As with 9/11 conspiracy thinking, Alex Jones acted as a major popularizer of crisis actor meme. Jones said back in 2012 and 2013 that Sandy Hook was a “false flag” and that “no one died”. He claimed that the children killed were acting for the cameras, and that the parents had faked their own childrens’ deaths.
Under pressure, Jones has sometimes tried to back away from his role in propagating the theory. But in other incidents since – from Orlando to Las Vegas, Jones’s first resort in his broadcasts and on his website has been to assume that the official accounts are elaborate lies, and that many on the scene are in on the deception.
Jones and others often take advantage of the inevitable confusion that attends complex events like mass shootings to freely speculate on the events, and lodge their explanation in the minds of their audience.
These theories would be laughable, and unworthy of our attention, were it not for their real world impacts, and the fact that so many people accept them. When Jones was interviewed by Megan Kelly last year, parents of Sandy Hook victims took to the airwaves and the Internet to protest. They said that on top of their grief, they had been harassed for years since the massacre by people who, thanks in part to Jones, believed that they and their dead children were lying.
The teens who are bravely speaking out after the attack will not only have to contend with conservative media bottom-feeders questioning their competence to speak about the massacre. They will also have to deal with people who think that they are knowingly participating in an elaborate hoax.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...flag-the-rise-of-conspiracy-theory-code-words