How long do you think it takes conspiracy theorists to turn nasty after a national tragedy? A year? A month? Nope: Immediately.

On December 14, 2012, Lenny Pozner’s six-year-old son Noah was one of 27 people murdered by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Pozner has since been consistently insulted and threatened by people who think he and his son were actors paid by the government to stage a crisis for reasons that only make sense to those whose thought processes sound like shrieking lemurs.

Pozner and a volunteer network he founded have been fighting back against these harassers using tactics like threats of legal action and YouTube takedown requests. That sounds like the worst thing in the world, so naturally we wanted to hear his story.

How long do you think it takes conspiracy theorists to turn nasty after a national tragedy? A year? A month? “They emerged immediately,” says Pozner. First on the scene was Jonathan Lee Riches, an ex-con infamous for filing countless frivolous lawsuits. In a YouTube video posted two days after the shooting, he argued that Lanza had been mind-controlled by the Illuminati. ” left voice mails for Nancy Lanza and Ryan Lanza on December 14. On December 16, Riches descended upon Newtown and pretended to be a relative of Adam Lanza. He got arrested, but he made videos right away about how it was a conspiracy to take away civil liberties.”

Riches was soon arrested for violating parole, but he was only the vanguard. Merely glancing around the internet, it’s not hard to come across examples of Sandy Hook conspiracy theory “tourism.” We found an “inquisitive couple” that visited Newtown a little over a month after the shooting and were shocked to find that people didn’t want to talk to them (clearly a sign of a cover-up!). Another theorist’s website says they visited in 2014 to argue that the entire town is fake. Shit, why stop there? Maybe the entire USA and its history are an elaborate charade intended to deprive 300 million people of their gun rights.

So yeah, picture the craziest person you’ve ever met, multiply their insanity by 10, and then imagine that they’ve been cloned to build a small army. That’s what Pozner deals with daily. Search for “Sandy Hook conspiracy” on YouTube and you’ll get 244,000 results. One 20-minute “documentary” has three million views. Popular talk radio personalities like Alex Jones quickly jumped on board, rallying his fans to the noble “All These Dead Children Are Phony And Their Grieving Parents Are Actors” cause. It’s a rabbit hole without end, and Pozner threw himself into it just weeks after the shooting.

And when has Alex Jones ever been wrong about anything?

“I was outraged by what I was seeing unfold, particularly by someone like Alex Jones, who has a sizable audience. So I emailed him in January and called him out for suggesting that this was a staged event and that we were all so-called ‘crisis actors’ faking our grief. He invited me on his show, but I would have nothing to do with him. It was barely a month after my son was murdered, and I was still in a fog of grief and denial. The last thing I wanted to do was deal with the press.”

If conspiracy theorists could name a king without immediately beginning to suspect that their monarch was a reptilian Illuminati stooge, Alex Jones would be that king. His radio show gets two million listeners a week, and his websites and videos pull millions of views. In an article written five days after the shooting, Jones’ site said “it would take a fool not to question the motive behind it all: Is this all part of an evil pre-conditioning program?” And that was just the start of their coverage.

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