Unlike the intellectually dishonest chickenshits in charge of nearly every denialist echo chamber out there, I have always allowed visitors to post contrarian opinions here in the comments section, just as long as they don’t repeatedly make claims without providing evidence (I can’t do all the work for you lazy idiots) or fail the Shill Challenge (the rules of which are actually quite simple: if you’re going to forego an actual discussion and skip right to accusing me of being a “shill”, prove it and I’ll donate $300 to Wolfgang Halbig’s retirement legal fund. Fail and your baseless accusations will be deleted, and your IP banned). There are two major benefits to allowing these comments to stay, in my opinion: 1) I get to address a legitimate question or concern from an actual, honest (if not a bit misguided) truth-seeker who may have somehow gotten caught up in the copious amounts of denier garbage currently clogging up the Internet’s tubes, or 2) I get to publicly humiliate another brain-dead assgoblin who mistakenly believes that they’ve found yet another home for their watery bullshit. Our new friend “Shelley” of Monroe, Louisiana falls into the latter camp.

Commenting on Sandy Hook Elementary Was Open, Part Five: Dawn Hochsprung’s Twitter Feed, Shelley barely manages to string the following words together:

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The preposterous claim—which has since become denier canon—that Sandy Hook Elementary School was closed in 2008 due to non-existent “asbestos contamination” isn’t based on any actual evidence but has been made purely out of convenience. Trying to explain how the government, FEMA, or the lizard people could pull off a convincing fake school shooting in an abandoned building is already a logistical nightmare, but attempting the same feat in a fully operational school, brimming with hundreds of children, is exponentially harder. Yet whether they allege the school was closed for four years or just four days, Sandy Hook deniers have failed to produce even a shred of proof in the three and a half years since the shooting. This is indisputable.

Meanwhile, there is a truly impressive amount of evidence to the contrary, reinforcing the painfully obvious: Sandy Hook Elementary School was, of course, open and fully operational on December 14th, 2012, when Adam Lanza forced his way in and murdered twenty-six people. The school was not closed in 2008 (nor in 2009, 2010, etc.). Those who persist in claiming otherwise fall into one of three categories: liars looking to cash in, the mentally unwell, or gullible fools. There’s at least some hope for the last group, which is one of the driving reasons for this series—and this entire site—to exist.

As explored in Sandy Hook Elementary Was Open, Part Ten: 101 More Photos From Sandy Hook School, media outlets that typically cover the Newtown area—particularly The Newtown Bee—have written about Sandy Hook Elementary literally hundreds of times since the school was built in 1956. And between The Bee, the Danbury Newstimes, the CT Post, and the Newtown Patch, over 195 articles were written about the school between 2008 and 2012 alone. There are likely many more, but digging through The Newtown Bee‘s archives for the appropriate material proved to be a bit cumbersome, so these results are not comprehensive. Still, in what should come as a shock to absolutely no one, none of these articles paint a picture of anything other than an active, functional elementary school, regularly attended by hundreds of children. Not a single one of them alludes to the school being closed, even temporarily (beyond the expected winter and summer breaks). Not one!

The CT Post wrote about the end of Monroe’s Chalk Hill Middle School (which, as an actual abandoned school, acted as the temporary home for Sandy Hook’s students), and New Jersey’s Marlton Sun recently wrote about the impending closure of the Florence V. Evans Elementary School in Evesham. The Newtown Bee even covered Newtown’s discussions regarding the possible closure of Newtown Middle School back in 2011. So, if Sandy Hook Elementary was in fact closed (and it wasn’t), why isn’t there a single article anywhere detailing the last days of the school? I mean, I know the answer.

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The nonsensical Sandy Hook denier narrative – wholly invented and peddled (quite literally, via autographed books, endless panhandling fundraising drives, and advertising revenue) by lunatics such as Wolfgang Halbig, James Fetzer, James Tracy, and Maria Chang – is one that aggressively defies all logic and reason. It requires us to believe that the United States government was able to successfully (at least in the minds of 99.99% of the world’s population) engineer an enormous, sprawling drama, involving hundreds if not thousands of fiercely loyal, silent conspirators and co-conspirators, simply to pass some limp-dicked local gun legislation, while simultaneously refusing to accept the idea that a mentally-ill twenty year-old obsessed with school shootings and with easy, unrestricted access to powerful assault weapons could shoot up an elementary school. It also requires us to believe that those same criminal masterminds possess the nearly endless resources required to pull off such a feat (which includes buying nearly everyone in Newtown a house apparently), but need to continually re-use their “actors” in vastly different “roles”. For instance, we’re told – presumably with a straight face – that Sandy Hook parent David Wheeler also needed to “play” an FBI agent. And as I learned the other day, veteran medical examiner Dr. H. Wayne Carver even had to direct traffic at the entrance to Dickinson Drive. Why would this be necessary when Newtown has a fully capable volunteer fire and rescue company? And why would he allow himself to be photographed this way by a member of the complicit mainstream media? Trust me, these are not the kinds of questions deniers like to answer.

