crisis actor

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

His name is James Tracy. “He’s not convinced the parents whose children were killed are really who they say they are,” Cooper said. “Tracy even cites a company called ‘Crisis Actors’ that provides actors to use in safety drills and the like. Apparently, that is supposed to bolster his case.”[5] Internet searches for “crisisactors.org” surged after Cooper’s broadcast, aided by Infowars, which jumped on Tracy’s reference to the website. The term “crisis actors” first surfaced in 1977, used in a report by Michael Brecher, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, to describe nations in conflict.[6] It gained its current meaning after the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, when Visionbox, an actors’ studio in Denver, set up crisisactors.org to promote its services as participants in active-shooter drills, to lend realism to the event and improve the emergency response.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper 360, transcript, CNN, January 11, 2013, https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/acd/date/2013-01-11/segment/01. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Ben Zimmer, “Plots, Politics and the Meaning of ‘Crisis Actors,’ ” Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2018, Life & Work, https://www.wsj.com/articles/plots-politics-and-the-meaning-of-crisis-actors-1520008999. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Jeffrey S. Morton, Patricia Kollander, and Thomas Wilson, “Letters: Why James Tracy, FAU’s Conspiracy Theorist, Should Resign,” Palm Beach Post, April 29, 2013, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/opinion/fl-xpm-2013-04-28-fl-online-letter1-20130428-story.html.

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Lenny Pozner, who lived near Pulse nightclub in 2016, noticed false flag conspiracies spreading online before the gunman who killed forty-nine had even left the premises. In Las Vegas, survivors still in their hospital beds after the 2017 shooting there that killed fifty-eight got onto their phones or laptops to report that they were alive, and found vicious attacks from people calling them “crisis actors.” In a now-familiar pattern, Sandy Hook conspiracies surfaced in isolated message boards and groups, then caught fire across social media, their spread fueled by algorithms that select what users see based on their past preferences and choices. John Kelly is a network sociologist and a pioneer in mapping online communities.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement
by Dave Cullen
Published 12 Feb 2019

They scoffed at the explanation: the Hoggs moved to Parkland from Torrance, California, in 2014, and David returned to spend most summers with his friend there. Sometimes, they went to the beach. The conspiracy sites howled. Crisis actor, obviously. Marco Rubio actually tweeted in support of the kids Tuesday evening, labeling the charges “the work of a disgusting group of idiots with no sense of decency.” “Thank you,” David tweeted back. His friends responded with humor. Wolf Blitzer asked Cameron about the crisis actor charges live on CNN. “Well, if you had seen me in our school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, you would know that nobody would pay me to act, for anything,” Cameron said.

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“These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the 60s who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard,” it said. The two-million-dollar celebrity windfall came with a price. Conservative critics took it as confirmation the kids were pawns—and added Decadent Hollywood to the list of puppet masters. “Crisis actor” charges leapt from right-wing websites to mainstream media. A growing conspiracy theory contended that school shootings were hoaxes cooked up by the Liberal Media as a pretext for a government gun-grab. It escalated when The Internet discovered that David Hogg had been photographed thousands of miles away in summer 2017.

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“These politicians have shown that they want to be on the wrong side of history and that’s absolutely fine—we’ll be sure to smear them in our history textbooks that we write, and that will be their legacy and how they will be forever remembered, as the cowards that many of them are—that want to take money from special interest groups instead of putting their constituents’ lives in front of their political agenda.” He peppered random answers with allusions to his Twitter accusers, spitting out terms like “libtards,” “Nazis,” and “crisis actors.” The digs were getting to him. He was angry at the system rigged against young black boys, repeatedly decrying the “school-to-prison pipeline.” That was a signature phrase of the Peace Warriors, and while David had missed the meeting at Emma’s house, the concept quickly permeated the group. David kept saying he was an angry person and a nihilist.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

