Emily Kopp Named Editor of Racket News

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.

Continue ReadingEmily Kopp Named Editor of Racket News

Jeffrey Tucker Describes the Bleak State of the World

Jeffrey Tucker has ambitiously taken the temperature of the political, economic and social world with an article titled: "The Coup, the Calamity, and the Conspiracy." I highly recommend a full read.

Tucker begins with this graphic:

Here is an excerpt:

[Y]ou could be more realistic and see that this was not a mistake at all. It was entirely intentional, the unfolding of a dark scheme hatched by an indescribably sadistic ruling class. Indeed, if this had all been an accident, we surely would have heard someone apologize by now.

There is also the planning involved. There was Event 201, the lesser-known Crimson Contagion, and many others. They are usually described in the mainstream press as rehearsals for unplanned contingencies, like resiliency training. Absurd. This was plotted far in advance. We have all the receipts. To realize this and connect the dots does not make you a conspiracy theorist. It makes you a person with the capacity to think.

To deny nefarious motives and schemes makes you impossibly naive to the point of sedation. At best, it makes you ill-read in history.

After five years, what can we say was the plan and purpose of this calamity? We all have our views. Certainly within Brownstone ranks, there are many opinions. We argue among ourselves all the time. Coming up with a clean and clear explanation is not easy because there are so many moving parts and so many industrial opportunists who took advantage of the crisis to cash out.

This is such an expansive article that resonated with me over and over.

I have many of the same concerns, but I won't say much here. I will say (as Tucker mentions in the early paragraphs) that I'm sure how well coordinated all of the powerful players are. Just because they are well-entrenched, monied and politically connected doesn't mean that they necessarily agree with each other day to day, much less year to year. But in my mind, there is definitely a hell of a lot of coordination.

The best solution to this horrific anti-Democratic mess is a vigorous, courageous and free press, but the powers-that-be know this deeply and they've got the formerly half-respectable "journalism" industry 95% locked down.

So in the meantime, it's Jeffrey Tucker, independent media and people like you and me doing what we can. It feels like a David and Goliath battle, especially when you see Trump kowtowing to Pfizer, just like Biden did and harris would have

Continue ReadingJeffrey Tucker Describes the Bleak State of the World

FFFO Report: EU, Financed by U.S. Taxpayers is Trying to Shut Down Free Speech in the U.S

Excerpt from a new must-read report issued by the Foundation for Freedom Online: "23 US-Funded Organizations Drive The EU’s War on Tech Companies."

The American taxpayer is bankrolling online censorship in Europe. Multiple organizations involved in enforcing the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), which imposes massive fines on American tech platforms found guilty of carrying “misinformation” or “hate speech,” are American entities backed by American government funding.

Supporters of these efforts, many of whom are deeply tied to the legacy US foreign policy establishment, admit that the goal of these efforts is to shut down free speech for Americans. The pressure is about to mount, as the previously-voluntary EU code of practice on disinformation becomes a mandatory regulation governing tech companies operating in the region.

The Foundation for Freedom Online has analyzed organizations that signed the EU’s code of practice, or are involved in enforcing it, finding eight organizations that receive funding from US government sources.

Additionally, two of the organizations on the list, NewsGuard and Bellingcat, are drectly involved in enforcing the EU’s censorship regime, as active participants in Europe’s network of EU-backed “digital observatories” aimed at detecting disfavored online narratives that can be analysed and targeted for censorship.

Who are these U.S. funded entities that are working overtime to deny Americans their right to free speech?  The above report names the names. And it is all looking incredibly ominous. The bottom line is that the U.S. right to free speech is being attacked by "foreign" entities that are financed by U.S. taxpayers. Americans are afflicted with the free speech version of an auto-immune dysfunction. Here is more from the report:

As the Foundation for Freedom Online highlighted in its 2024 Censorship Index, the U.S. government also pushed censorship in Europe through the State Department’s office of public diplomacy:

Gave the Atlantic Council a $300,000 grant to build a “transatlantic response to disinformation.” This grant was seemingly used to fund a conference involving conversations about cooperating on the EU Digital Services Ac (DSA)t. A grant transaction description mentions a June 2022 conference.

The Delegation of the EU to the United States and the Atlantic Council hosted a June 2022 EU-US Defense and Future Forum. During the conference, members of an audience, which included officials from the U.S. State Department, asked questions to and attended a talk by Gerard De Graaf on the EU-US Digital Policy Agenda, largely centered around the DSA.

