Consider yourself indulged, I think there truly is a “silent majority” that would prefer a return to facts-based reporting, and I appreciate you leading the charge.
12/02/25: Iagree, SV. And to Matt: You're 99% on target. But you'll never cease to be polite. The ability to "cease being polite" isn't in you. If it were, you would have ended up whoring at MSNBC along with the rest of the Great Media Gods of Our Epoch To Whom I Bow And Pray.
Not to split hairs or make it a left-right thing, but it was really during the Obama years that the wheels came off the wagon. The MSM decided in unison to prostrate themselves to the Chosen One and they've never managed/bothered to get back on their feet.
Yup, Billy. The Dems saw the coming of The Chosen One as the End of History. First they thought it was Clinton, and expected pizza and interns all the way down, which necessitated George W. Bush. But then The Messiah was supposed to close the door on dissent forever and ever. Instead, Obama's fecklessness and the media's slavishness gave us Trump 1.0 and Biden's dementia and the media's mendacity gave us Trump 2.0.
So how is that all working out for the Left?
Like most Racket readers, I suspect, I just want the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, and I'll take it from there. ;-)
It started with Watergate. Once journalists saw that they could take down a President, virtually anybody who entered the profession was shaped by that precedent.
Spot on! The lionization of Woodward and Bernstein turned every newsroom into a hive of investigative journalists. Why report facts when you could be a rock star?
Yes. I was in J-school, ‘72 to ‘76. However, we were taught to NOT rely on anonymous/unnamed sources. And now the only presidents and others worth investigating are Repubs and conservatives. How else does the DefSec disappear without telling his boss, and no one cares? Just one example.
That era began to inculcate students of journalism with their responsibilities as engineers of public opinion. Reporting the facts gradually became ancillary to changing the world. The greatest power in journalism is selection of the stories to NOT cover. For example, the Nov. 28th shooting of two surrendering West Bank Palestinians is not mentioned as context in the Hegseth murders. Perfect goose/gander sauce detail ignored, not good journalism.
I would only say that Nixon's ACTIONS took him down. The press did what it should have been doing all along but was more than happy to "Play along" to be on Kennedy's and other's good side. Nixon didn't have the personality to fawn at the press who in reality are just people like you and me.
Perhaps another review of the times, the issues, the events, the people in play and the actions of the deep state would expand your understanding of the hatred the Dems had for Nixon. He was their nightmare even tho they controlled Congress.
Absolutely. I remember when Candy Crawley (remember her?) and the rest of the media gang lied, and lied, and lied, and managed to drag Obumbler over the finish line for a second term. Poor Romney never knew what hit him. The debate following the Crawley debacle, he "forgot" to mention that Crawley and Obama had, very definitely, lied.
After the Obama win, At one of the first press conferences, the first questioner lobbed The Affable One a hardball question (I paraphrase): "How does it feel to have won such an impressive victory?"
Operative David Becker, an experienced Democrat election lawyer, left the Justice Department before charges were brought against him to create the ERIC architecture. ERIC with funding from a Pew Charitable Trust project, Pew Center on The States, with the grant provided by the George Soros-funded Open Society. Electronic Registration Information Center, originally a blue State project, had 11 member states by 2014.
Per Becker, ERIC located 17 million new voters for the 2020 election, the most in the history of their organization. For comparison, they only found 5.7 million new voters in 2012, Obama’s reelection. Did these ‘new’ voters vote, or were their names used on mail-in ballots or just filled in and fed into the system in what appeared to be safe Dem cities?
What was the voting results for the 2012 election? Obama: 65,915,795 – Romney: 60,933,504 – Other: 2,236,111
Obama bested Romney by 4,982,291. If you subtract 5.7 million voters, Romney would have won. Remember, House moved into GOP hands. (yeah, I know, so what)
Have been a bit of a broken record on X lately telling Matt (& dear Walter) that the re-tooled, re-invigorated re-focussed Racket News really should tackle
💥 Full Truth about COVID & the mRNA injections 💥
Operation Talla in the UK (uncovered thus far by MSM I wonder why 🤔) has all the receipts documenting centralized order from UK law enforcement to ignore/bury/discard all citizen complaints to police about the deadly jabs…
Search “Operation Talla” on eXtwitter
Don’t hold your breath for any coverage from conventional media… what does THAT tell us and out who is particularly in this Crime Against Humanity?
Yep, turbocancers popping up everywhere, advanced to Stage 4 in an instant, plenty of other jab side effects (look around with facility, friends, workmates…)
And what ever vestiges of camouflage, whatever remnants of a "veil" were shredded upon the election of Trump when the obeisance instantly transmogrified into shrieking venomous hysteria.
The overnight transformation was boggling.
At the time, I still had a subscription to WIRED.
The day after Trump was elected, WIRED went full TDS. Instantly. Ferociously.
I sent them an email about this -- I did vote for Trump (and again in 2020 and 2024) -- noting how I subscribed to a popular tech magazine and not a political rag. I subsequently canceled my subscription.
It was a pity. WIRED was still kinda fun. Dated in a certain sense as the tech tsunami had largely overtaken it -- things had progressed so quickly it was arguably difficult to write "consumer friendly cutting edge tech news" which was entirely doable back in the late 90's.
I guess WIRED still exists...as an overseas web site.