This situation unfortunately repeated itself in February 2018, when a student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen people.124 The tragedy turned a number of the Parkland students into high-profile advocates for stronger gun safety laws. In turn, some pro-gun advocates and fringe websites began claiming that these traumatized young people weren’t high school students at all but rather “crisis actors” who traveled around the country impersonating victims to generate sympathy and accelerate gun control.125 Once again, because authoritative sources had not yet debunked these conspiracy theories in the early days of their spread, users googling “Parkland” and “crisis actors” were seeing articles that were relevant, recent, and utterly absurd. The Russians, of course, were only too happy to exploit the confusion. Hamilton 68—an Alliance for Securing Democracy project that tracks Russian influence—identified a surge of bot activity pushing hashtags like “#guncontrolnow and alleging that the shooter was either a White supremacist or an anti-fascist.126 Firehosing is not just an inconvenience; in the twenty-first century, firehosing is tantamount to censorship by other means.

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Yet in the years since, the Internet has become a double-edged sword. Social media has given the student activists produced by the 2018 Parkland shooting the megaphone that comes with several million Twitter followers. Those same platforms also spread the false news stories that those students are “crisis actors” paid by George Soros to advance gun control.21 The Internet has accelerated what researchers at RAND have termed “truth decay.”22 Cyberspace has become a world where no idea is too conspiratorial to be true, where the click of a mouse sends outlandish opinions circulating instantaneously and widely, where our beliefs are reinforced by like-minded people and clever algorithms.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything
by Kelly Weill
Published 22 Feb 2022

Edgar Maddison Welch, affidavit filed December 12, 2016, in US District Court for the District of Columbia, https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/pizzagate-affidavit.pdf. 158 “in our own backyard” Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60. 158 actor of the same name Nathan Francis, “Edgar Maddison Welch PizzaGate Theory: Was the Comet Ping Pong Shooter a Crisis Actor? New Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold [Debunked],” Inquisitr, December 6, 2016, https://www.inquisitr.com/3772621/edgar-maddison-welch-pizzagate-theory-was-the-comet-ping-pong-shooter-a-crisis-actor-new-conspiracy-theory-takes-hold-debunked/. 159 “wasn’t 100 percent” Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions, New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html. 159 “sheer luck” Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, “Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison,” New York Times, June 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html. 159 torched a pizzeria across town Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins, “ ‘Pizzagate’ Video Was Posted to YouTube Account of Alleged Arsonist’s Parents before Fire, NBC News, February 14, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/pizzagate-conspiracy-video-posted-youtube-account-alleged-arsonist-s-parents-n971891. 160 “can’t live in this reality anymore” Sara Jean Green, “ ‘God Told Me He Was a Lizard’: Seattle Man Accused of Killing His Brother with a Sword,” Seattle Times, January 9, 2019, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/god-told-me-he-was-a-lizard-seattle-man-accused-of-killing-his-brother-with-a-sword/. 161 Wolfe’s first “likes” on YouTube Travis View (@travis_view), “I was looking at the ‘likes’ on the Youtube page of Buckey Wolfe,” Twitter, January 10, 2019, https://twitter.com/travis_view/status/1083437810634248193. 161 apology to QAnon fans Jennifer Smith, “Haunting Video of ‘Thor’ Actor Isaac Kappy . . . ,” Daily Mail, May 15, 2019, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7033879/Haunting-final-video-Thor-actor-Isaac-Kappy-committed-suicide.html. 162 his Mercedes-Benz “Authorities: Whitehall Man Threatened Government, Had Homemade Explosives,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 14, 2020, https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2020/07/14/mt-lebanon-bomb-explosives-kurt-cofano-whitehall-fbi-atf-allegheny-county-threats/stories/202007140103. 166 “time to tell the truth” Mack Lamoureux,“ ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes Was a Daredevil First, Flat Earther Second,” Vice, February 25, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/939nnz/mad-mike-hughes-was-a-daredevil-first-flat-earther-second. 167 “Is the media going to be there?”

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

About U.S. troops sent to build field hospitals in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak (not an attempt to stop the disease’s spread, but a plot to bring it to the United States to justify “mass lockdowns” at home). About ISIS beheadings of U.S. and British captives (possibly not real murders, but staged covert ops by the U.S. government starring crisis actors). About the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, on allegations that he sexually assaulted a housekeeper in a New York City hotel room (the charges were eventually dropped and a civil suit settled but Wolf wondered if the whole thing had been an “intelligence service” operation designed to take Strauss-Kahn out of the running in French elections where he had been “the odds-on favorite to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy”).

