Racket News

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden has ruled against the Defense Intelligence Agency in an ongoing Freedom of Information case, filed by the U.S. Right to Know:

For these reasons, it is hereby ORDERED that DIA shall either produce to Plaintiff or withhold all documents by September 7, 2026…

It’s not always significant when a court orders an intelligence or defense agency to produce records, as those agencies often ignore FOIA orders anyway. In this case, however, there’s a slim chance the Pentagon can be pressured to disclose something significant. Earlier releases to this same plaintiff offered the most graphic evidence to date that U.S. government analysts considered an engineered origin for Covid-19 possible, almost from the start. Raise your hand if you saw this DoD flow chart covered anywhere:

“When I saw the slides for the first time, I just about fell out of my chair,” says Gary Raskin of the U.S. Right to Know.

Raskin’s group, which has grown into a large team over the years, has been a major driver of Covid disclosures, thanks to a tireless program of FOIA filings aimed at gain of function research, communications of key U.S. researchers, and Covid-19 origins. With regard to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Raskin credits reporter Lewis Kamb and staff scientist Karolina Corin for plugging away in a years-long FOIA battle that produced multiple major stories, including two big ones in the last two years.

One concerned a DIA “genome analysis” that outlined the hypothetical scenario shown above,. The second, from February of this year, revealed an “authoritative assessment” that showed the Pentagon was looking at a lab leak scenario as early as March 27, 2020. That was ten days after Nature Medicine published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper “prompted” by health officials like NIAID chief Anthony Fauci and NIH head Francis Collins, and authored by a quintet of scientists who initially believed a lab leak was “so friggin’ likely,” but publicly declared the opposite. “This study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19,” roared Collins, under headlines like ABC’s “Sorry, conspiracy theorists: Study Concludes Covid-19 is ‘not a laboratory construct.’”

The DIA disclosures not only prove that military intelligence was entertaining a lab theory at the exact time officials were hammering an opposite narrative, they also show that intelligence analysts didn’t need secret data to go against the approved story. In fact, the classified write-ups are remarkably similar (to use a generous term) to the research of DRASTIC analyst and biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin. “I was surprised they didn’t cite me because they could have put just my Medium article in the citations,” Deigin laughs now. Both analyses center on the same unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that were undisguised from the start and should have been at the center of public inquiries, in government, academia, and media.

The DIA analysis not only shows that lab origin is possible, but also explains why consensus arguments against lab origin were laughable. Raskin has no idea what might come back on September 7th. “We don’t have the faintest idea of what they might turn over,” he said, adding: “After doing this project for six years, the only thing we know is to expect surprises.” The Pentagon theory of lab origin to date:

Subscribe now

The New York Times reverts to old form, thanks to a blue-party schism.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 08/11/26:

Listen to subscriber-only audio in your podcast app

Share the free versions of Racket To Go on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Link Here: How to Listen to subscriber-only audio in your podcast app

Automated transcripts can be found on the web browser or app version below the byline.

Share the Free Episodes of Get Lit:

Watch Get Lit on YouTube below:

Gearing for a White House run, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughs off “Woke 1” as “a little crazy.” On the strategy of losing every political battle in order to win the political war

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 08/10/26:

Listen to subscriber-only audio in your podcast app

Share the free versions of Racket To Go on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Had a chuckle reading the New York Times story this morning about Nebraska Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, whose interesting take on the two traditional parties is, “I think they both kind of suck.” The Times is stroking Osborn for the same reason the Democratic Party is promoting him — he’s running against Republican Pete Ricketts. Which is fine, and logical, but this was funny:

Off the stump, Mr. Osborn passes the political test of a guy you’d like to have a beer with. He is loose, chatty, goofy and prone to saying stuff that would give the average campaign consultant a heart attack.

What a blast from the past! The New York Times hasn’t pulled out the infamous “beer test” for a political candidate since May 22, 2015, when it ran this story:

The “beer test” was once a massively overused campaign reporting cliché. It grew out of a Sam Adams ad campaign in the 2000 race, and from Bush-Gore through the 2016 cycle it was nearly impossible to escape “beer test” coverage. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 beer test by default — it was hard to imagine Hillary Clinton having a beer at all — leading even Slate to pronounce “there has never been and perhaps never will be a candidate you’d be more eager to have a beer with than Donald Trump.”

When Trump won, it led pundits to rush out pieces explaining the beer test is no bueno, especially in races involving female candidates, and therefore “it doesn’t matter which candidate you’d rather have a beer with,” as ABC proclaimed during the 2024 cycle. Writers like Yascha Mounk of the Atlantic by then had already tried introducing a replacement called the “Inverted Likeability Test.” It never caught on.