There was an article in The Free Press by a former editor/writer at Vanity Fair who described the pretty-overtly lavish environment at CN when advertising rates were at a premium.
I grew up around advertising and book publishing and I have to admit that, even though I never experienced that kind of "Manhattan" lifestyle, the article made me nostalgic.
Print -- magazines, books, newspapers, whatever -- had a charm lacking from the online world.
Damned return key keeps posting before I am done…. remember in particular a fervent Renée Di Resta style piece of agitprop — pushed & hyped by Wired of course — bemoaning the dismantlement of the NGO money pipeline that funded all the censorship thugs (the goon misinfo troopers that the TwitterFiles, Mike Benz, & ultimately the Musk DOGE team
All the magazines I liked became a catechism of woke hyperbole or 24/7 Trump = Satan. WIRED should have had enough of a tech niche to avoid political grandstanding. They didn’t. When every online publication started axing comments and message boards during Covid, I decided to only read mags that allowed them. At one point my only sub was to National Review, which I’d never read much before. Their comment board allowed for occasional dissenting opinions. Esquire only printed short stories that would fit on napkins, then canceled them entirely. It became a tumbleweed zone of men’s shoe ads and Charlie Pierce’s agitprop disguised as bad Hunter Thompson. At one point, in desperation, I checked in on Playboy, only to find they’d nixed centerfolds and made the editorial masterstroke of mimicking a webpage in their content and layout. Why read for free online when you can pay money for the same thing in Playboy? Now, it’s just Substack. Great stuff, but I miss magazines.
I miss magazines too. Saved some and have picked up back-issues of others.
You could flip back and forth, put it down and pick it up and...it wouldn't change! The content would remain the same!
In contrast to the ever-more volatile web that "disappears" or "memory-holes" things wholesale.
Even the web was more fun in the late 90's. Not as slick, definitely, but more fun.
I used to work in web development and I can conjecture as to why the web degraded: mobile.
After maybe 2010 or even a bit earlier, all web sites had to be "mobile friendly" so that they could be viewed by the primary audience: cell-phone users.
So content had to be shrunk and the page layout had to be adaptable to any device....which is why so many websites have huge amounts of "negative space" when viewed on a computer monitor.
I noticed around then that style sheets were aping the layout of phone screens. I hate it. Why not optimize for different formats? Sure, they want us tethered 24/7 to dopamine delivery drones. There’s still a question of aesthetics. I didn’t even get a cellphone ‘til 4-5 years ago.
High-end Kindles are pretty book-like these days. Totally agree we’d be better served by culture you can’t unplug.
Probably more than you were looking for but if you're curious -- I used to live in this world -- the key terms that drove this are "adaptive web design" and "responsive web design".
The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (iirc) was the watershed event, followed by the release of Android. Prior to that point, browsing occurred on computers -- at least 99.9999% of it did -- and one worried about "what's the biggest screen [in pixel dimensions] that we can assume our audience uses". In the mid-90's, it was 800 x 600, by the early 2000's, it was 1024 x 768....these days of course so many monitors seem to be 10^40 x 10^30 (I'm joking).
Once phones and "mobile" became de facto, the economics of web/content development forced an approach where the layout would "render" in a "usable" fashion regardless of the platform the user was on. That is, people did not want to have to build separate versions of a site for different platforms or "user environments". It was basic economics and sanity-preservation.
The underlying technologies in all this are Javascript and "AJAX" and CSS = Cascading Style Sheets.
I haven't done web development for about 13 years now. I got out when the "frameworks" wars began, notably between React (open-sourced from Facebook) and Angular (open-sourced from Google).
As things were changing at a remarkable rate, the term "Javascript fatigue" was used to describe the arguably overwhelming variety available.
I got out just in time! :-) Still enjoy the stuff for my own efforts but I'm glad I'm not doing it as a job. Just too much of a moving target -- things are obsoleted or made incompatible waaaaaaay too quickly.
Yes. Sad. I pretty much stopped donating to a number of such when their "true colors" appeared to be revealed. I want to donate to (good) causes but finding out that some kind of wacky political agenda is really at the heart of their operation is genuinely disappointing.
Learning about all the "non-profits" (cough, cough) and associated NGOs that set up operations just north of the Darien Gap to facilitate mass "migration" (i.e., systematic illegal immigration = invasion) during the Biden years got me to stop donating. Truly bummed me out!
A serious, honest "wtf" seems completely in order.
We used to think that being national “members” was a righteous cause. Immediately after Trump won, #Resistance. It was curious. With the Sierra Club, I could get Resistance gear with our membership renewal. But when Nat Audubon offered to send me an anti-racist book, because I belonged to a nat bird-watching group. Oh boy. Knowing nothing about me, but assuming I am racist, because of — they know nothing about me and why I support (pause) birds. The scales fell from our eyes.
Someone will have to write a good account of the process by which wheels came off. Many threads came together. Criticism of Obama was presumed to be racist in origin, which encouraged seeing deplorable-ism everywhere, despite (/because of) historic triumphs in the election of a black president and Obergefell. An ideologically educated generation obsessed with identity and used to “safe-space” coddling started taking positions of influence in media. Inchoate, unsuccessful economic protest (the 99%ers, Occupy Wall St., etc.) gave way to identity-based policing of discourse, and corporate America was all too happy to encourage that shift. The trans trend was moving along a parallel track. All of which meant that about 2013, NPR started to become unlistenable.
