Jim Fetzer

[Editor’s note: The following is the complete text of the DEFENDANT’S RESPONSE TO PLAINTIFF’S OPPOSITION TO DEFENDANT’S MOTION TO RECONSIDER, AND FOR PROTECTIVE ORDER for Case 2018CV003122 in Dane Country Circuit Court as Document 215 Filed 06-14-2019. It was my final brief filed prior to the Oral Hearing on the Summary Judgment Motions in this case, where you can read the transcript and review other basic documents at The Sandy Hook “Pozner v. Fetzer Lawsuit: The Basic Documents. It begins, “Defendant James Fetzer, pro se and in the first person henceforth, pursuant to Wis. Stat. 804.01(2) and 885.14 respectfully asks this court to reconsider its order issued during the phone conference of May 16, 2019 compelling production of my emails, and grant a protective order establishing that the discovery cannot be had, as grounds therefor stating as follows” and is republished here verbatim with the addition of three video links to make them easily accessible to readers.]

BACKGROUND

With the emergence of the Internet, the role of citizen-journalists has increased and grown even as the role of professional investigative journalism has waned. Operation Mockingbird, which was initiated by the CIA in the 1950s, was so successful that William Colby, then its Director, testified under oath to Congress in 1975 that the agency owned everyone of any significance in the media. Carl Bernstein followed with an article in Rolling Stone, “The CIA and the Media” (1977), in which high officials of the agency boasted that their greatest success has been with TIME/Life, The New York Times and CBS. And the situation has only grown worse over the years, where, in my talks, interviews and radio programs, I often cite three panels of 100 execs from CNN, another 100 from NBC and another 100 from The New York Times, all of whom are dual US-Israeli citizens. A foreign power has been interfering with our elections, but it has not been Russia but Israel, as many commentators, including Paul Craig Roberts, have observed.

Investigative journalists undertake research of complex and controversial events, such as the assassination of JFK, the atrocities of 9/11, the moon landing and (what has now become) many occurrences where the government may have motives for concealing the truth from the American people. Because of my background in epistemology, methodology and the philosophy of science, I have an ability to sort things out more methodically and systematically than most other students of these events, where I bring together the best experts on different aspects and publish our work, where my initial research on JFK led to my chairing or co-chairing five national conferences in Minneapolis 1999, Dallas 2000, Dallas 2001, Duluth 2003 and Santa Barbara 2013, publishing four edited volumes (the most recent in 2017) and many blogs, lectures, YouTube videos and the like to disseminate research by the best experts to undertake their study. I lay out my approach in taking “conspiracy theories” from “theories” in the weak sense of guesses, speculations and rumors to “theories” in the strong sense of empirically-testable explanatory hypotheses in my “Thinking about ‘Conspiracy Theories’: 9/11 and JFK”, which is available on-line by its title.

SCHOLARS FOR 9/11 TRUTH

Having been dumbfounded by the “collapse” of the Twin Towers on 9/11 (but not imaging I would ever be in the position to do anything about it), I found myself in a lengthy discussion thread of experts from diverse disciplines in December 2005, when it occurred to me that an organization that brought together experts from around the world in collaborative research on 9/11 would be a good idea; and I founded Scholars for 9/11 Truth, inviting the physicist Steve Jones from BYU to be my co-chair. I created a web site, (now) 911scholars.org, to publish research, feature videos, sponsor conferences and press releases, of which I was the principal ‘ author and which can be found archived at that site. Scholars was such a success that it took off like a rocket and had around 800 members in four different categories of membership by late 2006. When Alex Jones organized his “American Scholars Conference” in Los Angeles, June 2006, he invited me to be the keynote speaker. When C-SPAN videotaped the panel discussion on Sunday, which was moderated by Alex Jones, all four of the panelists were from Scholars.

My first television interview was on “Hannity & Colmes”, where Ollie North was stilling in for Sean Hannity. I had been informed by the producer that they wanted to learn the results of our collaborative research; but in the waiting room before the show, I watched as Alan Colmes said, “You won’t believe what your students are being taught by their professors”, and I knew it was a set-up. I knew they didn’t know enough about my courses to have it right and was able to take control of the show from the beginning. In many ways, it may have been my most important appearance on television. I would subsequently be interviewed by Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and by Donnie Deutsch, all of whom were out to discredit me (with scant success). O’Reilly was the most difficult to deal with, launching one ad hominem after another and barely allowing me to speak. I thought it had been a complete disaster until years later, in New York for 9/11 events, after I had spoken at Cooper Union in the Great Hall where Abraham Lincoln had presented one of his celebrated speeches, I attended an Alex Jones event and was honored to be seated with the first responders, one of whom leaned over to me and said, “It was watching you on O’Reilly that convinced me 9/11 had been an inside job”, at which I felt it had been worth the effort, after all.

