My colleagues, None of this today that you are bringing makes sense, your inconsistencies, your hypocrisy, your sick of fancy unless you are in a cult.
And guys, I'm starting to think you're in a cult.
If you claim you back the blue but want to defund the police when the police go to your nominee's house to retrieve national security secrets, you might be in a cult. If you're supporting a guy who's felony convictions prevent them from getting a security clearance, you might be in a cult.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'Shea. I served in the CIA's Clandestine Service for twenty eight years, living undercover all around the world.
And in my thirty three years with the CIA, I served in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Although we don't usually look at it this way, we created conspiracies.
In our operations. We got people to believe things that were true.
Now we're investigating the conspiracy theories we see in the news almost every day.
Will break them down for you to determine whether they could be real or whether we're being manipulated.
Welcome to Mission Implausible.
I'm thinking about today's show which is a maddening show. We're going to talk about Sandy Hook and the conspiracy theories around Sandy Hook and watching John Stewart on The Daily Show talking about the dialogue around guns and how a lot of politicians and the GOP essentially guarantee that there's going to be such a supply of guns so little restriction, that there's going to be mass shootings, and then they also want somehow credit for saying that they're against mass shootings.
Now, all of us, by the way, is not to say that gun crime does not exist.
Of course it does, and some cities are worse than others.
But here's the thing, and I say this.
With all due respect, the balls of these right wing mothers talking about how there's too much gun crime and chaos in our democratic cities when Republicans are the ones who've enabled the flood of illegal weaponry into our city in the first place.
Right.
So, Sandy Hook, clearly, in my mind, there is a very mentally ill young man who had access to weapons he shouldn't have access to, and this massive movement of trying to turn that conversation into some completely crazy conversation where instead of that being punished by our society. People are rewarded. They make money by converting what is clearly a conversation about guns into a conversation about crisis actors and conspiracies.
It's a certain sense, it's a way of avoiding truth in facts, right that are unpleasant. There is a monster under your bed, and you don't want to talk about it. And if you don't want to talk about facts, you make up a false narrative that gives you control. I mean, it's a fact that the three states with the highest murder rates in the US are Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. There is a thirty three percent higher murder rate in
red states and in blue states. And I don't think people in the Southern states are any more are violent than anybody else. I think, quite frankly, it's people having access to firearms who shouldn't have them, and rather than have the conversation about, you know, sensible ways of protecting our children, it's morphed into this can't be stopped, or you know, strangely, we should just arm the children or the teachers. And then it goes beyond just the tragedy
of the children being shot. People then attacking the parents of the children. With some of the parents of the Sandy Hood kids have been threatened with death. They've had to move because they're under a threat by people saying that they're bad actors or that their kids didn't exist, and the burden of proof then is placed on them. You must prove that your child died or that your child existed. And this is simply taking logic and turning in. It's on its head.
But you guys did find a brave truth teller.
So we're proud today to have Eric Swallall, a friend and a congressman from California's fourteenth district in the East Bay of northern California. He worked on Homeland and National Security committees and ran for the Democratic nomination in twenty twenty as a gun control advocate. Hey, guys, great to have you Eric.
Yeah, of course, mind my pleasure.
So, Eric, one of the first questions I wanted to ask you about is, I know you did a lot of work on gun control. What do you do when you hear these kind of conspiracy theories that shootings aren't real, that it's crisis actors, that it's a hoax, the federal government is doing it classified training exercise, or it's a sy opera, what have you. How do you look at these issues?
Well, first, I look at it as a father.
I've got a seven year old, a five year old, and a two year old, and the two oldest have sheltered in place about a half dozen times this school year because of gun violence threats the greatest cause of death for children. And so first, I just want to protect my kids, and I want to protect everyone else's kids and keep the most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the most dangerous people.
I also approach it as a prosecutor.