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A recent post on Reddit’s conspiracy subreddit (their nomenclature, not mine) attempted to breathe new life into the very old, very stupid claim that all of the cars parked in the Sandy Hook School’s lot that morning were facing the same direction, which I guess is supposed to be evidence of staging rather than convenience. Confident that I had tackled this low-hanging fruit some time ago, I searched through my own posts and – much to surprise – found that I had only made very brief mention of it in Fact Checking “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”, Chapter One. Huh. Then I realized that this was due to the fact that the claim only appears once in Fetzer’s masterwork, in the Prologue, which I never bothered to cover due to my belief that any claims made in the prologue would surely be revisited later in the book. In my defense, I was just starting this wonderful journey and I hadn’t yet realized that, despite his many, many attempts, James Fetzer simply does not know how to write a book. My bad.

So, like one of those terrible dreams where you’re forced to go back to high school as an adult because you just realized you failed a class and never graduated, I must now relive one of the most painful experiences of my life: reading “Nobody Died At Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill To Promote Gun Control”, by James Fetzer.

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Maybe you don’t read all of my posts. I don’t know, and I’m not about to tell you how to read blogs. Maybe you’re busy! But if you do have a tendency to jump around a bit, maybe you skipped right over my June 13th, 2016 entry, titled “Dust Your Checkbook Off, Wolfgang”. If so, let me get you up to speed: self-professed school, gay nightclub, and whatever else now expert Wolfgang Halbig has for years offered up a number of cash rewards, ranging from anywhere between $1,000 to $10,000, in exchange for very specific photographs from Sandy Hook Elementary School. “Easy money”, according to Halbig. But of course these rewards are entirely fictitious; extensively advertised (but never delivered) in a transparent bid to bolster his credibility. After all, who would dare to offer up such substantial rewards – even if they were presumably taken from the six figure sum he’s somehow managed to earn in donations – unless they were absolutely certain that no one could possibly claim them? Or at least I assume that’s the logic behind it. But the truth is that this trick, much like Halbig’s entire carny routine, is as old as time (thanks to Stephen Tobey on Facebook for the great read).

Halbig has offered up one such mythical reward a number of times on his personal Facebook page, placing a $1,000 bounty on pictures from Sandy Hook’s 2012 Veteran’s Day breakfast:

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Hey, sometimes I like to talk about other conspiracy theories too, okay?

While the perplexing rise and even more baffling Republican nomination of reality television star and failed steak salesman Donald Trump has certainly been uh, interesting, the 2016 United States Presidential Election is not at all unique in that it has generated a metric shit ton of misinformation, which has spawned a number of goofy conspiracy theories. A fairly recent one – originating from the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA – managed to gain some traction among supporters of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In fact, it was the following video, taken by Eden McFadden – an actual Sanders delegate from California – that birthed this absolute twaddle:

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When I wrote Part Seven of this series, I mentioned that I was sorting through around 120 additional photographs taken in and around Sandy Hook School between 2008—the year deniers falsely claim the school was secretly closed (while failing to provide even a shred of empirical evidence to support their absurd fairy tales)—and 2012, the year Adam Lanza broke into the school and murdered 26 people. Many of those photographs were included in subsequent entries, while others provided further proof that Wolfgang Halbig is a liar (spoiler: he never paid me).

Even after all that, I still had over 101 photographs left—collected from The Newtown Bee (which conveniently provides photographic metadata for most of their content) and The Newtown Patch—that were a bit trickier to organize. So, this entry will serve as a kind of “dumping ground,” heavy on photographic evidence of the school’s operation but without the structure or narrative seen in previous entries.

Since there are so many photographs, it doesn’t make sense for me to post every single one. Instead, I’ll share the ones I believe are most important or particularly devastating to the claims that the school was closed during this time, while simply linking to the rest. I’ll also do my best to present them in chronological order and include the corresponding articles whenever possible. Photos with no real significance or that contain personal information (there are about half a dozen of those) will be left out for obvious reasons.

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The Sandy Hook School library was a hub of activity for both students and faculty. There’s plenty of evidence showing it was in use between 2008 and 2012. Some of this evidence has already been discussed in earlier entries. For example, when children’s author Patricia Polacco visited on September 15, 2011 (covered in “Sandy Hook Elementary Was Open,” parts six and seven), she signed copies of her books in the library, as shown in this photo from the 2011-2012 Scrapbook:

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Like the previous seven entries in the series (and those still to come), today we will continue to present even more evidence that Sandy Hook Elementary School was open and fully operational – and had been for fifty-six years – when Adam Lanza shot his way into the school and murdered twenty children and six adults. This of course runs completely contrary to the absurd idea – presented by conspiracy theorists such as James Fetzer and Wolfgang Halbig – that it was quietly shuttered in 2008 due to a non-existent asbestos problem. Or dirty walls. Or whatever the claim is these days.

Throughout the years, the students and staff of Sandy Hook lent their time to a number of charitable causes, from collecting Valentine’s Day cards for American troops every February to Thanksgiving food drives. These photographs represent just some of the events that took place at the school, featured here because they can be corroborated by write-ups in The Newtown Bee and/or on social media. Other examples of the school’s giving spirit can already be seen elsewhere on the site, such as the “small bags, bears, books, and basics” as well as the hats and mittens collection drives seen here. Many more are outlined in this article (“Sandy Hook School 3rd And 4th Graders Focus On Community Service”), published by The Newtown Patch on June 21st, 2012.

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