Select date

March 2024
Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun

Where the ‘Crisis Actor’ Conspiracy Theory Comes From

22-2-2018 < Blacklisted News 152 354 words
 

The term ‘crisis actor’ has been in the news a lot lately, because conspiracy theorists have accused survivors of the Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, of being actors—people paid to pretend they witnessed a horrible tragedy that actually never happened and was instead staged by the government in order to garner the political will necessary to ban guns.


To be clear, there is no evidence this is actually the case. Conspiracy theorists have questioned the legitimacy of people who lived through a horrific shooting—watched their friends and classmates slaughtered—in an attempt to harass and silence their political activism. “Crisis acting” is now a term that’s constantly bandied about by the Alex Joneses of the world and has been used to explain away terrorist attacks such as the Boston Marathon bombing and the Bataclan Nightclub shooting, as well as most mass shooting events in the United States. It has become just as important as “false flag” in the conspiracy theory lexicon.



It wasn’t until relatively recently that conspiracy theorists were audacious enough to suggest that terrorist attacks and mass shootings actually didn’t happen at all.


An unrelated local news story was used as "proof" that Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg was an "actor." Image: CBS LA / YouTube



Wednesday, a video claiming that shooting survivor David Hogg was an "actor" briefly became the top trending video on YouTube before the company deleted it. The conspiracy is now so mainstream that Jimmy Kimmel addressed the stupidity of it on his show this week.


The resurgence of this conspiracy theory led me to attempt to track down the origins of the term "crisis actor." I spoke to an emergency response trainer who has used “role players” to simulate crises for 40 years and went down the rabbit hole to find its origins as a completely unfounded conspiracy theory. It turns out that “crisis actor” is a relatively new phrase for a relatively new conspiracy.


Read More...


Related:
BRIAN HOGG APPEARED ON CBS 6 MONTHS AGO, APPEARS TO BE GROOMED BY MEDIA


Print