I prosecuted homicide cases in Oakland before I was elected, and I remember two of the victims in two separate trials that I did. The victims were teenagers, so sadly adding to that statistic of children the greatest cause of death for them being a homicide, and believing, you know, we don't have to live this way. And also I approached this as the son of a cop, a gun owning, duck hunting police officer who would take me elkin deer hunting when I was a kid.
So I grew up around guns. I'm comfortable around guns.
And you've had death threats too, haven't you a lot?
Yes, And so I understand why people want to protect themselves, and I also understand the culture of hunting in America. But I just happen to believe that we can preserve hunting, let people shoot for sport, and allow people to protect themselves, and still keep the most dangerous weapons from the most
dangerous people. So I guess it was fitting in a sad way that when I was going through congressional orientation in December of twenty twelve, that the Sandy Hook mass shooting occur, and just to set the scene for like my perspective on this. The Harvard Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School hosts new member orientation that they do every newly elected member of Congress, and I was elected in November twenty twelve, is sent to Harvard and we're
there and it's an exciting time. It's bipartisan, you're getting to know your colleagues. And it was the last day that we were there that we woke up to this tragedy. And one of the members of my freshman class was newly elected Congresswoman Elizabeth Esti, who represented Newtown where Sandy Hook was and So just imagine going to orientation, you just got elected Congress and this has come to your community. And I remember we all really rallied around Elizabeth to
support her and promise to do anything we could. And first meeting I had with Speaker Pelosi, or Leader Pelosi at the time in Congress was a gun violence task force stood up by the leader asking Mike Thompson of Napa Valley, a former marine who duck hunts.
If he would lead the task force.
And I was invited to be a part of it, naively believing, well, twenty children and six teachers were slaughtered by an assault weapon at the place we hold most deer in our communities, a schoolhouse, surely, like this is what it takes to finally do something about gun violence. And it was just a punch in the stomach to see that it would go nowhere. But what I and
I guess I should have expected that. What nobody expected, though, was that many far right gun extremists who were afraid that this would be a galvanizing moment, they invented a conspiracy around what happened.
There wasn't one conspiracy, There were like several competing illogical conspiracies. One being that nobody died, right, it was all crisis actors. In fact, some of the crisis actors as part as this conspiracy supposedly showed up in the Super Bowls singing in twenty thirteen along with Jennifer Hudson. I mean, it's not crazy, he gets. But another conspiracy is that Adam Lanza was hypnotized and drugged by the US government to carry this out. So the conspiracies go from it didn't
happen at all. It was crisis actors too, it did happen, and who was really behind it? But what unites them all is this was a setup to basically push gun control.
That's exactly right.
And the biggest, loudest voice with the widest audience was Alex Jones. He stated once on his own podcast that he said, they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey or Pakistan, And so yes, it had. Obviously the immediate effect was to just raise doubt about the shooting, to undermine any justification for a change in policy. See and then of course the emotional toll that it took and put on
the family members of the students and the victims. But again that what I have found, especially in this disinformation age, and we would really be lurching into it as we would go into the twenty sixteen election, was that we found ourselves on defense rather than offense. That we rather than saying this policy allowed children to be slaughtered, we have to change the policy. We start with saying, no, this was not a conspiracy that you know, they were not crisis actors or was not set up by the
government to take away your gun. So we're already apologizing or being defensive about what he has put out there, and it just made it all that much harder. And sadly it wasn't even the last school shooting.
Let's take a break.
We'll be right back.
And Rebecca, you know Sandy Hook was just one of many. And you've been on the hill for much of this, and so now I think we've all learned that people who follow politics, what do expect from either side when there's one of these horrific incidents. But I wonderful from you on Capitol Hill when you deal with these people every day. Is there a different is there different things from behind closed doors?
John.
It may surprise you that many of them believe that we should have tighter and stricter gun safety laws. But they have confided in me and many of my colleagues that the NRA is quite loud. And what they mean is that, you know, we have a system in our elections where outside organizations can spend unlimited, non transparent money.
