It’s the flat earth movement all over again. The flat earth thing started as a joke on 4chan. Like “wouldn’t it all be funny if we took something blatantly false and pretended to believe in it?” Then the idiots caught a whiff of it, mistook it for people being serious, then joined in unironically. At that point, 4chan took a step back and laughed, because what else can you do at that point? The idiocy fission reaction was self-sustaining at that point, so 4chan just let go of the reins and watched to see where it would go.
It dates back way further than 4chan, I want to say 70s maybe. But yeah this happens every couple of decades with flat earthers, hell I think there was a flat earth group back in the 1800s which was basically a running joke amongst naturalists. Then the dumbfucks came out of the woodwork.