Flat Earthers and the Richard Nixon meme

Flat Earthers love to spew lies and misinformation in the form of memes. It is unknown whether this is done with deceitful intent or whether they just do not know that what they are circulating is false. But one such meme circulating the internet is this: 

The implication here is that the photo on the wall, titled Earthrise, was taken supposedly on Apollo 11 in July of 1969. Therefore the moon landing must have been a hoax. Because how could Richard Nixon have a picture taken of the Earth from the moon prior to anyone going to the moon? 

The Flat Earthers also take contention with Richard Nixon being able to communicate with the Apollo 11 astronauts in space, though they give no scientific reasoning for why they take contention with this. The Flat Earthers are counting on their viewers not knowing how this works and hoping that they do not bother to look it up.

Here are the documented, scientific facts of the matter (no conspiracy theories or “Luciferian Big Bang propaganda” as the Flat Earthers accuse us of): 

1.) No one ever said that the Earthrise photograph was taken on the Apollo mission. It has always been documented to have been taken on the Apollo 8 mission that orbited the moon in December of 1968, 8 months before the Apollo 11 mission. So Flat Earthers are using a straw man argument, because no one has ever said that Earthrise was taken on Apollo 11. 

2.) As for the phone call, it was quite simple and was not even considered “high tech” for 1969. The telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and one was installed at the White House in 1877 under the order of Rutherford Hayes. The radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895. President Nixon was able to talk to the Apollo 11 astronauts by calling by telephone to Mission Control in Houston, Texas and they transmitted his audio over the radio to the Apollo 11 astronaut’s craft. The astronauts in turn radioed their audio back to Mission Control which was transmitting it over the telephone back to President Nixon. According to the AT&T Archives, "Simply, the call went from the Oval Office in Washington D.C. to Houston, where it was routed into space via Mission Control, through the capsule communicator, or CapCom, astronaut Bruce McCandless II.” Flat Earthers act like this is just the most wild conspiracy theory they have ever heard, but if you understand how radio transmission and telephones work then this is no conspiracy at all. And in all honesty, the Flat Earthers are the ones who promote wild conspiracies, promoting things much more unbelievable than telephone/radio transmission. 

So once again the Flat Earth conspiracy theory falls flat.