Newtown Conspiracy Theories: Obama, Iran, and Other Culprits

[DonViejo]

by Michael Moynihan Dec 27, 2012 4:45 AM EST

The government was behind the school massacre. Wait, it was Obama, in a ruse to take our guns away. No, it was Iran! Israel! Batman! Michael Moynihan on the paranoid wing’s ‘real truth’ about Sandy Hook.

In the mid-1990s, during the infancy of the World Wide Web, a visit to my local university library demonstrated that the Internet would be both a great tool of liberation and a megaphone for the fantastically mad. That small bank of Internet-connected computer terminals was reliably occupied by a few student researchers and an army of honking, snorting, flaky-skinned cranks, furiously posting to Internet bulletin boards. (I frequently traded pleasantries with one twitchy local who wore homemade body armor, claiming that it shielded his organs from computer smog while browsing the Internet.)

Almost 20 years later, behold how Tim Berners-Lee liberated the crackpot from his world of Manichean newsletters, how he freed the basement-dwelling “researcher” to hawk bad ideas to the undereducated and paranoid (think of the 9/11 “truth” movement). Indeed, the Internet allows us curious observers to view the creation of conspiracy theories in real time. For instance, while initial news reports of the shootings in Newtown, Conn., were plagued with dubious and false information—as is frequently the case with major tragedies—such “inconsistencies” precipitated a hunt for the real truth.

While ignoring the generic rantings that circulate via email and Facebook, I spent the past week browsing the websites and YouTube channels of the Internet’s most popular fear peddlers—those who almost, but not quite, trespass upon the mainstream—to witness the paranoid mind create an “alternative” explanation of the Newtown massacre.

It started with this story on BET.com. Def Jam rapper Gunplay, who currently is under house arrest on charges relating to an armed robbery, informed his 100,000 Twitter followers that the “Government killed dem [sic] kids to take our guns away. Another 9/11. Dont [sic] get it twisted.” It’s a surprisingly common belief among conspiracy theorists, I discovered, who claim not that the president seized upon the tragedy to push through onerous gun legislation—too simple—but that he engineered the tragedy.

Cui bono, ad absurdum.

more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/27/newtown-conspiracy-theories-obama-iran-and-other-culprits.html

[Renew Deal]

1. Maybe it was the Bush Earthquake Machine

[bbernardini]

2. It's sad, but when news of this first started breaking...

...one of my first thoughts was how the conspiracy theorists are going to handle it. Specifically, I thought about a guy who claims that all these incidents aren't real, and that all the people involved are actors. Sadly, I was right, and he soon started making similar claims about Sandy Hook.

[oldhippydude]

3. perhaps it was the fallwell assisnation that got them thinking......n/t