0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I’m Pascual Romero. With me as always is Celestia and Ben.

CW: Howdy.

BR: Hey there.

PR: So this week I…

BR: It’ll be a departure from our previous episodes.

CR: Yes, this week will be a bit of a departure from our previous episodes.

BR: This one will be interesting, we promise.

PR: Yes, we are going to be talking about conspiracies and a few specific ones.

0:00:56
CW: You’ve got to be specific with conspiracies because if you try to do all of them, it won’t just be a podcast, it will be a lifetime of study.

0:01:04
PR: Yeah, you could have just, well I’m sure there is a Wikipedia of conspiracy out there.

0:01:09
CW: Conspiropedia.

0:01:10
PR: We need like a skeptic one because I’m pretty sure we don’t have that specific one.

CW: Well we’re looking at conspiracies popping up right now in a very very widely examined topic the Parkland shootings. Which luckily those high school kids are old enough and some of them are very well spoken and very well able to defend themselves against these conspiracy mongers. But very recently in our nation’s history the Sandy Hook shooting involved children that were not old enough to defend themselves verbally after the shooting. And Ben has written about that, so we’re going to kind of plug his mind, because Lord knows he hasn’t gotten enough crazy hate mail from conspiracy mongers yet. We’re going to get his name out there some more so people write more angry letters.

0:01:57
PR: Yeah, let’s take a look at what Ben’s skeptical of this week.

(MUSIC)

BR: I was recently watching a documentary film. As you guys know, I’m a fan of Docs.

PR: As am I. I think we all are.

0:02:27
CW: Yeah, we did a whole show on it.

0:02:28
PR: Skeptics and documentaries are both good and bad. That’s right. We’re going to need a reverse ding for.

0:02:34
BR: But I recently rewatched a documentary from 2005 by one of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog.

PR: Oh, yeah. It’s a very dark man.

BR: Yes.

PR: Things are very bleak in his universe.

BR: They are indeed. I remember coming across his stuff with Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. He’s filmed in the Amazon several times and just things that smart directors don’t do. It’s just that’s just not it’s not something that is well you know this from filming Pascual. You just exponentially complicate the shoot.

PR: Yeah exactly I think the first film I saw from him was Heart of Glass. On one hand I found it to just be obviously a very fascinating director but also he just, there was something so disturbing about the way he tells things that I was just like wow this shouldn’t be this dark but it just feels very heavy on the heart while you’re watching it.

BR: It’s his gravitas even when he’s narrating The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is about this cave, I think, in France that had recently found these depictions of these art that was going back, you know, millennia or something.

0:03:48
CW: 30,000 year old cave paintings that blew everybody away.

PR: Yeah, I remember those.

CW: So what made you skeptical about this documentary you were watching?

0:03:56
BR: So the doc, for those who haven’t seen it, is about a guy named Tim Treadwell and he is notable for a couple things primarily being eaten by a bear.

PR: Oh yeah.

BR: That’ll get you in the books.

CW: That’ll make you YouTube famous.

PR: We’re starting this story from the end it’s like a Tarantino film.

BR: Spoiler alert, eaten by a bear. It happened in October 2003 and it’s a fascinating documentary for those who want to watch it. Basically, it’s this guy who I think is from Southern California, and he just fell in love with the bears in Alaska, and he would go out to this fairly remote area and basically just live with the bears.

0:04:38
CW: That sounds like a Southern California kind of dream.

0:04:40
BR: That’s what they do.

0:04:42
CW: People in Alaska were probably like, you go right ahead, surfer boy.

0:04:46
PR: The sharks weren’t enough.

0:04:47
CW: You have fun.

0:04:49
BR: Knock yourself out. But yeah, so he went up there and he spent many summers, in some cases, illegally. You’re not actually allowed to camp out there. In any event, it’s an interesting look at him, and a lot of it is found footage by the time Herzog came across it.

0:05:03
CW: That’s like the Bear Witch Project.

0:05:05
BR: Wow.

0:05:08
PR: Now we need to find a rimshot sound effect.

0:05:11
BR: You’re complicating things, Celestia. This is serious. This is a guy died here. So it’s a sad, sort of tragic story, but it’s a lot about this guy’s obsession. Of course, many of Herzog’s films are about obsession.

PR: Yeah.

BR: In one way or another. You can see why he would have been drawn to this particular subject.

0:05:31
PR: Yeah.

0:05:32
BR: In the case of Treadwell, again, most of the film is found footage that Treadwell himself shot trying to advocate for bears and that sort of thing. And he was trying to raise awareness and, you know.

PR: Raise a bear-ness?

0:05:45
BR: Well, bear-ness, yeah. But what was interesting was the thing that drew my skepticism and my sort of, you know, looking at it from a psychological point of view was the degree to which he would imbue the bears and the Alaskan nature with human qualities. And of course, this is anthropomorphizing and it’s, we all do it.

0:06:09
PR: Sure, sure. And it’s hard not to do with bears because they, even grizzly bears as fearsome as they come off when they’re angry, they look like big, giant, fluffy, fat, you know, jolly things, you know.

0:06:22
BR: You just want to go hug them.

0:06:24
CW: A lot of my male relatives look like bears.

0:06:27
PR: I’ve been called that before by some of my gay friends.

0:06:30
BR: Hey big boy…

0:06:32
CW: You’d make an excellent bear.

PR: That’s actually my gay friend that I was just hanging out with last week told me that in so many words. Suddenly this turned awkward anyway.

BR: Well, in this case, and again, it’s something we all do, and I come across it a lot in ghost hunting. A lot of times, you know, there’ll be ambiguous phenomena that’s attributed to ghosts. Someone will say, oh, well, you know, I lost my keys or my cell phone, he’s missing, whatever, it’s that mischievous ghost.

0:07:06
PR: Right, yeah.

BR: The little spirit playing games with me.

0:07:09
PR: Sure.

0:07:10
BR: And you see this over and over again where people will just imbue their own worldview and humanize interpretations of otherwise anomalous or just ordinary things.

0:07:22
CW: Well, yeah, in the ghost hunting realm, that makes sense that it’s completely bizarre to ascribe emotives to something like, oh, the chair is creaking. There’s an angry entity behind that squeaking chair. Whereas there’s no mind, there’s no brain, there’s no motives, but bears at least, they have a brain. Bears and bugs and all sorts of critters, they do kind of have a brain. You could argue that sardines and termites and smaller insects don’t really have what we would call a brain per se, but at least there’s a little something going on behind there.

0:08:00
BR: Sure, well in the case of the bears and that theme is one of the themes of Grizzly Man where you know you constantly throughout the film you see Treadwell humanizing talking about well you know the bear is being painful, the bear is angry with me. You could probably tell him the bear is angry with you to be fair.

