When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations

In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, as with the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, there were many cries of “False Flag!” and “Crisis Actors!”  Some claimed the entire event was a hoax manufactured by shadowy agents of the Deep State: others stated that the shooting was real but that the students speaking out for gun control were hired agents of CNN, the Democratic Party, George Soros or some combination thereof.  For some, this evinces a population which has utterly lost touch with reality. Others call it a sign of deep distrust with our government and with mainstream media.  Whatever the cause, these claims are widespread enough to demand our consideration and thorough examination.

What would it take to stage a Parkland or a Sandy Hook?  First, you would need the cooperation of many people.  Seventeen Parkland families and twenty-six Sandy Hook families would have to agree to your plan.  After the “shooting” they would then put their “dead” offspring in hiding whilst remaining in the community: let one “victim” be spotted walking the streets and the whole house of cards would come tumbling down.  They would either have to keep their extended family in the dark or bring them into the conspiracy. (“Should we tell Grandma about this or should we just let her think her baby girl got shot?”)  This would involve at a minimum dozens, more likely hundreds, of people who were in on the secret.  Keeping them quiet would require an enormous expenditure of money or some very convincing coercion.

Now you need multiple crisis actors. Several Parkland victims were hospitalized with “serious injuries.”  We would need to arrange for “doctors” and “nurses” to take care of these “wounded” students and plant them in the hospital: we would have to make sure that no medical professional who was not in on the conspiracy gained access to them.  That means multiple potential leakers, any of whom might have hard evidence to back their claims.  A recorded phone conversation with handlers, a surreptitiously recorded video of a patient in “critical condition” sitting up and laughing about the whole thing, a diary listing cash payments along with deposit slips to their bank: these are just a few of the ways one of these crisis actors might go off script.   To fake a school shooting within a community would be an operation of enormous complexity, and any engineer will tell you that more moving parts means more failure points.   Do you honestly think nobody at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would realize the “students” being interviewed were not students at all, or that none of the other doctors or nurses on staff noticed a special team of unfamiliar staff which exclusively handled Parkland casualties and which disappeared immediately after their release?

(As for the idea of a real shooter and paid crisis actors, that offers the worst of both worlds.  Consider the age of the purported “crisis actors.”  Would you trust the details of your top secret operation to somebody who can’t buy cigarettes legally — especially if your operation involved the mass murder of children?)

By contrast, grooming a troubled youth to shoot up his school is relatively straightforward. There is one failure point: if he gets too talkative, he can be easily dismissed as a mentally ill gunman with a history of delusional thinking.  As we have heard (and heard and heard), there is no shortage of guns in America and no shortage of ways to acquire them.  Why stage a fake shooting when it is so much easier to cause a real one? Why swear 43 families and an untold number of bystanders to secrecy under pain of death when you can arrange the shooting of 43 children with less effort and a far greater chance of success? This is a morbid calculus, but I think it is a sound one.

Now, for the sake of argument, let us assume that Nicholas de Jesus Cruz and Adam Lanza were subjected to MK Ultra-type brainwashing and driven to murder.  This brings us to our next question, one which Anton LaVey was fond of asking: cui bono (who benefits?)  The current theory is that these shootings are intended to raise support for gun control.  Yet neither Sandy Hook nor any of the other shootings which followed have resulted in any kind of stringent regulations.  If Sandy Hook and Parkland were supposed to lead to mass gun confiscations, they have so far failed miserably.  At some point the people behind these “false flags” are going to have to explain to an unsmiling finance officer what return they have received on the time and resources invested in these programs.

Instead of looking to false flags and crisis actors, we might instead check the demographics of Stoneman Douglas High School and the surrounding areas.  40% of the school’s students are Jewish and Broward County is home to 170,000 Jews. Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League have long used tragedies from Leo Frank to the Holocaust to promote their goals.  (I say this not with scorn but with admiration. If I want to protect my Folk I can hardly fault somebody else for protecting theirs — especially when they do such a damned effective job of it).  These organizations have large war chests and extensive ties to media and government officials. It’s not surprising that they found a few articulate students, including a student journalist, and put them before cameras as witnesses to an atrocity.  The grievance industry has been one of America’s biggest businesses for a while: in a world where victimhood is a moral virtue, what better representatives than young victims of a school shooting?