One of the more pervasive zombie myths still being propagated by the Sandy Hook denialist cult is the lie that Sandy Hook Elementary School quietly closed in 2008 and was therefore empty when Adam Lanza (who may or may not have even existed, depending on which wackadoo you’re dealing with) carried out his deadly attack on December 14th, 2012. This alleged closure was so quiet, in fact, that not a single local media outlet covered it.

This absurd fantasy seems to have originated with professional conspiracy theorist James Fetzer, a bloated carny who has been supplementing his retirement income with a series of increasingly insane (and lazy, based on the fact that nearly every word in “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” was lifted from a pre-existing blog entry) books declaring everything that has ever happened – from the moon landing to the Boston Marathon bombing – to be an elaborate fake. And despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary (including numerous photographs depicting a bustling school, years worth of PTA meeting minutes, school facilities surveys, news articles, job listings, etc.), Fetzer has seemingly based this outrageous claim entirely on a combination of outdated information and a total – and possibly intentional, though that may be giving him too much credit – misunderstanding of how the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine functions. That’s it.

But what is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (“The Wayback Machine”)? From Wikipedia:

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California, United States. The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001. It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a “three dimensional index.”

Since 1996, they have been archiving cached pages of web sites onto their large cluster of Linux nodes. They revisit sites every few weeks or months and archive a new version if the content has changed. Sites can also be captured on the fly by visitors who are offered a link to do so. The intent is to capture and archive content that otherwise would be lost whenever a site is changed or closed down. Their grand vision is to archive the entire Internet.

Hopefully you caught that. The Wayback Machine revisits sites “every few weeks or months”. This concept is reiterated later in the same article:

The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all tracked web site updates are recorded. Sometimes there are intervals of several weeks or years between snapshots.

And just in case it wasn’t already incredibly obvious, this is again stated very plainly – as a disclaimer – right there on their calendar view page:

So with that in mind:

“Arguably, the most compelling evidence that SHES had long been abandoned before the 2012 massacre is the testimony from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine of the school’s lack of of Internet activity from the beginning of 2008 through all of 2012.” pg. 34

Oof.

I can’t stress this enough: archived versions of websites, sporadically crawled by the Wayback Machine, are not at all synonymous with “Internet activity”. This claim demonstrates a level of technological ignorance best described as “absolutely staggering” (although it’s still not as egregious as the commenter who claimed “all internet connections” were “severed”, as if someone had walked into the school’s networking closets with a pair of gardening shears and just went to town).

“The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the Internet which uses a special software to crawl and download all publicly accessible World Wide Web pages. It was Jungle Server who first discovered that the Wayback Machine shows an absence of Internet activity from SHES since 2008 — the same year when the school was found to be contaminated with asbestos.” pg. 34

There is absolutely no evidence that Sandy Hook Elementary School was any more “contaminated” with asbestos in 2008 than it was in 1956, which is when the school was built. Just as my own home was no more contaminated with asbestos when I had the original siding replaced a few years ago than it was when it was built, which was sometime in the mid-50s (when asbestos building materials, including siding, were commonplace).

Since the book predictably does not provide a source for the asbestos claim, I was forced to trace it back to an entry on Maria Hsia Chang’s completely wretched “Fellowship Of The Minds”. Chang’s source is a single, short paragraph from the Newtown Bee’s website, published on November 7th, 2008. While no longer available at the provided URL, it is still accessible via – you guessed it – the Wayback Machine. You can view it for yourself here.

It reads:

The asbestos levels in Newtown schools pose no threat to the health or safety of those using the schools, according to Superintendent John Reed. The areas in the schools where there is evidence of asbestos — the ceiling above the high school pool, areas of the upstairs floor of the Middle School A wing and the girls’ and boys’ locker rooms, are also considered acceptable and safe.

Hopefully your reading comprehension is not as poor as Maria Chang’s, but if you’re at all confused, I’ll reiterate: in November of 2008, the asbestos levels in Newtown schools – which presumably included Sandy Hook Elementary, although it is not mentioned by name – presented no threat to students or faculty. So Chang’s own source does not corroborate her claim. And if Sandy Hook was “contaminated” enough to be closed (which it wasn’t), then where did that leave the high school and middle school, which were specifically called out for showing “evidence of asbestos”?

Furthermore, Sandy Hook Elementary School was given a 4 (out of a possible 4, indicating that there was “Not a problem”) for “Asbestos remediation” in the Connecticut Department of Education’s 2011 school facilities survey:

“To verify Jungle Surfer’s claim, I searched for SHES’s website, http://newtown.k12.ct.us/~sh” pg. 34

Here’s where things really go south: Sandy Hook’s website has not been located at http://newtown.k12.ct.us/~sh since the summer of 2006 (and it would change again in 2011). That’s when the webmaster for the Newtown public school district changed the address of every school’s site, not just Sandy Hook’s. And if you search The Wayback Machine for any of those old addresses, it returns very similar – if not even more extreme – results:

That Newtown changed the addresses for all of their school’s websites is not particularly difficult information to find – which I’ll show you in a moment – and it once again hammers home just how incompetent or deliberately dishonest this book’s researchers really are. They simply cannot be trusted to report the truth to their readers, and this is especially egregious when so much of this book is dedicated to vilifying the mainstream media.

