They merely got confused... thousands of years from now, they assume unix epoch time is based on the moon landing. And it's only a few months off anyway. Not much is left of Earth as far as they know, to be able to properly understand that those were two different events.

The Emergents are what they are, because they are, at the most fundamental level, busybodies who want to control others. Sometime in their own history, they found an excuse (the Emergency) to do that, and they never stopped doing it even after the crisis was over. In this way they map to most other authoritarian regimes in reality, but especially to the leftist authoritarian regimes. They hate "peddlers" after all, who sell things to others at fair prices and of their own free will. Not unlike the mutterings you see all over social media concerning capitalism.