Checkmate, flat earthers!
It's a spectacular demonstration of certain astronomical facts, you'd think. Samuel Rowbotham, the founder of modern flat-earthery, simply denied that the moon was involved at all, and posited an otherwise-unseen object that passed in front of the sun. Conveniently for his idea, solar eclipses always happen during the new moon. Rowbotham maintained, on the grounds of certain passages in Genesis, that the moon generates its own light.
Modern flat earthers tend to be just as dim when it comes to astronomy, and many of them think the fact that the path of totality goes from West to East is a killer argument. They fail to take into account the sheer distance between Earth and the moon, which means the shadow of the moon overtakes the eastwards motion of Earth's surface even though the moon's angular velocity around its orbit is much slower than the angular rotation of Earth.
The relatively small size of totality is also a "gotcha" moment for some flat earthers. Apparently it's gospel to them that a shadow cannot possibly be smaller than the object that casts it.
I shudder for the geometrical illiteracy of the flat earthers, whose numbers though small seem to be growing.
