Up at Florida Atlantic University, communications professor James Tracy has been regaling students for a decade with his thoughts on 9-11, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Kennedy assassination. He's basically that uncle who spends all week reading Infowars so he can corner you at Thanksgiving to tell you how the CIA really killed JFK.
Tracy's conspiracy theories have gone national this week, though, as he's tackled the Sandy Hook massacre. The tenured professor wonders whether Adam Lanza's murder of 26 kids and adults was actually just an elaborately staged exercise by Obama's government -- or really, if it ever happened at all!
Tracy has been writing about the massacre for weeks on his site, memoryholeblog.com, but the posts have gone viral after the Sun Sentinel picked them up for a story yesterday.
His writing is lengthy, complex, and uh, lennnngthy, but the Sun-Sentinel picks up on some highlights. After constructing a detailed timeline, he writes:
"While it sounds like an outrageous claim, one is left to inquire whether the Sandy Hook shooting ever took place -- at least in the way law enforcement authorities and the nation's news media have described."His basic thesis is that witness reports, early TV news coverage and other sources suggest that multiple shooters were actually arrested for the killing spree, but then police and patsy reporters conspired to pin the whole thing on Lanza.
Journalists capable of exercising a modest degree of autonomy and personal insight would have clearly recognized such leads, thereby extending them to a more rigorous examination of law enforcement spokespersons and the broader Newtown community. Instead, the news media once again wholly abdicated any such responsibility to serve the public by unquestioningly parroting official pronouncements and carefully instructing their audiences on exactly how to interpret the event.So what really happened in Sandy Hook? Tracy wonders if the whole thing wasn't an elaborately staged event.
"Was this to a certain degree constructed?" he asks the Sun Sentinel. "Was this a drill?"
Don't worry, though, Tracy isn't saying for sure that all those kids didn't die, he's just here to ask questions.
"Something most likely took place," he said. "One is left with the impression that a real tragedy took place ... Overall, I'm saying the public needs more information to assess what took place. We don't have that. And when the media and the public don't have that, various sorts of ideas can arise."
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