What are crisis actors?

The first time I had any inkling of what I now understand to be "crisis actors" was when I saw the 1998 movie "Wag the Dog." The premise of this movie, I think, is key to understanding a plethora of recent "newsworthy events" and I highly recommend it. It was about a presidential campaign's strategy to save an incumbent's second term, unfortunately enmeshed in an embarrassing scandal involving an underage girl. It would do this by whipping up an imaginary war between the United States and Albania (keep in mind this movie came out right around both the Monica Lewinsky scandal and US involvement in Serbia). During the movie they showed a cheap actress playing an Albanian girl holding a kitten and running away from a bomb (the kitten was actually a bag of potato chips, but was keyed into a kitten during post-production). This does not resemble the official or original definition of what have been come to be known as "crisis actors," but that's where the term is headed.

Originally, "crisis actor" was a respectable job of someone who acted in a drill used to train personnel in a crisis. Like in this (rather telling) video:



But imagine if such drills were used for propaganda purposes, instead of training purposes? I think that's the scenario we're seeing today, and we've seen it with Sandy Hook elementary school, the Boston Bombings, Elliott Rodger shootings, and now with these more recent beheadings. The media is lying to us, people! Don't trust anything the Mainstream Media is telling you. It really is that bad out there.