You know, we call them super packs. And because most of our elections are not very competitive, it's low turnout in these elections, for the primaries, and so the Republican colleagues and mind, they're not afraid about They're not afraid of losing in November to a Democrat. They're afraid of losing to a more conservative Republican. And they know in a low turnout election, it won't cost that much money for the NRA, you know, to spend in their race
and turn out you know, the most extreme voters. However, you know, the signal does not match the noise here because of course, across the country you see approximately eighty percent of gun owning Republicans want background checks, but the twenty percent who do not, you know, they're very loud. What's amazing to me, I guess not so amazing anymore,
twelve years on the job. Is that I used to think that I served with people who were otherwise employable, like we had all given up like better paying jobs to do this important job. But what I've come to find is that I serve with a lot of people who think this is the only job they can get.
And then so if you think this is the only job you can get, then of course you're going to be afraid of, you know, voting a way that's contra to how you really believe, but a way that would likely keep you in your seat.
Some of them may be right though, Right.
Eric, I probably tell the audience that you and I met in a paradise where there was no gun control at all, and that was Iraq in twenty fourteen. And of course, incredible amounts of guns firearms were flooded into
Iraq with no regulations whatsoever. Isis was able to arm itself, and we saw, you know, what a society looks like without any gun control regulations, right, And in fact, the first time we flew in a helicopter, there was surface to air fire, right, people firing weapons in the night, possibly even at our helicopter.
So I think I asked you if that was just you know, local fireworks celeration.
You told me it was.
I lied to you and told you it was celebratory fire and I could have relevant shooting at the noise of the helicopter we were flying in from beg Dad Airport. It did.
And right now and you still see conspiracy theory is you know, being peddled about, you know, who won the last election, or the federal government being out to get Donald Trump and what this has inspired, right because if you recall, I believe it was after the mar Lago raid on you know, Donald Trump's possession of classified documents, a madman with an assault rifle went to an FBI field office, you know, looking to kill FBI agents and
thankfully they killed him before he could do that. But in a country that's armed to the teeth and just you know, teaming with conspiracy theories, I mean that that is a very violent recipe for disaster. Violence is of course, I have always seen it, and I always tell juries it's the lowest form of communication.
Do you think the NRA piece will change, because obviously in the last couple of years, the NRA has gone through all kinds of convulsions, and seems to be in a much weaker place.
You know what's interesting, John, is that it turns out that Wayne Lopierre, the executive former executive director of the NRA, did not really have the interests of the members in mind.
And shocking, but what it turned out was that hard to believe for him to.
Enjoy a lavish lifestyle of private jets flying him, shuttling him all over the world and other.
Like a Supreme Court judge.
Like he was a Supreme Court judge, a fole of yea and a closet full of you know, ten thousand dollars.
Suits yachts to the Caribbean.
Yeah, he had to raise money from the members to support that, and how did he do it. He did it by firing up his members, vilifying anyone who had any recommendations on how to make us safer, and then collected the donations from the members and the gun manufacturers, suggesting that, you know, their freedom was at risk. And it turns out it was really just a personal grift.
Sounds like somebody else we know who has fifty million dollars of his supporter's money, you know, for his own legal fees, and they think that it's going, you know, to elect he and his ideas to the White House.
So Eric Marjorie Taylor Green famously said, just a couple of days ago, right, I look at your comments on this, that the FBI represented a threat to the president, to President Trump's life when they raided Marilaga. Right, they didn't really raid it per se. But I'll tell you John and I when we dealt with the FBI, so CIA and the FBI sitting down over coffee to discuss it,
they were armed as well. They're always armed, and in fact, they're paid extra to carry a firearm, and if they don't carry a firearm, they actually take a cut and pay. So they always want to carry a firearm. So spinning this up into a conspiracy theory of assassination and murder that takes it to a different level. And I'd sort of like your take on that.
The search warrant protocol showed that they were authorized, you know, to use lethal force if necessary, and so yes, they would be armed. And so Marjorie Taylor Green tweets out, I was the first to tell him, him being Donald Trump, that the FBI was out to assassinate him. So it's dangerous in so many ways. One, she's told this to President Trump, and he's now of course stoked this to his benefit. He's actually even put it in some of his legal filings.
