Author and broadcaster Donald Jeffries talks with attorney Louis Leo IV and Professor James Tracy about the TracyvFAU federal lawsuit, presently on appeal. Tracy was fired by Florida Atlantic University in 2016 for his controversial public views and writings on topics including the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing events.
The interview was recorded and broadcast on Truth Frequency Radio February 15, 2019.
Listen to interview via MP3 on Google Drive
On November 10, 2015 Florida Governor Rick Scott visited Florida Atlantic University for an early morning meeting of his cabinet alongside political appointees comprising Florida Atlantic University’s Board of Trustees and their managerial candidate, FAU President John Kelly. The meeting was chronicled in official docs and via a fawning Palm Beach Post report.
Perhaps ironically, it was also on November 10 that FAU administrators began disciplinary proceedings against tenured Professor James Tracy for operating this website.
Via PhiBetaIota
James Tracy: In Solidarity with Alex Jones: US News Media Targeted Professor for Questioning Sandy Hook While Failing To Do Theirs – Fake News Indeed
Mr. President,
I am a former Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). In early 2013, I became the target of a smear campaign led by prominent news media after I questioned coverage of the 14 December 2012 Sandy Hook massacre. The media called on FAU to fire me because of my concerns. I therefore appreciate your clear condemnation of the Mainstream Media (MSM) for “fake news” where those posing as journalists spread falsehoods and propaganda.
As a student of news narratives for nearly two decades, I observed several contradictions and anomalies in the media’s presentation of the Sandy Hook event. Following the shooting, for example, emergency response protocols were abandoned and first responders were refused entry to school grounds. Authorities apprehended an alleged gunman but placed him in the front seatof a police car.
A source close to MemoryHoleBlog has informed us they contacted Palm Beach Post courts reporter Jane Musgrave via telephone following the December 2017 trial of TracyvFAU wherein FAU Professor James Tracy sued his former employer for civil rights violations. This individual asked the reporter why the Post‘s coverage was so egregiously biased against Tracy and favorable toward FAU.
“Well, nobody likes [Tracy],” Musgrave replied. “He got what he deserved” because “kids died.”
When the party pressed Musgrave on why the newspaper’s coverage included so many glaring omissions of important evidence and testimony–content that would have put Tracy in a more positive light–the reporter responded, “We weren’t allowed to report that,” and that at the end of the day the Post would never publish anything supportive of the plaintiff.
This conversation confirms what the TracyvFAU plaintiff and his legal team observed as both the Post and South Florida Sun-Sentinel‘s sensational and flagrantly misleading coverage throughout the trial and even after the jury verdict was rendered.
The story titles alone suggest the Post‘s clear bias, with the Post referring to Tracy as the “Sandy Hook denier.” In one “opinion piece” the newspaper even solicits an embellished defamatory account of Tracy’s teaching style from one of its salaried employees.
-“FAU Professor James Tracy Claims School Fired Him for Sandy Hook Rants,” Palm Beach Post, November 30, 2017
-“Ex-FAU Prof on Trial Tries To Downplay Attack on Sandy Hook Parents,” Palm Beach Post, December 1, 2017
-“Christie: Tracy-vs-FAU More about Arrogance Than Free Speech, Insubordination,” PalmBeachPost.com, December 5, 2017
-“What It Was Like in the Class of FAU’s Conspiracy-Spinning Professor,” Palm Beach Post, December 8, 2017
-“Claims against FAU by Sandy Hook Denier Headed To Federal Jury Monday,” Palm Beach Post, December 8, 2017
After lengthy litigation and a trial where a federal judge repeatedly defended FAU and its administrators from the bench, the Post continued to ignore crucial testimony given by Tracy’s colleagues that demonstrated just how haphazardly the university’s provosts and deans applied the “Outside Employment/Activities Policy,” and how Tracy was virtually the only employee required to submit an “Outside Employment Form” for his protected speech on a personal blog.
One must keep in mind that FAU is among South Florida’s largest employers, with thousands of taxpayer dollars to spend on largely ineffective advertising in both newspapers. As one Post staffer explained to journalist and private investigator Jose Lambiet in 2017,
“Business people in the community are no fools. They know advertising in the Post no longer gets results. The news content is so weak that nobody’s reading. It’s like to trying to sell shit.”
Both the Post and Sun-Sentinel are so desperate to please this large advertiser that they are willing to effectively skew their coverage of one of the most significant First Amendment trials in recent history to fit what they perceive to be their readers’ prejudices–in fact, misconceptions that these papers and national news media played a major role in creating via slipshod if not fraudulent coverage of the December 2012 Newtown shooting. In this vein Musgrave is forced to function as an anti-journalist–one who documents an event then proceeds to deliberately deceive her readership.
