Back in the summer of 2025, I wrote about the African Union’s push to replace the Mercator projection with an equal-area alternative as an ideologically charged campaign rooted in grievance politics rather than practical cartography.
The Mercator map that these morons were complaining about enlarges high-latitude landmasses for an extremely valuable trade-off: it preserves angles and allows for accurate direction-finding.
Despite its downside – distortion of size near the poles, the Mercator’s ability to maintain accurate directions and shapes is still its big selling point. It’s a trade-off that has proven successful for many forms of navigation, from historical sea voyages to today’s digital map searches. So even after centuries, the Mercator projection still plays a crucial role in how we explore and understand our planet.
There is no "disinformation" inherent in a Mercator Map projection. Apparently, the reasons for the navigation-based distortions go unlearned in today's geography class to make room for DEI. pic.twitter.com/lnISAgOVbB
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) August 17, 2025
Despite the massive poverty afflicting large swaths of Africa, a deadly Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, active wars at various spots around the globe, and drug cartels that effectively control territory and institutions in some countries, the United Nations has found time and energy to adopt “Equal Earth”.
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