To trace the history of this goofball campaign reporting crutch is to take a short cut through the last 25 years of irrational political pathologies. Originally — I saw this with my own eyes— the beer test was a way for campaign reporters to flex during campaign seasons, since they were usually the chief arbiters of which candidate was beer-i-er than the next.

CBS even used beer as a reverse indicator for “weirdness,” which the network said was disqualifying, as Pat Robertson, Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich, Bob Kerrey, and Mark Sanford — all, they said, were at least a little flaky, and “none have passed the have-a-beer-with test.”

Beer started as a battering ram campaign pundits used against liberal candidates, then in the post-Bush era reporters used it to argue for Barack Obama. Post-Trump, blue-leaning campaign writers abandoned the beer test as a standard story element but revived it periodically to argue for certain candidates, even trying to shove beers in the hands of Kamala Harris. This was ironic on several levels, beginning with the fact that she usually looked in the bag whether holding a beer or not. The Stephen Colbert episode of October 2024 was a heavily-publicized dose of awkward:

The beer test has mainly vanishedsince 2016 because beer itself has become a stand-in for unredeeming deplorable values. Democratic male candidates stopped bothering with beer and instead tried tactics like livestreaming a haircut (Beto O’Rourke) or going on the “most extreme” state fair ride with a daughter (that was Tim Walz, who also tried blowing his balls off in a hunting video). After Elizabeth Warren torpedoed her campaign by trying to livestream a home scene that ended with her husband turning down an offer to “have a beer with” her, the Washington Post angrily decried America’s “preoccupation” with beer as a “barometer” for likeability. Why not, they suggested, quote a voter who’d commend Warren for having “fun aunt energy”? (We did not subsequently have “fun aunt” polling.) DSA candidates haven’t called for abolishing beer, but it’s absent from their messaging — though one Times profile described a “Building Working Class Solidarity” meeting they held over “$7 beers.”

Now, thanks to an odd edge case in which Democrats can root for an Independent without endorsing heteronormative leisure tendencies, the beer test today made a return in the New York Times after an 11-year absence. In the scheme of things, unimportant, but man is this country weird sometimes.

Having finished Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons,” Brad Pearce and I will be starting a new book today, a Stephen Crane collection that begins with the story, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. The tale is sometimes described as a pioneering work of American naturalism, sometimes called a satire, sometimes grumbled about as social commentary minus the solutions part. What do we think? Join us at 4:30 PM ET at:

Substack

Rumble

YouTube

You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

Readers just received a draft that in part reads:

“George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, commencing an all-out blitz by NGOs, whole ranges of things.”

The actual line is:

“George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, commencing an all-out blitz by NGOs, politicians like AOC, and media to force America to change the way it talked about whole ranges of things.”

Apologies, not sure how that one happened. It’s been updated.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave an interview to ABC’s Jon Karl over the weekend:

Karl: So you have Wisconsin coming up next, Francesca Hong, who is the Democratic Socialist of America-supported candidate for governor… You haven’t endorsed her. Are you going to?

Ocasio-Cortez: No, I haven’t endorsed in that race. My focus has been in winning back the Congress, winning back the House, and positioning ourselves to have the best chance possible to win the Senate. So I’ve been focused on those legislative races.

Karl: What do you make of those controversial statements? I’m sure you’ve seen. I mean, the Thanksgiving dust up. She says she doesn’t still believe that, but… the abolished prisons, abolished police… also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progressive candidates who have won… How do you get around that..?

Ocasio-Cortez: These races ultimately are local, and all politics are local. My understanding is that is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate.

Karl: Yeah, she’s moved away from a lot of that.

Ocasio-Cortez: Right. She’s moved away from it. And I have a local city councilman that - Yeah. Has this, uh, uh, saying — “Woke one was crazy.” (laughs)

Karl: Woke one was crazy. That’s so true!

Ocasio-Cortez: I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what—

Karl: Was it? I mean, did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean, you, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.

Ocasio-Cortez: You know, I think that, I think that during this time, and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. Yeah. And I think that the, the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.

Discussions! Fruitful! Quite a way to describe “Woke 1,” the first pass at saturation-bombing America with race paranoia, scarlet-lettering, and threats in an effort to produce grotesque public displays of ideological obedience.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to say, “Of course, during lockdown, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” What she means is, “We tried to shove it down your throats through the sheer power of our freakout before. This time, we’re going to get elected first.” AOC has to refer to “Woke 1” because “Woke 2” is now ascendant, and its primary characteristic is its effort to remarket itself as a viable electoral movement, less insane than that initial run from a screeching mob of torch-bearing half-literate buffoons who tried to burn the American project to the ground. Since Woke 2 is, like AOC, dusting itself off to run for office, it wants you to forget this earlier incarnation, even though none of its adherents have apologized or changed their minds:

Subscribe now

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.