Get Off My Lawn Podcast #122 | Everything you've heard about Vice is a lie
In this extra special episode we go over ex NYT executive editor Jill Abramson’s terrible book, “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts.” I only read the parts that were about Vice when I was there and I counted TWENTY, yes TWENTY major factual errors. Since completing the book, Abramson has gone on to do lots of press for it that includes defending the multiple examples of plagiarism and telling many more lies like the allegation Proud Boys are “white nationalist” and I was recently arrested for brawling alongside them.
And I'm not talking about the colorful stories the co-founders tell.
I'm talking about the reporting.
And the reason I bring this up is to talk about how terrible journalism is.
Every time they write about something you know, I've said this many times, your hometown, your favorite band, you, you go, that's not true.
No, no, that was the year before.
No, that's false.
And then your first takeaway is, boy, they sure are bad at reporting on this thing that I know about.
But then you take a step back and you go, wait a minute.
It's all bullshit.
And then you start reading other stuff about other people and you go, yeah, I doubt it.
Even the right does this.
Like Ilhan Omar.
She said, Obama's just a pretty face that got lucky.
Uh, Obama, pretty face.
And I looked up the quote and she never said that.
It's two separate things that are conflating.
Now, I'm no fan of Ilhan Omar at all.
I think that she is an affirmative action hire who was hired because she's Muslim, and when you affirmative action hire someone like that, their job is to affirmative action stuff.
Like, if I was hired, if the Scottish, national Scottish community pushed for me to get a job as a politician, I would feel obligated to do Scottish things.
And make sure that we have hand-cut fries in every restaurant and frozen fries are heavily taxed.
I'd make sure that whiskey and beer was cheap.
I'd make sure there was a pub on every corner.
You know, important Scottish cultural things like that.
I'd make sure the food was shitty and there was a lot more violence.
So Ilhan Omar feels obligated to, you know, push Palestine, push CAIR, C-A-I-R.
So here's an example, and I'm giving a nonpartisan example to show you how ubiquitous this issue is.
I don't think it was like this in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
I think maybe blogging has turned the media into LazyTown USA.
So yeah, Barack Obama, she belittled his pretty face and saying it was all an illusion and he caged kids.
We can't be only upset with Trump.
See, you get a few paragraphs in and you realize what her context was.
His policies are bad, this is her talking, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies.
They were just more polished than he was.
And that's not what we should be looking for anymore.
We don't want anyone to get away with murder because they're polished.
We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.
She wasn't talking about Obama.
She was talking about all politicians.
Kennedy.
JFK had a pretty face.
Justin Trudeau's got a pretty face.
I sound like a homo right there.
I have a pretty face.
Just because Ryan Katsu Rivera is breathtakingly gorgeous doesn't mean we have to follow what he has to say.
Just because your pants swell when he walks into the room, just because you catch yourself going, because drool is falling off your bottom lip, that doesn't mean we have to, we have, we have to, we can ignore his policies.
That's why I can get away with being a ditzy broad all the time.
Oh my god, you are such a ditz.
Did you figure out this stay-at-home dad thing?
No.
Sometimes I'll just say things to Ryan, and he's so dumb that it's like a riddle.
So if I say something particularly astute, then he doesn't go, oh, touche.
He'll just go, what?
And then I go, all right, well you have four hours to figure out what that was.
I know the word apt, okay?
Okay, so we saw, I was in his neighborhood, and I was dropping him off somewhere, and there was some guy pushing a twin stroller, and he was clearly not a manny, he was clearly a dad.
And so I go, the great thing about, and he was being kind of uppity, because we got in his way doing a U-turn, and you could see him like, You know, these guys turn into moms when they're stay-at-home dads.
And he was kind of being bitchy.
And you could see him going, oh, God.
Stupid men doing their U-turns.
And so I said, the great thing about those guys is if they ever give you any trouble, all you have to say is, ah, stay-at-home dad.
The acronym is APT.
And then, Ryan.
Oh, I get it now.
You finally get it now?
OK, what is it?
OK, well, the APT.
Um, I have to be, to be good at something or to be, uh, capable of something, right?
Okay.
And so when you say stay at home, is it like stay at home, dad?
Because it's like, you're not, you're not doing good out here in the outside world.
Uh, wait, I'm getting a call.
Oh, stay at home.
Dad.
So sad.
Sad as the actor.
Okay.
Well, you know what I thought?
I was using the context of, um, the post office.
Yeah.
So when you were like, I know that what you were, you were trying to figure out A-P-T.
Yes.
And you're like, the acronym for stay at home dad is A-P-T.
That doesn't make sense.
Apartment.