0:08:20
PR: That’s a pretty universal emotion.

CW: I like to assume every bear I come across is angry with me.

PR: Yeah, it’s a good rule.

CW: It’s a safe assumption.

0:08:28
BR: Yeah, well, but he, you know, in the film you see him talking about the bears being his friends. And bears and him establishing, I mean, you see him talking to the bears and he’s like, you know, oh, don’t do that, you know, and it’s very much in the same way that a person would talk to their dog or their cat. Except of course in this case it’s bears in Alaska.

0:08:51
CW: It sounds like he’s trying to like Jane Goodall the bears, like humanize them or primatize them, kind of make them imagine that they have a social structure. The way that humans and primates do, which they don’t.

BR: Which they don’t, right. And that’s actually one of the last scenes in the film, you have Herzog’s narration and there’s a shot of a bear that’s near Treadwell. And that’s what Herzog suggests is, when I look at this bear, I don’t see that friendliness. I don’t see that emotional connection that Treadwell saw. And so, again, part of the theme here is what psychologists sometimes call teleological promiscuity. That is attributing, imposing your own sort of rosy, personal worldview on these sorts of things. Anyway, that’s a theme throughout the film, but there’s one particular scene that jumped out at me and I recorded it We have a clip of it and we can listen to it it’s a short little clip, but it’s interesting where he there’s a scene where he’s looking at a bee on a flower and Treadwell, I mean you can hear the narration yourself and we’ll play it after this but he basically is talking about all it’s so tragic and he just is this, it’s this, you can see him welling up with tears at this dead bee and he’s musing about, about, oh, that’s, you know, it’s all part of nature and this worker bee, he gave its life for the hive and it’s this whole thing. And then the bee moves. And he’s like, oh –

CW: I wrote that whole eulogy for nothing?

BR: Well, it was just a fascinating contrast because within the space of 40 seconds Treadwell is on one hand about almost crying because of what he interprets as a dead bee and he’s you know invoking all this all the drama and the melodrama and the emotions behind it and all of a sudden like… oh I guess it’s fine, nevermind.

RECORDING: So sad. This is a bumblebee who expired as it was working at doing the pollen thing on this Alaskan fireweed. And it just is just, it’s really touched me to no end. It’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s tragic. I love that bee. Well, the bee moved. Is it just sleeping?

0:11:20
BR: Anyway, so that clip sort of has a lot of skeptical lessons to it, if you know what I mean.

0:11:27
CW: You can kind of hear how he’s just imbuing the bee with this human work ethic, like the bee goes home and has dinner with his little family. He’s like, I’m sorry, honey. Well, I say she, because all honeybees are she’s. All the worker ones are she’s. You know, oh, I really put in a long 14-hour day pollinating today. Barely have time for a Netflix movie.

0:11:56
PR: Then just like narrating as the bee’s dying. Two days from retirement!

BR: Damn you! Damn you to hell!

CW: And then it just kind of poof evaporates.

BR: Yeah, within just a twitch like, oh. He was sleeping. Alright, I guess I’m no longer in love with the bee. The bee is lazy and pissed me off.

PR: Then the bee stings him.

0:12:24
CW: Herzog had to have put that scene in the movie on purpose.

BR: Yes.

CW: Because that’s the kind of thing you would do on purpose. And you do have to wonder if the last thing he thought about bears as he was being eaten was, oh, I guess the bear’s not my friend.

0:12:39
PR: Yeah.

0:12:40
BR: Yeah, in fact, as it turns out, there’s an audio recording of him being eaten by the bear.  Attacked by the bear. And you don’t hear it in the film, which is probably just as well, but there’s, yeah, I mean, because he was recording constantly the whole time, and he was there with another woman, and there, I mean, there’s a whole tragic issue with that. Another person died. There’s a woman with him who was also killed.

0:13:00
CW: Oh my gosh.

0:13:01
BR: So there’s lots of interesting ethical issues in terms of not only his connection to the Bears, but also, you know, how much his personalization of the Bears was a factor in people saying, oh, well, I guess you’re really close to the Bears. I guess it’s okay to be here.

0:13:17
CW: Like it’s a contagion. It’s like, almost like a cult leader can talk people into believing things that are very bad for them.

0:13:25
BR: Yeah. Anyway, it’s a, for those who are interested in documentaries and also just sort of the human condition and there’s a little skeptical angle, it’s worth a look.

0:13:33
PR: Yeah, Herzog has a tendency with his documentaries and I like the way he delivers them because he tends to sometimes you want to you really want to have a story told from the side of someone who like doesn’t miss the irony and things and also maybe is a little cynical about stuff. Because it will seem to be a bit more truthful because he just won’t try to color the… He doesn’t he doesn’t paint it with anything, you know, except for his own kind of dry, thick, accented narration that makes everything sound like it’s about to be horrible. But it feels more honest and the way he kind of, the way the narrative that he creates in that story, which to be fair is basically just the timeline of events, it still kind of reminds me of this story. There was an old story, they say it’s a Native American legend, but it was quoted in the movie Natural Born Killers back in 94, I guess it was. And it was the parable of the rattlesnake, and it was this, you know, it said that there was a woman picking up firewood and she came upon a poisonous snake frozen in the snow, and she took the snake home and nursed it back to health. And then one day the snake bit her on the cheek, and as she laid there dying, she asked the snake, why have you done this to me? And the snake said, look, you knew I was a snake. And I think that that is almost like how that story is kind of told. And I mean, he doesn’t do it in a way that’s like, meant to be, you know, it’s not mean, it’s not mean spirited, but it’s very matter of fact, it is in my nature. Yeah, it’s like, I’m a bear, I’m probably will eat your face eventually.

0:15:09
CW: I’m curious, because I have not seen this documentary. You obviously have. You probably got the DVD with all the extras. Is there any sort of DVD extra that maybe has some experts on bear behavior who are deciphering some of the things that are going on that are being so misapprehended by the gentleman in the film?

0:15:28
BR: I do recall the film itself contains a couple bear experts who are like, yeah, that’s not good. Yeah, we know about Treadwell. Not a good idea. In fact, it’s interesting, not to flog the movie too much. But I mean, one of the people’s that that was interviewed, an Alaskan guy, he was basically saying it was disrespectful of Treadwell to come up there and basically treat the bears as if they’re his little playthings. It was disrespectful to the bears and also sort of to the culture there and the Alaskans that have to deal with this all the time.

0:16:06
CW: Yeah, that gives a new meaning to the word a healthy respect for nature.

0:16:11
PR: Yeah, no doubt.