In December 2006, my wife and I were flown to Athens (all expenses paid) to appear on a TV program hosted by the leading muck-racking journalist in Greece, who had been responsible for the downfall of corrupt administrations there. They had a panel of 12 other journalists who asked question while I addressed what had happened (illustrated by sensational video clips his staff had prepared). I was told going in that only a few would ask questions, to which I replied, “Not this time!” And, indeed, I was right: All 12 asked questions. The program was extended from 3 to 3.5 hours and broadcast worldwide by satellite. It was met with a sensational response from the 9/11 research community and was certainly a high-water mark for the 9/11 Truth movement.

I would subsequently organize the first 9/11 conference sponsored by Scholars in Madison in 2007 on “The Science and the Politics of 9/11”. I would be flown to Buenos Aires in 2008 to present lectures on JFK and 9/11; and then flown back the following year to be the keynote speaker at an International Symposium on 9/11 Truth and Justice held at The National Library of the Republic of Argentina. In 2010, I would organize a conference at Friends’ House in London, “Debunking the War on Terror”; and in 2012, I would organize The Vancouver Hearings held in June with a dozen speakers on diverse aspects of 9/11. I have edited and published two books on 9/11, The 9/11 Conspiracy: The Scamming of America (2007)—where the conspiracy theory of the government has proven to be completely indefensible—and (more recently) America Nuked on 9/11: Compliments of the CIA, the Neocons in the DOD, and the Mossad (2017), revealing how it was done and by whom, a tale that illustrates how much truth can be stranger than fiction.

THE DEATH OF JFK

Thus, I had already become deeply involved in collaborative research on the assassination of JFK and had published three volumes of expert studies—Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), which Vincent Bugliosi would describe as the only exclusively scientific books ever published on the assassination—it was inevitable that I would continue my investigations, which occurred with the plane crash that killed Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter, three aides and two pilots on 22 October 2002, which took place in close proximity to the Evelyth-Virginia Airport, 60 miles north of my office. I would publish 10 articles about the crash in the local alternative media and subsequently publish, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone (2005) with Don “Four Arrows” Jacobs, a Native American scholar then at Norther Arizona University. Wellstone was then widely regarded as “The Conscience of the Senate” and his death appears to have been in retaliation for his opposition to the Bush/Cheney war with Iraq, where Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, as even Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged at the time. My research on Wellstone has been substantiated by witness interviews in “They Killed Wellstone”, from Snowshoe Films.

MOON ROCK BOOKS

A partial list of (what could be called) my conspiracy research appears on my curriculum vitae at www.d.umn.edu/~jfetzer which I classify as “Applied Philosophical Research” (here, Exhibit A). Having offered courses in logic, critical thinking, and scientific reasoning for 35 years, I have felt an obligation to contribute to the public welfare by investigating these events in order for the American people to have access to the truth about their own history. After Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control (2015) was banned by amazon.com after selling nearly 500 copies in less than a month, we knew that we had to find a new, reliable venue for our research and founded Moon Rock Books (moonrockbooks.com). Our list has now grown from one book to a dozen, including research on the moon landing, the Boston bombing, Orlando and Dallas, Charlottesville, Parkland and more, with several new volumes yet to be released. We also have monographs on JFK (by Larry Rivera), European “false flags” (by Nick Kollerstom, the leading expert on the London 7/7 subway attacks) and on the threat posed to the Deep State by the emergence of the Internet as the new Gutenberg press (by Preston James). See our covers.

ABUSE OF PROCESS

The case before the Court represents a gross abuse of process, because its underling motivation has nothing to do with defamation but with the First Amendment, our freedom of speech and freedom of the press, in the absence of which the United States Constitution is meaningless—a relic of ages past, in which Americans had the right to speak their minds and to publish opinions without interference from institutions acting as surrogates of the government. Preston James has it right when he explains that the Internet has become an enormous threat to the Deep State and a source of anxiety to those whose interests are adversely affected by those who expose falsehoods and reveal truths, which has always been the motto of my websites (today, see jamesfetzer.org).

I had published 770 blogs before my earlier website (jamesfetzer.blogspot.com) was taken down, But not before I had made the transition to a new and more secure site to withstand intervention.

