Soon enough, the White Helmets were called into suspicion; the fact that they speedily arrived on the scene to render aid was deemed suspicious. The accusations have toggled between suggesting that the White Helmets faked video footage of the attacks and that they actually carried them out, murdering civilians; in either case, the implication is that the attacks were an attempt to justify Western military intervention in Syria. The claims aren’t very subtle: Russia’s ambassador to the European Union, Vladimir Chizhov, called one chemical attack a “staged event,” adding that the White Helmets were “already caught in the act with staged videos.”

Russian state media—Sputnik and RT—as well as a conspiracy-leaning site called 21st Century Wire that’s often described as sympathetic to the Russian government, began attacking the White Helmets as a terrorist organization in 2018, deeming them likely responsible for the chemical attacks in cooperation with the actual Syrian terrorist group Al-Nusra Front. (In June 2018, for example, both RT and Sputnik claimed that the White Helmets were preparing a “false flag chemical attack” in Idlib, Syria.) Drawing on their large volume of material, far-right bloggers in the United States started to echo the accusation.

The overall effect was to whitewash Assad’s deadly attacks on civilians, casting doubt on their source, and to make it sound as if anyone who talks about the brutality of the Assad regime is a mindless warmonger. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd attacked the White Helmets onstage, calling them “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for the jihadists and terrorists,” adding, “If we would listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would be encouraged to encourage our governments to go and start dropping bombs on people in Syria.” And Vanessa Beeley, a blogger at 21st Century Wire, claimed that the White Helmets’ work rescuing civilians is actually a sinister act of imperialist control. “Led by the US and UK this group is essential to the propaganda stream that facilitates the continued media and political campaign against the elected Syrian government,” she wrote in 2016, “and permits the US and NATO to justify their regime of crippling economic and humanitarian sanctions against the Syrian people.”

The term “false flag” itself has become more complicated over time. Jones and lesser-known conspiracists, for example, have sometimes said that an incident is a “hybrid:” partly real, partly staged by the government—the Las Vegas shooting as well as the Pulse nightclub massacre have been described that way. How exactly that could be is mind-bending, but it’s a way to point at a theory—the government had a hand in this—without having to interrogate it fully or prove it. (The theorizer might imply that the shooter was brainwashed or mind-controlled into carrying out the government’s dark scheme, but they often decline to be quite that explicit. Jones, for example, speculated that Stephen Paddock was “a patsy” or a victim of CIA brainwashing; InfoWars claimed that an unnamed government source said the attack might have been intended to “increase the Shadow Government’s Surveillance State.”)

Additional events identified as false flags have come to include ever-more-insignificant and far-flung incidents: Robert Ussery, the conspiracy theorist arrested for trespassing at the Sutherland Springs church, claimed that a hot-air-balloon crash outside Austin and even a biker shootout in Waco were both government-orchestrated false flags.

The logic of false flaggery has become so convoluted that Ussery and other lesser conspiracy theorists have said that Alex Jones is himself a false flag, a government plant designed for a sinister purpose. “Alex Jones promotes the hoaxes as real,” Ussery wrote darkly, and incorrectly, on his website. “He is a lying gatekeeper, a government sponsored traitor.”

Even the maker of Loose Change, Dylan Avery, has expressed alarm at the rise of false flag thinking. He told the Outline in 2018 that he sometimes felt alienated from the movement that his film helped create. “Before, when you said you believed in 9/11 Truth, it meant the original investigation was shoddy,” Avery said. “But you weren’t a nutjob. Now, as soon as something happens, people say it’s a false flag.”

How do ideas such as false flags—some of the most complex, unintuitive, hard-to-believe conspiracy theories on the planet—spread and gain such power and force? Kate Starbird, a researcher at the University of Washington, led a team that in 2017 released a study on the ways hoaxes and false flag theories proliferate online following mass shootings. They found that a few sites were central to sharing, spreading, and furthering hoax theories: BeforeItsNews.com, NoDisinfo.com, and VeteransToday.com (a normal-sounding site that frequently runs stories questioning the veracity of Sandy Hook and other mass shootings).