Yes, it's going to be important to keep hold of all those threads lest we lose the truth, overlook the forest for the trees, so to speak. One important thread is the fact that with the appearance of social media and the loss of advertising dollars, MSM was desperate to find a new business model. This is when media outlets began to pander to their already left/right readers. Soon it was impossible to distinguish between news reporting and opinion in these outlets. When I pointed this out to a friend, a dedicated NYT reader, he was outraged that I no longer trusted this paper. He was a journalism professional and avery decent man. At the same time, the political parties had already ratcheted up their fight for power and control of government offices bloated by the steady flow of other people's money. So, the struggling msm grifted in to claim their share. A perfect marriage to spawn no holds barred tactics. Voters and readers were fed a daily dopamine diet, the modern version of bread and circus. I can't recall a time when politics was so important in people's daily lives, when there was such a desperate need to be right that objectivity became seen as disloyalty to the tribe, to morality. Election campaigns that are now priced at the millions of dollars are clear evidence of the size of the prize and the easily rationalized no holds barred tactics to win it. The normalizing of immoral behavior by those at the top of our society paved the way for grifters of every stripe.. A population of safe spacers, now addicted to dopamine overload, was easy prey to the grievance peddlers and the ready made scripts they provided for safe passage in one's tribe. If this were happening only in the US, it could be considered a local phenomenon. But the fact that it is happening throughout the West points to more generalized instigation, whether intentional or accidental. The goals of New World Order organizations,e.g., the UN, EU, Davos, etc. have been clear; those who play at that level do so for the same reasons as the power hungry do at lower levels. And they use the same norms-smashing tactics to sow fear and distrust that make populations easily controlled. Discussion of Identity becomes identity politics; discussion of race becomes racism; financial success becomes greed. Criminal behavior becomes victimization. First,Definitons, then norms change. One has to wonder if we are too far gone to ever come back to a center. If just one of our institutions--media, government or cultural--took the lead in calling the game we could have a chance.
Agree. I lived abroad during the 2008 election cycle and I could smell the propaganda wafting all the way to South Asia! That's when I woke up and everything changed for me.
Well, it certainly reached its fever pitch during that time. But another thing that Matt touched on "More phone calls and primary sources, fewer opinions..." We live in an era where everyone must/needs GIVE their opinion - even kids. Of course, I was raised in the time of 'children were meant to be seen and not heard'. So, there's that. 😆
1.) When I was an undergrad at the University of Chicago, Robert McNamara was awarded some kind of Quantrell prize or some such for his work at the World Bank. Well, once word got out that, duh, he was also Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, by golly, someone had to protest!
It was idiotic. It was immediately apparent the the real goal of the "protest" (cough, cough) was to act rowdy, scream and hopefully meet girls in the process.
At one point, "everyone" sat down in the street (why?) and the plain-clothes police officer managing the cops (hilariously dressed in riot gear...U Chicago students are about as threatening as wet Kleenex)...was speaking on his bullhorn that we needed to clear out or be arrested.
At that point, one guy I knew ("Horace")...and man, do I wish I could have captured it...comes flying down 57th street to University and plasters the lead cop in the face with a shaving cream pie.
I got up and walked over to sidewalk and (timidly, idiotically) sat on the curb. I was no longer in the street! But I was still phony-pretend showing "solidarity"! I grew up in Chicago and was a kid in 1968. No way was I going to get cracked by a CPD billyclub over some retards stunt!
Numerous people were arrested and immediately released. Just a clown show.
2.) Subsequently, when in grad school at the University of Minnesota, it was clear that "protesting" was a cottage industry around the university. A running joke was that the art stores around the university would never go out of business as people needed protest supplies!
I had the idea...I still think about it...of preparing "MadLibs" style pre-made protest placards. Something like a basic wooden handle attached to a placard with pre-filled slogan fragments:
Down with __________!!!
No more __________!!!
US out of __________!!!
Justice for __________!!!
etc.
3.) I recommend going back and watching videos of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or Revolutionary Communist Brigade (RCB) kiddies giving interviews. Talk about self-importance!
I don't have an exact reference...been meaning to search for it...but I recall seeing one video where a young gal is stating to the news cameras that they "haven't ruled out violence"...or something like that...to achieve their goals. What pretentious little shits.
I believe we might be in the same cohort. Luckily, in 1968 I wasn't yet in high school so I was 'on the sidelines' as well but you were much braver than I ever could have been. Just BEING there gives you street cred (or whatever they're calling it these days).
I think the 'Mad Libs' placards is a great idea!! It's certainly better than seeing the same colors & the same printing on 100 different posters like I remember seeing at George W.'s Republican convention. It was so hokey. It was obvious that Bush volunteers/staffers made up tons of them and passed them out to the crowd. 🙄 With your placards ppl would know what they were getting upfront - no pretense about it.
IMO - it was the Boomers - especially the Clintons 🤨 - who started all this 'gimme, gimme' and wanting to pontificate ad nauseam. I keep wondering how long the ppl at the beginning of the Boomer years - starting in 1946 - are gonna hang around. I'd like to think when that generation has gone to the big-sit-in-in-the-sky the remaining 'Gens' will finally have some peace & quiet and can find their way back to a less me-focused way of life. (Full disclosure: I am a Boomer 😉)
Definitely, Matt. Do what you need to do. I, for one, support you and deeply appreciate your efforts to get things right. A characteristic and conviction that seems to be all too rare in our current environment.
