MemoryHoleBlog Cited By Liberal “Fact Check” Site Snopes.com

“Watchdog” Seeking to Allay Suspicion Over Broward Deputy Jason Fitzsimons’ Death Has Possible Links to CIA

Longtime defender of official narratives and liberal “fact check” site Snopes.com gave MemoryHoleBlog some faint praise in an April 18, 2018 post addressing the viral news of Broward County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Fitzsimons’ unusual death.

Snopes made the argument that blogs reporting on the untimely death of Fitzsimons jumped too quickly on the bandwagon that his death was the result of a conspiracy, and did so without any actual followup. Bloggers can often “jump the gun” and run with stories that smack of trickery, failing to more carefully assess the facts and circumstances. Within these specific parameters we agree with Snopes, particularly since most blogs that carried our initial story on Deputy Fitzsimons failed to even acknowledge our subsequent post. As Snopes points out,

But these blogs did not mention Memory Hole’s follow-up story, which noted that Fitzsimons had used several different Facebook accounts, and that the account featuring the post criticizing Hogg had not been “scrubbed” and was accessible online at press time.

That being said, the fact that Snopes is the only above-the-board “mainstream” outlet (part of Facebook’s censor squad) to have addressed Fitzsimons’ death and is out to put the “conspiracy theories” to rest is enough to give one pause. In 2016 investigative journalist Wayne Madsen noted that Snopes.com is a “go-to website for CIA propaganda.” According to Madsen,

“Snopes.com is run by a California couple named Barbara and David Mikkelson, who founded the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society . . . The Mikkelsons chose the name Snopes because it is the name of a fictional family featured in William Faulkner’s novels that includes a pedophile, a murderer, a bigamist, a corrupt racist politician, and a thief who live in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. The idea is to label all those targeted by the Mikkelsons as candidates for membership in the Snopes family. […]”

In seeking to debunk the suggestion that Fitzsimons’ passing might be related to his criticism of Parkland shooting gun control activists, Snopes writer Arturo Garcia called the troubled Broward Sheriff and Medical Examiner’s Office to confirm that Fitzsimons’ death was unrelated to a single social media post. “A spokesperson for the Broward County Sheriffs Department told us that they did not consider Fitzsimons’ death to be suspicious,” Garcia wrote.

We also contacted the county medical examiners’ office, who said only that Fitzsimons’ case was pending. The sheriffs’ department spokesperson confirmed to us that detectives were aware of Fitzsimons’ controversial social media post about Hogg, adding, “It has nothing to do with his death.”

Reducing the suggestion of foul play to a single Facebook post is disingenuous. MHB never argued that Fitzsimons’ death was related to merely one inflammatory post centering on David Hogg, but rather that his online activity assessed over the course of many months suggested the deputy’s overall political orientation, and following from this Fitzsimons might indeed be adverse to supporting the Parkland shooting’s official story if he found it to be untrue.

While Snopes’ phone calls are certainly much more than the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Palm Beach Post have done on the story (which as of this writing is zilch) the fact that these government agencies–one of which has just experienced a mutiny among its employees–have denied any foul play in Fitzsimons’ death “debunks” nothing and is certainly not where the story should end.

As Otto von Bismarck famously remarked, “Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.” Unfortunately, while such skepticism is alive in the blogosphere and alternative media, in keeping with the CIA’s 1035-960 protocol such genuinely journalistic impulses are too often derided as “conspiracy theory” in today’s newsrooms.