The team found that the conversation around false flags is, not surprisingly, fueled by “alternative” media sites, most of which have certain, easy-to-recognize themes and biases: hostility toward science and the mainstream media is common. “In addition to anti-globalist and anti-media views, we found content that was anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, and anti–climate science,” Starbird and her coauthors wrote. “Most alternative media domains contained accusations about the activities of George Soros and the Rothschilds, and almost all hosted articles referencing “pedophile rings” of high-powered people around the world.”

There was another important element: the same stories, sometimes verbatim, appeared on different sites, over and over again. “We found the same stories on multiple domains, sometimes as exact copies, but also in different forms,” the team noted. “This means that an individual using these sites is likely seeing the same messages in different forms and in different places, which may distort their perception of this information as it gives the false appearance of source diversity.”

I often saw the same thing in conspiracy news sources, the most intriguing source being a writer named Makia Freeman. That probably isn’t his real name (nothing matching showed up in public records). For years his byline appeared across the conspiracy-verse, on a variety of little-known sites: ToolsForFreedom.com, Wake Up World, Paranoia Magazine, The Daily Sheeple, and The Sleuth Journal, as well as the slightly better-trafficked Before It’s News. On one site, Freeman’s online bio said that he writes on “many aspects of the global conspiracy, from vaccines to Zionism to false flag operations and more, and also including info on natural health, sovereignty and higher consciousness.” As with the conspiracy sources Starbird studied, Freeman’s articles frequently appeared identically or near-identically across multiple sites, populating an information world that is, on closer inspection, a lot like a hall of mirrors.

The motives of sites such as Before It’s News or The Daily Sheeple can be hard to parse, beyond generating clicks through frightening, outrageous, and alarming headlines. Sometimes, though, the motives are a little clearer. That’s the case with NewsBusters.org, a site run by the conservative group Media Research Center. The MRC is funded largely by the Mercer family, who backed Trump and a host of other ultra-conservative causes. NewsBusters is focused on liberal media lies, and it is prominently shared by other conspiracy sites.

Starbird’s research also found that Twitter users who shared information from NoDisinfo and Veterans Today were more prone to sharing information from RT and Sputnik. In other words, there are unholy and chaotic alliances among state-sponsored actors, bots, trolls, and garden-variety conspiracy theorists to help advance untrue stories, funneling them from the farthest fringes into the mainstream.

One particularly stunning example was covered by journalist Adrian Chen, who wrote in 2015 about a “troll farm” in St. Petersburg, Russia, where an army of employees paid by the Internet Research Agency sat all day long, posting disinformation and trying to sow chaos around catastrophic events in the United States. Some were real natural disasters, while some were entirely false events: nonexistent fires, fake shootings. The Internet Research Agency, Chen found, possibly had ties to an oligarch who was an ally of Vladimir Putin. The “troll farms,” as Chen explained in the New Yorker, were also part of an effort to kneecap Internet-based organizing and weaken people’s confidence in what they saw online. “Trolling has become a key tool in a comprehensive effort by Russian authorities to rein in a previously freewheeling Internet culture,” he wrote, particularly after massive anti-Putin protests were organized on social media.

Most of the time, false flag conspiracy theories do not have far-reaching global implications. Usually, the effect of the theorists is to make the lives of mass casualty survivors very difficult, and the wider world does not necessarily hear about it. The harassment of the families in Sutherland Springs, for example, amounted to a couple of tiny national news blips.