(MUSIC)

0:16:27
PR: So conspiracy theories, they pop up really fast these days. I think that when the recent Parkland shooting happened, I saw a link shared to the basically the unfolding event on YouTube and some of the comments on the live feed were already talking about false flag and crisis actors. And I mean, it’s just remarkable how quickly that can come out how it’s baffling that a person would even think that they would know this on a story that’s just popping up.

CW: It’s like a knee-jerk reaction.

PR: Yeah.

0:17:04
CW: Yeah, it’s unfortunate that it’s a knee-jerk reaction.

BR: Yeah. And we saw a similar thing with the Las Vegas shooting. I remember you were talking about how someone had a video of a window that they claimed as being the the fire was coming from.

0:17:18
CW: Absolutely the fact that just just last week on a totally unrelated conversation on Facebook a friend of mine posted oddly enough just a science link saying this is cool And she tagged two people she tagged me and this other girl and the other girl got on there and was furious now, the the link was just about science and the benefits of science to show you what’s true.” And she said, this is because you don’t believe me about the second shooter. There were absolutely multiple shooters and this other friend that got tagged went off about how the police and the government were covering up the fact that it was not just one guy in Mandalay Bay. It was three people, there were two people in the Luxor and da da da da and she’s got video footage and she, it was it was interesting to watch. I did not get too involved. I did kind of say, well, if you have video, give me a link. I’d be curious. And then I left it at that, and she didn’t provide anything, but she was absolutely convinced that the story we had been told was wrong.

0:18:13
BR: And that’s, of course, a common theme with conspiracy theories. One important part of it is this notion that there are people who are in the know and then there’s the sheeple.

CW: Yes, people in control, everybody’s controlled by something and we’re being spoon-fed something by the media that’s not true.

0:18:37
BR: The official story. So yeah, we’ll be talking today about conspiracy theories, particularly regarding school shootings. I want to begin by just pointing out the caveat that should be self-evident, but we’re not doing a deep dive into conspiracy theories overall. We’re not going to be talking about Sandy Hook. I mean, there’s dozens and dozens. It would take us hours to go through it. None of us have that kind of time or patience.

0:19:01
CW: You can only really do a shallow dive into this.

0:19:04
PR: Yeah, that’s all I’d ever want to do for my own sanity anyway.

0:19:08
CW: I really do think it could be dangerous to your sanity to look into too many, and I wonder if that’s how a conspiracy theorist is created.

0:19:15
PR: Could be.

0:19:15
CW: Somebody who looks into it for hours and hours and hours and hours and eventually you just brainwash yourself.

0:19:20
BR: Well it just gets exhausting because in most of these cases there are so many independent premises that a skeptic would have to address. And I mean, I’ve dealt with this with some 9-11 truthers.

0:19:36
CW: It’s a Gish Gallop.

0:19:38
BR: Yeah, they just throw all this stuff out there and even if you pin them, if you say, okay, give me this claim that you will admit, you know, would debunk, number one, they won’t give you anything falsifiable. But even in those cases, like, even when you pin them, like, okay, fine, you’re right about this, but, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and so you just spent 20 minutes or two hours or a month debunking this one thing that they had, this was the hill they were going to die on and they were like, okay yeah, but, no no no no no, that’s not what you said.

0:20:10
CW: Well, you may have disproved that one piece of evidence, but I was saving this other good evidence right here.

0:20:15
BR: Yeah, it’s a no-win situation.

PR: You don’t keep evidence in your back pocket, buddy. You put the best stuff out in front of everything.

0:20:23
CW: Yeah, there’s just never any best evidence. It’s all bad. And it’s a situation where, much like ghost stories, people take a wild bucket of bad evidence, of anecdotes, of suspected little tiny anomalies, and they put it all together and say, here’s proof of a narrative, when there’s actually no good proof, there’s a lot of bad proof.

0:20:47
BR: Yeah, and we saw this with Parkland, you know, some of the ones were floating around were again the whole thing was staged. That the the whole crisis actor and we can talk a little bit about that We touched on it before but it’s worth bringing up again in this context.

0:21:01
CW: I found information with Sandy Hook now, you’re gonna be our expert here, but I did a little bit of reading I found information that there is actually a group of actors that are under the business name Crisis Actors. And Sandy Hook conspiracy people pointed to that saying, look, there’s a group of actors called Crisis Actors who are advertising openly.

PR: Seems a little on the nose, if I’m going to be frank.

CW: And the service that these real Crisis Actors provide is they actually help schools and businesses and other places stage a drill of a crisis. Like, okay, your business has been attacked by, you know, bioweapons or there’s been a hurricane, and they stage things to help people with disaster preparedness.

0:21:53
PR: Yeah.

0:21:53
BR: Which is important too.

0:21:54
CW: Which is important.

BR: You have to have real world practical, you can’t just have it, well, if there were 15 people here, how would you treat them? Because each case is different. Well, it turns out one of the women is 85 and has a heart condition. So in the real world, which is how we want our EMTs and first responders to react to, not just sort of hypothetical scenarios, these are the people that are trained to help with this.

CW: Yes, and it’s just an unfortunate thing that the name of this group was crisis actors because they were locked onto and held up as proof and they’ve of course had a statement saying no we don’t do that. I mean we’ve got a group in Las Vegas that I know people in called the zombie squad and they do the same thing. They help people with disaster preparedness and of course they know zombie makeup and everything too so sometimes they’ll show up with like a giant gash across their leg and and they have you know, different first aid situations and injuries, and they stress the importance of keeping food and water on hand. But the fact that they’re named Zombie Squad is not proof that there’s really an impending zombie apocalypse.

PR: They’re an agency that just brings zombies into town, just overruns them.

0:23:10
CW: There are so many specific aspects to the Sandy Hook conspiracy mongers. What did you want to take a look at first, Ben?

0:23:17
BR: Well I thought we’d take a look at first an overview. So you know basically it happened in December 2012 and you had a young adult named Adam Lanza who went into Sandy Hook Elementary and killed twenty first graders and six adults and he himself was killed.

CW: Now he killed his mother as well.

BR: Yes.

CW: Was that before or after?

0:23:40
PR: It was before he went in. Before he went in, yeah. So I think technically that puts it at 27 total.

0:23:45
BR: Yeah, depending on how you run the… I don’t remember whether it was the morning of the night before, but it was somewhat before that. So you had this horrific shooting and certainly it made international news and it was a big story. And as often is the case, you had Alex Jones and others immediately seizing on it as part of a conspiracy theory and a false flag operation. As usual, when you try and find out what is the operation, why exactly would they have staged this whole thing?

0:24:14
CW: Yeah, what’s the motive?

0:24:16
PR: I was hearing like, they’re taking our guns away or something, that’s like the whole reason they do it.

CW: Well, I mean, yeah, true to form, after Sandy Hook, none of us are allowed to own guns anymore, right?

PR: Yeah, no, they stopped doing that after Columbine.

