Conspiracy Theories
On December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, twenty young children and seven adults were killed at the Sandy Hook elementary school by a twenty-year-old young man using an automatic weapon (he had killed his mother on his way to the massacre).
I have been aware of the insane number of conspiracy theories that circulate online about everything. I’ve watched some of them in mocking disbelief, and I’ve enjoyed comedians who make fun of them. But I was ignorant of the conspiracy theories that began circulating immediately after the Sandy Hook slaying of the innocents. For all that is being written about Internet hatred and trolls,24 I am still stunned by what the community of Newtown has had to endure because of the conspiracy theorists who seized on this tragedy and did not cease in their manic pursuits for any bits of information that would confirm their insanity.
The father of a slain six-year-old reported that many people didn’t believe his son had died or even that he had lived at all.
Days after the rampage, a man walked around Newtown filming a video in which he declared that the massacre had been staged by “some sort of New World Order global elitists” intent on taking away our guns and our liberty. A week later, James Tracy, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote a blog post expressing doubts about the massacre. By January, a 30-minute YouTube video, titled “The Sandy Hook Shooting—Fully Exposed,” which asked questions like “Wouldn’t frantic kids be a difficult target to hit?” had been viewed more than 10 million times.”25
You are aware (how could you not be) of many long-standing conspiracy theories: The Holocaust never happened; we never landed on the Moon. Fourteen European countries have laws making Holocaust denial a criminal offense.26 But the Internet is a lawless realm. Fear and hatred motivate people to spend hours going over videos and photos to find tiny clues that substantiate their conspiracy theories. These clues that seem so obvious to them are woven together in a coherent story; this storyline is then used in endless confrontations with officials (who are assumed to be part of the conspiracy).
They aren’t looking for the truth—although they call themselves “truthers.” They are looking for confirmation of what they have chosen to fear.
Once the theory is set in motion, it is immutable to change. If evidence is presented from an outside source that might disconfirm it, such information is not denied. It is twisted into further evidence in support of the conspiracy. Perceptual filters take anything presented and warp it into confirming evidence.
This is the power of perception run amok. Polished by fear into an obscuring, microscopic lens, what becomes visible under scrutiny can only look the same. In their hermetically sealed bunkers of the mind, change is not a possibility.
The father of the slain six-year-old first spent years trying to give accurate information, even getting involved in a four-hour online exchange with the conspiracy theorists (some asked for proof that he was the real father; others demanded that his son’s body be exhumed.) These strategies led nowhere and caused him to go on the offensive using legal means to take down websites, stop their funding efforts, getting Tracy, the professor, fired, and removing hundreds of photos of his son by legal means, invoking copyright laws. But at enormous emotional and physical cost to himself—he has moved five times to avoid being found, including after the release of this article about him.
Other members of the Newtown community have also gone on the offensive because, as the father said, “People don’t understand what trolls are,” he said. “If you don’t feed them, they don’t just go away.” Another group has used the tactics of trolls, sending threatening emails to the family members of the main hoaxers and, bizarrely, sending them rubber ducks in the mail, which the hoaxers immediately assume are poisonous.27
What a horrible and obscene story this is. Yet it reveals so much about this time and the descent into hatred and self-protection.
We need to see this clearly. The enemies are not only outside the gates. They are here inside, haters unleashing deadly vehemence against innocent victims, using the very same technology that was meant to open us to the world and bring us together.