On December 14, 2012, a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and shot 26 people. Twenty of the victims were children. Within minutes of the shooting, conspiracy theories on the attack spread quickly on fringe forums and 4chan, eventually hitting popular conspiracy theorist YouTube pages and Alex Jones’ InfoWars. InfoWars famously became the great amplifier of the narrative that the Sandy Hook shooting was “indeed” a false flag attack, which persisted for well over a decade and stuck around as a repeated “fact” on every mainstream social media platform to this day.
Twenty-six people, including twenty children, were confirmed dead, and the parents, townspeople of Newtown (one of which I know), and onlookers across the world all grieved. Such a heinous attack did happen, but it was loudly being touted as staged for hackneyed reason or another. Many (though I am careful now not to say the majority) believe(d) calling such a horrible incident fake was done so in bad faith, to put it mildly, and repeated by the fringe to delegitimize real tragedies.
In the years since, we’ve witnessed countless mass shootings, notable violent incidents, and quite a few wars. All of them are confirmed to have happened because authorities have suspects, motives, weapons, and a litany of dead bodies. Even with mountains of evidence and video footage, the cries of “staged” grow louder each time. The difference now is how the same or similar crowds of people who believe a man could shoot up a school, kill children, and any attempt to disprove that is done in bad faith are themselves making arguments and exceptions for incidents they themselves believe are staged. These arguments are also no longer originating on fringe forums, but in the mainstream social web.
How Dare You
Several friends attended this weekend’s White House Correspondents Dinner as they are either correspondents at the White House or work in/around the same circles as those who frequent 1600 Pennsylvania’s press conferences. Though the current administration has been hostile, threatening, and callous towards the media (among other things), it is nonetheless important for such events to be covered — even and especially when the sitting president attends it (allegedly with aims to lash out at the press yet again.) This is the job of the press and, given some of the names in attendance, one they are particularly good at.
Days before the event started, the social web had already rendered its verdict. On Reddit and Bluesky — platforms I follow that loudly thumb their nose at the as chaos of Twitter/X — millions made their contempt heard and visible. How dare these journalists attend. How dare they normalize. How dare they sit in the same room, eat the same food, breathe the same air as this administration. The critique of the White House Correspondents Dinner as an institution has some legitimate history behind it, yet what was being expressed was a fundamental misunderstanding of how the media works and subsequent lashing out against those who were attending to do their job.
When gunshots rang out — fired by an actual person using an actual weapon in an actual room full of actual human beings — the same accounts, the same communities, the same people who had spent the prior hours performing outrage about journalistic complicity pivoted quickly to “staged.” No pause. No “wait, let’s see what happened” (as is the case with most shootings and breaking news). Just the instantaneous deployment of a conclusion that had been waiting for an occasion.
We’ve Been Here Before
Within minutes, the word “staged” was everywhere. Crisis actors. Conveniently timed. The same language and moves that were pioneered on fringe forums in the hours after Sandy Hook were being posted by people with real names and verified accounts and thousands of followers, some of whom have directly reported on, discussed, or decried the false flag conspiracy theories started fourteen years prior.
This is what happens after decade-plus of unchecked conspiracy infrastructure becomes the norm. As such beliefs are no longer fringe and extreme, but increasingly mainstream, millions more have learned its language and adopted it as they see fit. The people crying staged this weekend were nowhere near the same demographic as the people who harassed Sandy Hook parents into moving seven times, yet they unfortunately now parrot the same behaviors without making the connection.
That’s not to say false flag operations are not real. Many of Russia’s attacks in the current Ukraine-Russian war were committed after news of demonstrably false attacks (read: disinformation) made the rounds. Our own government does like and has been documented over history in such operations (Gulf of Tonkin, Operation Northwoods, etc.), with the same journalistic outfits wrongly reporting otherwise. Being skeptical of official narratives and of breaking news is a time-honored tradition, especially as the news during the following 24-48 hours often emerges to counter what was said immediately after such an incident.
To make blanket, first-run assumptions that what you just heard about was “staged” without any shred of evidence point towards it buries what actually happened. To bend the words of officials in favor of this narrative (regardless of their history with the truth) is doubling down on a delusion, to put it bluntly and mildly. Whereas (most of) those in journalism and handling of the truth wait for evidence before reaching a conclusion, what happened this week showed that many are satisfied if the conclusion comes first, and the reasoning for said conclusion can simply be assembled afterwards.
