As you may know, one of the more notorious Sandy Hook truthers, James Tracy, is about to lose his day job as a communications professor at Florida Atlantic University for harassing the family of one of the victims. Since learning last week that FAU has been moving to fire him, Tracy has done his talking via his blog, Memory Hole. On Sunday, he republished an open letter from fellow Sandy Hook truther and longtime friend James Fetzer, who felt the need to come to Tracy’s defense. But in the process of defending a comrade-in-arms, Fetzer revealed all we need to know about his own character–and that of the Sandy Hook truther movement in general. He apparently thinks that harassment is acceptable when it is done to satisfy the public’s right to know.
Fetzer is a retired computer science professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and a veteran of the conspiracy theory circuit. He and Tracy have been friends for years. In his open letter, addressed to the Sun Sentinel editorial board, Fetzer claims that Tracy is being “railroaded” for daring to question whether Sandy Hook really happened. For instance, he claims that there is considerable evidence that Sandy Hook victim Noah Pozner never really died. Among other things, he claims that a birth certificate that Noah’s father, Lenny, gave to Kelley Watt was actually fake.
The rest of Fetzer’s letter is pretty hard to read. As near as I can determine, it’s essentially a rehash of the standard Sandy Hook truther line that the shooting was actually some sort of FEMA exercise. He refers us to his book, “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook,” which he is making available free of charge because Amazon won’t allow it to be listed on its site.
But with a note appended to the beginning of the letter, Fetzer flushes his credibility–and his decency–down the toilet. He actually claims that Noah’s parents, Lenny and Veronique, no longer have the right to privacy.
When the Pozners took donations from the public, they lost their right to privacy, because it is in the public interest to avoid being taken for a ride by con men, shysters and frauds.
James Tracy was probing the legitimacy of their claim to have lost a son, which was a very good question because:
(1) Lenny had given a fabricated death certificate to Kelley Watt (which you can find in the book in Ch. 11); and,
(2) Noah was reported to have died for the second time in Pakistan (on or about 16 December 2014, two years after 14 December 2012).
I hope I’m reading this wrong. I really am. Fetzer seems to argue that anyone who asks for donations makes themselves fair game for behavior that any fair-minded person would consider harassment. That’s the only way anyone with a shred of decency can describe how Tracy sent a certified letter to the Pozners demanding proof that Noah had even been alive, and that they were his parents.
But then again, after digging more into Fetzer’s background, it’s not all that surprising that he seems to think that harassment is acceptable if it’s done in the “public interest.” For one thing, he’s a vicious anti-Semite. He once argued that the official narrative of the Holocaust is “provably false and not remotely scientifically sustainable.” He also claims that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, had a hand in Sandy Hook, and also helped orchestrate 9-11 as well. If this is the kind of person rallying to Tracy’s defense, it says a lot about Tracy–and the Sandy Hook truther movement in general.
I’ve done my share of muckraking in the past. Many of my longtime readers both here at Liberal America and at Daily Kos know that I have spent several years shining the hot lights on a cultish charismatic outfit that tricked me into joining it in my freshman year at Carolina. But I would never stoop to the level of harassment, even in the name of the “public interest.” By declaring that harassment is acceptable in order to get to the bottom of a story, Fetzer may have proven why his old buddy, Tracy, needs to be out of a job.