Even though the address for Sandy Hook School is incorrect, the website for all of Newtown’s public schools was in fact http://www.newtown.k12.ct.us back in 2008. And plugging that into the Wayback Machine returns the following results:

The first thing that likely jumps out at you is – with the exception of a single snapshot taken in January of 2010 – a gap that exists between November of 2007 and July of 2011. I’ll explain the reason for this later, but for now, if you take a look at the very last snapshot before the break (taken on November 20th, 2007), you’ll see that the link provided for Sandy Hook Elementary School is http://www.newtown.k12.ct.us/shs:

This address is corroborated by the earliest edition of “The Sandy Hook Connection” (Sandy Hook’s official newsletter) that I was able to find, which is dated January 8th, 2009:

When you enter that address – the correct address – into the Wayback Machine, you got the following results:

This narrows the gap considerably, whittling it down to April of 2008 (April? Do these goons think they closed the school with two months left in the school year?) through October of 2010, or a full year and a half shy of the original claim of four full years. But even taking into consideration the inconsistent nature of the Wayback Machine, two and a half years still seems like kind of a long time between snapshots. So what gives? As is usually the case with these things, there’s actually a very simple, technical explanation. From The Wayback Machine’s FAQ:

How can I have my site’s pages excluded from the Wayback Machine?

You can exclude your site from display in the Wayback Machine by placing a robots.txt file on your web server that is set to disallow User-Agent: ia_archiver. You can also send an email request for us to review to info@archive.org with the URL (web address) in the text of your message.

And what is a robots.txt file? From Wikipedia:

The robots exclusion standard, also known as the robots exclusion protocol or simply robots.txt, is a standard used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. The standard specifies how to inform the web robot about which areas of the website should not be processed or scanned.

Sure enough, we can see that on June 4th, 2008, the webmaster for Newtown’s public schools added the following to their robots.txt file:

And what do those two lines do?

This “User-agent: *” means this section applies to all robots. The “Disallow: /” tells the robot that it should not visit any pages on the site.

Once those changes were made, the Wayback Machine – by design – stopped crawling and archiving the sites for every school in the Newtown public school district, not just Sandy Hook. This is not up for debate, and anyone with a few minutes of free time can easily replicate the steps I took above and achieve the exact same results. And unlike the unscrupulous contributors to this cretinous book, I fully and enthusiastically encourage you to do exactly that.

If this is truly James Fetzer’s “most compelling evidence” that Sandy Hook Elementary School was shuttered in 2008 in preparation for an imaginary drill, what hope is there for the rest of his claims?

Of course there are still some that have talked themselves into remaining unconvinced, like alleged IT professional Ruth Teltru, who writes:

Still very suspicious that it just so happens Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT. that had the internet archive issues.

First of all, as explained as well as demonstrated in this very article, this is patently false: the site for every school in Newtown’s public school district produced similar results during this time period due to the fact that the robots file was applied at the root level, therefore impacting everything below it. So we’re off to a pretty rough start with this comment. But it gets worse (as it usually does), because even if you replace “Sandy Hook Elementary” with “Newtown Public School District”, it’s still wrong. I know that because unlike Ruth here, I actually checked the Wayback Machine results for the site of every district in Connecticut before running my mouth.

Of those districts – and there were a lot of them to go through – nineteen districts had a gap of over thirty months. That’s nineteen districts that had a gap exceeding Newtown’s. Three districts had gaps of four years or more:

Windsor Locks:

Torrington:

New Milford:

So once again, a Sandy Hook denier not only fails miserably in challenging my work, but makes another demonstrably false claim in the process. Will they ever learn?

More: Why “The Most Compelling Evidence” In “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Is A Bust, Part Two

Additional reading: “When The Internet Archive Forgets”

36 Thoughts on “Why “The Most Compelling Evidence” In “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Is A Total Bust

  1. Mike Smith on January 1, 2017 at 9:00 am said:

    That the school district prevented the Internet’s robots from crawling its pages producing the long web inactivity gap it did is very interesting, but doesn’t provide “fool-proof evidence” that any of the schools, including SHS, were fully or partially closed prior to the alleged Sandy Hook Elementary shooting of 14.Dec.2012. If anything, this lack of web activity on the part of the schools involved only adds to the massive confusion surrounding the event and provides debunkers ammunition to ridicule inexperienced investigators who admittedly jump into risky, unproven conclusions quite often.

    The David-and-Goliath-style duel we’re witnessing between independent, rising, often crude investigators and the almighty mainstream media over the Sandy Hook event is far from over. Debunkers do well and score points at the expense of the obvious mistakes the young investigators make, but the sheer power of the incontestable evidence available on the web in the form of videos and photographs — captured and propagated by MSM itself — is turning millions of viewers’ heads towards a bright, clear sign that reads “HOAX.” I’m referring to the likes of laughing Robbie Parker, joking Wayne Carver, or sloppy-sniper David Wheeler playing the double roll of victim’s father and faux FBI agent the same day of the event.

    Debunkers are seasoned sophists, who carefully craft arguments to push whatever case under the sun they’re paid to sell — and they’re quite good. But all we have to say to these snake-oil salesmen is “no thanks.”

    • Shill Murray on January 1, 2017 at 11:15 pm said:

      Oof. Give me a break. First and foremost, there is no debate. None. If there was one – and it’d be almost impossibly generous for me to suggest that there ever was – it’s been over for quite some time now. And it likely wouldn’t have centered around whether or not the tragedy was “faked”, as it’s a ludicrous idea that has never been supported by so much as a shred of empirical evidence. Just because one side of this imaginary argument refuses to accept the facts and move on doesn’t mean that there’s a legitimate debate to be had. That’s silly. Twenty-six people died at Sandy Hook School, the Earth is not flat, etc. Just stop.