That's why I was saying, get back to me in a day.
So that was that.
It's, it's new now.
This happened around 11.
So that took you an hour.
Yeah.
That took you an hour.
And where I had to go, when I went inside, I thought of just saying that because you're like, you know how to fuck with those guys.
You say, stay at home dad, the acronym is APT.
And although I didn't know what it meant, I almost said it to the person at the post office just to see if it like unlocked something or like a secret word.
But he's not a stay at home dad, he's got a job at the post office.
Yeah, that's why I didn't really get it.
I thought that's what I... What's it like being like you?
I don't know.
Do you get lost when you drive?
Do you just go, I don't know what the exit is?
Do you just drive into the abyss?
No, I'm a good driver, but... You must get lost, because I get lost, and I'm a genius.
So you must just get lost every single time you get behind the wheel.
No.
Well, I only go to a handful of places, so... What's 8 times 7?
8 times 7, 56.
Not bad, okay.
Yeah.
My God, there's a little Japanese in there.
Alright, so, yeah, that was clickbait, my headline, because it sounds like I'm going to be talking shit about Vice, but I'm not.
I'm actually going to be talking shit about the executive editor of the New York Times, who claims she was fired because of sexism.
I met her a bunch of times.
I thought we were pals.
I should have just lied to her like everyone else does.
But, uh, we talked a few times.
And she proceeded to totally roast my ass, and Vice's ass, in her book, Merchants of Truth.
Now if you look up- Oh.
Okay, so my joke was the acronym, and I thought it was really smart.
This is Ryan's joke.
He thinks merchants of truth sounds like sultans of swing.
And has decided... You're like a homeless person.
You're not just dumb, you're crazy.
You smoke filters.
You go through the garbage, you find filters.
No, I don't mean literally.
I mean, that's, you're kind of a, that's you.
Yeah.
Someone with a strip of pants hanging off their pants.
I act like I have double-digit cats.
No.
See, that's a dumb joke.
That's women.
Jesus Lord.
Okay, just shut up for a long time.
Okay, okay.
Like a year.
I was planning on playing this every time you say mercenaries.
No, no.
I said a year.
So, I think she probably got hired for incompetence.
This book, Merchants of Truth, and check out Michael Moynihan's studies of her plagiarism.
I'm not even going to get into that.
So I'm not getting into lies Staff of Vice may have said.
I'm not getting into her plagiarism.
I'm just focusing on her terrible journalism and how Boomers and the New York Times and that whole culture is an incompetent shitshow of Basically, losers.
I was gonna say idiots, but maybe losers, I think, is a better term for Jill.
And the New York Times, and Pinch, her boss, and the staff there.
These smug, Upper West Side liberals who tell the rest of the world how to think.
And they're so smug!
And you can be smug!
If you're amazing.
Christopher Hitchens could afford to be smug.
Jill Abramson, after reading this book, and I only read the parts about me, I counted 19.
I hope I find another one because 20 is a much funner number.
I counted 19 just terrible, pathetic mistakes.
Now, was she- I was gonna say maybe she was fired because she's terrible at her job and terrible at journalism and terrible at reporting, but I don't think that's the case.
I- I think she was fired because she- Pinch didn't like her anymore and, you know, those- these people, these rich liberals are just petty little cunts.
And they're just like, nah, you farted, you're fired.
That's probably why she was fired, don't overthink it, Joe.
But you may have- you've definitely under-thunk this piece of shit of a book.
I mean, it's really, really bad.
And the reason that I've made this my podcast is not really to talk about Vice, but to talk about how uninformed we all are because of the incompetence of the media.
And I'm a big fan of the New York Post.
I do not like Ilhan Omar.
I think she's toxic.
But I opened up with an example of my favorite paper.
Getting a story totally wrong and lying to you in the headline.
Elan Omar, Obama's a pretty face who got away with murder.
She didn't say that.
They're conflating quotes and then sticking them together in the headline like it's one big sentence.
Not true.
They're all lying.
Anyway, so let's use this book as a perfect example of shitty journalism.
And yeah, if you want to pursue it further, you gotta check out Michael Moynihan's tweets.
Maybe we'll dig those up.
About her rampant plagiarism.
Yeah, why don't you look that up while we do this.
Michael Moynihan's rampant plagiarism.
She also, despite the New York Times firing her, talks about the New York Times like it's the bastion of truth.
And if you really want to know how shockingly corrupt the New York Times is, I highly recommend Coloring the News by Bill McGowan.
Maybe he's listed as William McGowan.
M.C.
Gowan.
And Grey Lady Down.
Another book he wrote about the New York Times.