I agree. Between you and what Catherine Herridge posts, you 2 seem to have the best researched objective perspectives/facts that I can rely on. Thank you for the research you and your team do.
I am paying monthly for that exact reason. I figured I would hang in there for another month or two to see if they could right the ship. It’s sad. I have been there since “Common Sense” which appears to have left that publication.
I was there from the start, too. I actually printed Bari's Letter of Resignation from the NYT! And then...this autumn, I left her for Matt...and Walter.
TFP is now the neoliberal “Economists” who wrote and lie for Bloomberg. Open borders, private profits / public charge subsidies. Ukraine flags, climate change mandates and bans, taxpayer funded affordable housing -they’re Gavin Newsom as a website
IMO, TFP’s mast is swinging to and fro since Bari’s hand was taken off the tiller. Nellie’s TGIF edition is a perfect example of the wild wanderings of being caught up in the eddy currents while the rest of the fleet sits in the doldrums repeating MSM mast heads.
Noble idea. I will continue to support you with my subscription in this effort. Godspeed when the arrows are flying at you from all sides. Thank you in advance.
Utterly unclear about what you mean. You say that "I’m beginning to think more of that is needed," but the referent is "Just-the Facts." You go on to make, "a sincere promise to use the fact-based ethos to offend as many people as is humanly possible," but why would facts offend anyone? I'm sure whatever retooling you do will be excellent, but I wish I better understood what you were trying to say in your most recent post.
Yes. But I'd still be happier with a fact-based ethos that did not take offending people as its main motive or goal. It's too easy for that to slide into partisanship, precisely as "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" did.
A fact-based ethos in the service of truth, regardless of whom it offends, is more like what I've come to expect from Matt, and I truly hope this new effort does not segue away from that.
The issue is that most people look to take offense and/or promote their partisan agendae rather than seek the truth. The truth hurts sometimes. And that is unforgivable for way too many people.
The current media approach is to completely dodge facts or details that work against the supportive narrative favoring their side. And if not possible, to spin or lie. That's where we are.
Coming from a family of old(er) school journalists, whom leaned hard left personally but still let the chips fall as they would, I’m excited to see what your renewed commitment to straight reporting looks like. I commend and congratulate you on it, Matt, and I have all confidence that you’ll continue to distinguish Racket by its integrity.
Been subscribing for about (not quite sure) 5 yrs...you have been on an incredibly kinetic (and completely unforseen) journalistic adventure/journey/battle. Watching your honest, transparent evolution has been this reader's privilege. Be true. Thank you.
Consider yourself indulged, I think there truly is a “silent majority” that would prefer a return to facts-based reporting, and I appreciate you leading the charge.
Agree. You have done impressive reporting in the past. I paid because of your independent voice. Would be helpful in this polarized environment.
Ok boomer. (Couldn't resist. Just kidding. I agree 100%)
Do you think Matt is a boomer? I'm 74 and a bona fide boomer...Matt is young enough to be my son. Isn't he GenX?
was referring to NH boomer. :)
He wasn't referring to Matt. He was replying to a commenter named "NH boomer."
I think Patrick is referring to the commenter's name above his: NH Boomer
Thanks. My apologies to Patrick.
An honest boomer mistake. Fellow boomer.
No apology necessary 😊
Go for it Matt!
Amen! to SV's comment.
Proudly part of that silent majority.
#metoo!!!
12/02/25: Iagree, SV. And to Matt: You're 99% on target. But you'll never cease to be polite. The ability to "cease being polite" isn't in you. If it were, you would have ended up whoring at MSNBC along with the rest of the Great Media Gods of Our Epoch To Whom I Bow And Pray.
Thank you Matt! That sounds like a whole lot of what we need, and I for one will happily pay for it. It has value.
“...dispensing with any pretense to politeness.“
Wha?
I’m not paying for politeness.
And frankly, I didn’t notice any I could point to.
You’re doing a great job. Keep it coming.
Kurt is a god name for one with your point of view 🤪
Not to split hairs or make it a left-right thing, but it was really during the Obama years that the wheels came off the wagon. The MSM decided in unison to prostrate themselves to the Chosen One and they've never managed/bothered to get back on their feet.
Yup, Billy. The Dems saw the coming of The Chosen One as the End of History. First they thought it was Clinton, and expected pizza and interns all the way down, which necessitated George W. Bush. But then The Messiah was supposed to close the door on dissent forever and ever. Instead, Obama's fecklessness and the media's slavishness gave us Trump 1.0 and Biden's dementia and the media's mendacity gave us Trump 2.0.
So how is that all working out for the Left?
Like most Racket readers, I suspect, I just want the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth, and I'll take it from there. ;-)
...with dashes and dashes of humor.
Yes, and full doses please
I thought you left! Welcome!
Michael has been in better places. Some of us lucky few get to enjoy him almost every day. Just look for a little place jotting in purple.
And when Trump came along the MSM went the other way, believing themselves morally obligated to bring down the reprehensible D. Trump.