      I refuse to accept that there is anything confusing or even all that interesting regarding the changes that were made to the district’s website back in 2008. In my opinion, the only people who are still confused are those who choose to remain so. Literally anyone can take a few minutes out of their day to do some basic research and familiarize themselves with the process, which is not all that technologically advanced. There’s also nothing even remotely suspicious about it. The first thing to keep in mind is that there is no four year gap in snapshot activity. Fetzer – likely intentionally – used the wrong URL to come to this conclusion. When you use the correct address, that gap ends in 2010, or two years before the shooting. That alone is enough, in my opinion, to shut this ridiculous theory down for good. But exploring it even further, remember that this prevented the website for every school in the district from being crawled (though this would have absolutely no impact on their accessibility or usability). So why anyone – and I guess the circle of co-conspirators has now grown to include Newtown’s IT staff – would deem this necessary in order to engineer a successful “false false” shooting at one of those schools four years down the line is well beyond me, and I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation from any denier. And it makes even less sense (assuming that’s possible) that they would take this step while continuing to meticulously outfit the school with thousands of dollars worth of modern technical equipment, up-to-date books and magazines, holiday decorations, even going as far as to start making pizzas for the crime scene walkthrough. Plus the hundreds of photographs taken in and around the school, the nearly two hundred articles that appeared throughout multiple local media sources, the supporting government documents, and so on, all of which appeared between 2008-2012.

      You keep talking about “crude” or “inexperienced” investigators making “mistakes”, but James Fetzer has been promoting conspiracy theories since the early 90s. He wrote his first book on the Kennedy assassination back when I was a teenager. He has been doing this for a long, long time, whereas I have only been at it for a year now. Dismissing him as an amateur, prone to frequent slip-ups, is hogwash. The guy is a con-man, plain and simple. When he dedicates an entire chapter in his book to presenting crime scene photos out of order in an attempt to make the claim that the scene was staged, that is not a clumsy mistake, it is an outright lie. Hold them accountable. Stop making excuses for these goofballs. Be better than that. Be better than them.

      the sheer power of the incontestable evidence available on the web in the form of videos and photographs — captured and propagated by MSM itself — is turning millions of viewers’ heads towards a bright, clear sign that reads “HOAX.”

      No. Just… no. First of all, there are not millions of people who believe in this tripe. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please feel free to share it. I would love to see it. And in regards to this “incontestable evidence”, surely you are not referring to your ludicrous and long debunked claim that David Wheeler “played” an FBI sniper, are you? Come on, man. This one’s just laughable.

      Debunkers are seasoned sophists, who carefully craft arguments to push whatever case under the sun they’re paid to sell — and they’re quite good. But all we have to say to these snake-oil salesmen is “no thanks.”

      This just about sums it up, doesn’t it? A flat-out refusal of the facts (hey, at least you’re polite about it!), based on God-knows-what, and the allegation of paid opposition for good measure. Now is probably a great time to tell you about The Shill Challenge, which I created for people just like you, who are wholly unprepared to argue the facts and need to resort to baseless accusations instead. If you think I’m being paid (and I’m not, as I’ve stated multiple times), present the evidence, and I’ll donate $300 to your favorite Sandy Hook huckster (Halbig, Tracy, etc). It’s an easy way to support the cause and become a hero to the denier cult by discrediting me. But if you fail to back up your claim, you’ll be banned from the site. Do you have it in you?

    • Lmao @Mike Smith. This is the typical mind of the truther. He doesn’t have a clue what robots.txt is, he doesn’t understand how archive.org or the wayback machine work, but that doesn’t stop him from typing a novel to expose how ignorant he truly is.

      I’m starting a similar blog though it has a lot more personal opinion than this one. I wonder how many infowars retards are going to say that the government pays me to blog against a group of people they’ve successfully (and rightfully) ignored for years.

      I already get accused of being paid by the government to post YouTube comments LMAO.

      SHES hoaxers are the most intelligent people on the planet.

      • Shill Murray on January 17, 2017 at 1:59 pm said:

        Because of course the only way anyone could ever disagree with their preposterous and offensive stories is if they were paid to. No other possible explanation exists. Shit, I should be so lucky.

        Send me the link to your blog once it’s up, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see it. You can e-mail me at shillmurray at outlook.com.

  2. Hah! ‘Young investigators’. Halbig, Fetzer, Mead, Weigel, Kusznir. Is Mr Smith in his nineties?

  3. Great detailed entry. Thanks, Shill, for doing the work.

  4. NoOne Dieded? on June 20, 2017 at 4:58 pm said:

    interestingly the FBI crime data by year state never seems to come up.

    The FBI says no one died, are they altogerher wrong? Simply overlooked those ‘dead’

    sure…

    https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/tables/8tabledatadecpdf/table-8-state-cuts/table_8_offenses_known_to_law_enforcement_by_connecticut_by_city_2012.xls

    Murder and
    nonnegligent
    manslaughter

    Newtown = 0

    probably nothing to see here

    • Shill Murray on June 20, 2017 at 5:10 pm said:

      This nonsense has been debunked about 1,000 times at this point, including here on this site. The zero is not how many murders occurred in Newtown, but how many were reported to the FBI by local police (the murders are in the state totals since it was state police who reported them to the FBI). In total, the shooting is explicitly mentioned fourteen times in the full FBI report. Get your head out of your ass.