0:24:27
CW: They took all of my guns away.

0:24:29
PR: I have owned zero guns since Columbine.

0:24:32
CW: Obama and Hillary came around with a wheelbarrow and demanded that I put all my guns into it, and then they wheeled them away.

0:24:38
BR: That’s how successful that particular false flag operation was.

PR: It was so successful that I never even owned one, actually. Just throwing that out there.

0:24:46
CW: Time-traveling gun snatchers.

0:24:49
BR: Anyway, funny, you know strange how that works, but so you get all these cases And so I I was asked to look into the Sandy Hook shooting and against one of those cases where it’s as a skeptic And as a researcher and journalist you need to you need to set up a scope just it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole and you know, so I would I and I agreed to look into it. I said, I’m not going to spend months on that. I don’t have the time, no one wants to do that.

0:25:17
CW: Well it’s like having somebody ask you to paint their house. It’s a lot of work, and there’s a lot of different aspects. So you can say, OK, look, I want you to show me a two foot by two foot space, and I will paint that.

0:25:28
BR: Right, instead of just having it open-ended.

0:25:31
CW: Yes.

0:25:32
BR: So there are a couple of things. Again, we won’t get into all the aspects, but there are a couple of prominent conspiracies that came up. One of them was, and again, this goes back to the crisis actor idea. One of them was that according to many of these conspiracy theorists and videos, and if you wanna waste your time on YouTube, you can find many of these, that in at least one case, there was a parent who was going to talk about a press conference. It was going to a press conference to discuss the shooting. And as the cameras followed these people through the doors as they pause the door going through the door you can see one of them turning to another one and smiling or laughing or there was something that was to some people evidence that this was not a parent that had recently had a child killed.

PR: Wow.

0:26:22
CW: And that’s another thing that came up with the Parkland conspiracy mongers which we touched on this a few episodes ago where it was held up as evidence that these kids must be acting because there was a press event and they had you know Emma Gonzales and David Hogg were seen smiling for a photograph that they took with the with the journalists and all I can think is when somebody holds it up as evidence oh they smiled it’s like okay have you ever been to a funeral? Have you ever been to a deathbed? I have watched people die in a hospital, people I loved, and there are moments over the person who is dying where you exchange a smile with loved ones. You smile. It just, it happens. It’s your face is built to do it. And you smile for photos, and you smile for all sorts of reasons. You smile as you give a eulogy sometimes, it proves nothing.

0:27:16
PR: Yeah, it’s ridiculous to think that a person has to be crippled with grief for X amount of time.

BR: Perpetually.

PR: Grief is a thing that in any level of sadness, we’ve all felt sad in our lives, and any given time you may find something funny, you might laugh at something, you might be happy to see someone, you might exchange a happy memory I mean, there’s there a multitude of reasons why you would smile and that…

CW:  You can even be in the throes of grief and still smile depending on the circumstances. I mean there’s situations where people find themselves laughing at funerals and they don’t know why they can’t figure it out, but it’s it’s a gut reaction emotions are strange things.

BR: You know, that’s just what I find just flat-out ignorant. Any psychologist can, this is not, this is not a shock, this is not a surprise, any psychologist will tell you that people handle grief in different ways. Some will smile, some will, it’s not, even if they’re laughing at a joke, so what? That there’s, there’s literally no connection between the fact that the parent of a slain child smiled or laughed in the days afterwards. There’s no connection between that and suggesting that they didn’t suffer some tragedy. There’s literally nothing there.

PR: Yeah, and even if they didn’t feel anything, just theoretically, if they didn’t feel sad about their child and somehow were just fine, that still doesn’t say it’s a conspiracy. I mean, even if I grant you what you think is happening, you’ve made no, no, you’ve provided no evidence.

0:28:53
CW: I mean that somebody who is, shows absolutely no signs of grief, it’s possible that they just don’t show it externally. It’s possible that they are emotionally stunted and don’t feel the same things we do.

PR: Sure. They could be a terrible human being for all I know, but it still doesn’t prove anything.

CW: I have known way more emotionally stunted people than I have known crisis actors.

PR: Same. Yeah. Same.

BR: Well it was just it was just such a bizarre I mean to somebody who either has a background in psychology or really is an adult or has I mean just anybody who’s…

CW: Ever been to a funeral.

BR: Right.

PR: Ever experienced life. Yeah. It’s just so bizarre like what in the hell are you talking about?

0:29:39
BR: And it was so self-evidently bullsh**, I’m like, but I mean this is one of the things they’re hanging their hat on. So there was that and that’s again, that’s just, it’s just bizarre, but that’s what they want with it.

0:29:51
CW: And it’ll come up again.

0:29:52
PR: It’s likely.

BR: It’ll come up again. March up that hill, buddy. Knock yourself out. And then there was another case of where this is basically just a misreading or misunderstanding of human psychology and human nature. Just like flat out. And then in addition, again, there’s lots of different versions. One of them was a photographic proof. So yes, so there was photographic proof that in fact, one of the children who was allegedly killed, who was killed, was actually still living. And this was a case of a six year old girl named Emily Parker, who was in fact shot to death in a school massacre. And this has been widely reported, this is non-controversial to non-idiots. However, a lot of the conspiracy people said, well, no, hold on here, because as it turns out, they say, no, Emily was photographed with President Obama.

0:30:40
CW: Because that’s what you do if you have faked your own death or had your parents fake a death. You show up and get photographed with the president.

0:30:46
BR: Yes, that is the logic behind this.

0:30:50
CW: What is the premise that they are basing this on? How do they know it’s Emily?

0:30:57
BR: Well, as presidents often do, except the current president, they want to go reassure the victims of the tragedy.

0:31:07
CW: Offer some consolation.

0:31:09
BR: Yeah, condolences.

0:31:10
CW: Which also often comes with photo ops.

0:31:13
BR: It does, it does, yeah. I’m trying to reassure a nation that this is this is something you’re concerned about. And Obama visited with the families of the victims and including the Parker family. And there is a photograph of a girl that looks a bit like Emily Parker wearing…

0:31:30
CW: And the Parkers only had one child, right?

BR: They had more than one child.

CW: Oh, so it might have been a child besides Emily.

BR: Yes, perhaps a sister about the same age. Which she has. Yes. So I imagine it might look like somewhat… In a identical or similar dress because of course there’s more than one type of dress. Dresses are not usually not unique.

CW: So there was a dress that Emily was seen in, I’m assuming she perhaps was killed in this dress?

BR: I don’t know if she was killed in the dress. But there are photographs of her… There’s a photograph of Emily Parker in a dress wearing a dress of the particular pattern or cut right and then a similar looking girl wearing a nearly identical or identical dress about the same age was photographed of Obama in association with the Sandy Hook Massacre.

