Let me know if this has already been posted and I will delete. Chris Knowles of the Secret Sun weighs in with potent insight, as usual. At least this answered my main question about this case, "Why on Earth and Heaven and Hell would anyone teach their "mentally ill" child to use firearms? Links at original post.
Fearporn Kills, or Adam Lanza and TEOTWAWKI This situation is not only difficult for me as a parent but also because, as longtime Secret Sun readers realize, I know what it's like to lose someone to gun violence and do so during the Christmas season.
But as investigators struggle to find a motive for the Sandy Hook massacre, I'd offer up a working theory for the event- that it was brought about by paranoid delusions about the so-called end of the Mayan long count calendar, a fast-approaching date which the "Doomsday Preppers" have been obsessed with.
The Doomsday movement is closely tied into elements on the far right, particularly the Religious Right. But survivalism is also closely associated with the militia movement and its front groups such as the Gun Owners of America, an organization whose founder Larry Pratt has called for (white) gun-owners to form leaderless cells based on the Guatemalan death squads of the 1980s.
The entire network of conspiracy radio hosts- nearly all of whom are closely tied to the far right- works hand-in-glove with survivalist hucksters. Sites like Raiders News Update essentially act as motivational propaganda for prepper salesmen (in Raiders case, for its sister site Survivor Mall).
However, with the Christian constituency of the survivor movement rapidly aging and losing its ability to sustain itself (outside of the radical racial fringe of the Christian Identity movement and related), born-salesmen like Horn eagerly embrace the kind of Neo-Theosophist apocalypticism that New Age gurus like Elizabeth Clare Prophet peddled.
Indeed, Raiders News burned a lot of bandwidth on the 2012 meme, to the point that Christian Right apocalypticism and New Age Left apocalypticism have synthesized into a toxic brew of fear, paranoia and proto-fascism- the Doomsday movement.
All of this came to mind when Adam Lanza's greasy-haired, wild-eyed aunt was tracked down in Illinois and revealed just what the Lanzas were up to in their quiet, isolated McMansion in the Connecticut foothills:
Marsha Lanza called Nancy Lanza "self-reliant."
"The only reason she would have guns," Marsha Lanza said, "was for self-defense."
Two law enforcement sources said the murder weapon was one of those guns, a semiautomatic rifle. The others were a pair of semiautomatic pistols. The mother of Newtown school massacre gunman Adam Lanza was a survivalist who was stockpiling food because she thought the world economy was on the verge of collapse. Nancy Lanza began hoarding food and water because she feared that the onging financial crisis was going to bring about the end of civilized society.
She reportedly became 'obsessed' with guns and taught Adam how to shoot, but on Friday in a grim twist he blasted her to death while she laid in her own bed. Law enforcement sources told the Hartford Courant that she had not gotten up - and could have even been asleep - when her son killed her.
The disclosure raises the prospect that Adam could have had the same apocalyptic views as his mother, and that she could have even encouraged them in him. The Mayan Apocalypse, which the ancient Mayan people thought would mark the end of the world, will supposedly take place on December 21, although it is not clear if Adam thought that was the case.
Here we see the grotesque Orwellian revisionist language of the modern Tea Party Right. The aunt says Nancy was "self-reliant", yet she lived on alimony paid by her millionaire ex-husband. The aunt says she kept automatic weapons for "self-defense", yet she lived in a virtually crime-free (and very well-policed) area. The aunt was clearly sympathetic to the survivalist delusion and uttered the usual bromides of the Right when asked about keeping automatic weapons out of the hands of the disturbed. She also contradicts herself when speaking of the paranoid isolation that neighbors had seen going on in the Lanza household.
With Adam suffering from neurological issues related to an apparently severe case of Aspergers (full disclosure: this author also scored very high on an Aspergers questionnaire, which shouldn't surprise readers of this site) and having no visible social life, it's highly likely he bonded with his mother and bought into her Doomsday delusions.
Her former sister-in-law Marsha said she had turned her home ‘into a fortress’. She added: ‘Nancy had a survivalist philosophy which is why she was stockpiling guns. She had them for defense. ‘She was stockpiling food. She grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. She was skilled with guns. We talked about preppers and preparing for the economy collapsing.’ Marsha added that her nephew had been raised by ‘kind, nurturing’ parents’. She said she last seen Adam in June but recalled nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
When I began to process all of this- survivalist Doomsday Preppers, computers, wealthy suburbs, marginalized, paranoid kid, corporate bigwig father- I was suddenly reminded of an episode of Millennium that I had written about here a few months back.
It hit me like a ton of bricks- this event bore a striking similarity to the plot of 'TEOTWAWKI', written by Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz (you can read the transcript here). Here's a brief summary from a MM fanpage.