    • Ruth Teltru on March 21, 2018 at 12:04 am said:

      Yep, and the FBI link you provided is still active almost 10 months later. Still very suspicious that it just so happens Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT. that had the internet archive issues. Archival record counts on the internet don’t lie.
      You who take a long time using a lot of words that make no sense to create confusion. Again back up your claim and show us the records where Newtown School’s IT department made these changes. There will be documented archives of those changes, which are already so suspicious. Las Vegas is another loose end deal…

      • Shill Murray on March 28, 2018 at 1:27 am said:

        Still very suspicious that it just so happens Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT. that had the internet archive issues.

        First of all, as I pointed out in my previous reply, it wasn’t just Sandy Hook Elementary School that experienced this non-existent “issue” (it’s not an issue if it’s by design), but every school in Newtown’s public school district. That’s because the change was applied at the root level. And since you claim to be in IT, you should understand this. There are six other schools in Newtown’s public school district, all of which experienced the same “gap” in snapshots. Are you going to suggest that, based on those results, every school in Newtown shut down in 2008? Again, this is all covered in this article. Please read before you comment.

        Secondly, did you actually check the Internet Archive results for every public school district in CT? I imagine it would be useful before making such a bold claim. My guess is that you didn’t, because I did and it turns out that – surprise – you’re wrong.

        As discussed in this entry, when you use the correct URL for Sandy Hook’s site as it existed during that time period, there is a gap of two and a half years… or thirty months. So I consulted this list of websites for Connecticut’s public school districts and viewed the snapshot history for each and every one, comparing them to Newtown. Not counting the websites that are no longer active, I found sixty-two districts with a gap of twelve months or longer in between website snapshots. Fifty-four of those districts had a gap of eighteen months – a year and a half – or longer. Thirty-six had a gap of twenty-four months or more. Finally, nineteen whole districts had a gap of over thirty months. That’s nineteen districts that had a gap exceeding Newtown’s. Three districts (Windsor Locks, Torrington, and New Milford) had gaps of four years or more! So when you say that “Sandy Hook Elementary is the only school in CT that had the internet archive issues”, that is a demonstrably false (or, as it’s otherwise known, a lie).

        Furthermore, maybe you missed this entry, but it turns out that the schools Wolfgang Halbig worked as a glorified hall monitor – Lake Mary and Lyman High Schools – also show huge gaps in Wayback Machine activity. Lake Mary has a gap of over two and a half years, from April of 2003 until December of 2005, which is longer than Sandy Hook’s. Were those schools closed?

        Archival record counts on the internet don’t lie.

        Sure, but only when those archival records actually exist. The Internet Archive itself admits that their records are not complete. It’s on their site:

        Note
        This calendar view maps the number of times http://www.newmilfordps.org/ was crawled by the Wayback Machine, not how many times the site was actually updated.

        You who take a long time using a lot of words that make no sense to create confusion.

        Which words, specifically, are you having trouble understanding? I have to admit this is the first time that I (you are talking to me, right?) have been accused of using too many words, or not making sense.

        Las Vegas is another loose end deal…

        Once again, someone who has accused others of changing the subject is… changing the subject.

  5. Mike Mouse on June 26, 2017 at 5:37 am said:

    Shill, you are a shill as any half awake person can see. You don’t address any of the real issues. The school had been closed for over a year for sure. It was in a state of total disrepair as shown by the FBI photos. Etc. if you are trying to fool anyone you fail. Book bag and body bag. Peopke saying lies like this are a total give away. If you aren’t paid you have some other angle to be so crooked.

    • Shill Murray on June 27, 2017 at 2:44 am said:

      You don’t address any of the real issues.

      James Fetzer referred to this embarrassing misrepresentation of the Internet Archive results as “the most compelling” evidence that the school was closed. Alex Jones himself has cited the very same information on his show on more than one occasion in order to come to the same asinine conclusion. But now it’s no longer a “real issue”? Why? Because it’s been so thoroughly debunked? Give me a break. It’s about as “real” an issue as anything else as that makes up this nonsense theory can be.

      The school had been closed for over a year for sure.

      You idiots can’t even agree on how long the school was allegedly closed! You say “at least a year”, Wolfgang Halbig says four years, etc. This is what happens when you base your goofball claims on total hokum.

      It was in a state of total disrepair as shown by the FBI photos.

      Amazing. The school somehow manages to get worse and worse with every re-telling of this tall tale. First it was “dirty”, and now it’s in total disrepair. That’s obviously bogus, as any reasonable person knows. The truth is that it was a small, 50+ year-old public school in America, and it looked the part. That’s what a lot of public schools look like these days, and it’s unlikely to get much better. If any of you dopes saw some of the public schools in my area, you’d swear they were all preparing for some sort of “false flag”.

      But of course you can continue to believe the alternative, which is that the United States government spent years as well as millions of dollars preparing for a fake shooting at an abandoned public school (a public school housing hundreds of children that managed to close so quietly that there is no mention of it anywhere on the Internet or elsewhere), going as far as to plant up-to-update magazines in a barely visible magazine rack, etc, only to somehow forget to make the place look habitable (or at least up to the lofty standards of conspiracy theorists) before they took thousands of crime scene photos. That one makes a whole lot of sense, right? And of course we’re told by these very same people that obviously the Lanza house was staged because it’s too clean.

      If you aren’t paid you have some other angle to be so crooked.