It started with Watergate. Once journalists saw that they could take down a President, virtually anybody who entered the profession was shaped by that precedent.
In Collusion with America's Almighty Alphabet Agencies... THAT was the Historical Marriage of Powers unique to our Modern Age.
True enough-they're nearly interchangeable now.
They were then as well. Operation Mockingbird
100% When intel Mafia no longer wanted to remain in the shadows and also decided to occupy elected offices, the media changed drastically
🛎️🔨
Spot on! The lionization of Woodward and Bernstein turned every newsroom into a hive of investigative journalists. Why report facts when you could be a rock star?
And Deep Throat turned out to be FBI? Hmmm.
Yes. I was in J-school, ‘72 to ‘76. However, we were taught to NOT rely on anonymous/unnamed sources. And now the only presidents and others worth investigating are Repubs and conservatives. How else does the DefSec disappear without telling his boss, and no one cares? Just one example.
That era began to inculcate students of journalism with their responsibilities as engineers of public opinion. Reporting the facts gradually became ancillary to changing the world. The greatest power in journalism is selection of the stories to NOT cover. For example, the Nov. 28th shooting of two surrendering West Bank Palestinians is not mentioned as context in the Hegseth murders. Perfect goose/gander sauce detail ignored, not good journalism.
I would only say that Nixon's ACTIONS took him down. The press did what it should have been doing all along but was more than happy to "Play along" to be on Kennedy's and other's good side. Nixon didn't have the personality to fawn at the press who in reality are just people like you and me.
Perhaps another review of the times, the issues, the events, the people in play and the actions of the deep state would expand your understanding of the hatred the Dems had for Nixon. He was their nightmare even tho they controlled Congress.
Winners write history and mostly get it wrong.
Take down a President and cash in as a hero
That's how it looked to me too
Absolutely. I remember when Candy Crawley (remember her?) and the rest of the media gang lied, and lied, and lied, and managed to drag Obumbler over the finish line for a second term. Poor Romney never knew what hit him. The debate following the Crawley debacle, he "forgot" to mention that Crawley and Obama had, very definitely, lied.
After the Obama win, At one of the first press conferences, the first questioner lobbed The Affable One a hardball question (I paraphrase): "How does it feel to have won such an impressive victory?"
Yep! Always thought of her as Creepy Crawley.
I thought it was Crowley, like Alister?
Correct. But she was kind of creepy-(Crawley), the way she jumped in reflexively to support Obumbler.
Is anybody creepier than ol’ number of the beast Alister Crowley? I mean have you seen a picture of the guy? Do what thou wilt…
It's "Aleister", but, yes.
Alister almost reads like "A-lister"...like someone at the top...not the bottom.
Yes, you can do what thou wilt but don't complain if the long-term result ain't what you were hoping for.
Operative David Becker, an experienced Democrat election lawyer, left the Justice Department before charges were brought against him to create the ERIC architecture. ERIC with funding from a Pew Charitable Trust project, Pew Center on The States, with the grant provided by the George Soros-funded Open Society. Electronic Registration Information Center, originally a blue State project, had 11 member states by 2014.
Per Becker, ERIC located 17 million new voters for the 2020 election, the most in the history of their organization. For comparison, they only found 5.7 million new voters in 2012, Obama’s reelection. Did these ‘new’ voters vote, or were their names used on mail-in ballots or just filled in and fed into the system in what appeared to be safe Dem cities?
What was the voting results for the 2012 election? Obama: 65,915,795 – Romney: 60,933,504 – Other: 2,236,111
Obama bested Romney by 4,982,291. If you subtract 5.7 million voters, Romney would have won. Remember, House moved into GOP hands. (yeah, I know, so what)
Thanks Shelley. Very informative and thought-provoking!
COVID was another ...... the coverup continues.
The hundreds of stories reporting what we were subjected to during COVID . . . There should be a tv network dedicated to that alone.
Have been a bit of a broken record on X lately telling Matt (& dear Walter) that the re-tooled, re-invigorated re-focussed Racket News really should tackle
💥 Full Truth about COVID & the mRNA injections 💥
Operation Talla in the UK (uncovered thus far by MSM I wonder why 🤔) has all the receipts documenting centralized order from UK law enforcement to ignore/bury/discard all citizen complaints to police about the deadly jabs…
Search “Operation Talla” on eXtwitter
Don’t hold your breath for any coverage from conventional media… what does THAT tell us and out who is particularly in this Crime Against Humanity?
Yep, turbocancers popping up everywhere, advanced to Stage 4 in an instant, plenty of other jab side effects (look around with facility, friends, workmates…)
And what ever vestiges of camouflage, whatever remnants of a "veil" were shredded upon the election of Trump when the obeisance instantly transmogrified into shrieking venomous hysteria.
The overnight transformation was boggling.
At the time, I still had a subscription to WIRED.
The day after Trump was elected, WIRED went full TDS. Instantly. Ferociously.
I sent them an email about this -- I did vote for Trump (and again in 2020 and 2024) -- noting how I subscribed to a popular tech magazine and not a political rag. I subsequently canceled my subscription.
It was a pity. WIRED was still kinda fun. Dated in a certain sense as the tech tsunami had largely overtaken it -- things had progressed so quickly it was arguably difficult to write "consumer friendly cutting edge tech news" which was entirely doable back in the late 90's.
