The Crisis Actor

The crisis actor is a particularly vile accusation thrown at the survivor of an event or a relative of a victim of an event. The term is loosed at the individual by a conspiracy theorist who does not believe that the event occurred. It is a relatively new term and is related to the concept of a "false flag" operation. The idea here is simple and we will use the most recent mass shooting in the United States as an example. 

On Valentine's day of 2018 an individual pulled a fire alarm at a school in Florida and as the students left their classrooms the individual opened up with an AR-15 style assault rifle killing 17 students. Afterward he fled and was subsequently arrested. This the most basic factual telling of the massacre itself. 

This event, because it involved guns, naturally caused it to be under the suspicion of right wing conspiracy theorists who have an automatic response to any event similar to this: that's it is a ploy to remove guns from the average American citizen. In the past such conspiracy theories usually involved Satanic control, video games and other media influence, or some kind of irreligious attitude allowing the right wing conspiracists to allege literally any other cause than a person with mental issues having easy access to firearms. Now, the conspiracy itself has changed from a false cause hypothesis to one of straight denialism. 

"Crisis actor" as a term was not, to the best of my knowledge, used prior to the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012. This mass murder was perpetrated, according to the facts, by a man carrying an AR-15 style weapon resulting the deaths of 20 children and six teachers. The term is first popularized by a Florida University professor who denied that the event happened and that the entire thing was staged to remove our gun rights. This incredible claim was then adopted by other conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones to cause the harassment of Lenny Ponzer, a parent of one of the victims, as the claim is that the murders never happened and that he (as well as other parents of the victims) were acting. 

It became more used a year later during the Boston Marathon Bombing as some attacked victims for not "looking enough like they were in pain" for being actors in the latest government crack down on civil liberties. Since then it has been applied to every other similar event: the Paris attacks, the Charlie Hebdo murders, the San Bernadino murders, etc. 

The conspiracists themselves, doing their best internet sleuthing, look at hundreds of pictures of events and cherry pick the ones in which two people at both events look kind of similar. In most cases, the resemblance is based on skin and hair color, but anyone who doesn't want to believe in these theories can easily make the differentiation between the individuals. The evidence in favor would be laughable if the accusation wasn't so monstrous. 

Their belief seems to be the following: that the all powerful conspiracy (Illuminati or whatever) wants to remove the gun rights of the citizens. Instead of just using their power to pass a law, they stage an event and hire actors to portray the grief, struggle, and human misery of the result. This will cause the rest of the population to sympathize and then demand that the guns be removed. Then the UN (or the Illuminati or whoever) can take over. I've addressed this conspiracy earlier, so I won't dive into it, but the crisis actor is an integral part and that is what needs to be focused on. 

This facet of the conspiracy didn't take off after Sandy Hook for a reason: the conspiracists need to be able to show that the "actors" being used are the same between events. Numerous memes exist comparing grieving individuals who apparently show up at both Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon. This lends proof to one of the primary motivations for these people: they want to feel important or clever. Backed up a few studies (Lantian et. al 2017, Imhoff and Lamberty 2017), the motivation is that conspiracism offers the chance to be unique and superior over the rest of the masses. Ignoring the fact that the people only look similar in the most basic manner (white, darkish hair), the conspiracist has found their "proof" while ignoring all evidence of the contrary they look for what Keeley called "errant data:" an out of focus picture or one in which the faces are obscured. Anything that can explain their belief that the event didn't happen because an all-powerful organization caused it for a different purpose. 

The real problem for the theorist is that the theory itself collapses under its own hypothesis. If such an organization were powerful enough to fake a massacre at a school (or wherever) then surely they are powerful enough to not have to use the same people as the crisis actor. Surely they have another recourse than having to go through the incredibly complex machinations of faking an event. If, this sinister group is real, have no moral compulsions, then why wouldn't they just have the event occur with the real individuals doing the mourning? It's not only simpler, but then you don't have to rely on bad actors to not convey the right amount of emotion when being photographed. These are of course rational questions of an irrational accusation but any amount of consideration would disabuse the entire notion from the minds of any reasonable individual. 

Works Cited:

Lantian et. al "I know Things They Don't Know! The Role of Need for Uniqueness in Belief in Conspiracy Theory" Social Psychology 2017

Imhoff and Lamberty "Too Special to be Duped: Need for Uniqueness Motivates Conspiracy Beliefs" European Journal of Social Psychology (2017)