I like coloring the news better because it tackles liberal bias in the media, but it's ancient.
It's probably from 2000 and it talks about liberal bias way back then.
So it's obviously gotten much worse.
I think 90% of the Trump coverage last summer, they did a study on this, 90% was negative.
This is from a country that loves the guy.
At least 50% of the country adores this man.
But 90% of the news don't.
of the news don't. - So, I'm just gonna go through some of them here.
And again, I want this to not be about Vice or me, but to be about the state of journalism.
She talks about Trump's penchant for serial lying at the very beginning, which I thought was amazing, because that's what she does.
Okay, so she starts talking about Vice on page four.
Right?
I should explain the book.
So the book is, it's actually kind of a cool idea.
She wants to talk about how journalism has changed and how it's gone online and the stories are cheaper now and there's, it used to be, you know, the four gatekeepers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, I don't know, the LA Times, I don't fucking know.
And now it's sort of everyone.
So she takes two oldies, The New York Times and the Washington Post, and then two newbies, BuzzFeed and Vice, and she breaks them down into one, two, and three.
Which, by the way, my book does.
The Death of Cool, I break the story of Vice down to Vice 1, Vice 2, and Vice 3, which are literally three chapters here.
So she may have stolen that idea from me.
I'm not including that.
I'm not including plagiarism.
I'm not including Bill McGowan's excellent coverage.
I'm only talking about The glaring, lazy ass mistakes in this book.
So page four, number one, Shane Smith.
This was my childhood friend.
We were buddies when we were 13.
We started Vice.
I started Vice with Saroosh, hired him two years in as a sales guy.
Anyway, Shane Smith, Vice's founder and one time hard partying lads mag editor.
Shane was never the editor of Vice.
I don't think he ever claimed to be the editor of Vice.
He was never listed on the masthead as the editor.
So that's the sort of tone of the whole book.
It's just like, it's based on a true story.
It's a novel.
You know, like, I talked about this last podcast.
Braveheart took a bunch of liberties so they could have a good story.
Mel Gibson wanted to have a good story, so he made a four-year-old, a 20-year-old, and he changed a bunch of shit.
Okay, that's how life works.
That's what she's done.
She's just writing up fiction.
An editor kind of sounds, I mean, he was the publisher.
He was the top sales guy, but he's listed as the publisher.
It sounds better to say editor.
So I'll just say editor.
Okay, that's how life works.
You can just make up things.
Oh yeah, she took, she, this is a great sentence, by the way, and it's not listed.
So now that's, that's one, saying Shane was the editor, right?
He maybe wrote four or five articles when I was there, and I was there from its inception till 2008.
Now, I stopped reading the book post me leaving.
I assume the lies just continue.
So anyone who was there, like, oh, Thomas Morton was this guy we used to call Baby Balls.
How about this sentence?
gets correct in the book and it's it's so rare that she gets the story correct that you go oh shit wow in fact i could probably list the time she was correct in this book and it would be a shocking number did you find moynihan's uh plagiarism good okay um how about this sentence as for the new digital competitors the question was whether they were ready to step up to be our guardians of truth
that's how she sees the new york times the guardian of truth after all of their horrible catastrophes jason blair and oh my lord there's Bill McGowan wrote two books on all of the New York Times lies and when you start reading it with a critical eye and you see their contempt for the family and their blind worship of Islam,
So on the same page she talks about the Times being the guardian of truth.
She says, until a Mexican billionaire rode to the rescue with a huge loan.
She's talking about Carlos Slim, who bailed out the New York Times from bankruptcy, and all of a sudden there was a bunch of fluff pieces on Carlos Slim.
There's another example of their incompetence.
All of their coverage of illegal aliens became very positive.
What a coincidence that Carlos Slim, Carlos Slim's a, he's not actually ethnically Mexican, I think he's Lebanese or something, but he's a Mexican.
And he makes all his money through cell phones, but also through the charge to send money back.
So when illegals send $3,000 back, he keeps a nice little 50 bucks.
And that adds up to a billion.
Pretty fast.
So he wants us to keep getting illegals because they pay his bills.
And the Times happily followed suit.
Just like Jeff Bezos doesn't like Trump, so the Washington Post shits on him as soon as possible because they get their money from Jeff Bezos.
Why buy a newspaper if you can't get them to say what you want?
But of course she just glazes over that.
Uh, what's this?
No, got bored.
I also wrote in the book when I got bored.
She talks about BuzzFeed a lot.
BuzzFeed started, I think, in 2006?
We were already 12 years old in 2006.
So to compare BuzzFeed and Vice and pretend it was neck-and-neck is just a bizarre thing to do.