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* * * This flurry of activity by Other Naomi during the Covid era meant that the stakes of getting confused with her had become significantly higher than they were in that restroom in Manhattan. Her earlier forays into unfounded conspiracies were frequently offensive and no doubt hurtful to those who she hinted were spies or crisis actors. But they never put large numbers of people into active danger. With Covid, that changed. And when it came to the notorious “vaccine shedding” fiction, it was easy to see why she was getting so much traction. The claim that vaccinated people could somehow infect unvaccinated people with dangerous particles started circulating at a crucial moment in the pandemic when many were deciding whether or not they were going to trust the shots.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Trolls sometimes plant misleading or inaccurate information into credible sources, such as think tanks or local media, which are then frequently quoted by journalists. For example, less than an hour after the Parkland high-school shooting occurred in February 2018, far-right trolls made plans to hijack the public narrative. ‘Start looking for [Jewish] numerology and crisis actors,’ one wrote on the image board 8chan. This disinformation and obfuscation technique is called ‘source hacking’.45 In December 2018, Der Spiegel revealed that one of their award-winning journalists, Claas Relotius, had freely invented major parts of his stories, including quotes, places, scenes, even entire characters.46 This scandal gave far-right actors such as Martin Sellner across Europe ammunition to paint all journalists as dishonest and unprofessional.47 One month later, in January 2019, members of Generation Identity launched a nationwide campaign against journalists, attaching posters on the façades of media outlets across the country and attacking a journalist of the newspaper TAZ in Berlin.48 A similar wave of scepticism towards scientific studies took root when three scholars published a series of hoax papers called ‘Grievance Studies’ with the aim of exposing flaws in the academic review processes of journals in 2017 and 2018.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

In July 2018, for example, the head of Facebook’s News Feed, John Hegeman, was asked by CNN to explain why Alex Jones’s Infowars site was hosted. If Facebook was dedicated to eradicating fake news, why did it tolerate a site that disseminated nonsense rumours that the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre were ‘crisis actors’? Hegeman insisted that Facebook was simply a place ‘where different people can have a voice’. The baser truth is that Facebook profited from allowing advertisers to target people who liked the Infowars page.27 Facebook ultimately caved, only after Spotify and iTunes banned Infowars the following month.

Picnic Comma Lightning: In Search of a New Reality
by Laurence Scott
Published 11 Jul 2018

The amplifying quality of social media means that there is a new responsibility in expressing your position. To take an extreme example, in the days following the Parkland School shooting in Florida, which killed seventeen people, the number-one trending YouTube video was a clip arguing that the students speaking out in anguish for gun control were hired ‘crisis actors’, in the pocket of CNN. What began as a video posted twice to Facebook quickly received hundreds of thousands of views. These deliberate acts of misinformation need to be seen for the smallness of their origins rather than the enormity of their impact. They must, in Smith’s words, be dismantled, destroyed, ignored.

Radicalized
by Cory Doctorow
Published 19 Mar 2019

There had always been low-key conspiracy theories about the Eagle, going back centuries: he was a demon summoned by Freemasons to subjugate America; he was a secret laboratory experiment gone horribly wrong (or, sometimes, exactly right); he was a special effect created by hologram projectors or AI-based video-doctoring algorithms, and the people who claimed to have seen him were hypnotized, or crisis actors, or special effects themselves. Then Bruce asked to see him and brought along a small, air-gapped tablet on which he’d stored PDFs of the Intellipedia entries about the Eagle, along with their edit histories, as NSA analysts and private-sector contractors from Booz Allen and Palantir and S.A.I.C. debated their own conspiracy theories about his use as a secret Chinese (or European, or Russian, or private-sector crime syndicate) asset, and what someone might have offered him or threatened him with in order to turn him.

