Conspiracy Nutjobs Delight In Torturing Orlando Shooting Victims

Patience Carter, who was injured during The Pulse nightclub
massacre in Orlando, was victimized again by nutjobs
 claiming she's a crisis actor partiipating in a government
ruse to take all our guns away, or something.
Photo by Zack Wittman/Tampa Bay Times 

A woman named Patience Carter was shot and injured at The Pulse nightclub during the massacre there earlier this month and a friend she was with was killed.

Carter, like all the victims in this shooting deserves all the support and love anybody can give her,  obviously.  

But cue the nutjobs!

Every time something like this happens the conspiracy weirdos come out of the woodwork to tell us the same old story they have. This massacre didn't happen. It was staged by the government to take all our guns away and suspend all our civil rights.

And those victims we all saw on TV? Those are all crisis actors brought in to stage the "shooting"

Riiiigghht.

You'd think the conspiracy wackos would come up with something original, but that's the narrative they give every time.

We could safely ignore these idiots if they didn't make sport of harassing people like Patience Carter. But they seek people like her out, splash her all over the internet and "expose" her as the fraud she is clearly not.

According to Slate, the "proof" the conspiracy dingbats offer is that Carter is supposedly a crisis actor , which is obvious because she had interned at television station WTFX.

She worked for awhile at a TV station! Which proves she's an actor!

Or something like that.

Patience Carter meets with President Obama after the
Orlando shooting, not before, as the conspiracy nutjobs
would have it. 

Carter also Instagrammed photos of herself after the shooting, including one in which President Obama was comforting her when he went down to Orlando after the crime. 

Someone changed the time stamps on Carter's Instagrams to make it look like they were taken before the shooting, then re-posted them on line.

Hey, if you do a sleight of hand and change the time stamp, then the time sequence really did alter, apparently. What, these conspiracy theories have Cher's "If I Can Turn Back Time" as a constant earworm in their sick little heads?

Similarly to this situation, the kooks tortured parents of young children who were killed in the 2012 Newtown, Connecticut school massacre. As if these grieving parents needed more pain in their lives.

I'm not sure what to do about these nutjobs. Trying to bat away their idiotic rantings is just a fruitless, endless game of whack-a-mole.  Still, they deserve all the ridicule we can throw at them, which is what I'm trying to do here.

As for Patience Carter, she ended up "thanking" the morons who were bothering her with the nutty conspiracy theories. On Instagram she wrote: "It's your outrageous insensitivity that makes me want to heal even faster, and grow even stronger."




WTFX

Karma Brings Great Lesson To Caitlyn Jenner Critic On Facebook

The Mark Hogancamp artwork
Facebook user Terry Coffey
used in a viral post last week.  

You've probably seen this meme all over social media:

People are criticizing those who are calling Caitlyn Jenner brave for her very public transition from the former Bruce Jenner to a glamorous looking woman on the cover of Vanity Fair.

In that criticism was people pointing to heroic U.S. soldiers and calling them the brave ones, not Caitlyn Jenner.

To me, these critics missed part of the point. There are different kinds of brave. Huge numbers of U.S. soldiers are undeniably brave, and we should be forever grateful for their service.

That should go without saying, but the current state of public discourse forces me to state that obvious fact.

At the same time, Caitlyn Jenner is brave, too, for encouraging other transgender or would-be transgender people to be themselves in spite of bigots and worse.

One of the people who cited brave U.S. soldiers as being much braver than Jenner was a person named Terry Coffey of Oregon, who pointed out the bravery of soldiers as incomparably greater than U.S. soldiers.

Coffey wanted an photo to match his Facebook post regarding this, so he found what appeared to be a photo of two World War II soldiers.

It showed one soldier carrying another wounded soldier on his back. That wounded soldier is pointing a gun, presumably returning enemy fire. These me, he said, represented bravery.

According to Huffington Post, Coffey found the uncredited image online, and put it in his post. This Facebook post went totally viral, with more than 800,000 page views.

Give that, Coffey decided it would be good to find out who took the photo, so the photographer could be credited.

The two soldiers in the image Coffey used are actually toy figurines made by artist Mark Hogancamp. 

It turns out Hogancamp was beaten almost to death in 2000 because he dressed like a woman. (Hogancamp was not transgender; he liked to cross dress.)

Coffey learned that information while looking up details of the figurines.

On Facebook, Coffey followed up with another post:

"In an ironic twist, I have discovered that the photo is part of a documentary created by a man who was beaten nearly to death outside a bar in 2000.

After spending 9 days in a coma, suffering severe brain damage and being unable to walk or talk for a year, he chose to deal with the pain of the tragic event by creating an imaginary world of characters and photos and stories, all set in WWII. His work is the subject of an upcoming documentary. 

Why was he nearly beaten to death by 5 strangers?

Because he was a cross-dresser. 

I could have chosen any one of hundreds of photos  depicting bravery, but I chose this one. Do I think it was an accident?

No, I don't. 

What happened to this man was cruel, wrong and unforgivable.

Hate helps nothing.

Love wounds no one.

and God heals all.

(and irony makes you think.)"

You know what?

I believe U.S. soldiers are brave. I believe Caitlyn Jenner is brave. And I believe Terry Coffey is brave.

Coffey's original post criticizing the idea that Jenner was brave probably appeals to conservatives who have an unyielding, unchanging view of what is right and wrong.

Coffey learned a good lesson and took it to heart. The fact that he broadcast that lesson probably raised the ire of people who can't stand the fact that an experience changed Coffey for the better. So Coffey is brave for admitting his mistake and noting that he changed his mind.

All kinds of media outlets want to interview Coffey, but he says he's politely turning down all media requests.

Which is good. Everything that needed to be said was said in his post.

Well done, Mr. Coffey!