The Washington Post and the New York Times is a much more suitable comparison.
Alright, ready?
Number two!
And this is going to sound irrelevant to you, and I know I'm starting to sound like Lenny Bruce when he became obsessed with his trial and would bring the transcripts of the court documents on stage and pour through the minutia.
But this is relevant.
Of course, Lenny Bruce was relevant, too, but it got a little pedantic as he tore through the hundreds of pages of court docs.
And this is going to get a little tedious, too.
It's all part of a bigger picture, which is when you're reading a book, when you're reading an article, when you're reading or seeing a video, a documentary even, you are dealing most of the time with a half-assed piece of shit who has no regard for the truth.
Now, of course, take that line out of context and say, Gavin McInnes calls Jill Abramson a piece of shit.
No, I was talking about lazy journalists in general.
So, Soroush Alvi hired McInnes after seeing the comic book he was working on, called Pervert, and taking a particular liking to a strip about heroin.
Nope.
So we should never seen my comics.
We had a friend in common, Rufus Raxlin was his name.
And he said, yeah, my buddy's starting a magazine.
You should go see him.
And so I went over there and I said, I want to be your comics editor.
I was into auto bio comics back then.
And I showed him my comics and he said, sure.
I don't have anyone.
I'm flying by the seat of my pants.
I'm doing this completely by myself.
He was shopping the magazine door-to-door.
The truth is much more interesting than this shit, anyway.
He was shopping the magazine door-to-door, and he had printed it out on a shitty little printer, and sort of glued the pages together, and made a tabloid with articles, and then there was blank spaces that said, your ad here.
And he was going to, you know, retail places.
Just by himself.
Just trucking along.
Very impressive.
No editorial team.
No sales.
Just Saroosh alone.
So he hired me to be the comic guy and I saw how easy it was to write and how... I was immediately struck by how conformist writers are when they write a CD review.
They just say, and coming in their epitomous debut, the Beastie Boys have a blah, blah, blah.
The first song hits you hard, and it's just so similar to every other CD review.
So I did my first CD review, because he wanted some variety, and I said, it was a Furnace Face.
That was an Ottawa band.
And I said, the first song sort of goes... I was making fun of CD reviews, and I spelt out... like D-F-F-F-C-H.
And then that sort of started the whole style of vice, which was kind of anti-journalism.
None of that's here!
Nothing remotely interesting, just made-up stories about how Saroosh saw my comic book on the street and he liked the heroine thing, so he said, get me Gavin McInnes!
Which is fine to be fiction, but...
I bet, uh, that's not what she's going for.
This is pushed as a non-fiction book.
In fact, the ironic title is Merchants of Truth, the Business of News and the Fight for Facts.
Stop doing that or I'm gonna kill you.
And then she talks about the stash of titles he poured over in his parents' basement offered a veritable encyclopedia of taboo takes.
Magazines like Sewer Cunt, Fuck Magazine, and Murder Can Be Fun.
Everything else was so boring to read, he later said, and this stuff actually felt alive because it was seething with hate.
You know, here's another thing she should have done.
Mentioned that hate back then was totally different than it is now.
Today, hate means racism.
Back then, one of our favorite comic books was called Hate by Peter Bag.
Hate just meant this sort of grumpy, Anthony Cumia, everyone sucks kind of thing.
It didn't mean I'm racist, which is a distinction she should make if she wants to be an accurate reporter.
But when I first read that, I thought, hey, maybe she stole that from my book.
And I did list Sewer Cunt and Fuck Magazine and how she was like them, but this wasn't an example of plagiarism, which is pretty rare in this book.
It's uncommon to find things that are not plagiarized.
And Michael Moynihan, I asked him actually, I said, let's do a podcast or a vidcast or a YouTube video where we go through all these.
And I don't think he's allowed with with vice.
I have a non-disclosure agreement and Yeah, there's a lot of legal problems with us Reuniting so I think he realized the pros outweigh the cons But um, yeah, if you just look look up Michael C Moynihan plagiarism Jill Abramson and he lists a ton of Where they were just stolen verbatim.
And I think what happened here is, I think she's rich.
I think she's spoiled.
I mean, her previous book, what was it called?
It was called like, The Life of Puppies.
Oh, it's called The Puppy Diaries.
And it's just about how she got a dog.
And then the doggie was a puppy and then they learned.
I sound like Jiminy Glick.
And then they learned to live with a puppy.
That's her previous work, The Puppy Diaries.
So, I think she just paid a bunch of interns, probably her daughter's friends, and said, she's got this really irritating Connecticut drawl, this aristocratic drawl.
Hi, I'm working on a book.
