I still remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard about the massacre at Sandy Hook almost 14 years ago.

It was the second national tragedy in my lifetime after 9-11 that left an indelible and permanent mark on the conscience, something you remember for the rest of your days.

Now, the two events are not the same in terms of their scale, severity, geopolitical importance, or death toll, obviously, but they were so shocking, so morally outrageous that they imprint themselves somewhere deep in your soul, like a kind of psychological impact crater.

I also remember just as vividly the conspiracy theories that almost immediately sprouted up

like weeds around the Sandy Hook shooting. Within days of the attack, if not hours, it had been

decided by legions of internet commenters and a few prominent right-wing personalities, Alex Jones,

most famously, that the attack never actually happened. It was staged.

It was a hoax. The government had perpetrated an elaborate ruse, one that apparently involved

hundreds of people, including not just government officials, but members of the media and so on.

The dead children were not actually dead or maybe never existed. The grieving parents were

frauds, crisis actors, playing a role. Now, none of this was true, of course. There was no evidence

to support any of it, but many people apparently believed it anyway. They pointed to weird

details surrounding the event. And from those data points, if we can call them

that, they constructed an entire cinematic universe. The conspiracy theorists said that the initial

reports out of the school were inconsistent and contradictory. There was talk of a second shooter,

but then it turned out that it was only one shooter. They pointed to other

things like news articles about the shooting with timestamps appearing to show that the articles

were published before the event occurred. And most of all, most of all, they pointed to the

mannerisms of the parents. They circulated clips of the parents smiling or appearing to chuckle

or behaving in other ways that were deemed strange and inappropriate.

Now, rather than conclude that people respond to grief differently, especially when there are cameras pointed at their faces,

the theorist decided that an inappropriately timed smile must be evidence that everything we think we know about the crime isn't true.

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