Soon after 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, a group known as Never Again MSD emerged on social media. The group’s Facebook page, for instance, ‘run by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting’, was surprisingly up and running the following day, February 15, complete with the popular #NeverAgain.
The students that comprise Never Again MSD are widely regarded as the initiators of the ‘March For Our Lives’ gun-control demonstrations that took place in Washington, DC and across the nation on March 24. The march has now spawned many more initiatives that are fighting to end gun violence.
The power of youth, eh? It’s a charming narrative. But let’s read on.
A Revealing Email
On March 30, blogger Dr. Eowyn wrote a post on the ‘Fellowship of the Minds’ website that suggests that plans for the demonstrations were initiated long before the Parkland shooting. The evidence? A statement in an email sent to a source of European researcher Ole Dammegard by Officer Scott C. Earhardt of the Homeland Security Bureau of the Metropolitan Police Department:
In reference to your inquiry concerning the March For Our Lives Demonstration, here in the District of Columbia on March 24, 2018. MPD received a permit application several months prior to the actual event, and there was several months of planning for this large event.
If a permit application for the march was received several months prior to the actual event, of course, then the notion that ‘March For Our Lives’ sprung from a spontaneous grass-roots initiative by high school students is completely destroyed. But not just that. It also gives added weight to suspicions that the entire Parkland shooting was a false flag event.
OK, let’s tread slowly here. Whenever the term ‘false flag’ is brought up, it tends to polarize people into two camps: believers and non-believers. It’s a difficult thing to sit on the fence long enough to use proper discernment, because of the amount of cognitive dissonance it causes.
What is a ‘False Flag’?
Wikipedia tells us, ‘False flag refers to covert operations designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party (group or nation) being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility.’
The Parkland shooting, strictly speaking, is a false flag event if there was a hidden agenda—like gun control—behind the execution of the event. It is not a matter of whether or not all the deaths reported were fabrications. The lynchpin, in this case, would be if perpetrator Nikolas Cruz was not acting solely of his own accord (i.e. that he was under the influence of drug-facilitated mind-control by the true planners of the event and/or was aided in material ways by hidden accomplices who are not recognized in the official narrative). Certainly much evidence has been brought forward to support this possibility, but this article will be limited to the single piece of evidence discussed above.
If the Parkland shooting had planners whose motive was stricter gun control, then certainly the idea of trauma-stricken kids starting an emotional grassroots movement chastising NRA-funded politicians for their inaction on strong gun control legislation is a most powerful optic. In fact, this idea evokes visions of a jubilant self-congratulatory celebration after a long brainstorming session inside a well-funded liberal think tank.
Damage Control
And so, if these planners got wind of an email that leaked out which states that preparations for the ‘March For Our Lives’ demonstrations occurred months before the Parkland shooting, they would quickly realize that their narrative was going to be challenged. And they would naturally move into damage-control mode.
What tools are at their disposal?
- Order ‘concerned citizens’ (read: trolls) onto the offending blog to refute the validity of the email. Check. (Read comments from EpiDoc and others in the comments section of the article here.)
- Order ‘non-partisan bloggers’ to write posts refuting the validity of the email. Check. (This post in the blog Politifact came up as the first ‘top story’ in a Google search on ‘March for Our Lives’)
- Order ‘independent watchdogs’ to label as ‘FALSE’ the premise established by the email. Check. (This Snopes entry came up as the second ‘top story’ in a Google search on ‘March for Our Lives’)
- Most importantly: Compel the offending party by any means necessary to deny, retract, or at minimum keep silent. Check. (Officer Earhardt has up to now not responded to requests for confirmation of the email)
Using Discernment
I stand before you as a person with a single-minded interest: the truth. I do not write to tell you what is true, I write to stoke your level of discernment in your own personal search for the truth, as a comrade-in-arms.
What I have come to believe is that in issues such as this, there are two forces at play: those who are seeking to uncover the truth and those who are promoting an agenda based on false perception. Each individual piece of information needs to be examined on its own merits, where commonsense human motivation becomes the guiding principle.
Breaking Down The Email
In the case of Officer Earhardt’s email, let’s look at what makes sense using this lens. Is it likely that Officer Earhardt did not write this email, as commenter EpiDoc suggests? No. There is hard evidence that otherwise stands up to scrutiny.
Is it likely that he ‘had mistakenly mixed up the annual D.C.-based March for Life rally that happened in January with the more recent March for Our Lives demonstration in the email,’ as claimed in the Politifact article? No. While people do occasionally make mistakes of this kind, they are not so common. After all, the date of March 24th was explicit in the email. Note that the idea of the officer confusing two different marches is obviously one of the few options available if one is trying to discredit this evidence.
Furthermore, this is in conflict with EpiDoc’s claim that the email itself was a fabrication. Whenever we see a stark contradiction in two attempts at the refutation of evidence being used in search of the truth, your discernment antennas should be up in full force.
Finally, Snopes’ claim their investigation determined that ‘the permit application for the March for Our Lives rally was received on 21 February 2018, one week after the massacre’ is brought into question based on the fact that in the District of Columbia Special Events Task Group / Special Events Planning Guide, it is stipulated that organizers of such events must ‘Submit Letter of Intent to the MSETG AT LEAST 180 DAYS PRIOR to the planned date of the event.’
The Battle For Our Collective Perception
If we are to arrive at the ultimate truth about the Parkland shooting, we need to examine every piece of evidence presented on both sides with open discernment, and then see how our conclusions from each piece of evidence cohere with one another. We can also use this method to bring together our understanding of such events in general, as a consequence of recurring patterns we notice.
It is simple enough for those who want to forward a false perception to refute a single piece of evidence that challenges the revelation of truth, especially if the general public are more ‘comfortable’ with that very mainstream perception. And that helps keep the status quo. Those who wish to lock us into a false perception realize that it is actually the awesome power of our collective perception that creates the world that we live in.
Our task as truth seekers is to see the patterns of deception and learn to recognize, in each instance, whether the pure truth is earnestly being sought, or a false perception is being maintained.
