The Professor of Denial

James H. Fetzer leans back in his chair, folds his arms over his gut, tucks his chin into his thick neck, and furrows his bushy eyebrows in what seems a cultivated pose of ponderment. He has shaggy white hair and is dressed in academic sloppy-chic: tweed blazer with elbow patches; wrinkled, red polo shirt; baggy, cuffed khakis; and boxy, white New Balance sneakers. His rimless, rectangular spectacles serve mostly as a prop that he takes on and off to accentuate his mood.

At almost 79, the retired philosophy professor has the waddling gait of a stocky man starting to shrink with advancing years. But here in a Wisconsin courtroom in October, Fetzer is every bit the tempestuous man he was in the classroom: animated, bellicose, and unflaggingly confident in his intellectual superiority.

Across the courtroom, Fetzer’s longtime nemesis is stoic by contrast. Leonard Pozner is soft-spoken and restrained. In a dark-gray suit and salt-and-pepper goatee, Pozner, 52, is thinner and more polished than in the old photos of him still frequently used in the media. Fetzer says he’s too thin, too young-looking, and too goateed to be who he says he is: the father of the youngest victim of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Fetzer thinks Pozner is a phony (“probably Mossad”) and doesn’t believe his son or the 19 other children slaughtered in their first-grade classrooms ever existed.

In the seven years since the shooting, Fetzer has leveraged his academic credentials to become a leading voice in a community of skeptics who argue the Sandy Hook tragedy and other mass shootings are hoaxes. On his blog and in a book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control, Fetzer accuses Pozner of circulating a fake death certificate for a fictitious child when he tried to prove his son had lived and died. Those statements are the focus of Pozner’s lawsuit against Fetzer, who lives in Wisconsin. With DNA tests, government documents, an affidavit from the funeral home, and Pozner’s son’s medical files in the court record, the judge has already ruled for Pozner on summary judgment and declared Fetzer’s statements false and defamatory. The jury is here only to decide how much Fetzer’s lies should cost him.

Still, Fetzer remains undaunted, certain his expertise in scientific reasoning gives him a special ability and duty to expose the nefarious plots all around him.

Before he became a full-time conspiracy theorist, Fetzer was a prolific philosopher of science who wrote about the theoretical foundations of computer science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. He founded the international journal Minds and Machines, wrote or edited a long list of books, and retired from the University of Minnesota at Duluth in 2006 with an impressive title: distinguished McKnight university professor emeritus.

Fetzer’s academic accomplishments are key to his legal defense, and his lawyer cites them in his opening remarks at the trial. “Dr. Fetzer has had a life as a distinguished professor and researcher,” Richard Bolton says. “The book, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook, while it may be provocative in many respects, I think you’ll find that it is, in fact, a serious book of academic research.”

Six of the book’s 13 contributors have doctoral degrees, Bolton tells the jury. (That includes James Tracy, who was fired from his position as a tenured communications professor at Florida Atlantic University in 2016.) Still, the book is not scholarly. It’s filled with conjecture built around the heinous notion that grieving families and survivors are really con artists and “crisis actors.” The right-wing radio personality Alex Jones of InfoWars, who is also being sued by Pozner and other Sandy Hook families, has gained widespread attention for spreading the conspiracy theory. But it was Fetzer, Tracy, and others with academic credentials who helped construct it and give it an air of legitimacy.

So how did a prolific academic become known for advancing some of the most repulsive conspiracy theories of our times? From Fetzer’s point of view he’s doing what he’s always done: bringing together “the best experts,” questioning widely held assumptions, and arguing for what he believes to be the truth. Indeed, he still lectures like a professor, still writes and edits books and articles, but he is also a creature of the Internet — a frequent blogger and guest on fringe YouTube channels and internet radio shows. And in the digital era, which rewards falsehoods and extreme theories, Fetzer has achieved a level of notoriety that he never could have as an academic.