I guess WIRED still exists...as an overseas web site.
Wired is barely hanging in as Condé Nasty website that tries hard to push the IfficialNarrativeTM, I remember
There was an article in The Free Press by a former editor/writer at Vanity Fair who described the pretty-overtly lavish environment at CN when advertising rates were at a premium.
I grew up around advertising and book publishing and I have to admit that, even though I never experienced that kind of "Manhattan" lifestyle, the article made me nostalgic.
Print -- magazines, books, newspapers, whatever -- had a charm lacking from the online world.
Damned return key keeps posting before I am done…. remember in particular a fervent Renée Di Resta style piece of agitprop — pushed & hyped by Wired of course — bemoaning the dismantlement of the NGO money pipeline that funded all the censorship thugs (the goon misinfo troopers that the TwitterFiles, Mike Benz, & ultimately the Musk DOGE team
… team dismantled). Remind me next time not to rely on an old iPad to post to Racket Comments 🙄🤣🤣🤣🤣👍
All the magazines I liked became a catechism of woke hyperbole or 24/7 Trump = Satan. WIRED should have had enough of a tech niche to avoid political grandstanding. They didn’t. When every online publication started axing comments and message boards during Covid, I decided to only read mags that allowed them. At one point my only sub was to National Review, which I’d never read much before. Their comment board allowed for occasional dissenting opinions. Esquire only printed short stories that would fit on napkins, then canceled them entirely. It became a tumbleweed zone of men’s shoe ads and Charlie Pierce’s agitprop disguised as bad Hunter Thompson. At one point, in desperation, I checked in on Playboy, only to find they’d nixed centerfolds and made the editorial masterstroke of mimicking a webpage in their content and layout. Why read for free online when you can pay money for the same thing in Playboy? Now, it’s just Substack. Great stuff, but I miss magazines.
I miss magazines too. Saved some and have picked up back-issues of others.
You could flip back and forth, put it down and pick it up and...it wouldn't change! The content would remain the same!
In contrast to the ever-more volatile web that "disappears" or "memory-holes" things wholesale.
Even the web was more fun in the late 90's. Not as slick, definitely, but more fun.
I used to work in web development and I can conjecture as to why the web degraded: mobile.
After maybe 2010 or even a bit earlier, all web sites had to be "mobile friendly" so that they could be viewed by the primary audience: cell-phone users.
So content had to be shrunk and the page layout had to be adaptable to any device....which is why so many websites have huge amounts of "negative space" when viewed on a computer monitor.
I noticed around then that style sheets were aping the layout of phone screens. I hate it. Why not optimize for different formats? Sure, they want us tethered 24/7 to dopamine delivery drones. There’s still a question of aesthetics. I didn’t even get a cellphone ‘til 4-5 years ago.
High-end Kindles are pretty book-like these days. Totally agree we’d be better served by culture you can’t unplug.
Probably more than you were looking for but if you're curious -- I used to live in this world -- the key terms that drove this are "adaptive web design" and "responsive web design".
The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 (iirc) was the watershed event, followed by the release of Android. Prior to that point, browsing occurred on computers -- at least 99.9999% of it did -- and one worried about "what's the biggest screen [in pixel dimensions] that we can assume our audience uses". In the mid-90's, it was 800 x 600, by the early 2000's, it was 1024 x 768....these days of course so many monitors seem to be 10^40 x 10^30 (I'm joking).
Once phones and "mobile" became de facto, the economics of web/content development forced an approach where the layout would "render" in a "usable" fashion regardless of the platform the user was on. That is, people did not want to have to build separate versions of a site for different platforms or "user environments". It was basic economics and sanity-preservation.
The underlying technologies in all this are Javascript and "AJAX" and CSS = Cascading Style Sheets.
I haven't done web development for about 13 years now. I got out when the "frameworks" wars began, notably between React (open-sourced from Facebook) and Angular (open-sourced from Google).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_web_design
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_development/Core/CSS_layout/Responsive_Design
https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/responsive-vs-adaptive-design-whats-best-choice-designers/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-based_web_frameworks
As things were changing at a remarkable rate, the term "Javascript fatigue" was used to describe the arguably overwhelming variety available.
I got out just in time! :-) Still enjoy the stuff for my own efforts but I'm glad I'm not doing it as a job. Just too much of a moving target -- things are obsoleted or made incompatible waaaaaaay too quickly.
After Trump won, All OfThe Nature Groups we have been “members” of for quite awhile went all #resistance.
Yes. Sad. I pretty much stopped donating to a number of such when their "true colors" appeared to be revealed. I want to donate to (good) causes but finding out that some kind of wacky political agenda is really at the heart of their operation is genuinely disappointing.
Learning about all the "non-profits" (cough, cough) and associated NGOs that set up operations just north of the Darien Gap to facilitate mass "migration" (i.e., systematic illegal immigration = invasion) during the Biden years got me to stop donating. Truly bummed me out!
A serious, honest "wtf" seems completely in order.
We used to think that being national “members” was a righteous cause. Immediately after Trump won, #Resistance. It was curious. With the Sierra Club, I could get Resistance gear with our membership renewal. But when Nat Audubon offered to send me an anti-racist book, because I belonged to a nat bird-watching group. Oh boy. Knowing nothing about me, but assuming I am racist, because of — they know nothing about me and why I support (pause) birds. The scales fell from our eyes.