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias
by Kevin Cook
Published 30 Jan 2023

ALEX JONES built InfoWars into an empire worth well over $100 million by claiming that events ranging from Waco in 1993 to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, the 2012 shootings of twenty children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, which he supported, were “inside jobs,” false-flag operations. In April 2022, after losing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Sandy Hook parents, whom Jones called “crisis actors” conspiring in “a hoax,” InfoWars filed for bankruptcy. The INCIDENT AT WACO remains the deadliest action by federal forces on American soil since the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In 2007 the Native American activist, actor, and musician Russell Means released a song called “Waco, the White Man’s Wounded Knee.”

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

‘Sorry to interrupt: I know you’re very busy right now trying to convince yourselves, and the rest of us, that your hero couldn’t possibly have used chemical weapons to kill up to 70 people in rebel-held Douma on April 7. Maybe Robert Fisk’s mysterious doctor has it right – and maybe the hundreds of survivors and eyewitnesses to the attack are all “crisis actors.”’ To add to the confusion, others rushed to defend Fisk, including the anti-corporatist ‘media criticism’ website Media Lens, whose exoneration began: ‘UK corporate media are under a curious kind of military occupation.’ The reader was invited to believe that Fisk’s critics were largely stooges who were influenced, if not controlled, by British intelligence.

How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations With Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason
by Lee McIntyre
Published 14 Sep 2021

Just like what happened at the Parkland shooting. My blood pressure jumped. My wife and I have a very good friend whose sister lost a child in the massacre at Sandy Hook. If I got angry, this dinner really would be over. But how could I let him get away with this hogwash? He began to talk about how the Parkland kids were “crisis actors.” That the mom of one of the “victims” said, “I don’t want thoughts and prayers, I want gun control,” which made him a little suspicious. He said, “Isn’t that exactly what the anti-gun lobby wanted her to say?” At that point our conversation devolved into a long back-and-forth over conspiracy theories and burden of proof, Occam’s Razor, and why I had such a big problem with the idea that you could count speculations and suspicions as evidence.

Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy
by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin
Published 7 Nov 2023

A speaker at a pro-police rally the day before the attacks told supporters to “take the cane out… and discipline the kids.” Many police officers outright sympathized with the men in white. On WhatsApp groups, frontline officers in unrelated units praised the men in white for “teaching the kids a lesson,” saying that they had used the “perfect weapons” for the job. They believed the injured civilians were just crisis actors, that all the victims were protesters and legitimate targets. The men in white had helped police punish people who were disrespectful of their government and of China. It was permissible because it was done in the name of the country. Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that 43 percent of the Hong Kong public had zero trust in the police in the months following the Yuen Long attacks.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

He usually leaves a manifesto in their car or at their home because they get killed or “suicided” at the end of the attack so that they can never speak about the incident.196 • The physical evidence from the crime scene gets lost, contaminated, or even intentionally destroyed, and the surveillance cameras either malfunction or the footage is confiscated and labeled “Classified” by the FBI.197 • Most eyewitness video evidence is either grainy, out of focus, or non-existent, and the good quality footage either gets confiscated by the FBI, or the person’s cell phone memory gets wiped on “national security” grounds. • Independent eyewitnesses gave conflicting accounts about what actually happened at the event, but those eyewitnesses that were interviewed on the corporate news give unrealistic and overly-detailed descriptions of what they claim to have witnessed. • Alleged victims are discovered to be crisis actors that appear in multiple events, promoting faked or staged cell phone footage to further push the intended account of events or to authenticate the story.198 • Families of victims show odd behavior, no emotion, fake crying, or even laughter during interviews. This is known as “duping delight” and it is a clear and obvious indicator of deception.199 • The families of the victims either have acting backgrounds or ties to government agencies, and the “victims” receive millions in federal payoffs or charity proceeds

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

And the users moved in parallel with YouTube’s recommendations, further evidence that it was the algorithm that drove them. That spring, after a school shooting, YouTube’s high-profile “trending” page began promoting an Alex Jones video claiming that the violence had been faked. Jones had pushed versions of this since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, when he called the murdered twenty children and six teachers “crisis actors” in a vague government plot to justify confiscating guns or imposing martial law. The conspiracy had spread on YouTube ever since, consumed by growing numbers of viewers who, enraged, organized years-long harassment campaigns against the families of the murdered children. Some parents went into hiding, and several filed three separate lawsuits against Jones for defamation.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

