670: Beware the Jabberwock
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When he wants to explain to people what his life is like these days, Glenny sometimes tells this story. An election night in 2016, he says, he went to a bar, got a seat near a TV, ordered a beer, and started making a small talk. And I turned to the guy to my right and said, "Did you vote?" And from there, he went into a long explanation about just some shadow government ideas and whether voting makes a difference, and probably ten minutes into it, he was talking about mass shootings, and then eventually Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook, of course, were gunmen killed twenty children, all in first grade, as well as seven adults. His random stranger then started telling him any of this particular story about Sandy Hook. Either the whole shooting was fake. It had to be fake, he said, because one of those first graders also showed up as a victim in a second mass shooting, all the way over in Pakistan. In the corners of the internet where people trade Sandy Hook conspiracy stories, this is a key piece of evidence that Sandy Hook was not real. Of course, it was real, and what happened in Pakistan was, in reality, about two years after Sandy Hook, the Taliban gunned down more than a hundred kids there. And there was a public vigil, and at the public vigil, probably as a sign of solidarity with other kids who had died in school shootings. The corners had this photo of a boy from Sandy Hook, smiling and wearing a Spider-Man shirt under a quarter of a jacket with a furry collar. Sandy Hook deniers saw that in the coverage, and they pounced, "Did he die twice? Did he die at all?" So the guy at the bar with Lenny is rattling through all this Pakistan stuff, and then, as Lenny explained to one of my co-workers, Mickey Meek, the guy mentions the kid's name, Noah Posner. I didn't really need to hear much more than that. Just needed to shut him down, basically. So what did you do? I took out my driver's license, and I said, "Look who you're talking to. You know, show some respect." The boy in the photo was Lenny's son, Noah, who was six when he died. Was he connected? Well, he sure he connected it instantly, yeah. And he just became more agitated, very angered, went outside, and maybe had a cigarette, came back, yelled at me some more, "Oh my God, how much did they pay you?" "How can you do this?" He was committed to his belief. I was the villain. People like this man at the bar pretty much redefined everything about the way Lenny lives his life, where he lives, how he lives. He runs into these hoaxers in person, and pretty much every day online. They think the government has paid him millions to play the part of a grieving dad. And their mind's Lenny is the sick one. Noah was never even his kid. And the person who has popularized these theories more than anybody is Alex Jones, who runs the website InfoWars, and who pushed these theories with his radio show and his YouTube videos. Alex Jones made his name right after 9/11, promoting the idea that 9/11 was an attack orchestrated
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