Particularly painful for individual survivors is the idea of the crisis actor. For close to a decade, even as false flag peddlers harassed and terrorized people who had lost loved ones in mass shootings, much of the United States had never heard that term. That changed in February 2018, when a mass shooter killed seventeen people and wounded seventeen more at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Some of the teenagers who survived the Parkland attack became immediate and well-spoken advocates for gun control, transforming their pain and grief into political action. As they became more famous, students such as David Hogg and Emma González were subjected to intense hostility and false flag suspicions. It struck many of the usual suspects as just too tidy and contrived that they were attacked (with a gun) and immediately began fighting for gun control. But Hogg and González and the other Parkland teens responded forcefully to accusations that they were tools of the federal government. “I’m not a crisis actor,” Hogg told Anderson Cooper on CNN, a few days after the shooting. “I’m someone who had to witness this and live through this.”

Thus the wider world discovered the concept of the crisis actor. It first appeared, however, years earlier, immediately following the killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, on a number of conspiracy blogs that seized on a press release issued by a company called Visionbox. Located in Denver, Visionbox is an acting studio; a little over a month before the Sandy Hook shootings, the company announced that its students were available to help with “active shooter drills and mall shooting full-scale exercises.” They were clearly offering to help companies and law enforcement with such exercises, but conspiracy theorists seized on the phrasing, specifically a section that promised the students were willing to play civilians.

“The actors can play the part of the shooters, mall employees, shoppers in the mall, shoppers who continue to arrive at the mall, media reporters and others rushing to the mall, and persons in motor vehicles around the mall,” the release read. “Visionbox Crisis Actors can also play the role of citizens calling 911 or mall management, or posting comments on social media websites.” Two sites, Fellowship of the Minds and Memory Hole Blog, pounced on the press release as evidence that “crisis actors,” a term they quickly co-opted, were being hired to carry out fake events like Sandy Hook. And if the events were staged, then the victims—the dead and the wounded—were also faked, alive and well, perhaps, or wholly invented. Soon, James Tracy, the publisher and main author behind Memory Hole Blog, became embroiled in a feud with a Sandy Hook family over their murdered child, one that dragged on for years.

Lenny and Veronique Pozner were the parents of Noah Pozner, the youngest child to die in the mass school shooting. Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists insist that Noah never existed and thus never died. Or else they sarcastically insist that he died twice, once at Sandy Hook and again in Peshawar, Pakistan, two years later, where Noah’s photograph was displayed at a memorial for child shooting victims in Pakistan (although he was not represented as a victim of that shooting).

A father of four, James Tracy was for many years a professor of media studies at Florida Atlantic University. A syllabus for one of Tracy’s classes shows a very thoughtful reading list about the role of conspiracy theories in public life and conspiracy panics—the periodic sense we get in the United States that conspiracies are swamping us, taking over, and warping reality. But something changed for Tracy, and he went from teaching a syllabus related to conspiracy theories to spreading some of the most egregious ones. In December 2015, in an op-ed for the Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Pozners wrote that Tracy had begun harassing them after they demanded that conspiracy sites stop using Noah’s image.

“Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image,” they wrote. “We found this so outrageous and unsettling that we filed a police report for harassment. Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the ‘unfulfilled request’ was ‘noteworthy’ because we had used copyright claims to ‘thwart continued research of the Sandy Hook massacre event.’”

The Pozners also charged that Tracy was using his university credentials to bolster his assertions. In a response letter to the Pozners’ op-ed that was never published but that Tracy later read in court, he wrote, “The Pozners, alas, are as phony as the drill itself and profiting handsomely from the fake death of their son.”

Tracy was eventually fired for his writing on the Memory Hole Blog site, with FAU claiming that he hadn’t properly disclosed the blog as an “outside activity” that could potentially affect the university. Tracy promptly sued FAU, alleging wrongful termination and an abridgment of his rights to free speech, but he lost. He always maintained that he didn’t discuss Sandy Hook in class, and that outside of work he was just asking questions the media refused to consider. In a statement to CNN, he wrote that his research “led me to conclude that the nation’s media failed to provide an accurate, in-depth and sustained investigation of what took place at the school on the morning of December 14.”