To be clear, he was in New York City at the time, right, he wasn't even there. But okay, I just want to make that.
Let's walk yeah, let's let's debunk this.
He was in New York City, and as you know, just like the agency, this is the FBI, they knew where he was. He also had a secret Service detail. If they were out to get him, they would not have gone to an empty house.
They wore polo shirts.
Just because they didn't want the raid jackets, and then they didn't want to be seen as disrespectful. So he actually was treated better than most people who were subjected to an FBI raid. Third, President Biden, when his documents were retrieved that he had in his possession, was subjected to the same protocol. And fourth, every search in America that the FBI conducts follows that protocol. So it was no better or worse other than the polo shirts for
Donald Trump. But the danger, though, is that Marjorie Taylor Green and Trump putting this conspiracy theory out there.
What it does is it creates a pretext.
For violence for people in their movement to believe that this is us versus the government, and unless we take up arms and defend Donald Trump from an assassination, they're going to get him. And going back to the earlier point, and a country that has over three hundred million, it has more firearms than people that should be really concerning.
This allows them to say they're just fighting back as opposed to actually initiating violence.
I guess I'll just put a button on the Sandy Hook conspiracy. Thankfully, although policies were not changed, assault weapons
are still allowed, we don't have background checks. The four different families did bring multi million dollar lawsuits against Alex Jones, who perpetuated this conspiracy, and they won, and actually the judgment ended up being one point five billion is what their loss was deemed to be for the trauma that they were subjected to to be told over and over that their children did not die or they were crisis actors, and so there was, you know, thankfully, some accountability and
hopefully that does deter others.
I recall also, I think it was in twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen, the Newtown School Board wrote to President Trump and urged them to recognize that the murders of the twenty six people at Sandy Hook and ask them to remove your support from anyone who continues to insist the tragedy was staged or not real. And my understanding is Trump nor the White House responded to that letter.
But what I don't understand is in the process they continue when they're angry and start talking about undermining the Justice Department, undermining the FBI, underne our law enforcement system that those people rely on. They expect that the Justice Department is professional and takes it seriously because they rely on it themselves, But at the same time they're undermining
it with the American people. I can imagine FBI officers who do now today, probably as they travel and they go about their business, they have to worry about violence because it's out in the community that they might have tried to assassinate President Trump and.
John It may surprise me that these radicals who would believe Marjorie Taylor Green may not be so discerning when it comes to law enforcement. They may just see a local cop on the beat and lump them all together and it just seems that if it's not condemned and buried, that it puts a target on the backs of all law enforcements. So we had a Judiciary Committee hearing today.
We had the ATF director at the hearing. Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the FBI, and I took a little bit of a detour from my questioning of the ATF director pointed out what Marjorie Taylor Green had said, debunked it with also the FBI statement, but also the points I just made earlier. And then I did something I
rarely do. I asked my Republican colleagues, if any one of them, starting with Chairman Jordan, would condemn what Marjorie Taylor Green said, and I just I held, and I paused, and I waited, and I could only get one of them, and he said, he said, that's a ridiculous statement that you would have to ask us that, And I said, it sure is, and it's ridiculous that she would say it and put us any of us in a position
to have to condemn it. And so it's really unfortunate that they just what they fear is that condemning it puts a target on their back, so they would rather keep the target on the back of the police than to shift it to themselves.
Okay, let's take a break from the craziness just for a minute.
Or two, and we're back.
James Fetzner, who started began the Sandy Hook conspiracy that Alex Jones hooked into. He's gone wider and claimed it was a Mosad hit squad and this is part of the Jewish conspiracy. And our enemies in Iran in Russia have picked up Alex Jones and Fezner and are also pushing this as well.
I'll leave you at this the struggle that I have with conspiracy theories because after Trump was elected, I believe it or not, the Democratic Caucus, I think brilliantly, Speaker Pelosi brought an NYU psychologist to our retreat to talk about Trump and.