After a fatal shooting during a high school basketball game, Frank Black, Emma Hollis, and Special Agent Barry Baldwin travel to Seattle to become involved in an investigation that will soon lead to a survivalist group supported by a high-brow computer corporation. It soon becomes evident that this group is so frightened of the predicted Y2K computer meltdown that they're stockpiling food and weapons in preparation for Armageddon and willing to kill anyone, including their own children, in order to ensure their own survival.
The shooting is during a pep rally, not a game and the death count is lower and the kids are older. The shooter here is a jock rather than a nerd. ( a curious choice in normal circumstances, but makes sense in the context of the paranoia being shown). But not even a show like Millennium- as brutal as it was- could ever imagine something so horrific as the Sandy Hook massacre. But so much else is so striking, in a dream-logic way.
Left: Ryan Lanza Right: Shooter from 'Teotwawki'
• The shooter is described as "numb" and "uncommunicative", terms that have been used to describe Lanza (who apparently suffered from a dangerous condition in which he was unable to feel physical pain).
• The shooter's father is a high-level executive and his mother is gripped by apocalypse fever.
• The shootings are related to a hoaxed apocalypse (the y2K hoax, as opposed to the y2012K hoax) with which the shooter has become obsessed.
• Kids on the Internet plays a central role in the action in 'TEOTWAWKI', (still very much a novelty in 1998 when the episode aired) and Adam Lanza used to have LAN parties at his house for his school's computer club.
I'm sure my eagle-eyed viewers will find more.
Of course, this isn't the first time a Carter/Spotnitz script foreshadowed real-life events. The most well-known is the Lone Gunmen 9/11 pilot (which Doomsday Preppers and other extremists claim was an example of the non-existent "Revelation of the Method", an imaginary "ancient" doctrine culled from the teachings of a distinctly contemporary Neo-Nazi) but an even more remarkable example is Carter's Lone Gunmen script which spelled out the fall of Sen. John Edwards several years before any of it had even gone down. I had my own foreshadowing of a Carter/Spotnitz script several years before the fact.
And the very same day the horror at Sandy Hook was unfolding, yet another Millennium script was quietly unfolding in the news, when a distinguished medical journal confirmed the then-unthinkable theory put forth in 'Collateral Damage', that Gulf War Syndrome was the result of the US bombing of an Iraqi nerve gas depot. I wrote about "Collateral Damage' in the same post I wrote about TEOTWAKI.
It could very well be that there were dissident elements in the intelligence community feeding Carter suppressed information to bypass the tight grip their bosses have on the media- mainstream and alternative. Indeed, the theories that GOP disinfo agent Alex Jones spouts about it don't even make sense, never mind have any real evidence to support them. Especially when you actually watch the episode and not just 5 second clips on some conspiracy site.
But at the same time there's so much weirdness at work that there are obviously other forces at work. And that's a reality that scares the Doomsday crowd more than anything else.
Fascists are prone to masking their agenda, but always show their hand once you get them talking. If you run across a New Ager who leavens his rap with Prison Planet headlines, or a hippie who's forever alluding to a mysterious "them", you'll find their true agenda will surface rather quickly once you get them talking. Many of them are often Fundies on parole (or Rumspringa) and you'll find that the truly weird terrifies them.
In order to cope with their terror, they'll cite the easily-disproven disinformation spread by other far right figures like Fritz Springmeier and lifelong Naval Intelligence asset Bill Cooper. Everything is a 'false flag' or similar, no matter if there's a single shred of evidence to back it up. In fact, it's precisely the lack of any evidence that proves the theory in the apocalyptic mind.
And of course, it is exactly that apocalyptic mindset to which we may well lay the massacre of the innocents in Newtown at the feet of.
I can't help but think that 12/21/2012 was the stressor here. Did Lanza feel that nothing mattered anymore in light of the coming apocalypse? Or was he- in his warped calculus- trying to actually spare these babies the horrors of his imaginary apocalypse?
There's another Millennium episode along those lines, '19:19'. Here's a brief synopsis:
Frank Black, Peter Watts, and Lara Means race against time to locate a busload of kidnapped children who have been buried alive in a quarry by a prophecy dictating madman who believes that World War III has begun and he is the one destined to carry out the Book of Revelation's instructions.
In that episode, it turns out the madmen had actually protected the children from a tornado. Was there a similar impulse in Lanza's misfiring synapses- that he was sparing the children from a greater horror? That may well emerge as investigators sift through the Lanza home.
It's an unhappy reality how much Millennium seems to have prophesied our times (and The X-Files as well). It could well be why Chris Carter has become such a whipping boy for the Cheetos 'n' Hentai set out there in the fanboy world. They're as terrified- in their own way- as the Apocalyptics. They run to the cold comforts of nihilism instead of Fundamentalism. But the two are in fact reductionist mirror images of each other.
UPDATE: Revelations that Lanza was a vegan because he didn't want to hurt animals may bolster my theory that he somehow wanted to spare the children from a great horror on "Doomsday." But then again Hitler was a vegetarian so who knows?
http://secretsun.blogspot.gr/2012/12/fe ... a-and.html