PR: That’s evidence of a ghost though that’s not evidence of a conspiracy right?

CW: I can’t think of any other explanation because all dresses are one-of-a-kind items yeah they’re each made by magical elves that never use the same pattern

0:32:27
PR: I’ve never seen the same dress used twice in my entire life.

CW: Well as somebody who has siblings Parents often buy the same dress for two sisters or the same shirt for two boys, because they want to take a cute photograph of the whole family and they want people to match

0:32:41
PR: Sure, or and I mean that what it in what if it is the same dress. I mean my brother and I shared clothes growing up and like just you know the sister may have died but I mean I don’t think that precludes wearing her clothes or just throwing them out. I mean if the kids comfortable wearing them I mean it just to me again it’s like…

CW: She might have even chosen to wear that dress because it reminded her of her sister and she was you know she it was a whole act of love and remembrance.

0:33:15
BR: And it goes back to exactly what you said, the conspiracy doesn’t even make sense on its own premises. If you’re really trying to tell us that Emily Parker was not killed in the massacre and that the story that she’s dead is false, you don’t have her photographed with the President of the United States and circulate that photograph. That is the last thing you do.

0:33:39
CW: Well, it’s that conundrum that conspiracy theorists fall into in that they think that people are incredibly, unbelievably intelligent and complex and able to weave these tales and pay off all these people and get everything so organized to pull off some grandiose plan, but they’re also so stupid that they have their main crisis actor photographed with the president the day after the tragedy.

0:34:07
PR: Yeah, that’s ridiculous. I mean this country has successfully protected more than 18,000 people in the Witness Protection Program. Think of this, this is since 1971. 18,000 people have been able to disappear from public record and pick up a life somewhere else and this is the government organizing this. Not once have we cracked that. Okay, they can’t seem to not hire the same three people every single time a crisis happens. I mean, it’s insulting to our intelligence.

0:35:07
BR: Yeah, and when you point this you really does that does that make sense to you? I mean I’m not trying to be insulting let me just let me just repeat back what you just told me let me just rephrase and I’ll say and Okay. So yes, so there’s that one and then there’s another case in the Sandy Hook shooting incident in which I got an email from a guy who challenged me to explain the fact that he had found information that Adam Lanza was listed as having died on December 13th.

0:35:38
CW: The day before he killed everybody.

0:35:40
BR: Before he killed everybody. So I got this email back in 2013 and this person said, you know, he says, and it was interesting because the reason I replied to this, and I wrote it up for Skeptic & Query Magazine, was I sensed that the person was a conspiracy theorist but open to some logic.

0:35:58
CW: He wasn’t fully, fully down the rabbit hole yet.

0:36:00
BR: Yeah, yeah, and he tried to be making this, and he was sort of like, you know, I honestly don’t understand this. He didn’t come at me, you know, hey, Mr. Shill. It was…

CW: The email was not in all caps and sprinkled with word salad. It was not. It was not. So anyway, his basic question was, can you help explain why the Social Security death index would list Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza as having died on December 13th, 2012, the day before the Sandy Hook shooting. Now, I hadn’t looked into this particular angle before. Again, there are dozens or hundreds of angles and little tidbits. I mean, this is what conspiracy theorists do. They do anomaly hunting and if anything seems weird, out of the hundreds of hours of reportage and video and footage and photographs, they comb through all this stuff, because they’ve got time on their hands. And if anything doesn’t seem normal to them, such as a parent who’s lost a child smiling, if that seems weird, then they…

0:37:05
CW: Then it’s a gotcha.

0:37:06
BR: Then it’s a gotcha, like, wow, look at this.

0:37:08
CW: Well, this is at least something that isn’t tied to the vagaries of human psychology or some sort of strange photograph that you need to track down. It’s a piece of bureaucratic information.

0:37:19
BR: Exactly. So let me just briefly sort of touch on it because it is, it’s a fair question. The question of why a Sandy Hook parent might smile or laugh, it’s not a fair question, it’s a stupid question. This is a fair question. How is it you know, according to this data, so anyway, he sent me this thing and I replied to him and I said, okay, well, where are you getting this information? I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m just asking what’s your source here? So he sent me a link, he said that I confirmed it myself by searching the index via Ancestry.com and Genealogy Bank. Now keep in mind that these are private organizations. Ancestry.com is a private commercial organization. They may or may not use government records, but this is not the official capital O resource.

0:38:15
CW: I’ve got an uncle who has put a bunch of stuff on Ancestry.com, and my mother doesn’t like that fact because she says he got half the stuff wrong about her side of the family. That’s what I know about Ancestry.com.

0:38:29
BR: For what that’s meant, it doesn’t mean it’s all wrong, it just means that the information that is there is not necessarily reflecting accurate current government data.

PR: So you’re saying the coroner in the hospital doesn’t report to Ancestry.com?

0:38:43
BR: I don’t think that. They might pull from it, but that’s not…

0:38:46
CW: He said something about the Social Security office, correct? Is it something connected to some sort of index, a death index?

BR: Yeah, a Social Security death index is what was what the phrase was.

CW: So those two websites, Ancestry.com and Genealogy Bank, pulled from that database to get that information?

BR: Apparently so.

CW: Okay.

BR: So and to be fair, I mean, again, to be fair, I was trying to dig into this and it does appear that there was an error that was made, at least according to the particular resources that I was sent. And the first thing I noted was, again, it goes back to the idea of anomaly hunting. Let’s say there’s a typo here, right? There’s a mistake, someone puts a wrong date in. What does that mean? And one thing that reminds me of is Elvis Presley conspiracies. And one of them is the idea that one way that we know he’s still alive is that his name is misspelled on his tombstone. Because apparently Elvis Presley’s middle name is Aaron, A-R-R-O-N, but it says A-R-O-N.

0:39:57
CW: Well, if it’s on his, technically it’s not a typo, if it’s on his tombstone, it’s a carvo. They’ve carved it incorrectly into stone.

0:40:10
BR: That’s true. Unless it’s typeset with the computer.

0:40:13
CW: So they had to work really hard to get it wrong. So are they saying that, well I don’t know, if Elvis was still alive you’d think he’d be able to supervise that saying, oh no no no man, my name does not have that extra letter. No, no. So here’s the thing, right? So as it turns out, Elvis wanted his name changed from the original Aron, A-R-O-N, to have two A’s. And so, I mean, there’s no mystery. That is known. That is not a controversial statement. That’s well known. But the idea that somehow Elvis got around, he’s like, it’s okay to fake my death because it didn’t spell the name quite right. Who thinks this? So the idea that even if Elvis Presley’s tombstone had a typo on it or a carvo, it means nothing.

0:41:02
CW: And it wasn’t!

