With what will surely be known as one of the most baffling, awful years in recent history finally coming to a merciful end, I figured I’d wrap things up with a (very) short list of the 2016’s biggest cowards, at least according to me, and presented in no particular order:
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“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook”
Chapter Seven
By: Allan Powell and Kelley Watt
Let’s say you’re the kind of person who enjoys magic shows. So, you gather up the family one Friday night and head down to… well, wherever it is magicians perform these days. You splurge on front-row tickets and take your seat, ready for an evening of family-friendly entertainment. The magician finally takes the stage and starts things off by pulling a rabbit out of his hat. Sure, it’s an old trick, but the kids are thrilled, and everyone seems to be having a good time.
Then the magician spends the next hour and a half performing the exact same trick—pulling the same rabbit out of the same hat, over and over and over again. You’d be pretty pissed, right?
That’s precisely the situation we find ourselves in with Fetzer and his crew pulling the same tired trick yet again: presenting photos out of order and out of context.
For this chapter’s fact checking, I’m taking a different approach. Instead of breaking it down claim by claim, I’ll address pages (or multiple pages) at a time, highlighting specific sections. This will be much easier to follow if you have a copy of Fetzer’s book (which I sincerely hope you didn’t pay for) as well as access to the files in Connecticut’s final report, which I’ll be referencing often.
Read More →I like to think there isn’t much that slips by me, especially when it’s something this painfully obvious. But as reader Brian Neal helpfully pointed out, I managed to miss a real whopper here.
Read More →If we set aside our better judgment and continue indulging the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, con men, and criminals that make up the Sandy Hook denialist cult—by respecting their claim that the school was closed between 2008 and 2012 (despite not a shred of evidence)—we stumble upon yet another point of interest: the numerous glass display cases in the school’s lobby. Throughout the years, there were typically 3 to 6 of these cases. Most were tall, vertical cabinets just inside the main entrance, often along the front window that Adam Lanza shattered to gain entry. There was also a museum-style table display, moved around depending on what was featured, and a built-in wall display near the office and west hallway.
What’s consistent across all of them (aside from the obvious) is that, in photos published by The Newtown Bee, the Newtown Patch, and the school’s own website (all included below), the contents of these cases change frequently, further proving the presence of normal student activity. Unless, of course, you still believe that secret agents spent four years meticulously decorating a supposedly abandoned school with current magazines, new children’s books, state-of-the-art technology, and pizza—all for some photos most people will never see. That’s what people like James Fetzer, Wolfgang Halbig, and Maria Hsia Chang would have you believe: that a school “infested with asbestos” and supposedly used as storage was secretly outfitted with all of these things—just to pull off an elaborate hoax.
Read More →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.
Read More →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.
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.
Read More →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:
Read More →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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#10 – “There Was An Emergency Preparedness Drill/Exercise Nearby”
Mentioned no fewer than three times in Nobody Died At Sandy Hook, FEMA’s “Planning for the Needs of Children in Disasters” is repeatedly mischaracterized as either a “drill” or an “exercise.” In reality, it’s a six-hour independent study course based on materials from this Save the Children document. While FEMA offers the course online, some state organizations occasionally teach it in a classroom environment—which, for the record, looks a lot more like this:
…than this:
If you have even a passing familiarity with reality, you may notice a couple of differences!
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