You know, they sort of have Basset Hound jowls, rich New Yorkers, and they sort of talk like they just got back from the dentist, and they can't feel their lips at all.
So, my daughter's friends, I paid them to go fill in some holes in my book.
And of course, they don't have, they're spoiled, right?
Legal aliens did all their jobs their whole lives, so even these kids she hired, and I'm guessing she hired kids by the way, even these kids she's hired, they have no work ethic, they have no interest in it.
I mean, Matt Palumbo helped Dan Bongino write Spygate, and Matt really cares about what he does, so the research is amazing and there's zero plagiarism.
This is just a bunch of rich kids in skinny jeans who just cut and pasted, handed it to Jill, and Jill didn't bother looking it up.
This is, by the way, this theory I just said, that's me giving her the benefit of the doubt.
That pathetic scenario is better.
Then what she's being accused of, which is her doing the cutting and pasting.
Anyway, here's just one of the many examples.
In August 2003, McInnes wrote a column in the American Conservative magazine run by Pat Buchanan.
In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals, a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often, who believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin.
I don't remember saying any of this.
He laments the liberal views of most of the people who pick up his magazine, saying they're brainwashed by communist propaganda.
And here's, so that's Ryerson Review of Journalism, right?
2005.
Here's Jill!
Basically repeating that exact sentence.
He wrote a column in the American Conservative magazine run by Pat Buchanan calling young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals, a phrase McInnes and his ilk often used.
So the Ryerson Review says, a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often.
Jill goes, a phrase McInnes and his ilk often used.
Is this someone who should be writing?
Is this someone who should be putting a book out?
Do you want to do one where you read her, I got another one, when he lived in Chicago?
Okay.
I read hers and you read the original.
Okay, that's more fun, but let me just finish this one.
Sure.
Who would believe anyone with dark skin over anyone with light skin?
He lamented the liberal views of his magazine's readers, and that contrasts to he laments the liberal views.
So she made lamented past tense, that's the only change there, and then saying they were quote-unquote brainwashed by communist propaganda.
Okay, so you want to do the vice cop one?
Yeah.
All right.
So you're Jake Maloney.
So let's read at the same time.
Yes.
You ready?
So you're Jake Maloney.
So I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read Time Out, and you read Joe Abramson's book.
Okay.
Ready?
One, two, three, go.
When he lived in Chicago, Jason Mojica sang in punk bands, ran a record label, and owned a cafe, the Jinx Cafe, and a video rental shop, in brackets, Jinx and Big Brother, respectively.
He even wrote a few art reviews for this magazine.
In December 2006, Mojica and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn't be saved.
The result was the 2008 documentary Christmas in Darfur.
Holy shit!
So the only thing she didn't cut and paste was Was in Time Out, Jinx and Big Brother are in brackets.
In the full name, Jason Mojica.
Oh yeah, she cut out Jason.
Well, because she'd mentioned him earlier.
Sure.
Anyway, there's a thousand of these.
I mean, there's literally about ten.
And this is just him writing about what he knows.
Oh, you also have to read Thomas Morton did basically what I'm doing.
I'm pretty sure I hired Baby Balls, and he just has a very high IQ.
That's all you really need, a work ethic and a high IQ.
Actually, fuck a high IQ, you really just need a work ethic.
Um, continuous Gavin, sure.
Uh, so, you gotta look up this article on Medium, by Thomas Morton, called News to Me, and the first line is, what I learned about myself from Jill Abramson's Merchants of Truth.
Sorry, that's the subhead.
The graphic design is pretty bad, and the subhead looks like the first line.
And Thomas is doing what I am doing right now.
Thomas went through every mistake and she talks about him as like this hipster in skinny jeans and an ironic t-shirt and he wasn't.
He was a midwestern nerd with a wife who had unbelievable tits and when they got divorced I never got over it.
Because she was smart and funny and just perfect for him, and they got divorced?
Fuck you, Thomas.
What an idiot you are.
Those tits are in someone else's hands right now.
A little off track, but yeah.
What a waste of two great tits.
Both her tits were wonderful.
That was a joke.
I think Sarah Silverman said that back when she was funny.
Someone asked her if she has nice tits, and she said, one of them's really nice.
So yeah, Thomas Morton lists all her mistakes, and I'm listed.
So we're only at number two, I'm afraid.
Number three.
Almost on a whim, the trio, she's talking about me, Saroosh, and Shane.
Almost on a whim, the trio applied for funding from a non-profit agency in Haiti.
What?
What?
I need some free money.
I think I'll go to Haiti.
Is Haiti in Africa?
No, no, no.
Haiti is shared by the Dominican Republic.
