Meet the Sandy Hook truthers

From Salon.com:

Most of the theories are really pieces of a larger meta-theory: that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, perhaps by the Obama administration, designed to stir demand for gun control.

In the latest angle, theorists think they have found “absolute proof” of a conspiracy to defraud the American people. “You reported in December that this little girl had been killed,” a reader emailed Salon in response to a story. “She has been found, and photographed with President Obama.”

The girl in question is Emilie Parker, a 6-year-old who was shot multiple times and killed at Sandy Hook. But for conspiracy theorists, the tears her family shed at her funeral, the moving eulogy from Utah’s governor, and the entire shooting spree are fake. Welcome to the world where Sandy Hook didn’t really happen.

There are dozens of websites, blog posts and YouTube videos extolling the Emilie Parker hoax theory. If you Google her name, the very first result is a post mocking her father for crying at a press conference after the shooting. One popular video, which already has 134,000 views, was made by the producers of a popular 9/11 Truther film. “Just as the movie ‘Operation Terror’ shows the 9/11 attacks were a made-for-TV event, so too were the mass shootings … There can be no doubt that Sandy Hook was a staged event,” the narrator intones. He goes on to say that the adults who participated in the media coverage of the shootings “should be prosecuted as accessories after the fact in a mass murder” — i.e., the parents whose children were murdered in the massacre should be thrown in prison.

More here.

Wow.  This is pretty fucked up.  But then I guess I shouldn't be surprised.  There's no telling how many right-wingers are embracing such kooky conspiracy theory, but the entire GOP caucus in the House was recently chasing similar phantoms, that the Obama administration stages murders in order to scare the population into embracing gun confiscation, in their notorious "Fast and Furious" inquiry.  So right now this Sandy Hook thing is in Alex Jones tinfoil hat territory, but we've already seen that this kind of bullshit has the potential to go very mainstream very quickly.  We should keep an eye on this for a while.

But clearly, such nuttery shows just how backed against the wall gun culture feels right now.  They no longer have any arguments that seem reasonable.  They don't know how to justify their position when gun wielding mass murderers are doing their thing every other week these days.  Cognitive dissonance is the necessary result.  Delusion is the only place to which they can retreat.  Of course gun nuts are embracing fantasy; they have to or they'd no longer be gun nuts.

But this is also typical of what's been happening with the right wing overall since President Bush went and inadvertently proved most of their beliefs wrong.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to discuss important issues with conservatives because they insist on their own "facts."  Global warming isn't happening, a plot hatched by scientists worldwide to gain more funding.  Obama is a Muslim or a Kenyan or a socialist or a Nazi.  Evolution isn't real.  We found Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.  Poor people caused the financial crisis.  Women don't become pregnant when they're raped.  And on and on and on.  What do you do when your most cherished beliefs are proven, without a doubt at all, to be totally wrong?  Well, you can either reevaluate your own existence and how you relate to reality.  Or you can double down on the fantasy, shouting down people who tell you the truth.

That's where many conservatives are right now.  I see no sign of them letting up on it, either.  Things could get much worse.

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