To talk about how to.
Counter a lie. And the psychologist she told us something that was really fascinating. She said, the problem you face is that once he puts it out there, yes, with like maximum response.
Like data shows that if he.
Says the sky is red, not blue, and you spend a lot of time and resources say no, the sky is blue. Here's the proof that yes, in the near term, you can get people back to believing that the sky is blue. She said, the research shows in the mid and long term they regress to the original lie. And so you are in a position always with folks like this as to do I try and counter the lie or do I just let it go and hope that not that many people hurt it and not amplify it.
So, Eric, do you think that you know, the majority of them have come to the point like where you said, where they believe this guy is red or do they in their heart our hearts, know that it's not red.
I think too many believe that it's read because they're told by you know, a messiah like figure of Trump or others that it is. But I do believe that a good amount just recognize something that is weaponized to
benefit their own political position that they've staked out. It feels also that I work in pro wrestling, and what I mean is that you have so many personas that I encounter, But when we're like not in the quote unquote ring or not on camera, they act a completely different way, and they may hit me over the head with a steel chair when we're.
In the ring.
But when we're not and we're not on camera, they'll want to brow out or be your friend.
Yeah, I think I think Eric made some really good some really good points there. So John, what do you think what's the difference between a cult and a conspiracy? What do you think it is?
Jed, I don't know, but our friend Eric Swall, I think, did a quick take on that.
And this was the Congress.
Let's take a look, my colleagues.
None of this today that you are bringing makes sense, your inconsistencies, your hypocrisy, your sick of fancy unless you are in a cult. And guys, I'm starting to think you're in a cult. That is your right, but it's not your responsibility. I promise you that's not what your constituents would want. So if you believe in states' rights except when a jury in that state convicts your nominee for president, you might be in a cult.
If you can't.
If you claim you back the blue but want to defund the police when the police go to your nominee's house to retrieve national security secrets, you might be in a cult. If you're supporting a guy who's felony convictions prevent them from getting a security clearance, you might be in a cult.
Now, let's speak with our producer Adam Davidson and try to sort this all out together.
So, of all the many, many things that are absurd about these conspiracies, I'm particularly obsessed with this idea of crisis actors. Let's just say we decided we wanted to do something that involved hundreds of crisis actors. How do you find them?
Where do you do you?
Do you audition?
Do you audition? Do you hire them crisis by crisis or do you I mean some of the conspiracies say, oh, look this person was in this one and was also the Parkland shooting or whatever. It's really hard, by the way, to act well, and children are rather famously like there's a reason why at any given moment there seems to be one child actor who's in all the movies because Hollywood can find one or maybe two, like seven year
olds who can actually act. They're like, all right, you're in every movie until you're twelve, and then we need a new seven year old. So that's just one air Like, how do you find them? How do you cast them? How do you Leaving aside the ever present issued in every conspiracy, which is how do you keep everyone silent? But then the other is are you casting them on demand? So are you bringing you know, if we need a thousand crisis actors in Sandy Hook, where are we holding these?
Or the other alternative I think of is do you have them already? And they're just like, how do you bring them in?
How did you.
Stage the incoming of these folks? Did they get a per diem? Did they get a per diem in a hotel? Someone at the school is going to be like, you know, I happen to notice that two weeks ago we didn't have any students and suddenly we have a thousand new students. This feels to me like a self refuting conspiracy theory because you just think even the slightest thought of how would we make this happen? Are their cities filled with crisis actors and they've just been there for.
It's amazing nobody can find the advertisement for them?
Yeah, how did this work? Is it like the old Russian military cities where there's just a locked city that nobody.
That's a good idea and the crisis actors can only have one role? Right? I mean on TV when you're watching a movie and you're like, oh, I know that guy he was in? What movie was he in before? But with a crisis actor, you can't have I don't want to make light of this, but you can't be like, play a kid who's killed in real life and then show up in the next mass shooting.