After the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017, some YouTubers filled the data void with crackpot theories about “false flags” signaling that the massacre was staged. That happened again after a November shooting in Texas. Then again in February, when a gunman killed seventeen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. On the internet fringes, theories arose that student survivors from that tragedy, outspoken in their gun reform support, were paid “crisis actors.” YouTube thought its systems were prepared to deal with such falsehoods until an account named “mike m” uploaded an old local TV clip of a Parkland activist with the title “DAVID HOGG THE ACTOR . . .” Propelled by conspiracy peddlers, curious onlookers, or some combination thereof, this clip went viral.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

When Tufekci watched Donald Trump campaign videos, YouTube began to suggest “white supremacist rants” and Holocaust-denial videos; viewing Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton speeches led to left-wing conspiracy theories and 9/11 “truthers.” At Columbia University, the researcher Jonathan Albright experimentally searched on YouTube for the phrase “crisis actors,” in the wake of a major school shooting, and took the “next up” recommendation from the recommendation system. He quickly amassed 9,000 videos, a large percentage that seemed custom designed to shock, inflame, or mislead, ranging from “rape game jokes, shock reality social experiments, celebrity pedophilia, ‘false flag’ rants, and terror-related conspiracy theories,” as he wrote.

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson
Published 25 Sep 2023

Parents who lost children at Sandy Hook found themselves the targets of online conspiracy theorists who claimed that the massacre had been some elaborate hoax, part of a secret plot designed to take guns away from Americans. People took to social media and discussion groups to argue, without any facts, that the school massacre had been staged by what they labeled “crisis actors.” They harassed the Wheelers in particular because they had done some acting before having children. Connecticut lawmakers responded quickly to the parents’ pleas. The small state that had been the birthplace of the U.S. firearms industry, where the AR-15 was first manufactured, took action to rein in ARs by the early spring of 2013.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spawned a flood of war propaganda on all sides of the conflict. The Kremlin peddled a steady stream of disinformation, domestically and internationally, which was often echoed by the Chinese government. Russian falsehoods included claims that the United States had bioweapons labs in Ukraine and that Ukrainian civilians injured in Russian attacks were “crisis actors.” Ukrainian defenders, for their part, pumped a steady stream of heroic tales of brave resistance on social media, many of which were false. These included stories about the “Ghost of Kyiv,” a mythical Ukrainian air force pilot who reportedly had downed six Russian planes. Except the video footage circulating online was from a video game.

Wanderers: A Novel
by Chuck Wendig
Published 1 Jul 2019

She smirked. “What can I say? I’m good at my job. I designed a very effective prediction engine.” She linked her arm in his. “Now we’d better get a move on, don’t you think? The mystery of Maker’s Bell awaits.” Look at this photo of these 11 zombies—four of them are identifiable Antifa crisis actors. This isn’t some foreign attack or some kind of outbreak. This is a leftie conspiracy in action. Stay frosty, spread the word. Two words: fake. news. —user KobraKommandr at r/conspiracy, answering the question, “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen while alone?” JUNE 4 Pine Grove, Pennsylvania “SO LIKE, WHAT THE FUCK is going on here?”

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell
by Neal Stephenson
Published 3 Jun 2019

That vehicle’s license plates were not issued by Utah but by the Municipal Authority of Moab. And Sophia—who had been reading about this—already knew why. The Utah state legislature had been taken over by Moab truthers who insisted that Moab had been obliterated by nuclear terrorism twelve years ago. From which it followed that anyone claiming to actually live there was a troll, a crisis actor in the pay of, or a sad dupe in thrall to, global conspirators trying to foist a monstrous denial of the truth on decent folk. In recognition of, and indignation over, which they had passed a law ordering the state licensing bureau to stop accepting motor vehicle paperwork from Moab. Unable to register vehicles in Utah, the people of Moab had begun printing their own plates, which had actually become a status symbol and desirable swag item in faraway places and produced revenue for the town until being buried under knockoffs.