0:41:03
BR: And it wasn’t!

0:41:04
CW: If his family said, you know, he always wanted to add an extra A because spelling it the other way is kind of dumb and he’s always, well I’m going to say that because my brother’s name is Aaron with two A’s and so that’s the right way to spell it. So if it’s well known that his family knew about his wishes and decided to put that on the tombstone, then it’s not even an error.

BR: Yeah, it is a non-thing. It’s just the result of people not researching Elvis’s life and wishes before they come up with cockamamie theories as to why he’s still alive.

0:41:35
BR: So in response to that, I wrote back to this guy and I said, OK, well, I will try and sort of poke around, try to figure out why it was that if this listing is incorrect. And as we’ve talked about before, before you try and find out why something happened, make sure that it happened.

0:41:53
PR: Yeah.

0:41:54
BR: It’s entirely possible that the data set he’s drawing from is flawed and that it doesn’t actually reflect the official. So again, there’s layers here. But the first thing I said was, okay, well, what are you implying? I mean, let’s just say that you’re right. Let’s just say that Adam Lanza was actually killed on December 13th, the day before the shooting. So what? Let’s just say that’s right. So are you saying that someone else did the shooting? What did you…

0:42:26
CW: Well, obviously, we’re living in the world of Minority Report, where Tom Cruise got information from sentient psychics in a bathtub of goo to find out that Adam Lanza was going to kill all these people so that they went back in time and killed him first.

0:42:42
PR: But then he went back in time and hid behind the theater and he still successfully. So little did Tom Cruise know Adam Lanza did it in his own past. So this is getting complicated.

BR: Yeah, this is getting mind-boggling. So again, either you believe that Lanza was alive the day he committed the crime or you think he was dead. So just posing this conspiracy theory causes a problem for your own conspiracy theory.

0:43:10
CW: What do you mean he was a zombie and killed the kids as a risen dead being? Or do you mean he was killed before and then replaced with an actor?

0:43:22
BR: Right, I mean, so does this mean that somebody else did the shooting or the shooting didn’t happen or that someone else killed the teacher? And it doesn’t, questioning this doesn’t clarify anything. In fact, like most conspiracy gotchas. It just makes the matter even worse, it just digs more of a hole

0:43:44
PR: Yeah, and it just it makes you have to you know and immediately what comes to mind is I’m like okay off the top of my head I’m guessing it they probably are trying to say that the the real Adam Lanza was killed and then they put in a Doppelganger or whatever and he did it so that they could blame that guy but then it’s like well if the government killed him then they wouldn’t need there to be a death report the day before it happened they would hide the body he would disappear.

CW: The government is in charge of the Social Security system as well.

PR: Yeah, he would disappear he wouldn’t he wouldn’t be killed and then recorded as dead because then we find And then it’s like, and what? Like this still happened?

0:44:29
CW: Or why is there a need to have Adam Lanza be the guy who it’s pinned on? Why not just, hey the crisis actor, who’s going to commit the murders, and use his name?

PR: Sure, why not?

0:44:42
CW: And then put him into witness protection!

PR: Witness protection, no one figures that one out.

0:44:45
BR: Yeah, so I wrote back to him, so here’s the question, is it more likely that A, somebody somewhere made a simple typo and that Adam Lanza was actually killed December 14th as evidence in dozens of witnesses say first hand, or B, that Lanza actually died a day earlier and that some unknown person caused the Sandy Hook shooting for reasons nobody has explained and Lanza was being blamed for it, again for reasons that aren’t clear, but which of these two is based in reality?

0:45:16
CW: That’s a very straightforward and yet also Bayesian sort of question. You have to look at the odds. Okay, what are the odds that this same data group can be explained by another thing? And overwhelmingly I would have to go with typo.

BR: Occam’s razor, right? And so this, and again, the idea that, to be crystal clear, I have not sorted out exactly the origin of this mistake. My best guess, having spent some time looking into this, is that it is what we often call a mistake, a typo. Somebody, some, or some government drone put the wrong data in. And so, again, keep in mind here, that the reason this is significant to the conspiracy theorist is because it’s within the context of a shooting that they think is suspicious. Now, people make mistakes on things all the time. At the DMV, on your Starbucks order, on your water bill. There are countless mistakes that nobody cares about. Oh, I got charged an extra ten cents for this. Oh, they have the wrong address, the wrong zip code. I get my mail anyway, but it’s one off. Yeah, it’s not significant. It is a non thing unless it happens within the particular context of something. Well, anything and it goes back to anomaly hunting. Anything you think is weird is going to be seen in the light of a conspiracy. What’s the hidden sinister message? What’s the hidden sinister message of you not getting two pumps of vanilla in your latte? You got one pump. What does that mean?Think about it, sheeple.

0:47:14
CW: One positive notion of all the Sandy Hook conspiracy theories that I found as I just kind of did like a shallow dive, as we said, we can’t really do a deep dive and keep our sanity here, is that many very mainstream publications front and center came out with debunk, debunk, debunk. They knock them down one by one. Good on you, journalists. Did you look into any coverage of these theories and debunkings?

BR: There was a piece that the Huffington Post did, which I was grateful for, because it saved me trouble having to dig in. And to be fair, when I see these debunkings, I usually take the next step to look at them myself. I don’t just like, oh, they debunked it, because I don’t know, I’m not sure who they are.

0:48:02
CW: Well there’s a lot of stuff the Huffington Post has gotten wrong.

0:48:05
BR: Yeah, exactly.

0:48:06
CW: But when they do get something right, I’m grateful for it because they’ve got such a wide reach.

0:48:11
BR: Right. So there was a piece in the Huffington Post that talked about this specific issue. And I’ll just quote briefly from it. It says, The mistake may not have been made by the Social Security Administration. The death master file, a database with information on millions of dead people that is used to prevent identity theft is compiled from social security records of Americans whose deaths have been reported to the SSA, the Social Security Administration. And whoever reported Lanza’s death may have made an error. Again, government makes minor errors all the time. And unless it’s something that affects our livelihood or shuts off our water, it’s not that big a deal. And the fact is that even if the Social Security Administration made a mistake, it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. In this Huffington Post piece, it says that between May 2007 and April 2010, more than 36,000 people were reported as dead by the SSA, although they were still alive, according to CNN research. So 36,000 people were listed as having been dead.

CW: Now, how many of those people went out and shot up a school the next day?

BR: You know, the only one that anyone cares about, unless the checks aren’t coming in, is Adam Lanza.

0:49:24
CW: Well, and we hear all the time about dead people showing up to vote. It could just be that the Social Security Administration has listed them as dead before they are. And we all know about people still receiving Social Security checks after they have passed away. I’ve known situations just in my own circle of friends where they’re like, you know, my father died two years ago and I’m still getting stuff from social security and I keep trying to write to them and get them to clear it up.

