It is a shameful fact concerning online discourse that school shootings, which continue to occur at alarming rates across America (per CNN), are sometimes co-opted into the narratives put forward by conspiracy theorists. The most notorious instance of this involved the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012, which left 20 children and six adults dead. Distressingly for the families of the victims, an online conspiracy theory soon emerged that claimed the atrocity was fake, and that those who had lost loved ones were “crisis actors.” Alt-right commentator Alex Jones, who pushed the false theory through his social media platforms, was later sued by the parents of a number of the victims, to whom he was ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages.
While the Sandy Hook conspiracy was disproven, a similar idea was put forth in January 2024, after several new caches of documents related to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were made public. The documents named numerous high-profile associates of the couple though the majority of the information contained within them was already public knowledge. Despite the documents not being the bombshells that some news outlets reported them to be, online conspiracists nevertheless claimed that a tragic school shooting in Iowa which saw two dead and six others injured was planned to distract from the fresh round of revelations regarding Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. There is zero evidence that this is the case.