Although some of them claim, like that's one of the crazy conspiracy theories, so they'll show see this picture here, this kid looks just like this kid in this other mass shooting. But like, either way, it doesn't make any sense, right, And then what do you do after, Like, now there's a seven year old kid, do you kill him? Do you send him to Slovenia to grow up?
I think even lots of crazy people know that there's no such thing as crisis actors for these kind of things. It shows a desperation of someone wanting to deflect or change the things. Like my only thing I can argue is that a crisis actors that pretended like they were killed. I truly have no other arguments.
If I was brought into a meeting in the agency and they said, Okay, hey, we're gonna we're gonna do all these fake shootings. We're gonna make people feel bad. And the reason to do this is to stop guns being taken. Well, they're not being taken anyway.
I happen to live in America where there are these mass shootings and I happened to notice none of them cause gun control. Like I feel like, if you guys came to me the forty eighth time, I'd be like, guys, this is really expensive. We've now like had four hundred thousand crisis actors. We've had to like bury them in the Mariana trench to get rid of their bodies, and we don't have any gun control. So can you come up with a new idea?
Texas who pays the take? Like, we should go to the irs and see, Like, we'll.
Walk me through that. Let's just walk through pretend the CIA was running this. What is the paperwork involved on a per person basis?
Oh my gosh, this is this is like so crazy.
I don't even notice.
So first of all, if their miners would have to get their parents permission, we don't know how to do this. There'd have to be a budget.
Actually, I would love to bring our producer John Stern. Are you there?
John?
Oh?
Thank you for inviting the Adam. I'm always here.
Cause you have actually created TV shows and movies. You've done them with big casts sometimes.
And we can list all of my credits if you like, but I'll be very specific. If we had one hundred extras, here's what the support would need to be. Where do they park? So you're going to need to rent a parking lot. A parking space is obviously not going to be right by the suburban house. You need to find this. You have a locations department that finds the parking lot. So there's the people who own the parking lot. You
have someone who works for you parking PA. Now you need to shuttle everyone to the location.
Sorry, a crisis, parking PA.
That's right, crisis PA.
Shuttle Now you need to shuttle all these people to the location. Generally you'll do this in fifteen pass vans at rotate back and forth and are driven my team stairs. Maybe you can get some non union people. If it's in a southern state and those vans you're renting and you're filling with gas and you're ensuring, so then they need a holding area. You might rent another space. If there's a church right on the corner or a school. Well, in this case of school is a set or you'll
set up a tent. If it's in hot weather, you need to have air conditioning, you need to have bathrooms. You generally bring those in and a honeywey. Let's dispense with the idea that any of them need any makeup or clothes. They just all come as they are. Let's make it easy. But they all do need to sign in and out and release forms, and there's generally one
extra PA production assistant for every fifteen extras mention. Their parents would have to come with them too, right, it's not just the kids or the parents could drop them off. But technically, I mean the rules are the parents have to be on set. If you really get into it, if they're working during a school day, then you have to have an onset tutor and you have three or
four hours of the day that they're tutoring. All right, Then there's food you buy, law have to have craft services, and someone who buys that food brings that food there, serves that food, cleans up afterwards, and then you do that again, you say lunch. Then you need a payroll department to pay all these people.
I mean that logistics are insane.
Well housing them. They're not local because everyone would know, oh my god, this is a real production.
This is not a first idea best idea situation. All right, guys, this one fascinating, heartbreaking. But next week we'll try and to do a goof your one.
If you're supporting a guy who's felony convictions prevent him from getting a security clearance, you might be in a cult. And if the guy you're supporting for president has felony convictions that prevent him from going to Cherman, Tina, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Egypt.
Eat the Opian.
My motion takes Presidentia, Iran and Israel, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, is Out of New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Atlina, South Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United.
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry O'sha, John Cipher, and Jonathan Sterner. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission Implausible is a production of honorable, mention and abominable pictures for iHeartMedia