Long time readers may recall that I used to check in from time to time on a website known as The Thinking Housewife, seeing it as a somewhat genteel and quaint version of highly conservative views based on a Roman Catholicism that was so ultra-traditional that it viewed the current pope Francis as some kind of liberal anti-Catholic imposter who had infiltrated the church in order to subvert if from inside. All that was good clean fun until in 2015 she suddenly put up a post where she went on an extraordinary anti-Semitic rant. At that point, I decided that the site was not funny anymore and stopped visiting.

But that did not end the outrageousness. Various commenters to my post pointed out that things had become even worse and that she had since become a firm believer that all the gun massacres that made major news (San Bernadino, the Pulse night club in Florida, Sandy Hook elementary school, the shootings in Brussels and Paris, even 9/11) were all false flag operations. Here is her response to someone who asked her how a hoax on the Sandy Hook scale could be pulled off.

We are almost certainly dealing with government-funded, legal propaganda to achieve a national security objective: the disarming of perceived threats to the citizenry. The United States Department of Defense has conducted information operations for years in foreign countries during wartime, and now it is doing it at home. Civilian participants are almost certainly convinced these operations involve a good and necessary objective. Furthermore, they are likely paid large sums and have signed non-disclosure forms, which include serious penalties, possibly imprisonment for a very long time, if the terms are violated. Unless you understand those elements — the conviction of a critical and legal goal, the large amount of money involved and the threat of punishment — it’s hard to grasp how these things can be pulled off.

In that post she shows a photo of a funeral for a Sandy Hook victim and says that six people in the photo are either smiling or suppressing smiles, indicating that they are incompetent actors. I actually can see only one person at the top left who could be vaguely considered to be smiling. But even if there were six, the idea that no one smiles at a funeral is ludicrous. It is human nature to smile at friends and loved ones even at the worst of times.

I had forgotten about that site but just yesterday, there was a new comment to my 2015 post that said that she is convinced that the Parkland shootings were yet another false-flag hoax and that the surviving students being shown in the aftermath are highly trained crisis actors. I really don’t want to send people into that cesspool of absurdities but in a recent post I confessed my mystification at those who disbelieve these events to such an extent that they will even go to the extent of harassing the survivors and families of the victims. Since Laura Wood (aka, the Thinking Housewife) writes clearly, she does offer revealing insights into the mentality of those who believe such theories, as you can see from her many posts on the Parkland massacres.

There is no proposition, however absurd, that cannot be defended if one is willing to add on any auxiliary assumptions.