It's an island.
Thanks.
What continent is it in?
You know what?
I'm not sure.
It's in the Caribbean.
Here's a really stupid question.
Is the Caribbean a continent?
I don't think that's the case.
Haiti is located in the Caribbean Sea.
It's in North America.
Haiti's in the same continent as us.
Oh.
Welcome aboard, guys!
Sorry about your earthquake tornado thing.
I couldn't tell in the before-after pictures which is which, but I'm gonna get a ton of money out of you, Haiti, because that's how it works.
Haiti and their... their... Montreal... Here's what was going on!
Canada's really into multiculturalism.
Why?
Because Canada wants to be different from the States.
So they have this really stereotypical, silly view of America as a bunch of evangelical rednecks who wear cowboy boots and are in the Klan and hate Negroes.
That's how they see America, as Boss Hogg from Dukes of Hazzard.
So they pour tons of money into being multicultural.
It's an affectation.
And Quebec is one of the biggest money vacuums for taxpayer dollars.
So what do they spend it on?
They spend it on multiculturalism.
Now, there's not a lot of ethnic minorities in Quebec because they're very strict about their language.
They only let French people in.
So the only time you're going to get a visible minority is a French-speaking place like Haiti.
So for most of my adult life, blacks were nerds because if you are rich enough to get out of Haiti, then you're an aristocrat who wears a scarf with a blazer, doesn't drink, doesn't swear, is very religious and super boring.
If you hear about a black party, like a bunch of black people partying in Montreal, you don't go because it's going to be a coke and chipper.
There's going to be no action.
So when I moved to America in 99 and everyone was talking about these dangerous, scary blacks, I'm like, you mean those rich nerds?
Anyway, that's what black people are in Montreal.
They're rich nerds.
And they have, even when they rap, they have this affectation where they take on, like, the Parisian ghetto accent, which is not their accent at all.
They're all rich aristocrats.
Anywho...
So when they're throwing money around, these rich Haitians go, let's form a group called Image Interculturelle.
And they say, we are visible minorities, we need money.
So they get all this money to promote multiculturalism, and they don't care.
They just wanted the check.
So they hire Soroush and they go, hey, shithead, go make a magazine and make it about, you know, the, the Caribbean day parade and the Polish parade and just talk about all the multicultural shit.
I don't care if you make one copy or two copies.
I don't even care if it's legible.
It just has to exist.
So we get our check and we'll give you a hundred bucks and we'll keep the other 900.
So it was a scam.
And, The fact that they were Haitian is ancillary.
They were a multicultural group that happened to be fronted by mostly Haitians.
From a non-profit agency in Haiti?
I wrote a book before, and the fact-checker had to go through it all.
Even, like, I wrote Death of Kool, which, by the way, is the only place you will see the story of Vice, up until I left, totally accurately portrayed.
I offered a thousand dollars for any lies in that book.
I mean, don't people have to go through this?
Especially when you're the executive editor, prize-winning journalist Jill Abramson takes it to the core of the fight for the survival and future of the news business.
Surely, when you're writing about truth, and you have the word truth in the title, it's one of three words in the title, surely you can afford it.
Pay a fact checker a thousand bucks.
Especially when things seem weird.
Like when you read that.
Funding from a non-profit.
The trio applied for funding from a non-profit agency in Haiti.
I believe Haiti is listed as the worst place on earth.
It's like if you Google most crime, you get Caracas, Venezuela.
I believe Port-au-Prince is the rape capital of the world.
Who the fuck?
I bet it's literally impossible to apply for funding from any group in Haiti.
Imagine they get a letter from Montreal.
Hi, can I get a few thousand bucks to do a Montreal magazine?
What?
Why?
Who are you?
Who are you?
Why are you calling me?
No, they have French accents.
Alright.
Oh, good news, guys!
Great news!
I got the numbers wrong, and I listed number 3 twice.
That means we're up to 20!
Not three.
Four, I write in the book.
So, number four.
Smith told one of his girlfriends that he was dying of a mystery illness, maintaining the lie for over a year.
They were feral, said one woman who knew them, though Smith would come to court respectability.
His company never shook the misogyny at its roots.
So that's two.
Lie one.
Yes, Shane did tell a girl that it's been reported that he was dying.
I believe her name was Meryl Smith, a successful artist.
He told her this lie in like 2009.
She's taking an event from 2009 and sticking it 15 years earlier in the early 90s.
1994.
She's making it there.
15 years earlier in the early 90s.
1994, she's making it there.
So, and she's crowbarring that in so she can talk about the misogyny at Vice's roots.
There was zero misogyny in Vice's roots.
First of all, there was just three of us.
