As the immediate, visceral shock of the Parkland school shooting has receded, a familiar cynicism has crept into the American far right. In the dark corners of the Internet, the same students who initially recorded the assault on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and who recounted the terror in harrowing testimony afterward, are being denounced by various pundits, conspiracists, and other professional cranks as pawns in a vast Deep State plot. It’s a common allegation on the political fringe: in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, Alex Jones, who runs the Web site Infowars, claimed that the shooting had been a “false-flag” attack designed to rile up anti-gun sentiment. After a gunman killed 58 people in Las Vegas last year, countless videos appeared on YouTube claiming that the victims were “actors.” In the case of the Parkland school shooting, students have been accused of being manipulated by the Democratic Party, running interference for the F.B.I., representing antifa (anti-Fascist) activists, and being bankrolled by billionaire George Soros, a favorite bogeyman of the far right. The more passionate and well spoken the students appeared, in interviews with CNN and Fox News, and the more organized they have become, the more they have been suspected of advancing a clandestine agenda.

“The wonderful minds behind the Women’s March and a number of other far-left, hashtag-resist groups have been working with these kids,” Lucian Wintrich, the White House correspondent for the fringe-right Gateway Pundit, told me, defending an article he wrote accusing the Parkland students of being “coached” to push a pro-gun-control agenda. “All of a sudden, these kids are not only suddenly brilliant at incendiary rhetoric, but also incredible graphic designers [and web developers], and some of the best organizational minds in the country—and they just came out of nowhere? Give me a break.”

On Wednesday, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) responded by demanding that Wintrich’s boss, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft, be removed from a panel on free speech later this week. (Pam Geller, the anti-Islamic extremist running the panel, shut it down instead.) Elsewhere, however, baseless conspiracies about the Parkland survivors have rapidly entered the Republican mainstream. Right around the time Wintrich was pushing his theory, a state employee e-mailed a Tampa Bay Times reporter from his Florida House of Representatives e-mail account with the same claim. “Both kids in the picture are not students here but actors that travel to various crisis when they happen,” Benjamin Kelly, an aide to state representative Shawn Harrison, told the reporter, referencing an image of high schoolers David Hogg and Emma González. To bolster his claim, the 61-year-old Kelly pointed to a widely circulated YouTube clip of Hogg getting into an altercation with a lifeguard in California over a boogie board. “There is a clip on you tube that shows Mr. Hogg out in California. (I guess he transferred?)” wrote Kelly, echoing conspiracists’ claims that Hogg was a “crisis actor.”

On Tuesday morning, the president’s son, Don Jr., liked two posts on Twitter suggesting that Hogg was working on behalf of his ex-F.B.I. father. “Could it be that this student is running cover for his dad who Works as an FBI agent at the Miami field office Which botched tracking down the Man behind the Valentine day massacre? Just wondering. Just connecting some dots,” the post read. Former sheriff David Clarke, who remains slated to speak at CPAC, tweeted that “The well ORGANIZED effort by Florida school students demanding gun control has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all over it.” (A representative for CPAC said Clarke was invited to talk about immigration.)

The same day, CNN reported that a top official at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Jon Cordova, was placed on leave after an investigation revealed that he frequently promoted conspiracy theories about everyone from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Khizr Khan on his social-media accounts. CNN itself appeared not to take action against one of its own contributors, former Republican congressman Jack Kingston, who tweeted: “O really? ‘Students’ are planning a nationwide rally? Not left wing gun control activists using 17yr kids in the wake of a horrible tragedy? #Soros #Resistance #Antifa #DNC.” Asked about the comments on air, Kingston doubled down: “Do we really think—and I say this sincerely—do we really think 17-year-olds, on their own, are going to plan a nationwide rally?”