When Nobody Died at Sandy Hook was published, in 2015, it sold nearly 500 copies in a month before it was banned by Amazon. Posted free online, it has since been downloaded an estimated 10 million times, according to court records. In 2016, the progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America pointed out, Roger Stone, a former campaign adviser to President Trump, appeared on Fetzer’s internet radio show and told him “there’s really nobody in the researcher community that I respect more.” That same year, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that one-fourth of Americans believed it was true or possibly true that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was faked to increase support for gun control.

In the past four years, the independent publishing house Fetzer co-founded has also published books he’s edited on mass shootings in Parkland and Orlando, Fla.; the Boston Marathon bombing; the car-attack death of a woman in Charlottesville, Va.; the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the John F. Kennedy assassination; and the moon landing. He disputes historical facts about the Holocaust and believes the real Paul McCartney is dead.

Philosophers who knew Fetzer through his scholarly work say they are baffled by the nature of his current research. Paul S. Davies, a philosophy professor at the College of William & Mary who published a paper with Fetzer in 1995, describes the scholar he knew then as an intellectual “workhorse.” “I am at a loss for how someone who could do what he did for many decades in philosophy has gone on to that,” Davies says. “I’m genuinely puzzled and genuinely perplexed.”

When I meet Fetzer at a trendy taco shop near the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus a couple of days after the trial, he is eager to talk about his academic career. He enumerates every accolade he’s received since high school in a practiced soliloquy larded with self-laudatory pronouncements: “It was a big deal.” “It was a hit.” “It was a sensation!” He cuts me off whenever I try to ask a question.

Born in California, Fetzer graduated from Princeton in 1962, served in the Marine Corps, and earned his Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University at Bloomington. After grad school, he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky. Though he published a dozen articles and won a teaching award, he was denied tenure. He’s still bitter. “I stepped on too many toes,” he says.

Fetzer zigzagged up and down the East Coast in visiting positions for a decade. He taught at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of South Florida, and the University of Cincinnati. He spent one semester as an eighth-grade science teacher. He couldn’t land a permanent gig and suspected a conspiracy against him. Word had gotten out that he was “a troublemaker,” he says.

A turning point came when a friend suggested a postdoctoral fellowship at Wright State University, in Ohio, designed for linguists and philosophers interested in computer science. “What I discovered was a bonanza of philosophical problems,” he tells me. He published a significant paper in the journal of the Association of Computing Machinery. In it, he argues that computer programs cannot be relied upon with certainty — in part because the machines and the programmers themselves are fallible.

When I read the paper recently, I was struck by his comments on truth and warnings against certainty in conclusions based on subjective beliefs. “Perhaps few of us would be inclined to think that our senses are infallible, i.e., that things must always be the way they appear to be,” he wrote. “The occurrence of illusions, hallucinations, and delusions disabuses us of that particular fantasy … We should not overlook that, apart from imagination and conjecture, which serve as sources of ideas but do not establish their truth, all of our states of knowledge — other than those of pure mathematics and logic — are ultimately dependent for their support upon direct and indirect connections to experience.”

Before the fellowship and paper, Fetzer interviewed for seven junior academic positions and failed to get any offers. Afterward, he says, he had interviews for seven senior positions.

In 1987, after 10 years on the academic job market, Fetzer accepted a position at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. He was hired as a full professor with tenure. Former colleagues say Fetzer’s hiring was part of an initiative to bring in prolific scholars in order to raise the university’s research profile. Fetzer had already published three books and soon published several more. “It was like I had been emancipated,” he says.

Once Fetzer landed in the small, congenial philosophy department in Duluth, he proceeded to blow things up. Former colleagues describe him as self-righteous, overbearing, and given to angry outbursts. “It was like an insane elephant walks into a room of delicate furniture,” says Eve A. Browning, who is now chair of the department of philosophy and classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Faculty meetings became so unbearable because of Fetzer’s behavior, the department stopped holding them. “He’s a very accomplished bully,” Browning says.

Lincoln Agnew for The Chronicle

When Leonard Pozner takes the stand on the second day of the trial, his lawyer projects a picture of a dark-haired, cherub-cheeked boy onto the courtroom screen.

“My son’s name was Noah,” Pozner tells the jury.