Someone will have to write a good account of the process by which wheels came off. Many threads came together. Criticism of Obama was presumed to be racist in origin, which encouraged seeing deplorable-ism everywhere, despite (/because of) historic triumphs in the election of a black president and Obergefell. An ideologically educated generation obsessed with identity and used to “safe-space” coddling started taking positions of influence in media. Inchoate, unsuccessful economic protest (the 99%ers, Occupy Wall St., etc.) gave way to identity-based policing of discourse, and corporate America was all too happy to encourage that shift. The trans trend was moving along a parallel track. All of which meant that about 2013, NPR started to become unlistenable.
Yes, it's going to be important to keep hold of all those threads lest we lose the truth, overlook the forest for the trees, so to speak. One important thread is the fact that with the appearance of social media and the loss of advertising dollars, MSM was desperate to find a new business model. This is when media outlets began to pander to their already left/right readers. Soon it was impossible to distinguish between news reporting and opinion in these outlets. When I pointed this out to a friend, a dedicated NYT reader, he was outraged that I no longer trusted this paper. He was a journalism professional and avery decent man. At the same time, the political parties had already ratcheted up their fight for power and control of government offices bloated by the steady flow of other people's money. So, the struggling msm grifted in to claim their share. A perfect marriage to spawn no holds barred tactics. Voters and readers were fed a daily dopamine diet, the modern version of bread and circus. I can't recall a time when politics was so important in people's daily lives, when there was such a desperate need to be right that objectivity became seen as disloyalty to the tribe, to morality. Election campaigns that are now priced at the millions of dollars are clear evidence of the size of the prize and the easily rationalized no holds barred tactics to win it. The normalizing of immoral behavior by those at the top of our society paved the way for grifters of every stripe.. A population of safe spacers, now addicted to dopamine overload, was easy prey to the grievance peddlers and the ready made scripts they provided for safe passage in one's tribe. If this were happening only in the US, it could be considered a local phenomenon. But the fact that it is happening throughout the West points to more generalized instigation, whether intentional or accidental. The goals of New World Order organizations,e.g., the UN, EU, Davos, etc. have been clear; those who play at that level do so for the same reasons as the power hungry do at lower levels. And they use the same norms-smashing tactics to sow fear and distrust that make populations easily controlled. Discussion of Identity becomes identity politics; discussion of race becomes racism; financial success becomes greed. Criminal behavior becomes victimization. First,Definitons, then norms change. One has to wonder if we are too far gone to ever come back to a center. If just one of our institutions--media, government or cultural--took the lead in calling the game we could have a chance.
Agree. I lived abroad during the 2008 election cycle and I could smell the propaganda wafting all the way to South Asia! That's when I woke up and everything changed for me.
Yep. Because if you criticized Obama in any way, you were kinda, sorta, probably, you know... One of *those* people.
Well, it certainly reached its fever pitch during that time. But another thing that Matt touched on "More phone calls and primary sources, fewer opinions..." We live in an era where everyone must/needs GIVE their opinion - even kids. Of course, I was raised in the time of 'children were meant to be seen and not heard'. So, there's that. 😆
This appears to be an artifact of the 1960s.
In my own little experience:
1.) When I was an undergrad at the University of Chicago, Robert McNamara was awarded some kind of Quantrell prize or some such for his work at the World Bank. Well, once word got out that, duh, he was also Secretary of Defense during Vietnam, by golly, someone had to protest!
It was idiotic. It was immediately apparent the the real goal of the "protest" (cough, cough) was to act rowdy, scream and hopefully meet girls in the process.
At one point, "everyone" sat down in the street (why?) and the plain-clothes police officer managing the cops (hilariously dressed in riot gear...U Chicago students are about as threatening as wet Kleenex)...was speaking on his bullhorn that we needed to clear out or be arrested.
At that point, one guy I knew ("Horace")...and man, do I wish I could have captured it...comes flying down 57th street to University and plasters the lead cop in the face with a shaving cream pie.
I got up and walked over to sidewalk and (timidly, idiotically) sat on the curb. I was no longer in the street! But I was still phony-pretend showing "solidarity"! I grew up in Chicago and was a kid in 1968. No way was I going to get cracked by a CPD billyclub over some retards stunt!
Numerous people were arrested and immediately released. Just a clown show.
2.) Subsequently, when in grad school at the University of Minnesota, it was clear that "protesting" was a cottage industry around the university. A running joke was that the art stores around the university would never go out of business as people needed protest supplies!
I had the idea...I still think about it...of preparing "MadLibs" style pre-made protest placards. Something like a basic wooden handle attached to a placard with pre-filled slogan fragments:
Down with __________!!!
No more __________!!!
US out of __________!!!
Justice for __________!!!
etc.
3.) I recommend going back and watching videos of the Weather Underground, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or Revolutionary Communist Brigade (RCB) kiddies giving interviews. Talk about self-importance!
I don't have an exact reference...been meaning to search for it...but I recall seeing one video where a young gal is stating to the news cameras that they "haven't ruled out violence"...or something like that...to achieve their goals. What pretentious little shits.
I believe we might be in the same cohort. Luckily, in 1968 I wasn't yet in high school so I was 'on the sidelines' as well but you were much braver than I ever could have been. Just BEING there gives you street cred (or whatever they're calling it these days).