0:49:50
BR: So yeah, so again, it’s a case of where, you know, the people that are promoting these school shootings and the false flag stuff, they’re just they’re just looking for anything weird. Any anomaly is going to be latched onto as a gotcha, like explain this. Well, you know, there’s nothing to explain. When you take a deeper look at it, so what? Okay, yeah, a typo happened, and typos happen all the time. The only reason you care is because this was involved with the Sandy Hook thing. And so, again, it’s confirmation bias, right? It’s remembering the hits and forgetting the misses. And I guarantee you that the conspiracy guy that contacted me ignores 99% of the minor mistakes, errors, typos, undercharges, overcharges, things that aren’t quite right in his life.

0:50:43
CW: In his daily life, yeah.

0:50:44
BR: Except for this one, which is the smoking gun that something’s not kosher with the Sandy Hook story.

0:50:51
CW: Now you took the time and put the effort in to look into this for him and to email him back with a succinct explanation for what you thought it was. What were you met with? Did you get an email back from him in all caps with word salad or did he seem to take your advice to heart?

0:51:08
BR: Well, in this particular case, I got a response back. I have it right here. I’ll just quote it. He says, “thank you. It’s good to see a mainstream source finally addressing it. I think what disturbed me most was how close I came to thinking maybe there was something to this claim. I knew it had to be a mistake, but what an absolutely irresponsible mistake to make. Perhaps data entry has been outsourced as well. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to respond.”

0:51:32
CW: Americans can make mistakes and typos.

0:51:34
PR: Yeah, I was going to say, we are just fine at that. Have you ever been to the DMV?

BR: That’s what they do.

PR: Have you ever gotten a letter from the IRS? Seriously, these are all people that are fallible just like the rest of us.

BR: And often they have other departments within the DMV and IRS that are responsible for fixing the mistakes the other departments make. So it’s like there’s like different layers like yeah we fix the mistakes everybody else makes. And then there’s other people that fix their mistakes.

0:52:02
PR: Yeah, there’s like a guy at the very bottom, there’s a guy in the basement in the back corner of a storage room with a typewriter and a red stapler on his desk.

0:52:10
CW: We do have a whole department of corrections in this country.

BR: It’s like Brazil.

CW: Well, that’s fantastic that it sounds like you kind of pulled him back from a precipice.

0:52:20
BR: I think so, yeah.

0:52:22
CW: He might have been going head first into that giant rabbit hole that we all don’t want to dig into.

0:52:28
BR: Yeah, I was pleased that he took the time. And again, part of the reason that I think it worked out this way is that I didn’t just trash it. I contacted him and said, you don’t sound like a kook. Maybe you are, but you’re coming to me with a notable lack of all caps. And I respect that. And because of that, I will make a sincere, legitimate, slightly more than a half-assed attempt to try and sort this out for you. And I think he responded to that. It wasn’t just me like, well, you just do it. I was like, all right, legitimate question. Let me look into it.

0:53:02
CW: And a note to all kooks who want to waste Ben’s time. Don’t come at him in all caps with word salad. Disguise your kooky question in normal language with some politeness and he’ll spend some time on you.

0:53:16
BR: Or I’ll forward it to one of my Squaring the Strange co-hosts and ask them to dig into it.

PR: Well you’ll just get a response back from me that’s just, oh come on man! That’s it, that’s all you’re going to get from me.

BR: Well I do have to say that just sort of in follow-up to that, I mean even though that particular case he did seem to be genuinely open to alternative explanations for it. You know, the piece that I wrote for Life Science on the Sandy Hook conspiracy case, that got me hate mail for months, in fact, years.

0:53:49
CW: I’m not surprised.

0:53:51
BR: That story probably got me as much or more hate mail than anything else I’ve written, and months and years later. In fact, to this day, six years later, I still occasionally get emails from people who read that who accuse me, I’m part of the conspiracy, I’m part of the shill.

0:54:13
CW: Disinformation agents.

0:54:14
BR: Yeah, yeah, and it’s, and you know, we’ve touched on this before in other episodes, but part of it is because there’s this natural adversarial stance that they take. And the assumption is that if you are trying to clear up or clarify or debunk or explain a conspiracy claim, it’s because either you are part of the conspiracy or you’re just brainwashed.

0:54:43
CW: Well, and the really, really disheartening, just sickening thing that I’m sure you’ve seen the videos of these conspiracy theorists who very forcefully and very bluntly, they think they’re doing the right thing, they go up to the relatives of victims. And pick fights with them and verbally harass them, sometimes physically harass them. And I believe it was one of the, there was a reverend from one of the church massacres who lost his daughter in the church shooting. And I sat there horrified watching these two conspiracy buffs, an older man and his wife just, you know, you’re going to hell and you’re a demon and blah, blah, you know, just pitching a fit at this poor guy who’s lost his daughter. And yeah, I’m not sure what can be done about that, but you know, the more people we can pull back from the precipice like you did with that fellow, the better.

0:55:39
PR: Yeah. And as a parent, I mean, you know, my son, when he was just four years old in pre-k, you know, we got a letter home that was like, we are going to be doing active shooter training with a police officer, you know, in a couple weeks or something. And just my heart sunk reading that letter that I’m like I’ve got my four-year-old kid in a pre-k school and you know and we live in a nice area and you know nothing really happens around here and and but it’s like that this thing this is something that schools do now and and my son knows something about dealing with someone walking into his school with a gun I mean all through elementary and high school, it was never a thing. I mean nobody nobody thought about something like that happening and sure it had happened a couple times throughout history but nobody thought of it as a real threat and mind you statistically it’s still a very very slim chance.

CW: We could do a whole another show on the realities of statistics. Whether, you know, what is a danger versus what is a perceived danger. People want to take take active steps against.

0:56:56
PR: Yeah. And I think that the big thing for me with these conspiracy theorists and especially the ones that go after the families and the parents and how dare you. I’m fairly confident I’ll never have to deal with this just again statistically but if if something ever happened to my family because of one of these situations, you know The last thing I would need is someone getting up in my face about what happened first off – what the fuck do you think you’re gonna achieve by doing this to begin with even if you think you’re right?

0:57:28
CW: Well half the time it’s it’s to create a sensational YouTube video, right? because they immediately upload these and then it adds to the pile of what they call anomalies because they get a parent riled up and you just that the fact that that your son brought home a flyer about saying they’re gonna have an active shooter drill that just enabled you to imagine what it would be like yeah to be the parent of a victim in one of these situations and that brings it home that oh my god what these people deal with and then on top of it you get these apples trying to pick a fight to get a YouTube video saying, I just accosted this crisis actor and look at how they’re reacting. See how angry they are? They don’t like the fact that we’re seeing through them. If they were really a grieving parent, they wouldn’t react this way. Are you kidding?