      My angle is that I hate bullshit and bullshitters, especially the kind that harass the families of murdered children. But if you’re so sure that I’m on someone’s payroll, prove it and I’ll send you $400. That’s the “Shill Challenge”, which I’ve written about a number of times on the Crisis Actors Guild Facebook page. I’ve been offering it as long as the site’s been up (about a year and a half now) and no one has even attempted to collect. Sad, but entirely expected.

  6. Ruth Teltru on March 21, 2018 at 12:19 am said:

    You’re getting defensive and it’s not going to shut people up. Stop changing the subject and answer the questions with evidence. These folks are challenging YOU and YOUR CLAIMS. These people aren’t harassing any of the residents of Newtown as you falsely claim – they are demanding evidence and facts. For one, the person that did the ‘tango’ when trying to explain Newtown’s IT department’s reason for making changes to Sandy Hook elementary holds no water. I’m in IT and I want the records of those changes they made. If anyone killed anybody at that school, I can tell you right now that it wasn’t a crazy man – it was a sick, abusive, powerlust for gun control. Bottom line. It will always go back to that, but gun control isn’t going to stop school shootings! If you love America’s kids you will protect the schools first and foremost and stop using a school shooting to push a lame political agenda that doesn’t work (Look at Sweden!) Bad guys will ALWAYS have guns and will shoot our kids! We want zero school shootings – not ‘less’ school shootings. Get those badass, trained and licensed and sane U.S. Vets in the classrooms to protect our kids!

    • Shill Murray on March 28, 2018 at 12:20 am said:

      You’re getting defensive and it’s not going to shut people up. Stop changing the subject and answer the questions with evidence.

      Who are you talking to? Who is getting defensive? Who is changing the subject? I can’t imagine you’re talking about me, because the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the way it works (and, more importantly, it way it does not work) is the subject. At least it is for this particular entry. Other questions and claims have their own, separate entries. Familiarize yourself with site’s search bar. As far as evidence goes, there’s plenty here – far more than has ever been provided than the people making these ridiculous claims – you just choose not to accept it. I know that I’ve more than adequately explained not only why Wayback Machine snapshots are not in any way synonymous with “Internet activity”, but why the gap in snapshots exists in the first place. I also managed to demonstrate that those making this bogus claim are using demonstrably false information in order to do so (ie an outdated, incorrect web address).

      These folks are challenging YOU and YOUR CLAIMS.

      I think you have this backwards: my claims are that theirs are nonsense. Both James Fetzer and Wolfgang Halbig are well aware of my site and the work I’ve done here in debunking their garbage, but neither one has had the balls to refute any of it. And thus far, their lackeys have done an absolutely miserable job in picking up the slack, relying on ad hominems, Gish gallops, or the doubling-down of their already debunked twaddle. I’ve always been open to correcting mistakes on the site, and I’d love for an intellectually honest challenge to my work, but the reality is that I’m usually just approving comments from brain-dead goofs that would rather call me a “shill” (or worse) than engage in any sort of actual debate. To be fair, one guy came close but ended up going a bit off the rails in the end. That’s one guy in… two years, I think it’s been. And even he agreed Fetzer and Halbigs were dopes.

      These people aren’t harassing any of the residents of Newtown as you falsely claim – they are demanding evidence and facts.

      Give me a break. When Lucy Richards called Lenny Pozner and told him, “You gonna die, death is coming to you real soon”, which evidence was she demanding? Did Jonathan Reich plead guilty to demanding facts? Get out of here with this garbage.

      For one, the person that did the ‘tango’ when trying to explain Newtown’s IT department’s reason for making changes to Sandy Hook elementary holds no water.

      What are you talking about? Who is “the person”? And what do you mean by “did the ‘tango'”? The IT department did not make changes to just Sandy Hook’s site; they did it for the entirety of Newtown’s public schools. If you had read the article, in full, then you would know that.

      There are a number of reasons why a webmaster would choose to prevent their site from being crawled, often due to dynamic content, and it was common enough that the Internet Archive mentions it a number of times in their FAQ.

      I’m in IT and I want the records of those changes they made.

      Why on Earth would you need a record of a change being made when you can actually see the change being made, via the Wayback Machine? Again, this is all outlined in the article you are leaving a comment on. Simply look at the Wayback Machine’s snapshot of newtown.k12.ct.us – which is the domain that hosted the site for every school in Newtown’s public school district – from June 4th, 2008 and you can see the first appearance of the actual robots.txt file that excludes the site from web crawlers for yourself. Go back a bit further – to the snapshots taken in April and May of 2008 – and see that they were previously only using robots to block the crawling of their event calendar (possibly their only dynamic content at the time). Go back even further than that and you’ll see that the file did not exist. There, you’ve seen the change take place with your own eyes. Demanding anything further is just silly and quite honestly a perfect example of the kind of goalpost moving I’ve come to expect from your type.

      As for any internal records that may or may not exist documenting the implementation of a robots file on a public school district’s website, what leads you to believe that you have a right to this kind of material? If you believe this information should be public, have you filed a FOIA request? If not, why? Take some initiative. After all, you’re in IT!

      Now let’s say this documentation did exist and it was given to you; would you accept it and admit your mistake? Because I personally doubt it. After all, if you’re unwilling to accept the timestamped results of the Wayback Machine, explicitly showing the change being made, then why would you accept something that is much more easily faked? Maybe you’ll go on to demand a printout of the webmaster’s brainwaves from the moment they came up with the idea. Then maybe even a home video of their conception.