I think the 'Mad Libs' placards is a great idea!! It's certainly better than seeing the same colors & the same printing on 100 different posters like I remember seeing at George W.'s Republican convention. It was so hokey. It was obvious that Bush volunteers/staffers made up tons of them and passed them out to the crowd. 🙄 With your placards ppl would know what they were getting upfront - no pretense about it.
IMO - it was the Boomers - especially the Clintons 🤨 - who started all this 'gimme, gimme' and wanting to pontificate ad nauseam. I keep wondering how long the ppl at the beginning of the Boomer years - starting in 1946 - are gonna hang around. I'd like to think when that generation has gone to the big-sit-in-in-the-sky the remaining 'Gens' will finally have some peace & quiet and can find their way back to a less me-focused way of life. (Full disclosure: I am a Boomer 😉)
The wheels came off the wagon thousands of years ago. It's the system, not the individual.
Although I have no complaints about Racket News up to this point, I trust your judgement and await the changes. Cheers, Matt & team!
Please leave nothing unskewered. This is the reason yours is the only subscription I pay for.
Definitely, Matt. Do what you need to do. I, for one, support you and deeply appreciate your efforts to get things right. A characteristic and conviction that seems to be all too rare in our current environment.
Hell yeah. Screw the bastards. Non partisan statement.
Yep, both sides.
I agree. Between you and what Catherine Herridge posts, you 2 seem to have the best researched objective perspectives/facts that I can rely on. Thank you for the research you and your team do.
I'll have to give Ms. Herridge a look. I was hoping for this when I had subscribed to The Free Press, but they've moved away from that
TFP is also now owned by CBS.
TFP is giving the NYT a run for their money. Hence the "if true..." bullcrap. I should have cancelled or paid monthly, I'm stuck for a while.
I am paying monthly for that exact reason. I figured I would hang in there for another month or two to see if they could right the ship. It’s sad. I have been there since “Common Sense” which appears to have left that publication.
I was there from the start, too. I actually printed Bari's Letter of Resignation from the NYT! And then...this autumn, I left her for Matt...and Walter.
TFP is now the neoliberal “Economists” who wrote and lie for Bloomberg. Open borders, private profits / public charge subsidies. Ukraine flags, climate change mandates and bans, taxpayer funded affordable housing -they’re Gavin Newsom as a website
I have never paid a year inn advance for anything that is available for a monthly charge. Buyers remorse is always an issue!
Lesson learned. At my age you'd think I'd made all the mistakes there were to be made....
IMO, TFP’s mast is swinging to and fro since Bari’s hand was taken off the tiller. Nellie’s TGIF edition is a perfect example of the wild wanderings of being caught up in the eddy currents while the rest of the fleet sits in the doldrums repeating MSM mast heads.
I’m a subscriber. She is spot on in her reporting
Which one? There appear to be four (4) of her on Substack!
I agree!
Get it on. Bang a gong. Get it on.
Noble idea. I will continue to support you with my subscription in this effort. Godspeed when the arrows are flying at you from all sides. Thank you in advance.
As always, thank you Matt. Just another of the many reasons we all subscribe.
Utterly unclear about what you mean. You say that "I’m beginning to think more of that is needed," but the referent is "Just-the Facts." You go on to make, "a sincere promise to use the fact-based ethos to offend as many people as is humanly possible," but why would facts offend anyone? I'm sure whatever retooling you do will be excellent, but I wish I better understood what you were trying to say in your most recent post.
Most people today are so partisan that a fact that unfavorably shows their side will offend them. Yes?
Yes. But I'd still be happier with a fact-based ethos that did not take offending people as its main motive or goal. It's too easy for that to slide into partisanship, precisely as "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" did.
A fact-based ethos in the service of truth, regardless of whom it offends, is more like what I've come to expect from Matt, and I truly hope this new effort does not segue away from that.
The issue is that most people look to take offense and/or promote their partisan agendae rather than seek the truth. The truth hurts sometimes. And that is unforgivable for way too many people.
Try telling a liberal the fact that men can't give birth and observe the reaction. Offense, they will take offense.
The current media approach is to completely dodge facts or details that work against the supportive narrative favoring their side. And if not possible, to spin or lie. That's where we are.
I'm puzzled too, but all will become clear…
It's a bit of a tongue in cheek based in reality.
Coming from a family of old(er) school journalists, whom leaned hard left personally but still let the chips fall as they would, I’m excited to see what your renewed commitment to straight reporting looks like. I commend and congratulate you on it, Matt, and I have all confidence that you’ll continue to distinguish Racket by its integrity.
while I have always felt confident in your reporting, and enjoy your snarky comments, if you say there is another level, then i say:
GO FOR IT !!
I am coming along for the ride
Been subscribing for about (not quite sure) 5 yrs...you have been on an incredibly kinetic (and completely unforseen) journalistic adventure/journey/battle. Watching your honest, transparent evolution has been this reader's privilege. Be true. Thank you.
And Walter is the pepper to your salt.
The chili pepper
The Flea to his Kiedis.
You have been a subscriber for four years and ten months (it shows when you click the red badge next to your name.)
This outlook and attitude is why I love you and gladly subscribe. Thanks for being you!