WWMD?- My co-worker thinks the Vegas shooting was a hoax

[weibo]

I have 2 different comments, first of you want a funeral program from some one who died there I can send one. Second if you are in the civil service and he is blaming the government remind him that he is talking about his employer and that could lead to issues regarding his employment status. Take either direction depending on what works for you.

[babybear]

Lenny Pozner used to believe in conspiracy theories—until his son’s murder became one, said journalist Reeves Wiedeman. Now he’s taking on the people who say the Sandy Hook massacre never happened.

On December 14, 2012, Lenny Pozner dropped off his three children, Sophia, Arielle, and Noah, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Noah had recently turned 6, and on the drive over they listened to his favorite song, “Gangnam Style,” for what turned out to be the last time. Half an hour later, while Sophia and Arielle hid nearby, Adam Lanza walked into Noah’s first-grade class with an AR-15 rifle. Noah was the youngest of the 20 children and seven adults killed in one of the deadliest shootings in American history. When the medical examiner found Noah lying face up in a Batman sweatshirt, his jaw had been blown off.

It didn’t take long for Pozner to find out that many people didn’t believe his son had died or even that he had lived at all. Days after the rampage, a man walked around Newtown filming a video in which he declared that the massacre had been staged by “New World Order global elitists” intent on taking away our guns. A week later, James Tracy, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, wrote a blog expressing doubts about the massacre. By January, a 30-minute YouTube video titled “The Sandy Hook Shooting—Fully Exposed,” which asked questions like “Wouldn’t frantic kids be a difficult target to hit?” had been viewed more than 10 million times.

As the families grieved, conspiracy theorists began to press their case in ways that Newtown couldn’t avoid. State officials received anonymous phone calls at their homes, late at night, demanding answers: Why were there no trauma helicopters? What happened to the initial reports of a second shooter? A Virginia man stole playground signs memorializing two of the victims, then called their parents to say that the burglary shouldn’t affect them, since their children had never existed. At one point, Pozner was checking into a hotel out of town when the clerk looked up from his driver’s license and said, “Oh, Sandy Hook—the government did that.”

Lenny and Veronique Pozner moved to Newtown in 2005, partly to send their kids to better schools, but after Noah’s death they saw no choice but to leave. “What happened just weighed on the town like a Chernobyl-like cloud,” Veronique told me from her home in a state far from Newtown that the Pozners prefer not to identify, given the threats that conspiracy theorists have leveled against some Sandy Hook families. The Pozners’ marriage had been falling apart before the shooting, and though Noah’s death briefly brought them back together, the couple eventually divorced.
Lenny lives by himself a few miles from Veronique. Since relocating, he has moved apartments four times and gets his mail delivered to a P.O. box on the other side of the state.

There is no universal Sandy Hook hoax narrative, but the theories generally center on the idea that a powerful force (the Obama administration, gun-control groups, the Illuminati) staged the shooting, with the assistance of paid “crisis actors,” including the Pozners, other Sandy Hook families, and countless government officials and media outlets. The children are said to have never existed or to be living in an elaborate witness-protection program.
Lenny may have been the first Newtown parent to discover that conspiracy theorists didn’t believe his son had been killed, because he used to be a serious conspiracy theorist himself. “I probably listened to an Alex Jones podcast after I dropped the kids off at school that morning,” Pozner said, referencing the fearmongering proprietor of InfoWars. Pozner had entertained everything from specific cover-ups (the moon landing was faked) to geopolitical intrigue (the “real” reasons why the price of gold sometimes shifts so dramatically), and saw value in skepticism. For him, the appeal of conspiracy theories was the same as that of a good science-fiction movie. “I have an imaginative mind,” he said.