More recently, Musgrave reported on US District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg’s decision to revisit her misguided Halloween day summary judgement ruling and deny the plaintiff a new trial, pointing to the judge’s “stinging rebuke of Tracy’s claim that the jury got it wrong …
“The central premise in (Tracy’s) motion for new trial is that the jury’s verdict was against the great weight of the evidence,” Rosenberg wrote in a 31-page ruling. “This contention is without merit. Instead, the court concludes that the great weight of the evidence at trial was in favor of (FAU).”
Musgrave’s reportage, probably at her editor’s behest, repeatedly emphasizes Rosenberg’s ruling to deny the plaintiff a new trial.
Further, it is obvious that Musgrave never read Tracy’s Motions (here and here) since her slapdash piece attributes their authorship to Louis Leo IV, when in fact they were primarily authored and signed by co-counsel.
The Sun-Sentinel‘s brief story of Rosenberg’s ruling is (unsurprisingly) more reckless, as education reporter Marc Freeman fails to even mention the fact that the case is on its way to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
At the end of the day the eight-hundred pound gorilla in TracyvFAU must necessarily be overlooked by the Palm Beach Post, who ultimately answer to its owners-in-abesntia, the politically liberal Cox family. James Tracy stands accused of calling out Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration of staging a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in order to institute more stringent gun control laws. In December 2015 Tracy was (falsely) accused of criminally harassing the ostensibly Jewish “Sandy Hook parents” while consorting with “holocaust deniers.” These inflammatory accusations ultimately led to his termination.
According to the Post itself, Judge Rosenberg’s ultra-wealthy “Palm Beach parents are both well-known Democratic donors.” Rosenberg was appointed to her federal judgeship by President Obama in 2014. Rosenberg’s spouse, former Palm Beach County state attorney Michael McAuliffe, is a career Democratic Party politician. It is no secret in South Florida that he has major congressional and quite possibly gubernatorial aspirations.
Such ambition requires maintaining the good graces of Democratic Party power brokers whose central political platform is celebrating Obama’s political “achievements” and stampeding the US public into enacting stricter gun control. If this isn’t enough McAuliffe’s law partner, Martin Reeder, is the Palm Beach Post‘s attorney. One can only ponder how thick the “firewall” is between the newspaper’s editorial room and the McAuliffe-Reeder firm.
Rosenberg is also a former board member of the radical Anti-Defamation League, the Zionist espionage and agit-prop organization that stands vehemently against extending free speech to all and believes that any Gentile who so much as sneezes the wrong way is “hateful” or “anti-semitic.” The ADL is typically so extreme that its mention often elicits embarrassed eye-rolls from many in the Jewish diaspora.
Despite these conflicts of interest Rosenberg apparently never considered recusing herself. She instead allowed the plaintiff to embark on a costly litigation process then slammed the door in his face with a comprehensive October 31, 2017 summary judgement order in favor of FAU. With the trial the court simply gave defendant FAU, with the assistance of its advertising clientele, full exoneration in the court of public opinion.
Imagine for a moment if Tracy was a progressive-left professor terminated from his tenured faculty position for blogging about “climate change,” the villainous President Trump, and the conspiracy theory that Trump allied with Russia to subvert the 2016 election process. One need only look at the many Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs of American academics that fit this very mold–some of whom work at Florida Atlantic and the state’s other publicly-funded universities. Imagine that the judge comes from a “well-known” Republican Party donor family and was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump. Imagine the judge is married to a prominent Republican Party politician. Imagine the judge was Episcopalian and an active member of the National Rifle Association.
Then imagine just how different the Post‘s coverage of TracyvFAU would be?
Rory Tingle
UK Daily Mail
(May 6, 2018)
A union has paid for a huge billboard expressing ‘no confidence’ in the embattled Broward County Sheriff months after he was heavily criticized over the Parkland massacre.
The yellow sign on Interstate 95 just north of Sunset Boulevard tells Florida Governor Rick Scott ‘there is no confidence in Sheriff Israel‘.
It was funded by the Broward Sheriff’s Office Deputies Association, which in April passed a vote of no confidence in the Democrat supported by 534 of the 628 of voting members.
The Association wants Governor Scott to suspend or fire Israel. However Scott, a candidate for the US Senate, said he is waiting for the outcome of an investigation into the sheriff’s handling of Parkland, the Sun Sentinel reported.
The sheriff’s office failed to act on 18 warning calls about shooter Nikolas Cruz before he killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14.
The tips were among a series of what authorities now describe as the clearest missed signals that Cruz, who had a history of disturbing behavior, posed a serious threat.
