“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Appendix B By: Nick Kollerstrom
I’m not sure why these six pages are included as a second appendix rather than as another chapter, but bizarre choices like this are the least of this book’s problems.
Kollerstrom didn’t exactly cover himself in glory in his previous outing, managing to strike out on just about every goofy claim that dripped from his fingertips. Let’s see if he fares any better here. Granted, the bar couldn’t be much lower, so at least he has that going for him.
This is it—the infamous “FEMA manual” James Fetzer just can’t stop gushing about. Don’t worry if you find it disappointingly underwhelming. That’s probably because it’s an obvious amateur forgery. But before we dive into the weeds, let’s start with a little background…
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Afterword By: Nick Kollerstrom
“No-one has been able to get into the Sandy Hook elementary school to verify if there are any bullet-marks, bloodstains etc” pg. 209
No one! Well, except for the police, EMS personnel, and the parents of the victims. Surely Nick Kollerstrom isn’t seriously surprised that an elementary school where twenty-six people—including twenty children aged five and six—were brutally murdered wasn’t open for public tours… right?
That said, if he’s so eager to see bullet marks and bloodstains (and let’s be honest, he’s not, or he would have looked), he can flip through Detective Arthur Walkley’s crime scene photos. They’re all conveniently detailed in the report:
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Epilogue By: Dennis Cimino
This chapter’s author, Dennis Cimino, manages to out himself as an Obama “birther” by the second paragraph—because of course he does. Not just any birther, though—a particularly gullible one. The claim that President Obama attended school as “Barry Soetoro”? Yeah, that originated as an April Fool’s joke… back in 2009. So buckle in, folks, because it’s going to be a wild ride!
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Chapter Twelve By: Sterling Harwood
“Carver said one can control the situation better by using instead photographs of the dead to identify the victims, depending on the photographer. Snopes.com said that what Carver meant was that one can use a photograph of the face to identify the victim without showing wounds to the body of a child. This, however, hardly depends on the photographer; this depends instead on the shooter and where he shot the child. If the shooter shot the child in the face or even shot the identifying features of the child’s face off, then the photographer wouldn’t matter one little bit.” pg. 188
Much of this is totally irrelevant, as there’s no indication that Adam Lanza shot anyone’s “identifying features” off. Not that it would matter much anyway, as there are, of course, other ways to identify a body. As explained in CFS 1200704597, 00118939.pdf:
Professional crank James Fetzer and his band of loopy dipshits put an inordinate amount of stock in Twitter posts, citing them multiple times throughout the despicable “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook.” In Chapter Five, “Vivian Lee” uses a handful of confusingly time-stamped tweets—produced by a well-known Twitter bug, which I’ve discussed at length earlier—as one of the “top ten reasons Sandy Hook was an elaborate hoax.” On page 67, under “4. There was foreknowledge of the event,” she writes:
In addition, tweets about the shooting began before it occurred, a tribute was apparently uploaded one month before the event, and web pages honoring the victims, including a Facebook page R.I.P. Victoria Soto, were established before they had “officially” died.
A lot has also been made of a single, seemingly innocuous tweet from Sandy Hook Elementary principal Dawn Hochsprung’s Twitter account, posted on October 17, 2012, showing the school’s students participating in their annual evacuation drill. Despite looking nothing like the chaos that unfolded less than two months later (which should be an enormous shock to no one, ever), this is somehow supposed to be “proof” that what occurred on December 14, 2012, was actually just a drill:
Of course, this would not be at all noteworthy if the authors had any doubts about the legitimacy of the account, just as tweets from the morning of the 14th could not possibly be considered one of the “top ten reasons Sandy Hook was an elaborate hoax” unless they also had total faith in Twitter’s ability to accurately time-stamp user-generated content. With that in mind, Fetzer and his “expert researchers” logically have no choice but to accept the fact that all of the photographs shared by Dawn Hochsprung on Twitter between September and December of 2012 must also be genuine. These photos depict a busy, bustling elementary school, which obviously deals a devastating blow to Fetzer’s absurd claim that Sandy Hook had been closed and unoccupied since 2008—a claim that acts as the foundation for his entire theory (and, by extension, this book).
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with how these hucksters operate that the book makes no mention of Dawn’s Twitter timeline beyond the evacuation photo. In their attempt to obscure it from their readers, they even cite their own blog entries about the evacuation photo in the footnotes, instead of linking directly to the actual source. For example, from page 96:
Why wouldn’t they provide the URL to the post on Dawn’s timeline as their source? What is it they don’t want their readers to see?
On October 9th, 2012, Dawn Hochsprung tweeted a photo from a “Pathways to Common Core” conference. While this particular image doesn’t give us a look inside Sandy Hook Elementary, the event is corroborated by the November 2012 edition of Newtown Public Schools’ Superintendent’s Newsletter. The newsletter includes the following quote by survivor Natalie Hammond:
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Chapter Eleven By: James Fetzer and Kelley Watt
When I saw the title of this chapter, “Are Sandy Hook skeptics delusional with ‘twisted minds’?”, I thought, “Perfect! Easiest chapter yet. I’ll just write ‘yes’—or ‘yes, of course,’ if I’m feeling loquacious—publish, and move on to Chapter Twelve.”
But, as it turns out, there are actual claims being made here. Most are the same tired nonsense recycled from earlier chapters, but there are a couple of new ones thrown in for good measure.
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Chapter Ten By: “Dr. Eowyn” (aka Maria Hsia Chang) and James Fetzer
Chapter Ten is an interesting read—not because it finally, miraculously offers anything resembling compelling information (spoiler: it doesn’t), but because its claims were thoroughly debunked ages ago by Metabunk, Snopes, USA Today, and countless others. To their credit (I guess?), the authors actually acknowledge this within the first paragraph. Yet, inexplicably, the chapter doesn’t end there. Instead, James Fetzer and Maria Chang stumble through a weak counterargument that essentially boils down to “nuh-uh.” Riveting stuff.
A couple of smarty pants researchers from Dartmouth College have spent considerable time and energy studying what is commonly referred to as “the backfire effect”. The fruits of their labors resulted in a paper titled “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions”. I’m simplifying their work for the sake of brevity (if you’re really interested, just go read the paper), but the basic idea, which I’ve cribbed from RationalWiki, is: “the backfire effect occurs when, in the face of contradictory evidence, established beliefs do not change but actually get stronger“. Kind of really crazy, right? Knowing this, it can sometimes be difficult to muster up the willpower to confront conspiracy theorists, because you know that you’re incredibly unlikely to sway them, no matter how well-prepared or well-spoken you are. So I was pleasantly surprised when, after a relatively short back-and-forth, I was able to get a fanatical Sandy Hook denier to actually admit that they were wrong about something.
