Mike Benz: "Now even Blob Media is admitting Ukraine commandos blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, the CIA knew it and even coordinated with them in advance, then the Biden State Department lied to your fuckin face and told you Russia did it."
Here's the background. Here and here:
Emily Kopp, yet another reject from legacy news, has been named the new Editor of Racket News. This is excellent news. Below she spells out the principles of good journalism. You can make a strong case that the OPPOSITE of each of these principles are the modern foundation for corporate news. Emily opening statement as Editor:
It was once fashionable for corporate media to prescribe what to think and for Big Tech to clamp down on free speech and debate. These days it’s in vogue to embrace a relativist attitude toward truth. No journalist can promise truth, a slippery metaphysical thing that’s especially elusive in the first moments of a crisis. The only thing we can promise is to try for it.
That’s why we’re bringing old school journalistic standards to the new school, wide-open Overton Window. If we do our jobs well, we’ll provide occasional relief from the cacophony.
Racket already had a few internal rules barring advertisers, hidden investors, and silent edits, and general guidelines about a few other things.
We’re hanging on to those, adding a few more, and preserving all of them on our website for accountability. Here they are:
No advertisers, sponsors, or hidden investors. Our content is our own.
No partisan restraints. While we support certain overarching principles, we won’t mold reporting to serve a political party or ideological project.
No predetermined narratives. Complexity should be embraced rather than soothingly papered over. We worry about being wrong, not about being unpopular.
No reflexive dismissal of even outlandish sounding theories prior to examination. However we reserve the right to dismiss (even ridicule) the outlandish theories that do not bear scrutiny.
No recycled content. We will always strive to do original reporting. Every story on Racket will have at least one phone call behind it.
Not politesse about taboos if it gets in the way of facts. But the transgression of taboos is also not something to be gratuitously courted for easy shock value.
No trepidation in the face of personal attacks and intimidation. Neither Matt nor I are stranger to these tactics.
No sacrifices on the altar of access journalism. Access to powerful people in government can facilitate reporting. But ultimately, they are bureaucrats who work for us. We’re not afraid to lose friends for an important story.
No coy sourcing. Anonymous sources may be used, but not as a matter of course. We’ll strive to connect readers to primary sources, archived as much as possible. Procuring original documents is to be a central focus.
No axes to grind. We’ll try to be right and admit when we’re wrong. Corrections are announced and left published.
Finally, the audience should always be the imagined boss. Yes, it’s our job to give you bad news sometimes. But writing with readers in mind is good practice.
Welcome to the new Racket News.
If the phrase "limited hangout" is not yet part of your vocabulary, it's time to add it to your repertoire. Grok offers this definition:
A limited hangout is a strategy, often used in espionage, politics, or public relations, where a partial truth or selected information is disclosed to the public or investigators to prevent the discovery of more damaging or sensitive facts, effectively acting as a form of damage control when a full cover-up is no longer viable. The term originates from CIA jargon, as described by former official Victor Marchetti, who explained it as admitting "some of the truth when tight lips have slipped" but withholding the key details to mislead further inquiry.
Here is the only thing you can do to make sure you are not a victim of limited hangouts: Repeatedly ask: "What else have you not yet told me?" Ask this repeatedly, especially when dealing with people, government officials and corporate news outlets you have previously trusted. Consider these recent examples:
DOJ under Pam Bondi redacted a photo of Benjamin Netanyahu with Jeffrey Epstein from the files.
Redactions are admittedly an imperfect way of engaging in limited hangouts, but they work well enough often enough, given the limitations of human attention and memory.
DNC mega-donor Reid Hoffman was mentioned 2,600 times in the Epstein files. David Sachs: "The NYT story on Epstein & Silicon Valley has paragraphs on Elon, Peter Thiel … Reid Hoffman barely gets mentioned despite having the deepest Epstein relationship and having lied about it."
New York Times forgot to mention that one of its own reporters worked closely with Epstein well after Epstein was a known child sex trafficker. And see here.