Brad Slager
SunshineStateNews
(May 2, 2018)
Broward County is leading the state in enforcement of the new gun restrictions Gov. Rick Scott signed into law in March.
The Red Flag gun law, passed March 5, was written to allow local law enforcement to confiscate weapons from those displaying emotional problems, or posing a direct danger to others. This made Florida one of the select-few states to have such a law.
In the emotional weeks following the loss of 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, many Floridians — in fact, many Americans — called for a strengthening of Florida’s gun laws.
A number of new gun restrictions were suggested and many passed, despite no connection to the mass shooting Feb. 14. A ban on bump stocks, and an extension of the waiting period to buy a gun were also passed, even though those components had no relevance in the Parkland shooting. (Other suggested ideas, such as banning high-capacity magazines, and banning sales to those on the terrorist watch list, also bore no connection to events in Parkland.)
With the Red Flag law now in effect, the Sun-Sentinel looked into how counties across the state were enacting the new legislation. The newspaper found that, while many had begun to use this new tool, Broward county far exceeded all others in the enforcement and seizing of firearms under this law. To date, Broward authorities have taken a confiscation action 34 times. The Orlando area was a distant second, with a total of just five cases.
Continue reading Broward County Aggressively Enforces New ‘Red Flag’ Gun Law
By James F. Tracy
Yet another harbinger of corporate news media’s continued demise is evident when a familiar mainstream journalist with admitted ties to US intelligence agencies plays covert roles in the issues and events he claims to report objectively on. The case of Kurt Eichenwald suggests how the CIA’s famous Operation Mockingbird is alive and well in the twenty-first century.
On December 16, 2015 FAU administrators terminated this author on pretextual grounds. Less than 24 hours beforehand the same school officials received an inflammatory email from Newsweek‘s Kurt Eichenwald, among the internet’s most avid gun control advocates and anti-Trump crusaders who boasts of being “deeply wired into the intelligence community.”
In the query, one of thousands of emails produced by FAU during discovery, the fiercely partisan Eichenberg more than subtly pressures the FAU administration on Tracy’s public speech concerning the Sandy Hook massacre event, further suggesting that Tracy is mentally ill, guilty of criminal harassment, and may pose a legal liability to the university.
Eichenwald’s email was received by the university’s chief public affairs officer and immediately forwarded to FAU President John Kelly, General Counsel David Kian, and Provost Gary Perry. Perry forwarded the email to Associate General Counsel Lawrence Glick and Vice Provost Diane Alperin. Less than 24 hours thereafter Alperin informed this author he would be fired.
Continue reading CIA and the Corporate Media: The Case of Kurt Eichenwald
By Vivian Lee*
Global Research
American Herald Tribune
JamesFetzer.Blogspot &
OffGuardian
On December 11, 2017, in a serious miscarriage of justice, a jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, ruled unanimously in favor of Florida Atlantic University and against former Media Studies Professor James Tracy, who was suing for reinstatement after his firing in 2016. The jury found that Tracy’s “controversial” articles on Memory Hole Blog were not a “motivating factor” in his firing, the only question they were required to consider. Of course, Tracy’s posts at “his conspiracy theory blog” were indeed the reason he was fired, but the jury was convinced otherwise by FAU’s legal team with assistance from the judge. The case centered around Tracy’s writings on the anomalies found in the reporting on the Sandy Hook “massacre” of December 14, 2012. His skepticism about the event was not to the liking of the university.
James Tracy with his attorney Louis Leo IV arriving at federal court. Image: Palm Beach Post.
FAU maintained that Tracy was not fired from his tenured position because of his blog posts, but because he did not follow the “rules” set out by “his bosses” at the government-run institution. FAU attorney G. Joseph Curley insisted that Tracy was not denied his First Amendment rights, but that he simply did not follow university procedure. “Professor Tracy doesn’t follow the rules,” Curley told the jury. “They’re rules that everyone else follows. He doesn’t play by the rules.” FAU cast the case as one of a “belligerent,” rebellious,” and “nonconformist” employee being let go for “insubordination,” instead of that of a tenured professor exercising his right to free speech.[1]
FAU attorney G. Joseph Curley: “I could not be happier for FAU.” Image: Palm Beach Post.
FAU’s current “rules” require that faculty submit forms listing “outside activities” to be vetted for administrative approval, whether the activities are compensated or not. Tracy and other professors at FAU had argued that the policy is vague and confusing, constituting a form of prior restraint forbidden by the First Amendment, and leading to a climate of “fear and uncertainty” among the faculty. Aside from the fact that “outside activities” can reach into all aspects of a professor’s life and therefore be difficult if not impossible to list, such activities must not be subject to bureaucratic approval. And certainly, no tenured professor can be fired for not filling out a form, even at Florida Atlantic University.[2]