The Plaintiff, who calls himself “Leonard Pozner”, launched a very carefully crafted lawsuit that alleges defamation the basis of my having described the death certificate he shared with Kelley Watt as a “fabrication”. The true purpose, however, was not to complain about an actual case of defamation but to punish me, as a student of Sandy Hook, for exposing what happened there as a FEMA mass casualty exercise involving children, which was presented to the public as a child- shooting massacre to promote gun control. He has undertaken other lawsuits and efforts of this kind, where the recent past is littered with the debris of the destruction of the First Amendment wrought by “Leonard Pozner”, which includes his campaign to have tenured associate professor James Tracy, who wanted to make sure that the public was not being subjected to an elaborate scam and theft by deception, fired by Florida Atlantic University; and an ongoing assault upon Wolfgang Halbig, a retired Florida Stater Trooper, a former US Customs Agent, a past school principal and a nationally-recognized school-safety expert, who wanted to find out what had happened there in order to advise other school systems on the steps they should take to make sure something like that didn’t happen to them. I know them both. They are honorable men.

The Plaintiff has used his “HONR Network”, ostensibly created to protect the parents and the relatives of children and adults from harassment by skeptics about Sandy Hook, to take down blogs, videos and web sites that present the outcomes of research. He has boasted of having been responsible for having removed “tens of thousands” of content items from the Internet, where a YouTube video or an Internet blog would count as only one item. He has taken down “tens of thousands”, where, to my astonishment, I even received three strikes against my research since this case began. What the Court needs to understand is that the Plaintiff has been very open about his objectives in bringing these lawsuits, even when he has abandoned them when directed by the Judge to sit for a video deposition, as occurred in his lawsuit against Wolfgang Halbig. Consider:

There are four motives for punishment: to remove a threat; to set an example; retribution; and rehabilitation. By undertaking these lawsuits, the Plaintiff accomplished his goal of punishing those who dare to expose corrupt acts of the Deep State—especially in relation to Sandy Hook— where, in this case, he not only succeeded in having Wolfgang take down sandyhookjustice.com, where he was publishing the results of his research, but “to show other Hoaxers that they will be taken to court and it will drag on for a long time”, his true motive in his own words. Mike Adams (Exhibit B) and Sarah Westall (Exhibit C, prefatory to “Pozner vs. Fetzer: Sandy Hook Case that Could Destroy Your 1st Amendment Rights”, Part 1 and Part 2) are especially perceptive of the threat thereby posed.

The Plaintiff thereby admits that these lawsuits are improper, intended to censor, intimidate and silence critics with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition—a practice that is being defined within the context of the law as SLAPP suits impeding free speech:

Strategic lawsuit against public participation

The Social Media Giants are engaged in even more direct forms of suppression by taking down YouTubes and blogs that violate their “community standards”, which have now been expanded to include denials of “well-documented violent events”, no doubt including the death of JFK, the atrocities of 9/11 and (even) the Sandy Hook school shooting, which they explicitly cite. After all, the “official narratives” of these events are copiously documented, such as by The Warren Report (1964), The 9/11 Commission Report (2003) and the Report of the State’s Attorney on Sandy Hook by Stephen Sedensky III (2013), even though (as the book explains), it fails to establish a causal nexus connecting the alleged shooter (Adam Lanza) with the weapons he is supposed to have used and the victims he is alleged to have killed. If there is a more complete forensic failure in the history of criminology, I would love to see it. His fingerprints were not on the rifle with which he is said to have shot his mother and none of the 150 slugs reported to have been gathered from the scene could be connected with the weapon he is alleged to have used.

ARGUMENT

By any appropriate measure, I have been an active and public investigative journalist at least since I became seriously engaged in research on the assassination of JFK in 1992. I have done research on a wide array of events of great importance to the American people, including JFK, 9/11, Wellstone, Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, Orlando and Dallas, Charlottesville, and more. I have been published widely and been interviewed both nationally and internationally, including by NBC, the BBC (twice), Fox News (thrice), Showtime (for “Dark Net”, pitting me against the Plaintiff on Sandy Hook), but also by RT, Al Jazeera, Sputnik News, Russian State Television and Press TV (100+ times). In some cases, I received honoraria for my contributions. Conducting research, doing interviews, creating videos, writing blogs and publishing books are among the most important efforts of an investigative journalist, of which I am proud to be one.

In this capacity, I have acquired hundreds of sources across a wide range of investigations, not least of which are those related to Sandy Hook. The Plaintiff wants me to reveal my sources so he can replenish his efforts to destroy freedom of speech and freedom of the press and have new targets for harassment and lawsuits. Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning have set a high bar for defending their sources from punishment. I can do no less. Allowing access to my sources in this case would be to compound one abuse of process with another. WHEREFORE, the Court’s order compelling production having been in error for the reasons adduced, it must be reconsidered and vacated, in the interest of justice.

Dated: 14 June 2019 Signed: /s/ James Fetzer James Fetzer

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus on the Duluth Campus of the University of Minnesota and co-founder (with Mike Palecek) of moonrockbooks.com.