He glances up at Noah’s photo and quickly looks away. Pozner speaks in a steady, measured tone, pausing after each question as if centering himself. He tells the jury about his son’s funeral and the private viewing, where he said goodbye. He wanted to hold Noah’s hand, but he couldn’t: Noah had been shot multiple times, and much of his body was covered. “I remember saying goodbye to him, and kissing him on his forehead in a familiar way that I’ve always done,” he says.

He looks at the jurors as he speaks. One woman wipes away tears, and four other jurors hold their hands to their faces in various levels of distress. Seeing them, Pozner stops himself from describing the bolt of sheer grief he felt when his lips met the refrigerated flesh of Noah’s forehead.

For about a year after the shooting, Pozner was despondent, but eventually he returned to the “pattern of regular life” and discovered the budding conspiracy theory online. He came across Fetzer’s writings in 2014.

“I felt like I needed to defend my son,” Pozner explains to the jury. “He couldn’t do that for himself, so I needed to be his voice.”

He released Noah’s death certificate and other documents online. He founded the HONR Network, a nonprofit that works to get “hoaxer” content taken down from the Internet. He’s had thousands of posts deleted and blogs, including Fetzer’s, removed by hosting companies. Those actions have made him even more of a target for the army of online trolls. His home address and other personal information have been circulated online, and “investigators” have shown up at his home. He has moved more than a half dozen times to keep a step ahead.

He’s also received death threats. One of Pozner’s lawyers plays for the court a series of telephone messages that Pozner received in 2016. In them, a woman accuses Pozner of making up his son’s death, alludes to pedophilic acts, and calls him “Jew bastard” and a litany of other slurs. The woman was sentenced to five months in federal prison in 2017. FBI agents told Pozner that she had gotten her information on the shooting from Fetzer, Pozner testifies. “Death is coming to you real soon,” the woman says in one of the messages, adding an expletive for emphasis.

Fetzer leans back in his chair, crosses his arms, and smirks. When the court breaks for lunch soon after, he lists all of the reasons he believes the man on the witness stand was not really Leonard Pozner: wrong age, wrong girth, no double chin, wrong mouth. “Lenny doesn’t wear a goatee!” he tells me.

Earlier in the case, Fetzer was held in contempt of court and ordered to pay Pozner $7,000 for sharing the video of his sealed deposition in the case. Supporters — including a former school security administrator recently arrested in Florida for distributing Pozner’s personal information — have shared side-by-side comparisons of a still from the video with old photos of Pozner with Noah, insisting the images are proof it isn’t the same man. When I look at the photos, it seems obvious Pozner just lost weight and grew a goatee.

I ask Fetzer about his lawyer’s strategy: Is he essentially arguing that his statements about the death certificate could not have harmed Pozner because Fetzer’s entire book libels him? “Yes, sure,” Fetzer says. But there is another legal argument — one he says he shouldn’t tell me yet.

He leans in to whisper: “There is no way he could have been defamed because the true believers believe him. They think I am the nutcase.”

Fetzer was not on the Duluth faculty long before his attention turned to conspiracy theories. He was wowed by Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK. But the pivotal moment for him came soon after, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published interviews with the physicians who had performed Kennedy’s autopsy in an effort to debunk the conspiracy theory. The journal’s editor called the evidence irrefutable. Fetzer was outraged. He says he “realized that if someone of” the editor’s “level of distinction would abuse his position for a political purpose, some people of a special background and ability had an obligation to become involved.” That person was him.

He began researching the assassination, but maintained his academic work as well. In 1996 the University of Minnesota created a new award program that The Chronicle described at the time as a “genius grant.” Fetzer’s prolific scholarship earned him the lifetime title of distinguished McKnight university professor and a $100,000 grant.

In 1998 the Open Court Publishing Company released a book Fetzer had edited and co-authored, Assassination Science, about the Kennedy assassination. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, and U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone’s death in a northern Minnesota plane crash a year later, took Fetzer deeper into conspiracy theories. He went on radio and television shows, and gave talks about the plot he saw behind all three events. To his colleagues’ dismay, he also lectured about his theories in his classes.