The DOJ briefly uploaded — then removed — an 86-page document titled “Investigation into Potential Jeffrey Epstein Co-Conspirators.”
Amidst all the chaos, Rep Thomas Massie emerges: with some common sense:
Rep. Thomas Massie says he’s ready to use the nuclear option if the DOJ refuses to un-redact the names of Epstein’s clients. He warns he will simply start reading Epstein’s client names publicly if Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice does not release them. “If the victims want to give them to me, I’ve expressed that I’m willing to do that.” See also here.
This is a collection of some posts I made on X today:
I'll start with John Cleese:
It would be simple if US corporate media would simply tell us what's going on, but that's not what they consider their job to be. They have gone almost completely silent because they're trying to figure out how to spend this because the inconvenient to their ideology.
Tonight in Iran:
Elon Musk comes to the rescue with Starlink
How the Corporate media has covered past revolutions:
And all of a sudden this happens. The DNC must have sent out the memo that it's now a good thing for Democrats to criticize Hamas. Incredible lock-step obedience in one of the least organic 180s I've ever witnessed.
[More . .. ]
What are we to do with the many millions of people who poured over the border during the Biden Administration, while the Biden Administration denied that it was happening and then denied that it could do anything to stop the flow of unvetted people over American borders?
I know this is a complex issue at this point, but it has been more and more clear to me that this movement of migrants across our borders was orchestrated by the Biden Administration for the purpose of electing Democrats in swing states. What to do with millions of people who are illegally here now? Especially given the negative impact mass unvetted immigration has had on many parts of the US, including increased crime. It's a big mess, but it's important to understand what happened and why. Joe Rogan sums it up well when discussing the possibility that Kamala Harris might run for president in 2028:
I'll ask [Harris] controversial things, man. It's all I have to do is ask you, Why [was] the border open?" We can talk about that for three hours. Oh my gosh. What are you trying to do? Right? You could close that border. Trump closed that border in a day. Amazing. In a day. You could say I hate what's going on with ice, and I don't like it either. I don't like this thing of like taking people.
And here's the thing, well, they should have done it the right way. But if you're poor and you live in a third world country, that's not an available option. Okay? What is an available option is this one administration over four years was encouraging people to go through, not only encouraging you to go through. There's Red Cross stops along the way. They give you maps. They tell you how to do it. People are being, they're funding people getting in. They're paying for air flights. They're flying people in. They're moving people into swing states. They're getting them on Medicare. They're getting them on Social Security.
We talked about this one lady who did an interview. She was being told to try to get people on permanent disability. So she was told to ask them, "Do you have back problems?" They're like, yes, okay, great, personal disability. Now that she she said I was told to view them as a client now, And so you're trying, essentially to bribe people to Now, once you get them in to move to swing state. Then they count on the census. Once they count on the census, it adds congressional seats. So it's like you're rigging elections by bringing in immigrants, and then you're giving them money.
And all these people that live in these poor communities, they're like, "Hey, where was all this money for us? Where was all this money for the people in Chicago? In Chicago? Where was all this money the people in Baltimore?" No, no, they're doing it because they're trying to manipulate the election. It didn't work. You know, it didn't work. Like, I got into an argument someone about it. But, yeah, it didn't work, though. I go, Yeah, but they tried to do it. It didn't work.
But they did move people to swing states. They did leave the border open for four years. They did let in millions of people. They don't even know how many. They don't know how many people got through. That's crazy. Once they got them here, they did give them EBT cards. They did give them cell phones. They did. They moved them into the fucking hotel, that Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, this luxury hotel filled with migrants. They paid for their food. They did do this. They encouraged people. They did have sanctuary cities where they weren't going to arrest them. They let them come in.
Every bit of the above is easily substantiated by searching first hand accounts on X. Almost none of it can be found in corporate media outlets. Therefore, there's no way to discuss it civilly with people "across the aisle" since, factually speaking, we come from two almost non-overlapping informational ecosystems.