The whole phenomenon of believing that these mass-murders are nothing but hoaxes really surfaced around the Sandy Hook Massacre in December, 2012; though there were some very few surrounding the Aurora Theater shooting earlier that year. The Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013 had the same doubters. Even though there were no casualties, the 2016 Pizzagate shooting also was said to be a hoax.
All of these theories are essentially the same: they assert that these events never happened, but were staged by the Media in collusion with local police, government, and various vested interests. It's well-known to the FBI and others in law enforcement, however, that criminal conspiracies become less secure the more people who are involved in it. And this is one of the glaring problems with these theories.
How does it happen that these things could be staged and none of the locals know anything about it? They don't notice groups of actors, truckloads of stage-props, and ominous-looking guys in trench-coats suddenly hanging around the neighborhood?
Because what we're essentially talking about here is roughly the time, planning, and personnel involved to shoot a movie. This just doesn't happen in places like Sandy Hook and Parkland without being noticed. And doing it covertly during the Boston Marathon is even more problematic.
Speaking of movies, has anyone seriously considered the cost of staging a hoax like this? I thought of the 1976 movie Raid on Entebbe, which re-created an Israeli rescue mission of a hijacked airliner in Uganda, In 2018 dollars, production costs for that film would be around $16 million. That's roughly what it would cost to film a staged incident like the Parkland Shooting. Not counting of course the massive blackmail and extortion costs which would have to be paid to ensure all the participants' silence.
Last but not least, if any Corporate Media outlet tried faking something like this, Trump, Pence, and Sessions would be the first to uncover the hoax and the first to expose it. This Administration hasn't been the least bit reticent about calling out fake news whenever its happened; and finding out Parkland and Sandy Hook were staged would be the Golden Opportunity for the Administration to discredit the Corporate Media permanently.
The people who believe these types of theories usually fall into the logical fallacy of believing that causes and consequences of a certain action are necessarily correlated. The fact that anti-gun interests cynically exploit these tragedies lead some to believe that these same interests must have caused the tragedy in the first place to bring about the desired end.
At a blog called The Thinking Housewife, we read the following as an example. The authoress writes: "The convergence of Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine's Day was too much for the gun-grabbing massacre mimics to pass up." (Why not that a psycho could pick the same date to make a dramatic statement?) "Yesterday's supposed shooting of 17 students has all the hallmarks of another Sandy Hook Hoax." (Why? The dynamics of the two incidents have nothing in common other than that they both targeted schools.) "Could it be real? The burden of proof is upon those who say that it was." (Actually, no: the burden of proof is upon those who deny it.)
She goes on to say that the whole incident seemed scripted, while ironically saying that "Mere photos of parents and children crying do not prove that any murders occurred." To this, we would add that modern journalists reading off scripts and faking grief doesn't disprove that they occurred. All that it does prove is that our Media is made up of idiots and incompetents who are competing to be the biggest drama-queens to get ratings. It's what's cynically called by media insiders milking a tragedy.
The Corporate Media itself though is also guilty of spreading hoaxes about the shooting. The Moonie-affiliated Newsweek and the Daily Beast swallowed a troll's story that Nicholas Cruz was a White Supremacist---the fact that he's Hispanic and not White never occurred to these brilliant media minds. Currently they're spreading the equally ridiculous hoax that Russian hackers are trolling stories about the shooting, rather than admit the embarrassing truth that the worst comments are coming mostly from American Liberals.
All of this nonsense prevents us, as a society, from focusing on the central problems that actually lead to these tragedies. Which will end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy for those faking the news.
Well said.
ReplyDeleteI'm a conspiritress, so I love a good mystery, but just the same it seems as if we as a culture have gotten too smart for our own good. We're cynical, jaded, and we tend to see betrayal everywhere. Some of that can be blamed on the media, on fake politicians, on having been lied to so often. But the rest of it is something psychological. We'd almost prefer to believe an evil cabal has deliberately taken over the world, rather than to accept that people can be randomly and pointlessly evil and that our leaders can be downright stupid and negligent sometimes.
And so people will sometimes start to believe "Russians stole our election" and "mass shootings are a false flag." I find both of those notions far more comforting than the truth, which is probably more like our own NSA turned our computers into swiss cheese and the FBI has been so busy chasing Russian shadows, they completely ignored all the people trying to report actual threats.
It's the number of active shooters who were pre-emptively reported to the FBI that kind of disturbs me. If they have time to orchestrate a good false flag, you'd think maybe they could be bothered to orchestrate a bit of intervention and prevention, too.