James Tracy lectures at FAU for the first time since his firing
The former professor spoke to students about the CIA’s involvement in the media.
Former professor James Tracy lectures to current professor Marshall DeRosa’s Issues in American Politics class. Alexander Rodriguez | News Editor
April 8, 2018
James Tracy took his first steps on the Boca campus Thursday since clearing out his office over two years ago.
About 70 students attended his two-hour guest lecture in professor Marshall DeRosa’s Issues in American Politics class. The former communication professor gave what he called a “condensed” version of the CIA’s past involvement in American media.
“Obviously this lecture is something I’d like to cover in a whole semester, but I can’t do that given the situation,” Tracy said, referencing his 2016 firing over a failure to report outside income.
Although, Tracy believed his controversial blog, “Memory Hole,” led to his termination. Specifically, he claimed he was fired over posts claiming the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was staged by the government.
He later sued FAU for wrongful termination, eventually losing the case in December 2017.
Political science professor DeRosa, a long time colleague of Tracy’s, said he invited him to give a guest lecture even before his dismissal from the university.
The General South classroom was quiet throughout Tracy’s PowerPoint presentation, except for a “this should be interesting” comment from a student beforehand.
DeRosa thought the lecture, titled, “The CIA and the Media: A Brief History of America’s Unfree Press,” would teach students to be skeptical of what they hear because most of it is “filtered” through the news.
“We are at a default to the media, and that can be dangerous,” he said.
DeRosa then announced that students wouldn’t be permitted to record Tracy’s presentation.
To start off his lecture, Tracy played a video from Russia Today. In the video, German journalist Udo Ulfkotte claimed the CIA bribed him into writing positive stories about the U.S. and negative pieces about Russia.
Ulfkotte said there are, “respected journalists, but if you look behind them, you’ll find that they are puppets on a string of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Tracy then lectured for almost 90 minutes, presenting “historical evidence” of the CIA’s involvement in American media. This ranged from books on the subject to interviews with ex-CIA agents.
At one point, he brought up the media’s use of the term “conspiracy theorist.” After referencing the New York Times coverage of his firing, Tracy said the term is used “to chill speech and to discipline intellectuals.”
Afterward, DeRosa opened up the floor to questions.
One student sitting in the front row challenged the credibility of the Russia Today video. He asked how the public could trust Ulfkotte if he had apparently been swayed by the CIA in the past.
“I’m not saying I don’t believe him, it just seems, well, suspect,” he said.
Tracy responded by saying that Ulfkotte was just sharing his experience, leaving the interpretation up to the public.
Another student asked whether the CIA’s media manipulation has been positive for America in the past, mentioning the government’s involvement in the Cold War coverage.
Tracy said he could argue both sides.
“This constitutes a sort of fraud, where the media consumers are getting short changed,” Tracy said. “We aren’t getting the whole truth, but it helped us win the war.”
DeRosa then initiated a discussion on whether the CIA’s influence of the media will change.
“The problem is with the locus of power,” DeRosa said. “This is unfixable, it’s more of a fundamental, core issue.”
Tracy said he is more “idealistic” on effecting change when it comes to the media’s alleged corruption.
DeRosa questioned how the public could find the “real news.”
“Through all the clutter, all the noise, all the smoke and mirrors, how do you get to the facts?” DeRosa asked.
Tracy responded without offering a concrete solution, saying that he just wanted students to think critically of what they see in the media.
After the class ended, Tracy told the University Press he “spent the bulk of [his] life here,” teaching from 2002-16. He added that he hasn’t stepped foot on campus since he lost his lawsuit.
But because his wife works at the FAU library, he said he frequently drives through campus to drop her off.
Tracy described his first experience teaching in front of a class at FAU again as “both exhausting and exhilarating at once.”
Cameren Boatner is a staff writer for the University Press. For information regarding this or other stories, email [email protected].
