Bob Collins
Academia occasionally serves as a hideout for weird conspiracy theorists. The professor who insists the Wellstone plane crash was a government “hit” often comes to mind.
But the jig is up for James Tracy. He was fired last evening by a Florida university.
Demanding that Sandy Hook parents prove their children were once alive was just too much even for Florida Atlantic University.
Tracy, you see, believes Sandy Hook was an elaborate, staged hoax designed to pass gun-control legislation.
It’s unlikely the university would’ve taken action had it not been for this op-ed from the parents of one of the murdered children, Noah Pozner.
Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image. We found this so outrageous and unsettling that we filed a police report for harassment. Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the “unfulfilled request” was “noteworthy” because we had used copyright claims to “thwart continued research of the Sandy Hook massacre event.”
His blog post was echoed dozens of times on conspiracy websites, including one maintained by Tracy’s colleague and frequent collaborator James Fetzer, a Holocaust denier who expounded upon Tracy’s article by stating that our refusal to respond to this obscene ultimatum “implies that Noah did not die at Sandy Hook and confirms that Lenny is a fraud.”
Does Fetzer’s name ring a bell? He’s the professor, now retired, who pushed the Wellstone conspiracy, denied the Holocaust, theorized Jews blew up the World Trade Center, and published a book called “Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control.”
He did all that while an employee of the University of Minnesota Duluth, which provided him the safe haven that’s now been denied to his colleague.
More higher education: Christian college begins process to remove professor who wore a hijab (CNN)