The unanswered questions are how did Tracy come to hold the beliefs that he does, and how did they come to control his life to the extent that he lost his job and a good deal of his public standing? Tracy appeared frequently on conspiracy podcasts but never submitted to an interview with an actual journalist. In response to an interview request, he referred me to his attorney, Louis Leo IV, who repeated that Tracy never discussed Sandy Hook with his FAU students and his firing was illegal. “Tracy’s case has nothing to do with ‘Pozner’ (if that’s even a real name) or Sandy Hoax,” Leo wrote. “It’s about the First Amendment.”

In a phone conversation, Leo proved himself eager to join and even outdo his clients in mass-shooting denialism. “I think Sandy Hook was staged,” he said, then paused, and corrected himself. “I don’t like to use that because you can stage a real shooting. They were making things up. Nobody died.” The theory Leo and other Sandy Hook truthers subscribed to was that the school had been closed for years before the attack took place. “If you look at some parts of the school, it was in disrepair,” he said. “It was like a ghost school. It had been out of service. Hadn’t been functioning as a real school in a long time.”

“This category of recent conspiracy theorists is really a global network of village idiots,” Pozner told me by phone. “They would have never been able to find each other before, but now it’s this synergistic effect of the combination of all of them from all over the world. There are haters from Australia and Europe and they can all make a YouTube video in fifteen seconds.” Pozner was, as New York magazine noted, mildly interested in the fun, lighthearted kinds of conspiracy theories before his son died: Bigfoot, Area 51, the one about how the Denver Airport is a secret Illuminati hub. He would sometimes tune in to InfoWars in his car, but he didn’t take it, or Alex Jones, at all seriously.

After Noah died, when people like Jones started to call the attack suspicious (“I’ve looked at it,” Jones declared in 2014, “and undoubtedly there’s a cover-up, there’s actors, they’re manipulating, they’ve been caught lying, and they were pre-planning before it and rolled out with it”), Pozner took on a new mission. As Sandy Hook theories started ricocheting around the Internet, he thought he could probably talk some sense into the people spreading those theories, given that he was once a lot like them.

Pozner quickly found that trying to engage with conspiracy theorists just made him an object of threats and suspicion by an army of Internet personalities. For his trouble, Pozner was fixated on by two of the biggest Sandy Hook hoax peddlers, Tracy and Wolfgang Halbig. A grandfather from Florida, Halbig claims to be a former state trooper and “school safety expert.” He became a Sandy Hook denier early, making a speech before the Newtown Board of Education in 2014, saying that he wished only to find the truth about the murdered children. He has since made dozens of trips to Newtown, spending all of his pension and $100,000 more, and returning even as a growing chorus of Newtown dads let him know he’s in danger of an ass-kicking.

“I call it an illusion,” Halbig told the BBC, referring to Sandy Hook. “The biggest government illusion that’s ever been pulled off by Homeland Security.” He added, “I’ll be honest with you. If I’m wrong, I need to be institutionalized.”

When Pozner tried to contact Halbig, before he stopped working to persuade the deniers, he got a response from a different Sandy Hook denier. “Wolfgang does not wish to speak with you,” this person wrote, “unless you exhume Noah’s body and prove to the world you lost your son.”

Eventually, Pozner sued Halbig for invasion of privacy. Around the same time he filed the suit, he assembled what he called a “one-hundred-page book” about Halbig’s life to demonstrate what Pozner sees as his habit of lying and misrepresentation.

According to Pozner, Halbig’s interest in Sandy Hook was only the latest in a long line of similar obsessions. “Halbig gave other hoaxers and harassers copies of my TransUnion Comprehensive Background check, copies of my driver’s license, social security numbers of myself and family members, and photos if they donated money to his ‘Sandy Hook Justice’ nonprofit.” Pozner says. “He has sent thousands of harassing emails over the years: to me, to my attorney, to other victims’ families, to the school board members, to the police, to government officials, even to the FBI. I had to file charges with the police to get him to stop contacting me, not just with claims about my son and my family but about a whole host of other conspiracies that he was trying to raise money to pursue.”

