Mass shootings since the one at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, have attracted 9/11-truther-style conspiracy theories. The “facts” of these theories don’t matter, because they don’t add up to anything real. Believers in these theories—a mix of nihilists, fantasists, anti-government extremists, and rubes—find and encourage each other on Facebook, YouTube, and other Web sites. And now they have come for the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
On Tuesday night, David Hogg, who recorded interviews with fellow-students while hiding in a closet after the shooting last Wednesday, and who since has become one of the more prominent of the school’s students advocating for stricter gun-control laws, was compelled to address the ridiculous lies being spread about him—that somehow he was not really a survivor of a mass shooting but some kind of propaganda puppet. “I’m not a crisis actor,” Hogg said on Anderson Cooper’s CNN program. “I’m someone who had to witness this and live through this, and I continue to be having to do that.”
One of the most prominent Web sites pushing and encouraging these hoax theories is a credentialed member of the White House press corps: the Gateway Pundit. Last year, Andrew Marantz wrote about the site’s director, Jim Hoft, and its White House correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, for The New Yorker. On Wednesday, he spoke about the site and other right-wing media figures—Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Loomer—pushing Parkland hoaxes. “It’s not about getting to the truth, it’s about a kind of warfare,” Marantz said, noting that Gateway Pundit and other sites had taken this approach after past mass shootings. “The blog has to have a response to what’s happening, and the response has to be counter to what they perceive to be the mainstream, CNN, anti-Trump narrative.”
More mainstream outlets have in turn tried to cover these hoaxers, in an attempt to hold them accountable for spreading misinformation: performing fact-checks, writing on the meta-narrative, doing hostile interviews. And there are some consequences—on Wednesday, Jim Hoft announced that his panel at this week’s upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference had been cancelled following his blogging about Parkland. But Marantz doesn’t think that any of this will cost Hoft, in terms of his standing or his followers. “There’s no reason for them to stop,” Marantz said. “There’s no reason to think that this hurts them in any way. It’s part of the brand to be an outsider and a renegade and speak truth that the mainstream is too scared to hear.”