Kristin T Carey • Oct 2, 2021 at 9:56 am
Dr. Tracy was the best professor I ever had at Fau…and you wanna know why? He didn’t have an agenda and one never knew his political affiliation. He gave us resources and told us to go research ourselves.
Lenny Pozner's Scrotum • Aug 20, 2019 at 6:51 pm
Sandy Hook was a False Flag. I have a copy of the FEMA training manual from Dec. 12th.
Lenny Pozner is paid by the US government to try and keep this hush-hush.
The Boston Marathon bombing was staged also. Charleston church shooting–staged. Parkland = fake.
J J • Jun 18, 2019 at 11:43 am
Unbelievable the number of kooks here denying Sandy Hook. All of you are scum, putting parents who lost kids in a shooting through hell just to justify your own moronic, shameful loonie right theories claiming it’s all about taking away gun rights. You realize of course that your stupidity, your utterly disgusting, pathetic insane money grubbing attention whore antics are destroying the right to free speech? Society exists based on the belief that no idiot is going to do something to violate you and your civil rights. People like you scream about your civil rights and the first amendment yet you are responsible for that right to free speech being curtailed because you are unable to accept the truth of things and to violate the civil rights of others for your own sick ends. I hope that all of you, Fetzer, Tracy, Kraft, Jones, all of you, I hope you all have every penny you have earned with your sick conspiracy peddling taken away from you and are hounded the way you hound the Sandy Hook parents. I hope you are all ridiculed for the rest of your miserable lives, to be destroyed and forced out of whichever community you hide yourselves in, I hope that karma truly bestows a crapstorm on all of you for the rest of your insignificant, waste of DNA lives.
Leo • Dec 11, 2018 at 1:12 pm
Men like Prof. Tracy are heroes in the real sense of the word as real heroes suffer at the hands of the cowards who embrace falsehood, dishonesty, and treachery ( Shill Anderson Cooper comes to mind as well as those responsible for firing him at the University – perpetual shame on them all.). We need the more men like Tracy, Norman Finkelstein, and others who are fact checkers, those who ask real, often difficult, and always unpopular questions. Only then will we cease to indoctrinate and actually begin to educate.
L. L. • Apr 25, 2018 at 11:21 am
Prior commenter, “Dave Kraft”, may be a person, eager to believe false information that reinforces his prejudices or, he may be in Kosovo on Putin’s payroll, writing a comment to create dissension in the U.S.
Regardless, ABC paired with RMIT University in 2017, to fact check distortions and lies which are being spread. The incendiary statistics cited by Kraft about South African farmer murders are totally bogus. Actual South African murder rates are at the ABC RMIT site.
twncpcone • Apr 24, 2018 at 7:03 pm
Dr. Tracy has spared you the horrors of what the US has done. How can we contact him to give him money?
As of April 23, 2018….NOT ONE single piece of debris from any of the 4 supposed planes from the 4 locations of 9-11 has ever been physically verified by anyone. Just like the WMD’s in Iraq…you were lied to. Twncpcone. There were no commercial plane crashes on nine eleven.
HEADLINE: U.S. authorities have failed to produce clear and convincing evidence that passenger airliners crashed at the known landmarks on 9/11.
The FBI admitted in a letter to the Nevada District U.S. Court on March 14, 2008, signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick A. Rose, that records detailing the collection and positive identification of the wreckage of the crashed aircraft do not exist (Letter mirrored on http://www.aldeilis.net/fake/1083.pdf). He thus admitted that the FBI failed to formally identify the wreckage found at the various crash sites as belonging to the allegedly hijacked aircraft. It is, therefore, not established that the allegedly hijacked aircraft crashed at these locations.
L. L. • Apr 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm
Sandy Hook parents filed a lawsuit against Alex Jones for defamation.
If previous commenter, James Fetzer, is the same conspiracy theorist who has a Wikipedia entry about him, Wiki’s bio. provides background.