Lenny had worked for two decades as an IT consultant, but after Noah was killed, he found the crisis management that the job required to be overwhelming. In the year after Noah’s death, Lenny’s mother died, and he and Veronique separated. “People tell me it’s supposed to get easier,” Lenny said on the shooting’s first anniversary. “We’re waiting for that to happen.”
But in the spring of 2014, as he watched the hoaxer movement bloom, Pozner decided to try fighting back. He released Noah’s death certificate, to convince those who believed he had not been killed, and his report card—“Noah is a bright, inquisitive boy”—for those who believed he had never lived at all. One Friday night, a year and a half after the shooting, he joined a Facebook group called Sandy Hook Hoax, one of the more prominent hoaxer meeting grounds. Pozner told the group he was there to answer questions, and he expressed his empathy with their mind-set. “I used to argue with people about 9/11 being an inside job,” he wrote. Some members of the group asked earnest questions about inconsistencies in the official account. Others simply lobbed bombs. Pozner chatted for more than four hours, but his patience wore thin as the questions grew more absurd.
Pozner was kicked out of the group, but several people contacted him with more questions. “All they know is what they’re seeing online,” Pozner said, “the buzz of all of this disinformation.” Pozner had found his mission, and the next day he started a group called Conspiracy Theorists Anonymous, dedicated to debunking hoaxer theories.

He also took his fight public, writing an op-ed in The Hartford Courant in which he called out hoaxers by name, including Wolfgang Halbig, a 70-year-old retired school administrator in Florida. Halbig had become the hoaxers’ lead investigator, filing Freedom of Information Act requests for documents relating to the shooting and posting his findings on a website called Sandy Hook Justice Report. In May 2014, Halbig spoke at a public meeting of the Newtown Board of Education. “These are your children,” Halbig told the board, which sat in silence. “We want truth.”
After the meeting, Pozner emailed Halbig saying that he’d like to talk to him. Halbig didn’t respond, but Pozner says another hoaxer sent a reply: “Wolfgang does not wish to speak with you unless you exhume Noah’s body and prove to the world you lost your son.”
Halbig lives 45 minutes northwest of Orlando in a gated golf-course community. Halbig says that, initially, Sandy Hook horrified him. He had worked in school security for a number of years, and it was only after he was asked to give a presentation to the Florida School Boards Association about preventing such an attack that he began seriously investigating the shooting.
Two months after Sandy Hook, Halbig sent an email to an employee of the Newtown school district suggesting that the full story of the massacre had not been told and offering his services as a school-safety consultant to investigate. The board, flooded with such emails, never responded, which Halbig took as an affront. He began making FOIA requests and peppering people in Newtown with questions. In one email, he asked Sally Cox, the school’s nurse, who hid in a closet when Lanza opened fire, “Why close your eyes when you have seen blood before?”
Not long after he emailed Cox, Halbig says, two Florida police officers visited his home to relay a message from police in Connecticut that he risked being charged with harassment if he continued contacting people in Newtown. The incident made him a celebrity in the hoaxer world: Here was a real example, they believed, of the authorities trying to silence their investigation.

Halbig was far from the only active hoaxer. In 2015, James Tracy, the Florida Atlantic University communications professor, sent a letter to the Pozners demanding proof that they were Noah’s parents, and James Fetzer, an emeritus professor at the University of Minnesota, published a book called Nobody Died at Sandy Hook. In November, at a memorial run honoring Vicki Soto, a teacher killed at Sandy Hook, a Brooklyn man named Matthew Mills walked up to Soto’s sister, wearing an official T-shirt from the run, and demanded that she tell him whether a family photo had been photoshopped to include Vicki, whom he believed didn’t exist.

But Halbig has been the most persistent, and over the past two years, he has gone to Connecticut more than 20 times to examine documents, speak at public meetings, and attend hearings. The investigation has been financially costly to both sides. Halbig says he has raised more than $100,000 from supporters through fundraising sites, while state and local governments have had to devote significant resources to dealing with his visits and ceaseless document requests.
“This is my adventure,” Halbig told me in July at a diner in Newtown. Halbig was in town to review insurance claims he had requested, hoping they would show there had been no actual damage done by the shooting. By this point, he had narrowed his 16 main questions for authorities to five. “The questions that I’m asking, they’re not disrespectful to the families,” Halbig said. “This is my big one—who ordered the port-a-potties?” The vast conspiracy could be cracked, Halbig believed, if he could prove that toilets brought to the scene after the shooting had not been delivered by a local port-a-potty company hoping to be useful during a tragedy but had instead been ordered in preparation for a staged event.

[jono]

That's a hell of a read b-bear. Sad.

