men are sitting together, and one lays out his beliefs: the Earth is flat, the Moon landing was faked from the Moon (which he also thinks is flat), and he does not think the government should "phoscope Congress and rule for a thousand years." The other man reveals he believes in "God-Emperor Squatch" but considers that "a private matter."

The caption at the bottom reads: "The more conspiratorial politics has gotten, the lower my standards for fellow travelers." This is the core of the joke -- the term "fellow travelers" historically refers to political allies who share your general direction even if not your exact ideology. Here, both men hold wildly different and mutually incompatible conspiracy theories, but they are still willing to have a beer together because the bar for acceptable political companionship has dropped so low.

The humor mechanism is an exaggeration of a real social phenomenon: as fringe beliefs have become more mainstream, people with completely contradictory conspiratorial worldviews find common cause simply because they are both outside the mainstream. The comic also plays on the absurdity of considering one set of outlandish beliefs "public" and another equally outlandish set "private," as though believing in a God-Emperor Sasquatch is a matter of personal discretion.

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