Fetzer’s final years at the university were tumultuous. In late 2003 an online feud with a former friend who had challenged Fetzer’s theory about Wellstone’s death spilled into the real world. The man filed a defamation lawsuit against Fetzer and named the university and university officials as co-defendants. (The suit and subsequent appeal were both dismissed.)

Then, in early 2004, a university staff member filed a sexual-harassment complaint against Fetzer, according to disciplinary records obtained through a public-records request. The university found him at fault. Fetzer appealed, but was denied. The university suspended him without pay for the remainder of the spring semester. He told the Duluth News Tribune at the time: “This is a terrible miscarriage of justice.”

In the fall of 2005, Fetzer signed a terminal agreement with the university. He tells me he decided to retire so that he and his wife could move closer to their daughter and son-in-law, in Wisconsin. Public records show the university paid him a lump sum of almost $115,000, just over a year’s salary, to retire at the end of the academic year. The document made clear that the university’s legal-defense and indemnification plan would no longer cover him if he was sued.

More than 14 years later, Fetzer still uses his university email account for his conspiracy-theory research. Just before the trial, the University of Minnesota at Duluth put a disclaimer at the top of Fetzer’s official university website. “His theories are his own,” it says, citing the university’s policy on academic freedom.

In the hallway during a court break, I introduce myself to Fetzer’s friend Kevin Barrett, a former University of Wisconsin lecturer who is one of a handful of Fetzer supporters who show up at the trial. Fetzer joins us, and the two reminisce about the 9/11 “Truther” movement.

In 2006, Barrett, who has a Ph.D. in African languages and literature and who taught a course on Islam, made national news after talking on a local radio show about his belief that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been orchestrated by the U.S. government. State lawmakers called for him to be fired, and the Fox News host Bill O’Reilly cited him as an example of “college professors who hate their country.” Fetzer, who co-founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth a couple of months after signing his university retirement papers, went on The O’Reilly Factor to defend Barrett and 9/11 researchers. (O’Reilly called him “a loon.”)

Barrett now hosts an internet radio show and is an editor of a fringe website aimed at U.S. military veterans and known for promoting anti-Israel conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda. Fetzer used to be a regular contributor to the site, which in 2013 published his first article on Sandy Hook, in which he suggested Israel was responsible for the massacre.

When Fetzer leaves us to meet with his lawyers, Barrett tells me he isn’t swayed by Fetzer’s findings on Sandy Hook, but he is concerned about the ramifications of the case for free speech and the ability of researchers to question the official story of major events. He says the evidence Fetzer relies on looks “manufactured” to him, and he wonders if there is a conspiracy to entrap Fetzer and make all “alternative media” look bad. “I think he’s allowing himself to be set up,” Barrett says.

When Fetzer takes the stand as the final witness in the case, he touts his book and the “13 experts” he brought together to write it. A Pozner lawyer asks him about his decision to release it online free after it was banned by Amazon. “I had no interest in the monetary aspect,” Fetzer says. “I was seeking to expose the truth of Sandy Hook for the benefit of the American people.”

When the lawyer asks about the defamatory statements about the death certificate, Fetzer calls them “allegedly defamatory” and later defends them. “With all respect to the court, I believe this was a mistake and that indeed the statements were nondefamatory because they are true,” he says.

Judge Frank Remington of the Dane County Circuit Court calls the lawyers to the bench, then plays white noise over the speakers so the jury can’t hear their conversation. Fetzer purses his lips and sits, defiant, on the stand, staring straight ahead. Later, he will tell me that this moment, when he remained steadfast in his belief that he is right, is the most important moment of the trial.

The judge sends the jury away and scolds Fetzer.

“I’m not going to allow Dr. Fetzer to impugn the integrity of the court and undermine the legal rulings that were issued in this case,” he says.

When the jury returns, the judge strikes Fetzer’s statement from the record and orders the jurors to disregard it. When it is time for Fetzer’s lawyer to question him, the lawyer tries to distance Fetzer from the harassment Pozner has endured.

“With regard to threats made to Mr. Pozner, have you — have you talked with anyone or made any direction to any individual to make threats to Mr. Pozner?”

