When Obama Hating Goes Bad: Florida Atlantic University Fires Sandy Hook "Truther" Professor‏

James F. Tracy, the tenured associate professor of communications at Florida Atlantic University, who taught a class on conspiracies and suggested that the Sandy Hook shooting three years ago was a hoax perpetrated by the Obama administration, was fired on Tuesday.

The university first reprimanded Tracy in 2013: He (and plenty of others) began propagating his theories shortly after the event itself, in December 2012. From the Sun Sentinel, in January 2013:

    Tracy said he believes the deaths at Sandy Hook may have resulted from a training exercise. “Was this to a certain degree constructed?” he said. “Was this a drill?

    “Something most likely took place,” he said. “One is left with the impression that a real tragedy took place.”

    But, he added, he has not seen bodies, or photos of bodies. “Overall, I’m saying the public needs more information to assess what took place. We don’t have that. And when the media and the public don’t have that, various sorts of ideas can arise.”

    Tracy said also has doubts about the official version of the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9-11 terror attacks and the Aurora, Colo., theater murders.

Late last year, however, Lenny and Veronique Pozner asked Tracy to remove a photograph of their son, 6-year-old Noah Pozner—the youngest victim of the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut—from his website. He responded with a letter asking for proof that Noah had ever actually lived.

From the New York Times:

    Mr. Tracy continued his clash with the Pozners on Facebook, where he called the Newtown shootings a “drill,” a reference to a theory that the massacre was an exercise in which no one died staged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

    “The Pozners, alas, are as phony as the drill itself, and profiting handsomely from the fake death of their son,” Mr. Tracy wrote in a letter that is attributed to him on the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook page. Mr. Tracy declined to comment on his termination. His lawyer, Thomas Johnson, also declined to comment on whether Mr. Tracy would seek legal action or file a grievance against the university over his dismissal.

As it happened, Tracy, who had taught at Florida Atlantic since 2002, wasn’t fired for his beliefs about the Sandy Hook shooting, the Times reports, but rather his failure to submit paperwork (three years running) that listed jobs or other extracurricular activities that the university might want to know about—like, for example, his blog, or his weekly radio show, where he disseminated his noxious ideas.

-Gawker