Gun massacre conspiracy theories follow every massacre—fed in part by the NRA
Don’t Blame the Sandy Hook Truthers
Gun massacre conspiracy theories follow every massacre—fed in part by the NRA.
By David Weigel|Posted Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013, at 7:33 PM ET
On Wednesday afternoon, shortly before Manti Te’o’s girlfriend became the only story in sports, new Washington Nationals outfielder Denard Span brought his fans in on a conspiracy theory.
“I was watching some controversial stuff on YouTube about the sandy hooks thing today!” he tweeted. “It really makes u think and wonder.”
Anybody paying attention to the dark corners of the Internet—i.e., most of the Internet—knew what Span was watching. In one week, a 30-minute YouTube video titled “The Sandy Hook Shooting—Fully Exposed” has been viewed 10,000,000 times. It uses text, narration, and mournful music to annotate found footage and websites, “proving” that the murder of 26 people in Newtown, Conn., may have been propagated then covered up by government operatives with an agenda.
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I don’t know how to approach conspiracy theories anymore. Four-odd years ago, in my first piece for Slate, I profiled the “birther” activists who were petitioning to overturn Barack Obama’s victory, because they thought he was born in Kenya. I naively expected the birthers to lose their cases and move on. Many lawsuits later, I watched the chairman of the Arizona Republican Party transform the state’s Electoral College vote into a gripefest about Barack Obama’s troubling birth certificate.