0:58:15
BR: Fortunately, that sort of behavior is widely condemned. I mean, other than in some very, very fringes that Alex Jones nutters virtually everybody says that’s out of line and there’s been cases where people have been arrested for harassing them it is a problem and it is a serious problem it’s devastating for the family but it needs to be kept in perspective.

0:58:44
CW: Tt’s really the new version of picketing a soldier’s funeral being Westboro Baptist Church idiot and throwing a fit at somebody’s funeral.

0:58:55
BR: And even in those cases, the last few times that I heard anything about the Westboro Baptist Church’s picketing funerals, they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters who were giving nothing but love and support for the families. you know society does largely recognize that these are fringe assholes. It doesn’t make it okay but it’s just the comforting thing is that most people 99 point whatever are like you know what this is unacceptable even if you think as Pascual said even if you think this is true you know you back off.

0:59:35
PR: Go to your little conspiracy message boards, leave the families alone, because even if you subscribe to these conspiracies and even if you think this sort of thing happens, it baffles me to think that you would think that every single time something happens it is 100% that. The fact that you would brush off any possibility that this could just be done by someone as a horrible act, which history has proven happens all the time, I mean at least on a long enough timeline.

CW: That’s if you believe history.

PR: Right and so it’s just like okay so now every single time people are killed in mass it’s a conspiracy and again just go back to your little hole and talk about it with your idiot friends and just don’t see a lot of people in in everyone’s face all the time I mean those do make the news but even just getting on YouTube and then just commenting about it on like a mainstream news piece I mean every news piece I ever see there’s always a bunch of conspiracy theorists clogging up the conversation and and to me it’s just you know these people noise that does nothing but hurt people. There’s no good to it.

1:01:00
CW: There’s like a spectrum. As I mentioned at the top of this segment, I just ran into somebody last week on Facebook who was absolutely convinced that the Vegas shooting was being covered up and there were multiple shooters and this and that. Yeah, there’s gonna. There’s a there’s actually a lot of people who believe that these anomalies signify something right sometimes They’re really cloudy like as the person who wrote to Ben sometimes They’re really cloudy about what exactly it means and it just unsettles them and it just kind of puts in their head there’s something bigger at work here that I don’t quite grasp and I and the people are being misled and then Incrementally you go down that spectrum and you end up with people harassing the families. And the more we can do to put critical thinking skills out there to limit the pool of people in that first group the less we’re gonna have in that second more dangerous group. Yeah, I agree. And so keep fighting the good fight.

1:01:55
PR: Yeah. People like us doing these podcasts I’m hoping, you know, the fact that we we do have a pretty distinct lack of strong pushback from people tells me that you know at least what we’re saying is being considered thoughtfully enough not to come back with angry reactions and the times we have been corrected…

1:02:14
BR: To be fair, we do have smart listeners

1:02:17
PR: We do.

CW: We’re preaching to the choir as many skeptical podcasts do and I doubt the person who harangued me and my friend on Facebook is listening. She’s not, but somebody who knows her might be listening.

1:02:30
PR: That’s what, that’s my hope.

1:02:31
CW: And it’s, it’s all kind of a grassroots kind of person to person viral outreach.

1:02:35
PR: Yeah.

1:02:36
CW: You’re hoping that if you arm people with, you know, even just that phrase you used. So that makes sense to you.

1:02:41
PR: Yeah.

1:02:41
CW: Somebody might be able to use that to sort of make somebody consider, Oh, well, I guess that doesn’t make sense. I guess it should be a typo I guess yeah Elvis did want his middle name spelled with two A’s you know and then little bit by bit.

BR: That makes sense to you?

PR: One last thing I would I would just wanted to say real quick is that if you are a parent don’t hold back from telling people what you feel about things like this because I think that it’s important that people see the real-world effect of perpetuating nonsense like this because even if they do believe it maybe it’ll give them a little bit of pause when it comes to talking about it out loud.

1:03:20
CW: Yeah and the Parkland shooting I am buoyed up with hope every time I see one of those kids one of those high school kids who’s old enough to defend themselves every time I see them completely give the smackdown to some who’s insinuating they’re lying about their friends dying. I don’t want to say I get any enjoyment out of a mass shooting of children, but I do get a very heartened feeling seeing them stand up for themselves.

1:03:50
BR: And we saw that recently with Laura Ingram from Fox News. I mean, sponsors were bailing on her show. And that’s exactly what people need. I mean, that’s what they respond to. They may not respond to the brainwashed liberal left, but when suddenly sponsors are saying that’s not acceptable.

1:04:11
CW: Hit them in the pocketbook.

(MUSIC)

1:04:14
PR: Hey guys, Pascual here. I’m jumping in at the last minute here right before we release to do a little update. We have a late-breaking development relating to the Sandy Hook conspiracy mongers and it’s good news for skeptics and all reasonable people with any sense of empathy. Late on Monday, April 16th, after we taped this episode, two lawsuits were filed against Jones, Infowars, and Free Speech Systems LLC, a related company, for defamation. The lawsuits are on behalf of three parents of Sandy Hook victims, Mr. Neil Heslin, who lost his six-year-old son, and Leonard Posno and Veronique De La Rosa, who lost their son as well. These parents maintain that they have been harmed by Jones’ repeated statements that the Sandy Hook massacre never happened. As a result, they have endured mental anguish and repeated death threats from Alex Jones’s audience. Each lawsuit is seeking over a million dollars in damages, but more precisely, the parents just want the lies to stop. Whether these suits will be successful remains to be seen, but with Jones recently admitting during a custody battle that the so-called quote-unquote character he portrays on Infowars as an act, as well as the fact that these parents are private citizens, not public figures, there are a few signs that the parents may have a solid case. We shall see, and we wish those parents all the best in their pursuit of justice and peace. We would like to thank our sponsor-level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or just throwing us a buck or two per episode, check out patreon.com forward slash squaringthestrange. Every bit helps us keep the lights on here in Strange Studios and we could not keep bringing you content without the support of our generous friends. If you’re looking to provide moral support, head on over to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Every positive review helps us move up the podcast charts. Thanks again, strangers.

1:06:29
So that about does it for us this week. Next week, we’re going to be talking about MDE’s near-death experiences.

1:06:36
So that should be a pretty exciting episode, but until then, we’ll see ya. Squaring the Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC, copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriek Back. Additional music by Memory, Guitard and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content producer, Celestia Ward. Audio engineering, producing, and editing provided by Pascual Romero at Kronos Creative Studios. Additional support provided by Ashley Romero, and of course, our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring the Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Cronus Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.

1:07:23
you you you

Transcribed with Cockatoo