Is there a more exciting subject than trees? Of course not.
Throughout Chapter Eight of Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, Allan Powell—an Australian conspiracy theorist with no apparent background in botany, climatology, or northeastern American winters—leans heavily on the claim that the crime-scene photographs from Sandy Hook Elementary School were not taken in December at all, but sometime in the fall. His preferred window shifts slightly from page to page, but generally lands on “late October or early November.” Maria Hsia Chang (“Dr. Eowyn”) echoes this same claim in Chapter Two, Six Signs Sandy Hook Elementary School Was Closed.
For the uninitiated, Reddit is a user-driven content aggregator broken up into communities called subreddits. Each subreddit centers on a specific interest, and collectively they cover just about everything imaginable—news, politics, culture, hobbies, and plenty of nonsense. There are thousands of them. Based on subscriber count, the main conspiracy subreddit currently ranks as the 108th most popular on the site, nestled comfortably between the NBA and anime.
Sandy Hook denial is, unfortunately but predictably, a popular topic there. As a result, even a clueless doofus like James Fetzer manages to receive regular praise—along with occasional scorn, since conspiracy theorists love eating their own almost as much as they love conspiracies.
While it never really found a large audience, the conspiracyAMA subreddit was created as a spin on Reddit’s wildly popular AMA format, typically used by celebrities or public figures to interact with Reddit’s enormous userbase. The idea was to give conspiracy personalities a “safe space” to answer questions without immediate ridicule. Though the subreddit ultimately paled in comparison to its inspiration, it did manage to host one of the most disastrous AMAs I’ve ever seen—right up there with Woody Harrelson’s legendary meltdown.
The guest of honor was, of course, bloated clown James Fetzer, fresh off his Amazon ban and eager to milk his allotted fifteen minutes of relevance.
I strongly recommend setting aside some time and reading the AMA in its entirety. It eventually ballooned to 371 comments before finally running out of steam, and it’s an incredible document. What follows, however, are some of my favorite moments—packed with Fetzer’s bald-faced lies, furious backpedaling, and his predictably asinine takes on other subjects (especially Jews).
All responses are from James Fetzer, transcribed by the moderator. This may not mean much if you’re unfamiliar with Reddit, but it’s worth noting that Fetzer’s answers were rated so poorly by users that many of them were automatically hidden from view. That’s how badly things went for poor James… in his own AMA.
Still, don’t feel too bad for him. Fetzer seems convinced it went swimmingly. Seriously. Just take a look at this Facebook post:
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Chapter Nine By: “Dr. Eowyn” (aka Maria Hsia Chang)
Parsing through James Fetzer’s bullshit page by page has been a frustrating yet oddly satisfying process. So, it’s both a relief and a little disappointing when I come across a chapter that doesn’t require me to eviscerate yet another gross pile of lies—because someone else has already done such a stellar job of it. In this case, that someone is CW Wade from Sandy Hook Facts. CW has done an excellent job taking on “Dr. Eowyn” (real name Maria Hsia Chang), dismantling the nonsense in Chapter Nine so thoroughly that it would be a waste of my time (and frankly disrespectful to his work) to repeat the effort. You can find his takedown here and an excellent supplemental article here.
We make it clear that our death records are not perfect and may be incomplete or, rarely, include information about individuals who are alive. Because we do not receive reports for all deaths and cannot release all of the reports we do receive, the absence of a particular person [in the Death Master File] does not prove the person is alive. Our error rate is about 0.5 percent.
Nearly every SSDI search engine warns about these potential errors. GenealogyBank, which Chang relied on for her “research,” is no exception. Here’s what they have to say about the SSDI’s limitations:
GenealogyBank updates the SSDI database each week. The updates include corrections to old death records, as well as new names of the recently deceased. If a person is missing from the index, it may be that the SS death benefit was never requested, an error was made on the form requesting the benefit, or an error was made when entering the information into the SSDI.
In other words, Chang’s “research” is based on a source so notoriously flawed that even the organizations using it issue disclaimers about its unreliability. But sure, let’s treat it as gospel.
After powering through Chapters Seven and Eight of Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, I decided to reach out directly to Allan Powell, the author of both chapters, to see whether he was willing to clarify a few basic points. Chief among them: if so many photographs were not taken on December 14, 2012—as Powell repeatedly claims—when exactly did he believe they were taken? And did he believe any photographs from Sandy Hook were actually taken that day?
The goal was simple. By forcing Powell to commit to a timeline, I wanted to see whether his claims could survive even minimal scrutiny—or whether, as is so often the case with Sandy Hook denialism, they would collapse under their own contradictions.
Like many figures in this space, Allan Powell is not especially easy to track down. His background is opaque, his online footprint scattered. Still, I eventually located an email address and sent him a brief, polite, and deliberately non-confrontational message.
To my surprise, he responded. To my lack of surprise, his replies revealed a level of confusion and incoherence that exceeded even my low expectations.
What follows is the complete email exchange, presented in chronological order. Read from top to bottom. Powell’s responses appear in brown—because what other color would they be?
Beyond the rack of magazines dated 2012 (including issues published just weeks before the shooting), the school lobby was full of unmistakable signs that Sandy Hook was an active, operating elementary school right up to the day of the attack.
“Nobody Died At Sandy Hook” Chapter Six By: James Fetzer
Chapter Six, nominally authored by James Fetzer, is nothing more than a verbatim transcript of a thirty-minute interview conducted in May 2014 with a man named Paul Preston. That’s the entirety of the chapter—no analysis, no commentary, no added context. Just a transcript. It’s difficult to imagine a lazier way to pad a book, but it does neatly illustrate the level of respect Fetzer appears to have for his readers. Making matters worse, this interview isn’t even exclusive content; it has long been freely available online.
So who is Paul Preston? Much like Wolfgang Halbig, he is repeatedly described as a “school security expert,” a title that is asserted often and substantiated rarely. Despite the weight this label is meant to carry, any concrete credentials that would justify it prove frustratingly difficult to pin down.