      If anyone killed anybody at that school, I can tell you right now that it wasn’t a crazy man – it was a sick, abusive, powerlust for gun control. Bottom line.

      And you’re going to accuse me of changing the subject? Who’s talking about gun control? That’s well beyond the scope of this website, which is about debunking denier claptrap, so take this debate elsewhere.

      It will always go back to that, but gun control isn’t going to stop school shootings! If you love America’s kids you will protect the schools first and foremost and stop using a school shooting to push a lame political agenda that doesn’t work (Look at Sweden!) Bad guys will ALWAYS have guns and will shoot our kids!

      So… school shootings do happen, just not at Sandy Hook? Which school shootings do you believe are legitmate? Do you even know?

      By the way, if you are actually in IT and you do not understand the difference between snapshots taken by the Wayback Machine and “Internet activity” – as in packets in and packets out – then your job should be outsourced. If the guys on my help desk made such an ignorant, elementary mistake, I’d look to write them up.

  7. Shelley Garcia on April 4, 2018 at 12:46 am said:

    So it is kinda odd that they gave asbestos a 4 meaning it was “not a problem”.

    Even tho the school was noted as having high levels of asbestos. Were tests even done? This is a serious issue if they lied and said the school was safe when it was not.

    And more importantly, why is there not a single story of any of the parents suing.

    The Newtown Bee published an article about the high levels shortly after the shooting. Also high levels of lead. Just go to the website and do a search for “asbestos” for December 2nd, 2013. And you can read it yourself.

    What I find interesting is that real crimes usually dont need lots of people to debunk things that do not add up. Because they just add up.

    But please tell me that it was a mistake that the paper said there were high levels of asbestos and lead while reports claim the school was fine.

    Also have yet to see anyone explain why the live CNN footage (still out there so check for yourself) shows cops running into the school. But weird, its not Sandy Hook. It was Rose Lima. Rose Lima did not have a shooting for those that wish to discredit this as mixing up tapes.

    There is legit no reason for CNN to be claiming they are live overhead Sandy Hook when they are over another school.
    And there is legit no reason cops would be running into Rose Lima.

    But hey, its an easy cover to run under the “people died” claim.

    People do not question it.

    • Shill Murray on April 10, 2018 at 2:35 am said:

      Even tho the school was noted as having high levels of asbestos. Were tests even done? This is a serious issue if they lied and said the school was safe when it was not.

      “High levels of asbestos”? According to whom? Because if we look at the article from the Newtown Bee that you yourself cited, the only mention of “high” anything occurs in the following sentence:

      environmental contractors started reporting higher than expected levels of lead, asbestos, and PCBs in construction debris

      It doesn’t say that there are high levels of asbestos, just higher levels of asbestos, lead, and PCBs than expected. There’s a difference. And these levels were discovered in the construction debris. This is a very important distinction, and it’s why you had to cherry pick an article from a year after the shooting in order to find anything that supports your claim that the school had an asbestos problem, which it absolutely didn’t.

      Which leads me to my next point…

      Asbestos is not a problem until it’s disturbed, because it’s the asbestos dust that poses a health risk. The Twin Towers, for example, were constructed with 300-400 tons of asbestos, and 50,000 people worked there at any given time without any issue whatsoever. But first responders, rescue workers, survivors, etc. have been dropping dead from cancer ever since 9/11 due to exposure to asbestos dust and other harmful carcinogens present in the rubble. Hell, even my house was covered in asbestos siding up until a couple of years ago, when I finally had it replaced.

      So the truth is that a school – or any other building containing asbestos – could (and many built through the 70s still do) contain high levels of asbestos and still be perfectly safe. Newtown was pretty open about the asbestos in their public schools, as we can see in the following quote from a November 7th, 2008 article in the Newtown Bee:

      The asbestos levels in Newtown schools pose no threat to the health or safety of those using the schools, according to Superintendent John Reed. The areas in the schools where there is evidence of asbestos — the ceiling above the high school pool, areas of the upstairs floor of the Middle School A wing and the girls’ and boys’ locker rooms, are also considered acceptable and safe.

      Notice only two of Newtown’s seven public schools are singled out as even showing evidence of asbestos, and Sandy Hook isn’t one of them.

      And more importantly, why is there not a single story of any of the parents suing.

      Suing who? For what? A non-existent asbestos threat?

      The Newtown Bee published an article about the high levels shortly after the shooting. Also high levels of lead. Just go to the website and do a search for “asbestos” for December 2nd, 2013. And you can read it yourself.

      Again, it only says that there were “higher than expected” levels of lead. If you expect none, for example, then any level would be “higher than expected”. I’m not sure if this is a reading comprehension issue or you’re deliberately misrepresenting what’s actually in the article.

      What I find interesting is that real crimes usually dont need lots of people to debunk things that do not add up.

      This is one of the worst shootings in American history. Up until Vegas, it was the third worst, behind Virginia Tech (32 killed) and Pulse (49 killed). But due to the age of the victims as well as the sheer brutality of it all, you could make the argument that it’s one of the worst shootings in the history of the world. So there aren’t many comparable “real crimes” that we can draw parallels between. And Sandy Hook in particular attracts more conspiracy theorists than most mass shootings (which must mean it’s true then, right? Isn’t that how it works? The more people that oppose an idea, the truer it is?), so naturally it’s going to attract more people interested in debunking them.

