[ Flash ] The Headless Bangers' Ball

Erik Tegner founded and runs Frontières, a conservative media, and once drew a paycheck from the Danube Institute, a conservative think tank. Cue the Left, screaming foreign inteference.

There is something deeply, fundamentally rotten in France — and it has little to do with “the far right.” The rot seeps from the left and the “progressives”, a cohort congenitally incapable of fighting its battles in the arena of ideas. The question here isn’t whether one agrees with Frontières, a very conservative media outlet— it’s whether Erik Tegner has the elementary right to speak, and to found a media outlet, given that in France “printing and the press are free.” That’s Article 1 of the 1881 Press Freedom Act. Perhaps someone should send these people a copy.

StreetPress — that plucky “independent and committed investigative outlet, funded by its readers,” as it likes to purr — is outraged that Erik Tegner received €4,200 per month to act as the French relay for the conservative think tank The Danube Institute before founding Frontières. Scandalous! Except, of course, this is precisely what every think tank on earth does. They write analyses, reports, and policy briefs. They try to get them read by journalists and politicians, so that their proposition gain traction. That’s the job. How shocking !

Before being elected to Parliament in 2022, Benjamin Haddad — now Secretary of State for European Affairs — did nothing but work for American think tanks: the Hudson Institute, then the Atlantic Council. A foreign agent, by any chance?

As for StreetPress itself, it has been generously watered by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The documented grants are worth reciting: $65,000 in 2016 for video development; $24,500 in 2019 for a documentary on police violence; $70,000 in 2021, conveniently before the 2022 presidential election; and $100,000 in 2022 over two years, earmarked for fighting police violence and monitoring the far right. That’s nearly a quarter of a million dollars flowing in from a foreign influence network. But do go on about Mr. Tegner.

StreetPress also receives “pluralism subsidies” from the French Ministry of Culture — several tens of thousands of euros per year, €66,617 in 2023 alone. Government money, that is. Our money.

And who do we find lurking in StreetPress‘s ownership structure? The Héliée endowment fund for independent press support, holding 8.99% of shares. Héliée — isn’t that Hervé Vinciguerra, the multi-millionaire? Yes, the very man who tried to hand Denis Robert €400,000 to launch Blast!, a left wing outlet, in exchange for the scoop rights on Blast’s investigations, all in service of preparing a potential Arnaud Montebourg candidacy in 2022 — as L’Eclaireur reported at the time, based on Maxime Renahy’s revelations.

And who does StreetPress wheel out in its piece to thunder that Erik Tegner was, during his contract with the Danube Institute, a foreign influence agent? Macronist MP Éric Bothorel. Yes, the same Éric Bothorel who filed the complaint that launched a criminal investigation into X and Elon Musk on grounds that can only be described as fanciful.

Let it be said once more, for those in the back: disagreeing with Mr. Tegner is entirely your prerogative. Refuting him is too — if you have the intellectual wherewithal to do so. The problem is that they don't, and they know it. So they reach for the only knives left in the drawer: the personal attack, the smear, the ritual demonization. This, apparently, is what now passes for debate among people incapable of stringing together two coherent propositions — people who have forgotten, or never knew, that in a democracy you wage war on ideas, not on the men who hold them.

It is time — well past time — to abolish all press subsidies and let the public decide.