“Absolutely not,” Fetzer replies. “That would be antithetical to research.”

In her closing argument, a lawyer for Pozner, Genevieve Zimmerman, tells the jurors that Fetzer’s false statements accusing Pozner of circulating a forged death certificate “went around the internet like a virus.”

“We’re in a court where there are rules about what you can prove. There are such things as facts,” she says. “The court’s already established that what Professor Fetzer did was wrong. He’s still doing it today, still on his website, and it gets picked up by other people and carried around, spread all across the country.”

Fetzer’s lawyer argues that Pozner didn’t prove that Fetzer’s specific statements about the death certificate were what had caused him harm. “We’re not here right now to determine whether or not we like Professor Fetzer or whether we agree with him or whether he’s a good guy,” he tells the jury.

Four hours later, the jury returns with a verdict, but Fetzer is nowhere to be seen. The judge decides not to wait.

The jurors seem lighthearted, as if a weight has been lifted off them. They decide unanimously on a $450,000 award for Pozner — money he is unlikely to ever see. As the jury leaves, Fetzer arrives. He storms up to the front of the courtroom, the gate swinging behind him. After his lawyers tell him the decision, Fetzer seems, for once, out of words except for these: “I’m staggered!” he says repeatedly.

Halfway through our long lunch at Tex Tubb’s Taco Palace in Madison two days after the trial, Fetzer starts talking about the Jews. He says he is surprised Pozner’s lawyers didn’t call him a Holocaust denier. After all, he wrote the foreword to a 2014 book that argues that Jews were not killed in gas chambers. “I am a Holocaust denier, but not in the broader sense,” he tells me. “Millions of Germans and Europeans were slaughtered in World War II.”

Fetzer’s first online article on Sandy Hook speculated that it was a real shooting committed by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. He has since renounced that story and is still mad at the person he says misled him. “The essence of morality is to treat others with respect and never use them for your own means,” he sputters, echoing Immanuel Kant.

Now he sees Pozner as the Mossad connection. Noah was the only Jewish victim of the shooting, and Leonard Pozner spent some of his childhood in Israel. “They are trying to disarm America through these mass shootings, and there have been so many!” he exclaims.

He starts loudly rattling off other mass shootings that he thinks were staged. A couple who sat down in the booth behind us moves to the other end of the restaurant as Fetzer’s shouting gets louder. He defines, in philosophical terms, what it means to have “a rational mind,” and the next minute suggests that the village of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Conn., a town established in 1711 that’s a short drive from New Haven and just 80 miles outside of New York City, is entirely “synthetic.” He complains about the trial and how he wasn’t able to present the evidence that he says shows the shooting didn’t happen, which would prove the death certificate fake.

“I’m an expert of scientific reasoning,” he says. “There is no question about this. It has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

He takes off his glasses and slams his hands on the table. The couple who moved away earlier glower as they pass on their way out. Fetzer turns jovial again, like an affable grandpa. “Sorry if I drove you off!” he shouts and waves to them. The man flips him a middle finger. Later, the server will tell me they recognized him from news coverage of the trial.

Fetzer is unfazed. Soon, he will go back to court to seek a new trial, to no avail, and he will formally appeal. Pozner’s lawyers will ask the court for something more than money: Without fear of a monetary penalty, civil lawsuits have no punch, and Fetzer shows no signs of paying up or shutting up. So in December the court granted a permanent injunction barring Fetzer from repeating his defamatory statements about Noah Pozner’s death certificate — a rare prior restraint on speech that means Fetzer could face fines and jail time if he doesn’t comply.

As our lunch comes to an end, Fetzer leans in to talk probability. “What is the probability that six Ph.D.s would look at the evidence around Sandy Hook and all conclude it is a hoax?” he asks me.

I ask him what the probability is that every level of government and law enforcement and media is in on a hoax and that hundreds of people who knew the 26 victims and all the survivors have been lying for years?

He flaps his hands and shouts in a high pitch: “Listen, listen, listen!” He launches back into his theories, his “proof,” his philosopher’s qualifications.