So you can't talk about the horrific sexual harassment going on unless Saroosh was grabbing my ass.
Saroosh did all the music, Shane did all the sales, I did all the content, and the graphic design laying out the fucking thing.
Now, there was this thing called Vice Girl of the Month, where we'd take a picture of a pretty girl on the street.
It became the do's, sort of.
But that was just like a page three girl you'd see in the Sun Times or whatever.
It's just a pretty girl at the back of the magazine and a little bit about her.
Oh, she's a drama club student and she's super hot.
That's not misogyny.
So vice got a lot of shit for sexual harassment long after I was gone.
I don't know if it was true or not.
I wasn't there.
I suspect it was more of this politically correct bullshit where unless all your top brass are female, black lesbians in wheelchairs, then you're, you know, rape the rape capital of the world.
But I don't know.
Maybe there was tons of sexual harassment.
But what these reporters do, Emily Steele does it too.
She's a New York Times reporter who did a big expose on Vice.
And she called me and I didn't talk to her.
But you should have heard her messages on my phone.
She's like, Hi, I'm like Emily Steele, and I'm calling from the New York Times, and I want to, like, redo a story.
It sounded like the Frank Zappa song, Valley Girl.
And I thought, this is their prize-winning journalist?
Is getting women into journalism really worth it?
Because so far, we've got Emily Steele, the Valley Girl babysitter, and Jill Abramson, who thinks you apply for grants to Haiti, running the show.
So, two lies here.
One was that that Shane scam was in our early days, and two, that we had misogyny in our roots.
Just totally wrong.
This, by the way, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are all on page 43.
two, three, four, five, and six are all on page 43.
That's how pathetic this book is.
"Misogyny at its roots." Like, that misogyny at its roots thing, which I think Emily Steele did too, it's just the way they write now.
These lefty journalists, they start with the story done in their heads.
Vice has always had a problem with misogyny, and it came to a peak in 2010.
Now, or whatever it was, 2016, 17.
There, there's your story and then they go backwards and they move dates around and they find some, you know, lawsuit and then it looks like it's always been a thing.
No.
It was never a thing when I was there.
If there was an event, like some girl got her ass grabbed, that was a freak occurrence and I was never told about it.
We partied with our female employees in a totally egalitarian, cool way.
Ask anyone who worked there.
Ask Leslie Arfan.
Ask Amy Kellner.
Ask, uh... Ask any chick who used to work there.
We were all very cool.
Um, and if things got crazy after I left, then they got crazy after I left, but with the number of false allegations, uh, like Mattress Girl running around at the time, I'm, I'm dubious.
If anything, Vice bent over backwards after I left to be politically correct, didn't they?
I mean, it was all about trans this and gaycation and, and fucking...
It was all built for babysitters.
Anyway, lie number six.
Voice of Montreal, their free counterculture newspaper, debuted in October 1994 with an interview with Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.
Okay, no it didn't.
He was in maybe our third or fourth issue, so it didn't debut with that.
That just sounds better.
And it's John Lydon and he wasn't in the Sex Pistols.
So we'll count all that as one.
Since McInnes would later become the far-right founder of an anti-feminist fraternal order, the role-playing was quite a stretch.
Oh yeah, we're talking about how I would become a woman, because we needed more female writers, and I couldn't find them, so I just became female writers.
And that somehow is linked to Proud Boys, which came apart, came, what's the word I'm looking for?
Came around?
Came about?
Came about, I forgot that.
almost 20 years later, 1994, 2004, 2014, over almost a quarter of a century later, the Proud Boys were born.
So that is weird, because Gavin pretended to be a woman in the early 90s, and that's weird because he's a Proud Boy.
Yeah.
20 years, 25 years doesn't make a difference.
Um, number seven, he told one potential advertiser that their publication was distributed across North America and then mailed a few hundred copies to a skate shop in Miami and another batch to a clothing store in San Francisco.
That is not even remotely close to true.
What happened was, The head of Cargo Records, Japanito Nachaputo, some Japanese name, Kevin Komodo, actually, just popped into my head, said that he put our newspaper in boxes when he shipped across Canada.
We said thank you.
We became a national magazine overnight and told all the advertisers, we're no longer looking for just Universal Records Quebec, we want Universal Records Canada.
We're now a national magazine, so we don't longer deal with the regional offices, we want to deal with the national office.
Nothing to do with San Francisco or Miami, we weren't in America at the time.
And then Kevin backed out At the 11th hour and said, oh, it means more money with shipping.
I didn't realize that magazines weigh something.
Thanks, Kev.