Most of these aren't so simple, but with 9/11 the obvious question starts with: if you were planning the inside job, you'd be responsible for the planes. Why not just load the explosives into their cargo holds and thus ensure that the buildings buckled where it looked like they should? Why all the wiring and co-conspirators?

Because conspiracy fans love a big complicated story. Occam's Razor just alerts them to suspend disbelief in favor of bigger imagination. For some of them the best antidote is the detailed story of the hoaxers, like Halbig up there. Or the various Russian actors in some other cases.

[Sandbox]

one of my cousins husbands thinks Sandy Hook was a setup for an anti gun push as well.... we don't get along.... he's also a meth user... so there is that. I think conspiracy theories are interesting and they make you think in a different way but that vast majority can be quashed very quickly if you think about them logically. As most people know getting three people to keep a secret is an incredibly hard thing to do. The amount of "insiders" that would be needed to pull off a 9/11 type attack and to have no one speak of it i'm going to say would be impossible.

As for your worker....just keep an eye on him and if he isn't doing other insane things i'd just let it be.

[hutash]

In all fairness, what someone does professionally, and ultimately to earn a living, doesn't necessarily have anything to do with that person's beliefs or ideology. We all need to earn a living, and if you happen to be damn good at something that doesn't necessarily jive with your personal vies, but you can sleep at night, then fantastic, get after it! Go out there and do your thing to make money, while you do your other thing at the ballot box.

That's fine if you are a welder, baker or lawyer, but to get a Ph.D in genetics you have to have a pretty strong foundation in biology, and genetics only makes sense in the light if evolution. To get to that level and still be a fundi is pretty impressive.

[XXX-er]

Not only this ^^^, there is a large amount of beam-work and bracing that is removed as well.

and they cable beams and pillars to one another to make it fall just so, they rip out shit with bobcats, people placing the charges get feeling sick from exposure to the explosives ... its a fucking construction zone

of course the big question IS how did the WT towers fall in such a seemingly controled manner ... fuck knows

but some one a janitor/electrition/construction worker/ security would have seen the prep of a controled demo

but so far we don't have anybody saying anything about that ... just theories about what could have happened

[jono]

and they cable beams and pillars to one another to make it fall just so, they rip out shit with bobcats, people placing the charges get feeling sick from exposure to the explosives ... its a fucking construction zone

of course the big question IS how did the WT towers fall in such a seemingly controled manner ... fuck knows

They fell exactly as they were designed to fall. All that other stuff is just to make sure.

[AK47bp]

People still think the earth is flat, that the holocaust was a hoax, that Sandyhook never happen and that Obama, a Muslim born in Kenya, had Islamist operatives in his Administration. Whackadoodles abound.

Yea.....totally.

3 of the 4 things you listed are totally crazy.

[Todd Zander]

Related, when i was finishing my undergrad, in connecticut, immediately after sandy hook, a gun fag classmate brought up that it was a conspiracy to the professor.

Said professor was retired State Police Man.

Shit. You. Not.

[GeezerSteve]

People still think the earth is flat, that the holocaust was a hoax, that Sandyhook never happen and that Obama, a Muslim born in Kenya, had Islamist operatives in his Administration. Whackadoodles abound.

This. Add: 77% of American adults believe in angels. 40% believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. 38% are creationists, down from 42% ten years ago, so maybe there's a sliver of hope.

[ex-powderbroker]

People do actually go crazy sometimes. In college I was walking home from rugby practice with this friend of mine who was on the team, everything was perfectly normal. Then he shakes his head, kind of amused but bothered it seemed, and he says, "Well, there they are again, dammit." I was like "who?' because there was literally no one around but the two of us. He goes, "That film crew over there. They've been following me and filming for days now. I thought I had lost them but they're back, dammit."

He was dead serious. Not ranting, just kinda amused and annoyed. There was no one there but he saw a whole film crew with a director, a couple cameramen, lights, everything. A few seconds later we came to a split in the path and he went his way home and I went mine. I honestly thought it was some joke I didn't get, and that he was fucking with me, but he next day he was locked down in the psych ward. He stayed there for a while. I visited him once there and he was way the fuck out there by then. He withdrew from school and that's the last I ever heard of him.

Have you looked on Facebook?

