The Sandy Hook Conspiracy and the persuasion tactics that advanced this idea.
- cberkman8
- Feb 12
- 3 min read
Hello, my blog readers. In this blog post, we are going to take a dive into something a little darker than I normally like to go. I will be discussing the rise of the horrible conspiracy theory over the Sandy Hook massacre. This was a horrible tragedy that took place on December 14, 2012, when Adam Lanza went into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and murdered 20 small children along with 6 faculty members. At the time of this shooting, it was the deadliest in American history.
The shooting itself was not disputed by any credible news source or outlet. The controversy surrounds the conspiracy theory that emerged after the shooting, which claimed the shooting was a false flag and faked. Many different conspiracy theorists claimed the massacre was orchestrated by the U.S. government as part of a plot to help create stricter gun control laws. Another even more extreme theory was that this whole thing was faked, and the conspiracy theorist claimed it was a classified training exercise involving crisis actors.
These theories began almost immediately after the shooting, and speculation that this was a false flag operation began to circulate on Twitter and other social media sites. The main figure in this conspiracy theory was Alex Jones, the host and owner of Infowars. Within hours of the shooting, he went on his show and made the claim that the shooting was a hoax, a “false flag” meant to attack the Second Amendment.
Other key figures in spreading this horrible, totally false conspiracy theory were James Tracy, a Florida Atlantic University (Florida, am I right? 🙄) journalism professor. He suggested the shooting didn’t happen as reported. Also, a person named James Fetzer, who helped co-author some of the conspiracy content. An interesting piece of information I found was that a professor at UConn, Professor Amanda Crawford, considered this tragedy as the first major conspiracy theory of the modern social media age.
Many persuasion tactics and propaganda were used to spread and ignite this conspiracy. The Big Lie was on of the tactics we learned about this week as well as a major persuasion tactic used by Alex Jones. He described the shooting as “synthetic, completely fake with actors; in my view, manufactured.” Since the claim was so crazy, many people assumed there must have been something to it. Other tactics used in the conspiracy included denial, diversion, cherry-picking, rhetorical questions (“just asking questions”), emotional manipulation, and profit motive. Alex Jones was able to profit off this tragedy through his selling of products that he hawked on his Infowars show, such as dried food, doomsday prep gear, and different deit supplements. He made up to at least $70 million a year from this. Another major tactic used was cause vs correlation and misrepresentation. Due to mistakes that were made in the breaking news reports and conflicting information on the shooter's identity and what gun he used, people on YouTube were able to cut together these erroneous bits as proof of a cover-up and conspiracy.
Has this issue been resolved? Well, legally, yes, it has! And quite decisively. A jury in Connecticut has ordered Alex Jones to pay $965 million in damages to the families of 8 victims. A jury in Texas ordered Alex Jones to pay $50 million to the parents of Jesse Lewis. And in total, Jones has been ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion in damages. He also finally acknowledged in court that the mass shooting was “100% real.” One last major blow to this creep came in 2018, when YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and Twitter removed Jones from their platforms.
Unfortunately, this conspiracy theory hasn’t been fully resolved culturally. This playbook, which was established by Sandy Hook, has been replicated after other major tragedies, such as Parkland, the Boston Marathon, Las Vegas, and others. This won't be the last time someone uses a tragedy to gain notoriety.
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