L. L. • Apr 17, 2018 at 3:11 pm
The controversial faculty member, DeRosa, who invited James Tracy to speak, sparked the interest of UnKochMyCampus.org, an organization partnered with the Center for Media and Democracy. At the UnKoch and CMD sites, there is more information about the larger political movement associated with the Kochs and ALEC, an organization that disseminates draft state laws which were written by industry and legislators who are wined and dined by ALEC.
Theocracy Watch (at its site) exposed the lessons in the Weyrich training manual. Paul Weyrich was the architect of the religious right and the founder of ALEC and the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation.
The creation of a ruling class- a duopoly of American and Russian oligarchies eliminates the threat to the wealthiest, posed by democracy.
Destabilization of the U.S., through creation of dissension, is a well-known Russian strategy. Possibly, it has support internally.
Oscar • Apr 12, 2018 at 12:14 am
Tracy’s firing was orchestrated and an abomination. Good to see him back in the saddle
dave kraft • Apr 11, 2018 at 10:00 am
Wow, I can’t believe campus cops were’t there to stop you from entering. So much has happened since Sandy Hook. The Charleston Church shooting really stood out as a production and so did the Parkland deal right in your backyard. We have proven that the march on DC was planned months and months before Parkland. The all out media blitz and CNN’s town hall charade was maddening to the awaken minority. I owned a 12 gauge shotgun at age 10. Never once did I consider using it on the bullies and thugs I encountered throughout my edumacation. It was part of my father’s gun training and discipline. But if someone were ever to break into our house, they would be blown straight to hell at light speed. What if breaking into any house in America was met with the same deadly force? An armed society is a polite society. I have been following the South Africa White farmer slow genocide story for the last year or so. Almost every night a family farm house in a remote area is broken into by a band of Black barbarians. The husband is tied up and forced to watch the rape, torture and sadistic murder of his entire family. Often nothing is taken during the home invasions and the father is often left alive to live with the haunting memories. What did the ANC do when they came to power? Confiscated most guns and made it extremely difficult to obtain new ones legally. The results are deadly and make farming in South Africa the most dangerous job on Earth. My local paper never asks for sources on letters to the editors until my story on farmer murders. They simply did not believe it could be true that the government is sponsoring these heinous acts. But the politicians have been filmed over and over again calling for the slaughter of Whites. A blood bath is about to happen any day now that the Constitution has been changed to allow the confiscation of White owned land and everything on it. This was just one of many huge lies sold to you throughout your life time that Apartheid was the personification of evil without telling you what replaced it was going to be 100 times worse.
James Fetzer • Apr 9, 2018 at 2:30 pm
The dismissal of James Tracy was a political move that had no basis in fact but driven by the fantasy scenario of Sandy Hook, which he and I and a dozen other colleagues have exposed in NOBODY DIED AT SANDY HOOK (2015), which was banned after having been on sale for less than a month by amazon.com, no doubt because it blows the story apart and exposes that the school was closed by 2008 and there were no students there. I released if for free as a pdf and you can download your own copy.
Today we have discovered how they faked the kids using photographs of older kids when they were younger. Noah Pozner, whose father, Lenny, led the attack on Tracy, is an especially interesting case, having not only died in Newtown on 14 December 2012 but again in Pakistan on 16 December 2014. When Lenny was challenged by a serious student of Sandy Hook, Kelley Watt, he sent her a death certificate that was a fabrication of the bottom of a real death certificate along with the top half of a fake.
Obviously, if Lenny had a son who had died at Sandy Hook, he would have had a real one, not a fake. Wolfgang Halbig, with whom I traveled to Sandy Hook to take a look up close and personal and to speak to the Newtown School Board, has found a photo of eight of the Sandy Hook girls, looking perky, very much alive and well, who are juxtaposed with their images when they were declared dead in 2012. To see how they did it, watch “How to Spot a False Flag”, and learn how much you have been played.