[Neurodoc]

Working with paranoid schizophrenics, during my psych rotation in medical school, one thing that really struck me was how compartmentalized their mental illness could be. Some of them could seem perfectly reasonable and sane on most topics - until you asked them about their delusions. Progressively their thought processes would unravel, from logical conversation to loose associations to word salad. It was as if there was a crack in their minds, and if you pushed on it, the whole thing would shatter.

They were also absolutely convinced of their delusions, and there was no way to use logic to convince someone that no, you are not able to create new planets with your mind. No, you are not working undercover in this mental hospital. What the psychiatrists did was redirect these patients and try to persuade them to take their antipsychotic medications. Most didn’t want to, partly because of the side effects, but I think also because the delusions had some protective effect on their psyche. It’s better to be a social worker, working undercover at a mental institution, than to be a woman whose promising career was derailed by schizophrenia. Better to be a godlike creature, capable of creating new worlds than to be someone whose life has been defined and constrained by mental illness.

(Not all delusions are “protective,” of course. Many are persecutory or have to do with guilt and punishment.)

In the case described by the OP, one possibility is that his subordinate’s delusions represent the beginnings of more serious mental illness. The other possibility is that it’s a response to trauma. Mass murder on such a terrible scale leaves psychic wounds in any normal human being. It’s become part of our day-to-day lives now, but I don’t think that takes away from the trauma.

People respond to trauma in different ways. It sounds like the OP’s subordinate has simply decided to deny the traumatic event’s existence, which is a poor coping skill, because it sets him up for cognitive dissonance, which also causes distress. He keeps talking about his conspiracy theory because he’s seeking validation. He’s desperate for validation because of cognitive dissonance: some part of his brain knows that his beliefs and reality are in conflict, but he needs his delusion to be true, otherwise he can’t cope with the trauma.

For my part, I first learned of the massacre shortly after wolfing down three pieces of triple-cheese pizza at lunch (doctors eat shitty food, it’s tradition ok?), while glancing at the headlines on my phone. I was stunned by the magnitude of it, but subjectively I didn’t feel agitated or anxious about it. An hour later I became very queasy and nauseated, so I cancelled my afternoon clinic, went home, and vomited pizza all afternoon. I attributed it to food poisoning. Only the next day did it occur to me that perhaps the pizza wasn’t entirely to blame.

Either way, I think conspiracy theory guy may need help. If there are counseling services available in that civil service job, that might be something OP or HR could suggest. In the meantime, banning him from talking about it is a good plan. Also OP might recommend to his co-workers not to engage, but rather gently redirect if conspiracy guy starts in on his delusions again.

[Alaskan Rover]

I've tried everything- showed him victim's families at memorials. Reputed everything's said with what I think was very sound logic. I think that's what rattles me- how can a person be seemingly sane and intelligent in every other way and then be this devoid of logic.

The only thing I can think of is that his whole life has order. His homelife is all routines. His work is complete order- firewall configs, switches, VM's- everything is rule based. Nothing breaks that you can't diagnose and fix. But not this. And this isn't some elementary school. This isn't a gay night club. This is a concert- something he can imagine being attending. So I think he's trying to make it make sense. Trying to find the firewall config.

I will give him the week to pipe down. Then I think I'll have to get serious.

There is no arguing with these guys once their conspiracy theories start pinging in their brains. Same kind of guys believe the whole 9/11 terror attack was a hoax. That 3000 people didn't die in it. That it was all an orchestration. Guys like my best friend's brother in-law didn't cease to exist in the attack.

You can't talk logic with a conspiracy-theorist. They have a chemical brain imbalance. Same with clumate-change deniers. Reality is modulated and buffered by our own minds. Guys like your employee have lost their ability to clarify reality. What is in their minds IS their reality....nothing you can tell them will change that.

[Bobby Stainless]

This. Add: 77% of American adults believe in angels 38% are creationists,

How does that math work?

Only half of those that believe in Angels, believe in Divine Creation?

[DBdude]

I've tried everything- showed him victim's families at memorials. Reputed everything's said with what I think was very sound logic. I think that's what rattles me- how can a person be seemingly sane and intelligent in every other way and then be this devoid of logic.

