Conspiracy theoriesTruth prevails: Sandy Hook father’s victory over conspiracy theory crackpots

Published 24 June 2019

Noah Pozner, then 6-year old, was the youngest of twenty children and staff killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Last week, his father, Lenny Pozner, won an important court victory against conspiracy theorists who claimed the massacre had been staged by the Obama administration to promote gun control measures. The crackpots who wrote a book advancing this preposterous theory also claimed that Pozner had faked his son’s death certificate as part of this plot.

Noah Pozner, then 6-year old, was the youngest of twenty children and staff killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Last week, his father, Lenny Pozner, won an important court victory against conspiracy theorists who claimed the massacre had been staged by the Obama administration to promote gun control measures. The crackpots who wrote a book advancing this preposterous theory also claimed that Pozner had faked his son’s death certificate as part of this plot.

In an editorial on the subject, the Times of London wrote that “Conspiracy theories debase democracy, coarsen debate and defame innocent victims,” adding: “Mr. Pozner’s action to defend his reputation stands completely vindicated and has a wide relevance.”

Here is the Times’s editorial:

Democratic societies protect freedom of speech but must be vigilant in defense of truth. They cannot afford to allow malign conspiracy theories to insinuate themselves into public debate without vigorous challenge. A legal case in the United States demonstrates how vital that principle is.

In 2012 Lenny Pozner’s son, Noah, was six when he was the youngest of 20 children shot dead, with six adults, in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Mr. Pozner’s suffering did not end with this horror. He became the target of conspiracy theorists who claimed the massacre had been staged to promote gun control measures, and that Mr. Pozner had faked his son’s death certificate as part of this plot.

A U.S. judge ruled this week that the authors of a book espousing this preposterous thesis defamed Mr. Pozner. The obscure publishers have agreed to stop selling the book. Mr. Pozner’s action to defend his reputation stands completely vindicated and has a wide relevance.

The book that Mr. Pozner complained of is a farrago of nonsense. Its authors, James Fetzer and Mike Palecek, are also proponents of the conspiracy theory that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Islamist extremists but by the US government, to gain public assent for wars overseas. Mr. Fetzer, a retired academic philosopher, has extended his lack of rationality and decency to also deny the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.

It is tempting to argue that no one should take cranks like this seriously. Yet it wasn’t a realistic option for Mr. Pozner to ignore them. As well as suffering the agonies of bereavement, he was subjected to harassment and death threats for years as a result of these pitiful fantasies. He was not alone. Jeremy Richman, the father of another child murdered at Sandy Hook, recently took his own life after years of torment by conspiracy theorists. It is vastly to Mr. Pozner’s credit that he has fought back against calumnious deceit.

Conspiracies do happen. They have even been perpetrated by western governments: the Suez invasion, the Watergate cover-up and (a scandal in Israeli politics) the Lavon affair are examples. The speed with which these were exposed shows how hard it is to maintain even a simple, let alone a byzantine, conspiracy in the face of a free press.

The most pressing danger for western democracies does not come from these isolated scandals but from an abandonment of critical inquiry. Only this week, the biggest ever study into public attitudes to immunization, conducted by the Wellcome Trust, demonstrated that mistrust of vaccines against disease is at dangerously high levels. The conspiracy theory that vaccination is an elite plot to control the populace and lacks scientific validation is a threat to public health.

The state propaganda organs of autocratic regimes, notably that of President Putin, routinely churn out these fantasies. It’s their way of covering up state crimes, such as Russia’s assassination of dissidents, and weakening western democracy. They should be given no quarter.

Responsible news outlets have an obligation to expose them, and politicians in turn have a responsibility not to train invective on a questioning media. Anti-western conspiracy theories are not amusing diversions. They have real victims and coarsen public debate. This week one of the bravest of those victims fought back. It is no hyperbole to say that Western democratic societies are in his debt.