No public event has occurred in modern times that does not have an alternate, conspiracy theory narrative attached to it. President Kennedy was killed by the military industrial complex. The moon landings were faked by Stanley Kubrick in a studio. The World Trade Center was brought down by people working for Dick Cheney. President Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim born in Kenya.

The bodies of the terrorist massacre in San Bernardino were not even cold when the conspiracy theorists started coming out of the woodwork to offer their alternative narrative. Like most conspiracy theories, the newest one violates Occam’s Razor that states that among competing narratives, the one with the simplest explanation is likely to be the correct one.

The bare facts of the San Bernardino Massacre (1) are that on December 2, 2015, a married couple named Syed Rizwan Farook, an American of Pakistani descent, and Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistani-born legal resident, shot 14 people to death and wounded 22.

The massacre took place in a rented ballroom where a holiday party was being held by the San Bernardino County Department of Health, where Farook worked. The couple fled in a black SUV.

After a massive manhunt lasting four hours, law enforcement spotted the SUV and gave chase. The police in short order killed Farook and Malik in a fire fight. Later, the FBI determined that the couple’s garage was filled with weapons and home-made pipe bombs, and they were evidently home-grown, self-radicalized terrorists inspired by ISIS to commit a mass shooting.

This narrative was not satisfying for the conspiracy theory community. Clearly, something even more nefarious than an ISIS-inspired massacre happened in San Bernardino was more interesting.

Police Scanner Recordings

Typical of how the conspiracy narrative was constructed was shown in a video uploaded to YouTube by someone called “Lift the Veil” (2).

The video, based on recordings off of a police scanner, relates a lurid story of multiple black SUVs, a fake police chase, culminating in a staged fire fight for the benefit of the TV cameras. Much was made of the fact that the police collected video security cameras and kept people with smart phones out of the area. Clearly these actions were designed to keep a video record of what really happened out of public view.

Of course, police collect video cameras and recordings at crime scenes all the time to gather evidence. And no law enforcement organization is going to allow people to loiter in an area where a gun battle may break out at any moment.

The question arises, why would a conspiracy fake a massacre, a police manhunt, and a final gun battle? The logistics of such an operation would be complex, to say the least. The objective would have to be really important to stage such an event and somehow keep the fact that it was a false flag operation a secret.

An article on Infowars (3), the blog run by the Alex Jones radio show, provides the key. Quoting Dr. Steve Pieczenik (4), a former State Department official who has drifted into conspiracy-mongering, the piece suggests that San Bernardino was staged to further President Barack Obama’s gun control agenda.

Pieczenik has previously suggested that 9/11 and the Sandy Hook school massacre (5) were also false flag operations conducted by the United States government.