The only thing I can think of is that his whole life has order. His homelife is all routines. His work is complete order- firewall configs, switches, VM's- everything is rule based. Nothing breaks that you can't diagnose and fix. But not this. And this isn't some elementary school. This isn't a gay night club. This is a concert- something he can imagine being attending. So I think he's trying to make it make sense. Trying to find the firewall config.

I will give him the week to pipe down. Then I think I'll have to get serious.

have a low key conversation with him about not discussing it at work, even if you have already

[zartagen]

How does that math work?

Only half of those that believe in Angels, believe in Divine Creation?

Because those things aren't mutually exclusive.... Believing in angels isn't nearly as stupid as creationism. It's still an indicator of ignorance, but much less harmful to the collective.

Beginning to think you don't fully understand much of the "statistics" you post.

[Bobby Stainless]

Because those things aren't mutually exclusive.... Believing in angels isn't nearly as stupid as creationism. It's still an indicator of ignorance, but much less harmful to the collective.

Beginning to think you don't fully understand much of the "statistics" you post.

I asked a question, and I still don't buy that figure.

I'm starting to think, you are a bit of a douchebag.

You don't have to respond to me you know.

According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, 70.6% of the adult population identified themselves as Christians, with 46.5% professing attendance at a variety of churches that could be considered Protestant, and 20.8% professing Roman Catholic beliefs.

How is 70.6% of the US Christian, but only 38% believe that God created everything?

Christianity and believing in God, are mutually exclusive.

[zartagen]

If you truly can't wrap your head and the fact that there are varying levels of stupidity in religion, I can't help answer your question.

[Conundrum]

Growing up and living in a fairly religious state and seeing people I know well talk about religion, I would say of the 70.6% identifying with Christianity, many of them are non-believers or are not sure what they believe. It's just easier to say they're Christian than either take the time mentally to figure out what they believe, they don't want to identify with believing in nothing, or they just don't want to have the conversation with someone in the majority about why they think the majority is wrong. I have no statistics to prove this, just a gut feeling.

[GeezerSteve]

Right, there are cultural Christians who buy into churchgoing as a matter of community but don't believe all the hocus pocus Christian myth. Some believe all the dogma they are fed. Some of them are rational non-believers who identify as Christian purely as a matter of culture and/or community. Most are somewhere in between, believing bits and pieces of the Christian myth and eschewing the balance. And all of this is confounded by the wide variety of overlapping myth systems among various Christian sects.

Beerdrinker, the inanity of your failure to grasp the concept that believers pick and choose those myths in which they believe is exceeded only by your woeful comma placements.

[billyk]

How does that math work?

Only half of those that believe in Angels, believe in Divine Creation?

Religious beliefs are, by definition, illogical. Math does not need to work when you believe that the world was built in 7 Days tens of thousands of years ago, and dinasaur bones were planted by God as a test of faith.

[Bobby Stainless]

Right, there are cultural Christians who buy into churchgoing as a matter of community but don't believe all the hocus pocus Christian myth. Some believe all the dogma they are fed. Some of them are non-believers. Most are in between, believing bits and pieces of the Christian myth and eschewing the balance. And all of this is confounded by the wide variety of myth systems among various Christian sects.

Beerdrinker, your failure to grasp the concept that believers pick and choose those myths in which they believe is exceeded only by your woeful comma placements.

I figured Christians believed in God. My mistake. I don't pay much attention to it.

I would think more than half of Christians, believe the creation story.

[GeezerSteve]

I would think more than half of Christians, believe the creation story.

There you go again, placing a comma between subject and predicate. WTF?

And nowhere did I cite a statistic re belief in a deity. One can believe in a deity while eschewing a belief in angels and/or creationist theory. Capiche? (I say this for others because it's apparent you are unable to comprehend such concepts.)

[jono]

You keep taking about how different individuals might believe different things but where's the statistical proof?

[muted]

A couple weeks ago I worked with a guy who was working the Vegas concert. He is convinced there was two shooters, as was other people who were there he said. My first knee-jerk reaction was no, it probably sounded like it, but there was probably just some crazy echos. But it's interesting to hear how this theory started, it wasn't from internet idiots, it was from people there. The whole thing being a hoax though, that's a bit insane.