Pozner points out that a retiree with grandchildren presumably has better ways to spend his time. “He doesn’t go fishing or get together with his buddies. He starts blasting out these harassing emails to the FBI, to governors, to police, to school districts, to crime victims, to my attorney who then charges me because every email he has to read for fifteen minutes. It’s a nightmare.” Pozner has spent, he says, thousands of dollars in legal bills “just in Halbig sending spam. It’s insane.”

None of this seemed to bother Halbig, who maintained a cherubically sunny demeanor at every public appearance. He was even thrilled when nine Newtown families brought suit against the manufacturers of the AR-15, the gun that the shooter, Adam Lanza, used to kill their children. “They’ll have to exhume the bodies to prove it was the AR-15 that actually killed the children,” he told New York giddily.

Halbig and Tracy are only the most well-known Sandy Hook deniers. There is also James Fetzer, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth, who has written about conspiracy theories since around 2000, beginning with JFK and accelerating into Sandy Hook denialism. His barebones blog has exposed everything he considers a false flag or an operation by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, which is a lot of things. A Holocaust denier, too, Fetzer maintained that Sandy Hook was “a FEMA drill to promote gun control,” one in which nobody died.

In an object lesson on the spread of conspiracism—and the ways it can immiserate everyone involved—sites like Fetzer’s succeeded in converting fifty-seven-year-old Lucy Richards of Brandon, Florida, to denialism. Richards was at one point a waitress, but according to court documents had been living on disability payments for thirteen years, diagnosed first with agoraphobia and then obsessive-compulsive disorder. She didn’t have a computer, but she had a cell phone. At some point, she started reading, and that reading took her to some strange places, among them InfoWars and James Fetzer’s website.

It’s difficult to tell what about the story affected her, what button it pushed, what triggered an apparently volcanic rage. On January 10, 2016, Richards called and emailed Lenny Pozner. “Look behind you,” one message read. “Death is coming to you real soon.”

“Death is coming to you real soon and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“LOOK BEHIND YOU, IT IS DEATH.”

Richards made little effort to mask her identity, but it took almost an entire year for her to be charged. She told her lawyer that she was “reared in a hellhole.” At the time she stumbled on Sandy Hook denialism, she’d been estranged from her family for years. In her mugshots, Richards is a ghastly figure, with stringy hair, a pasty face, and a desperate expression.

She was indicted on four counts of transmitting threats across state lines, a federal offense. A plea deal would have allowed her to serve her sentence of five months on house arrest, but Richards failed to show up for her initial sentencing hearing. She was arrested and sentenced to serve out her time in jail.

“I don’t know where my head and my heart were that day when I made the calls, but they were not in the right place,” Richards meekly told the court when she was sentenced. As part of her sentence, the judge forbade her from looking at conspiracy websites.

Lenny Pozner, meanwhile, found that his life had been devoured—or shaped, if we want to put it more neutrally—by his crusade against the “truthers,” a term he preferred not to use. (He dubbed them “hoaxers” instead.) A few years after Sandy Hook, he formed an organization called the HONR Network, devoted to fighting denial and other kinds of conspiracism he considered particularly toxic, the kind in which the families of murdered children are harassed. YouTube was where he focused most of his energy.

“The responsible parties are Facebook and Google and YouTube,” he said. He would file copyright complaints or a terms of service violation whenever a website or a video used photos of Noah taken by the Pozners. As often as not, Google and YouTube refused to respond or sent polite auto-replies rejecting the complaints as having no merit. “Fighting with Google is a constant,” he said.

Pozner made a case that he recognizes as unappealing for some: for more regulation and control of the Internet, arguing that this is the only thing that can pull us back from the brink. “I understand that the concept of greater user safety measures is unpopular with these social media platforms because of cost and ideology,” Pozner told me. “But we can’t sustain an Internet that is unsafe for users and overrun with content that causes mass delusion, violence, and a threat to democracy.”