      Do you also believe the world is flat? Because there are an awful lot of people out there debunking flat earth theory. If you don’t believe me, search YouTube for “flat earth debunked”. There are over 630,000 results. That’s more than Sandy Hook. So, using your goofball logic, that means that the theory is valid. Some people just enjoy debunking bullshit, especially harmful, ugly bullshit like the Sandy Hook hoax fairy tale.

      Because they just add up.

      First of all, things tend to make a lot more sense when you manage to get the basic facts right. So, sure, the idea that a school could be infested with asbestos and still get a clean bill of health is kind of odd, but Sandy Hook wasn’t actually infested with asbestos; you just made that part up. Secondly, just because something doesn’t “add up” to you personally doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Get over yourself.

      But please tell me that it was a mistake that the paper said there were high levels of asbestos and lead while reports claim the school was fine.

      As demonstrated earlier, the only mistake here is the one you made when you quoted your source.

      Also have yet to see anyone explain why the live CNN footage (still out there so check for yourself) shows cops running into the school. But weird, its not Sandy Hook. It was Rose Lima. Rose Lima did not have a shooting for those that wish to discredit this as mixing up tapes.

      Okay, so make that two mistakes.

      At no point does CNN claim that the footage was live. Again, you appear to either not understand your own source or you’re lying because you don’t expect anyone to look into it.

      There is legit no reason for CNN to be claiming they are live overhead Sandy Hook when they are over another school.

      Again, CNN never claims that they are airing live footage. They chyron doesn’t say anything about it, and the word is never even uttered by anyone at any point during the entire three minute segment.

      And there is legit no reason cops would be running into Rose Lima.

      Are you for real? There was a shooting a mile away! As a result, all area schools were on lockdown, which is corobborated throughout the final report. Here’s a snippet from book 6, document 00152008:

      School Messenger is a notification service used by school systems to connect with parents, students and staff through voice, SMS text, email and social media. The first of these messages was sent at 9:55 am advising that “due to reports of a shooting… all schools in lockdown.”

      And here’s an exchange between Newtown Sgt Kullgren and a Newtown dispatcher in this transcript of Newtown PD’s radio transmissions from the day of the shooting:

      10:53:30 Newtown Sgt Kullgren: “Looking for confirmation that all other schools in town are in lock down.”

      10:53:35 Newtown Dispatcher Barocsi: “All schools as far as I am aware are in lock down, they were advised.”

      The Danbury Newstimes included a photo of police at St. Rose of Lima in a December 18th, 2012 article titled “911 Sandy Hook call shows early confusion”. The caption of the photo reads:

      After a horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School nearby, police respond to St. Rose School after a lockdown at the school in Newtown, Conn. on Friday December 14, 2012.

      So we have an elementary school, on lockdown, approximately one mile away from a shooting at another elementary school. Do you honestly not understand why cops would show up?

      Besides, what in the world do you think the cops going to St. Rose of Lima proves, exactly? How does that fit into your narrative?

      But hey, its an easy cover to run under the “people died” claim.

      People do not question it.

      And yet, here we are.

      • Stewart M on April 18, 2018 at 12:23 pm said:

        I lived in Bethel, CT at the time of the shooting. My daughter was in school at that time and I was notified by the school that the entire district was in lockdown due to a shooting in a school in the next town over. We were at least 15 miles away from Sandy Hook and our schools were in lockdown for about 3 hours. Many schools in Western CT were in lockdown that morning.

  8. Ruth Teltru on April 15, 2018 at 11:19 am said:

    B.S . If you look at the root level for all 19 districts they would result in the same exact months and year. Your story still doesn’t add up.

    • Shill Murray on April 16, 2018 at 1:23 pm said:

      If you look at the root level for all 19 districts they would result in the same exact months and year.

      According to whom? What is this based on? The same incredible research that led you – IT expert Ruth Teltru – to falsely claim that no other school in all of Connecticut had similar Wayback Machine results? And then I provided you a list of schools that did? Remember that? Probably not, otherwise I’m sure you would have admitted your mistake and apologized, right?

      Your story still doesn’t add up.

      No “story” here; just a technical, easy-to-follow, and most importantly demonstrable explanation of how the Wayback Machine, web robots, and The Robots Exclusion Protocol all work. As such, I’m not even sure what you’re arguing at this point. Just take the L, Ruth.

  9. David W on April 19, 2018 at 11:02 pm said:

    Love the work you put into this. Glad to see you actively slap down anyone dumb enough to argue against your demonstration by blatantly ignoring said demonstration. Unfortunately, it seems they don’t want to learn, or think outside of the box they built for themselves.

    Keep it up, I’ll be working my way through all your posts as I find time.

    • Shill Murray on April 19, 2018 at 11:37 pm said:

      Thanks, David. I often wonder if I’m wasting my time, trying to reason with the unreasonable, but then I realize that there’s also value in giving these folks the opportunity to make themselves look foolish. Half the time, they don’t even need my help. Anyway, it’s good to know that people are not only paying attention to these exchanges, but appreciate them as well.

  10. Albert on August 24, 2018 at 8:41 pm said:

    Anybody who has spent 30 minutes looking into Sandy Hook knows it was fake…

    There was a bunch of garbage we’ve all heard a million times before down here but I did everyone a favor and deleted it. You’re welcome. – SM

    • Shill Murray on August 24, 2018 at 8:55 pm said:

      Anybody who has spent 30 minutes looking into Sandy Hook knows it was fake.

