On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman shot and killed 26 people, including 20 first graders, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Robbie Parker's 6-year-old daughter Emilie was among those murdered.
The next day, Parker became the first family member to speak publicly about the shooting. Stepping up to the podium, Parker emitted a nervous, half-laugh before he gathered himself together and began to reminisce about Emilie's short life.
New York Times journalist and author Elizabeth Williamson says that Parker's reflexive response to the tragedy would later become fundamental to a massive conspiracy campaign that claimed what happened at Sandy Hook was a sinister government plot designed to encroach upon gun owners' rights.
Alex Jones, who hosts a conservative radio show and the website InfoWars, broadcast Parker's statement repeatedly, Williamson says, and "People picked up on this and this laugh, this sort of split-second moment in a several minute long, just anguished presentation, and they said that this small, gasping laugh was evidence that [Parker] was lying."
Denying that the Sandy Hook mass shooting had occurred became "a highly symbolic thing," Williamson says. "People did this for reasons of ideology. They did it for, in Alex Jones' case, profit. They did it for psychological reasons. There was a tribalistic bonding that happened around this."
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