Why the Parkland conspiracy theories are different

They aren't an attempt to make crazy sense of a senseless tragedy. They are a way of saying to the tragedy's victims and survivors: You aren't even worth arguing with.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez speaks at a rally for gun control.
(Image credit: RHONA WISE/AFP/Getty Images)

The moon landing was faked. The Holocaust never happened. Sept. 11 was an inside job.

Belief in the most outlandish conspiracy theories has long been a fixture of modern life. And as the mass murder of children in America's schools has also become a grimly familiar event, so has conspiratorial whispering — that the shootings were "false flag" operations orchestrated by anti-gun groups, or even that they never happened at all.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.