Here we go again.
On Tuesday afternoon, a female suspect entered the main campus of YouTube in San Bruno, CA, and opened fire.
Mass shootings bring heartache for their victims, and anger and confusion for those helplessly watching. Now, they also bring conspiracy theories meant to either politicize the incident, grift off those predisposed to believe conspiracy theories, or simply troll.
Here is a roundup of YouTube shooting conspiracy theories and hoaxes, and it will updated continuously.
On Friday night, normie America stared mouth agape at its collective Twitter account, astonished at tweet (since deleted) that newly-reborn sitcom star Roseanne Barr posted.
Wha…what?
Pimps all over the world? Trump breaking up trafficking rings everywhere? The hell?
Most people had no idea what the hell Barr was talking about, but anyone who’s spent time in the fetid swamp of online conspiracy theories knew exactly what she was talking about: the #QAnon theory that posits President Trump at the center of a plot to bust Satanic sex rings infesting the highest levels of the Democratic Party and Hollywood – with an insider called Q dropping secret knowledge of what’s to come.
Having survived the shooting of his classmates, Douglas High School student David Hogg has since been the subject of a firehose of conspiracy theories calling him an actor from Los Angeles, a stooge of his FBI-linked father, and a plant paid by George Soros.
Now comes a new accusation against Hogg: that he wasn’t even at school the day of the shooting, but instead rode his bike there afterwards, shooting footage and pretending like he’d survived the incident. Naturally, if Hogg didn’t actually survive the shooting, his activism would be a sham, and his instant celebrity would quickly fade.
This post has been updated
Early Wednesday morning, the brief reign of terror unleashed by the domestic terrorist mailing package bombs across Austin, TX, ended when the alleged bomber, 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, was discovered, chased down by police, and with a SWAT team moving in, detonated an explosive device in his car.
And if you think an open-and-shut ending to a crime spree means there won’t be conspiracy theories about it…well, you haven’t read enough of my work.
In my first piece as a contributor for Daily Dot, I explored the links between hot new right wing uber-conspiracy “The Storm” and old school internet prosperity scams.
While the “intel” drops of #QAnon and his or her anonymous comrades might seem cutting edge, in reality, there are a slew of old scams and plots based around similar themes – a supposed insider spewing torrents of tantalizing, fanciful “intel” about some great event just about to come.
One predecessor to “The Storm” was a scam from the early days of widespread internet use, called NESARA—which has roots in an even earlier intel-driven scam called Omega.NESARA was a set of monetary reforms proposed in the late 90’s by engineer Harvey Francis Barnard. He wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve, ban interest on loans, forgive all consumer debt, go back to the gold standard, and establish a national sales tax.
After years of trying to get Congress to pass NESARA, Barnard published it online in 2000, where it caught the eye of a Seattle-area New Age enthusiast named Shaini Goodwin.
Goodwin was an online shill for an “investment” called the Omega Trust, which purported to sell “Omega Units” of “prime European bank notes” for as little as $100, which would then “roll over” and return millions of dollars in profit.[…]Omega took advantage of the naivete of early internet adopters, and in particular, the growing ubiquity of Yahoo groups. By the mid-1990’s, it was a world-wide scam, with millions of dollars flooding into the small town where its creator lived, Mattoon, Illinois.
To read more about the line from Omega to NESARA to #QAnon, read my piece here.
Mike Rothschild 
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