This assembly of facts after conclusion troubles me most, especially from circles like Reddit and Bluesky. Though I am not shy about my personal political leanings (of which hover somewhere between Progressive and Left), I’m appalled by the fact that people and entire groups of which I share ideological circles have bought into the exact same playbook and rhetoric as Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists, facts be damned. The same talking heads I’ve followed and admired — comedians, interesting internet personalities, and yes, even some independent journalists — are either further amplifying or outright parroting these fringe theories about a staged attack just a few days ago.
About (Lack of) Empathy
Even if one genuinely believes — based on whatever evidence they find compelling in the first twenty minutes or several hours of an incident— that what happened was staged, the correct human response to a shooting in a room full of people is not mockery, nor is it satisfaction. It is not “who cares” because someone or many someones you do not like or outright despise were in the room. The “correct” and response is to decry any violence or attempted violence against anyone.
To be selective with empathy on certain attacks but apathetic towards others is to permit some violence. As violence only begets violence and what one refuses to grieve (or, worse, scoffs at) one has quietly agreed to allow to exist, the question becomes not whether one opposes violence but whose violence one decides to overlook. This is a slippery slope, as it then explicitly permits other groups to be selective with their empathy and violence, which only creates more violence and less empathy all around. We should not rejoice in violence or attempted violence against someone we dislike unless we are perfectly comfortable with others doing it against us.
Toeing the Same Line
Since Sandy Hook, the language of the fringe conspiracy theorist — false flags, crisis actors, cui bono, do your research — found its way into the mainstream and into the mouths of those who once decried the very thought that someone could think a mass shooting is a staged opportunity for the government to take a specific action afterwards. Whereas once this language belonged to specific networks and specific political groups, it is now the language of everyone and used everywhere, with real reaches in reasoning to justify such language and thought. The government and the media lies, so I know better. This is being done to justify such and such results, so of course it’s fake.
Every social platform from X to Bluesky, Instagram to Reddit, is now chock full of this kind of content and these comments, which remain unchecked and unmoderated for too many reasons to dive into here. Worse yet, they’re foregrounded on Discover, Popular, and For You pages, meaning millions of users trying to get a pulse on the platform at the moment will only be subjected to “Staged!” They will continue to see this with each and every like incident until many of them, after seeing such content over and over again and with increasingly worsening media literacy, will parrot the same lines.
What the social web has done — but especially what Reddit and Bluesky and every other platform that imagines itself the antidote to misinformation has done — is create an environment where performance (as much of this is performance as it is sharing of opinions) as well as the performance of critical thinking is socially rewarded regardless of whether any actual critical thinking occurred. The post that says “staged” gets the upvotes. The post that says “let’s wait” gets ratio’d. The post that says “these are real people” gets called naive at best and a shill at worst. The incentives are perfectly inverted and everyone using the platform is subject to them whether they know it or not.
What We Lost
People have always found it easier to grieve for those who look like them, vote like them, and live like them. This is not new and pretending it is new is its own kind of bad faith. Yet what is new is the speed of grief and the mainstreaming of once-fringe arguments. What’s increasingly more acceptable and popular is taking the same mechanisms used to twist reality on, say, an incident where children were murdered and using it to discredit or disprove an attempted shooting of elected officials. Even worse is how such rhetoric and conspiracies are actively rewarded on social platforms that exist largely to counter other platforms that foregrounded such talk in the first place.
Sandy Hook parents spent years in court to legally establish that their children existed and died. They won, Alex Jones was bankrupted, and it changed almost nothing about the underlying culture that made it possible. The same arguments are still on the same platforms and now moved to platforms once seen as safe refuges from such rhetoric.
The people in the Hilton were real, and I knew some of them. Their fear and trauma afterwards are indeed real. The shots were real. Yet consensus is that not only did they have no right to be there (how dare they!), but what they saw and heard was not a lone wolf attempt at assassination and instead a government plot because of a ballroom, or ratings, or the midterms. All of this was decided before the reporters in the room could actually report the news, because in an environment that rewards conclusion over inquiry and feelings over facts, no amount of reporting could sway millions who already made up their minds.