Gerard De Graff was the Director of Digital Transformation at the European Commission. He is responsible largely for the creation of the DSA. De Graff was named Special Envoy for Digital to the US and head of the newly created EU San Francisco Office in September 2022, seemingly fitted near Silicon Valley to push American tech platforms into compliance with Orwellian European regulations.

Continue ReadingFFFO Report: EU, Financed by U.S. Taxpayers is Trying to Shut Down Free Speech in the U.S

Walter Kirn: “Censorship is Just for the Prisoners who’ve Escaped the Info Dome.”

Walter Kirn: "In a way, censorship is just for the prisoners who've escaped the info dome. You know, censorship is just shooting the escapees but keeping people inside the dome and playing that 24 hour news act like music as maybe the main imperative. That is the part that I think will truly blow our minds." Walter has perfectly expressed something that distresses me every hour of the waking day. There are vast numbers of people in the US who ingest only the high-calorie low nutrition version of information. I've referred to this type of "news" hundreds of times as "corporate news" or "legacy news," to distinguish it from the work of journalists who rely primarily upon the contributions of individuals who value the quality of the work. The legacy news includes five major players who I have often featured in my posts about the legacy media walking in lockstep to withhold information or to propagandize us. Once upon a time these outlets practiced something more akin to journalism, but we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears (I have posted hundreds of examples) that these outlets are no even trying to tell us what is going on around us, no longer offering conflicting perspectives, no longer putting their stories into historical perspectives and no longer pointing out the hypocrisy of public figures who make claims that conflict with their prior statements each day. Rather, in coordination with the U.S. government (and its many agencies, such as DHS, DOD, CIA as well as CIA's cutout USAID) our major news outlets work hard to convince consumers of pre-determined narratives--they write these plot first, then they go out to construct the facts. They do it like lawyers representing their clients in court--their is no attempt to be even-handed.  In short, they engage in Censorship and Propaganda: The modern day versions of Scylla and Charybdis.

People who continue trust legacy news outlets have been convinced by these big corporate-monied narrative-purveyors that alternate opinions and dissident voices are radioactive. As they did throughout COVID, they argue that dissidents are far more nefarious than people, way worse than people you merely find disagreeable. Dissidents must be avoided at all costs because the dangers they pose with their facts and opinions are existentially dangerous. This way of promulgating news is a great danger. For example, by pounding a simplistic narrative about Ukraine-Russia, as many as one million people have died and the US Treasury funds have been diverted from helping Americans to going into a big black hole.  As a result of stifling COVID dissidents, they got almost everything wrong (I found this on X recently:

Dozens of people with whom I once experienced mutual warm feelings have cooled. If we bump into  each other, they look at me with suspicion. Some of them have accused me of being a Republican, even though my views are largely consistent with what I've always believed, including this: for the 40 years during which I voted almost entirely for Democrats. That said, I have spent my entire life declaring my independence from tribes, political, religious and otherwise. I'm proud of that and I have a lot of criticism for Republicans too, for instance the elimination of the CFPB. My acquaintances on the new Left tend to show intense unwillingness to consider alternative facts and opinions. They are locked down and in fetal position. This is not happenstance--this behavior is the result of one the tectonic plates underlying their media ecosystem. In earlier times, their information diet might have been more varied, but they are now victims of Stockholm Syndrome:

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X Explodes With Evidence that Numerous UK Girls Have been Raped by Pakistani Gangs. US Legacy News is Silent.

X is rapidly filling with credible posts providing evidence that numerous UK girls, at least 1,500, have been raped by Pakistani gangs over the years, yet the police have been covering this up and, in fact, criminally prosecuting UK citizens who try to express concerns about these rapes on social media.  Tommy Robinson's courageous reporting has been critical to bringing the issue of these UK rapes to the fore, yet Tommy is currently in UK prison for the crime of reporting on this issue.

Could the number of victims really be closer to 250,000 girls?

Consider Samantha Smith's allegations:

Bill Ackman weighs in:

Tommy Robinson's documentary, "Silenced," can be viewed here. It is gripping and horrifying. Tommy has made a very strong case and yet he sits in prison for exposing societal dysfunction and corruption:

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Continue ReadingX Explodes With Evidence that Numerous UK Girls Have been Raped by Pakistani Gangs. US Legacy News is Silent.