      Then maybe you should have spent 31, because everything in your Gish Gallop worth debunking has already been debunked. And has been for years.

      P.S. – I’ve removed most of your comment because I’m through giving you chucklefucks a chance to spout your tired old nonsense, especially when it’s clear that you haven’t bothered to read the site before unleashing your binary diarrhea, otherwise you’d understand how stupid you sound parroting easily disproven shit like “Not a single victim brought out to the triage area”. Because there are multiple pictures on this site that debunk this zombie myth, and they’re not difficult to find.

      And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re ever interested in pulling your head out of your own ass, I’d suggest starting here. Until then, hit the bricks.

  11. Travis Binkley on September 7, 2018 at 2:02 am said:

    Here’s something you can’t debunk that Halbig found. The company SYSCO who delivers food to these schools handed over their invoices from months prior to the “shooting”. The food was being re-directed to the Chalk Hill Middle School 15-20 miles away. There was no food or milk being delivered there months prior, no food, no milk = no kids. The school was empty and he’s got the invoices to prove it. You can find it on Youtube. That school was closed!

  12. Joseph Ciolino on December 2, 2018 at 5:09 pm said:

    Please de-bunk:

    Why did Sysco Foods and Dean Foods deliver their food and milk products to “Sandy Hook Elementary School” at 375 Fan Hill Rd, the Old Chalk Hill school from 09-01-2012 through 12-13-2012? Sandy Hook Elementary school was reported during the shooting aftermath as being at 12 Dickenson Drive.not Fan Hill Road.

    (all documents are a matter of public record.)

    • Shill Murray on December 5, 2018 at 11:12 am said:

      all documents are a matter of public record

      Please direct me to these public documents as the food service program at Sandy Hook was run by Chartwells, which is a private company. Therefore it is extremely unlikely that information on their customers is part of the public record.

  13. Jim Kim on March 2, 2019 at 7:35 pm said:

    The asbestos report and the robots.txt file are both as fake as Adam Lanza’s computer-generated Sandy HOAX photos. Anyone who still believes this massive HOAX needs a brain transplant. Nobody died there. PERIOD.

    • Shill Murray on March 27, 2019 at 3:41 pm said:

      “If I haven’t seen it, it doesn’t exist. But if I have, it’s fake.”

      This is such a monumentally stupid claim, one you didn’t even bother to try and back up presumably because you know it would be impossible, that I almost feel like a sucker for even acknowledging it when it’s obvious that it doesn’t deserve that kind of validation. But I guess I just have time to waste today because here I am.

      I’ll give you some credit: the idea that the robots.txt file cached by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine back in 2008 is somehow “fake” (what even is a fake file?) is a new one, at least to me. And I’d say that it’s because no one has been bold/insane enough to suggest something so ludicrous, but we know that’s not true because I’ve already written about the Super Bowl choir nonsense.

      When you click on this link, the one towards the bottom of the article, you’re looking at a cached version of the Newtown Public Schools website as well as an actual copy of the robots.txt file that was hosted there, both of which are now physically located on the Internet Archive’s servers. It is a “snapshot” that was taken by the Wayback Machine as the site was crawled live on June 4th, 2008, in a process that (again) included actually copying the robots.txt file from Newtown’s web servers to those belonging to the Internet Archive. So that’s not just what that file looked like that day nearly eleven years ago, it is an actual copy of that file.

      Now rather than waste my time even further by trying to explain to you just how difficult if not downright impossible it would be to “fake” that (and if you’re suggesting the folks at the Internet Archive are now complicit, then why wouldn’t they simply fill the alleged “gaps” in “Internet Activity” that birthed this hokum?), I’m instead going to ask for some evidence, any evidence at all, that the robots.txt file has been “faked”. I’ve already done the work, so now it’s your turn. After all, you’re the one making the claim, so the burden of proof is on you. You can start with explaining how a “fake” robots.txt file managed to impact the sites for all of Newtown’s public schools, and not just Sandy Hook.

      As for the “asbestos report”, first of all, it’s not an asbestos report; it is a full school facilities survey. The asbestos score is just one item of many. This survey, like the robots.txt file, has been cached by the Wayback Machine, making it extremely difficult (again, if not impossible) to “fake” without the explicit help of the Internet Archive. And even if I were to accept your claim at face value (and I’m not, because it is beyond stupid and you haven’t provided any evidence whatsoever) and say “sure, the school facilities survey is a fake”, there was never any evidence that Sandy Hook had an asbestos “issue” in the first place. Maria Chang’s lone source for this lie – which you can find in this entry – says absolutely nothing about Sandy Hook. Nothing. The only schools mentioned by name with “evidence of asbestos” in Newtown are the high school and the middle school. So, like your claim that the school facilities survey is “fake”, the idea that there was an asbestos “infestation” or whatever in Sandy Hook is entirely without merit and not backed up by even a fraction of a shred of evidence.

      Truly a failure on all levels.

  14. Ripper on March 29, 2019 at 2:24 am said:

    Sandy hook was a hoax and there is more than enough evidence to prove it. The school did close down in 2008 with evidence to prove it. Adam Lanza also died before the hoax ever took place and his obituary is evidence of this. The victims of sandy hook were also seen alive numerous times after the hoax. They even sang at the super bowl with pics and vids to prove it.

  15. Pete M. on June 23, 2019 at 6:38 am said:

    Keep the nose to the wheel Shill. It may not seem so but your work here is appreciated by many.
    Thanks.

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