And so Shane stayed up all night calling all these stores, Calgary, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver, all across the country and said, we'll give you a free ad if you distribute our magazine.
And we delivered the magazines we said we were going to deliver to every single major city in Canada, just like we had promised the advertisers.
And I always tell that story as a great example of when you're an entrepreneur, no is not an option.
So the difference between an employee and an entrepreneur, and by the way, I don't fault employees.
I think entrepreneur is just a genetic trait.
You love risk.
I don't think Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch or Bill Gates or any Warren Buffett.
I don't think those guys are driven by money.
They're driven by the challenge of building business.
Look at that show, The Prophet, with that Greek guy who was adopted.
He's a Syrian refugee or something.
Maybe he's Iraqi, Middle Eastern refugee.
It's a great show, The Prophet.
And you can tell the guy's not driven by money.
He just likes helping people and creating businesses.
Which the Americans, the left, the entire Western world has to acknowledge that.
That these aren't greedy bastards stealing your piece of the pie.
The pie is infinite.
And these guys love stimulating more pies.
Stimulating the economy, getting more jobs out there.
We need to revere entrepreneurs more.
And you don't get that from the left.
Watch 60 Minutes.
60 Minutes did a thing on Groupon, the guy behind Groupon, and that guy created a huge successful company that employed thousands of people, hundreds of people, I don't know how many people.
I'm being very careful to be accurate in this podcast because we're talking about accuracy.
And the 60 Minutes thing was all about how the guy's socially awkward and he might be autistic.
Okay, great.
Why don't you pick on a blind person too while you're at it?
So, uh, mailed a few hundred copies to a skate shop in Miami.
That sounds cool, man.
That sounds like, well, we were just hustlers.
What a scam.
And by the way, in this book, there's Shane, whose nickname was Bullshitter Shane when I, when we grew up in Ottawa, which she, she attributes to me.
I don't think I ever called him that.
He tells her stories about how he was in a gang and nine people died, which even if you're in MS-13, I bet nine people dying is a lot.
In Ottawa gangs?
That would be a world record.
But I'm not including that in these.
So Shane may have bullshitted her a few times, and she wrote them down, the stories down verbatim, although I think she doubted the gang one.
But I'm not including that.
I'm only talking about actual facts that she could have easily looked up.
Number eight!
A few days later they went back to Soinsky with a formal contract.
This is when we were bought.
So we were voice of Montreal, then we were voice when we became national, then we left the Haitians and became vice because we didn't want to get sued.
I made up a lie.
And said the Village Voice was gonna sue us.
And Canadian press loves David and Goliath stories involving America, so that just became coast-to-coast fact news.
And that's when we started lying to reporters, because it just became a fun game.
One reporter from La Presse, which is like Quebec's New York Times, I told her that Shane and I grew up as best friends and then one day we were wrestling and I was tickling him and we just stopped and stared at each other and we started making out.
And we realized that we hadn't been best friends, we had been madly in love.
And the picture for the article was us holding each other like belly to belly and staring into each other's eyes.
And I said to her, in French I said, You know what I mean?
When you've had a friend like that and then all of a sudden you realize that it's sexual, and she goes, I know exactly what that means.
And I remember thinking, good, because I don't know.
I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about.
I'm glad you're falling for it.
I'd love to pick your brain about that.
Yeah, tell me more about this gay love affair.
She had a fur coat on.
Anyway, so I think Shane's just continued the tradition, and you should do that.
Mr. Show, Bob and David do that too.
If the guy hasn't done his research and he says something boring like, how'd you two guys meet?
If they ask a question that you can find on Wikipedia, they would just start fucking with them and making up stories about Vietnam and shit.
And I should have done this to Jill, I'm realizing in retrospect.
I don't know, I haven't lied to journalists in so long that I forgot how fun it is.
Um, actually most of the people that have been interviewing me have been, no, that's not true at all.
Yeah, I don't know why I've, I stopped lying to journalists after Vice.
I, it was a mistake.
Anyway, I'm not including any of those.
So, we were, so then we were Vice and then this eccentric, uh, multi-millionaire, Richard Sawinski, invested in us.
And proffered a valuation of their company at a preposterous four million.
That's not true.
We said we were worth $1,000,000 at the time, which was preposterous.
That's a lot of money, but he signed it and promised up front $50,000 for each founder.
The truth is, Jill, that we gave him an evaluation of $1,000,000 and he bought 25% for $250,000.
So we each got about 80 grand.
$85,000.
That's what we got when we moved to New York and we'd been poor forever and all of a sudden we were rich.
I have written here in my notes, finally a true fact!
And because she said, Smith and McInnis did too much cocaine and found it impossible to have a good time in the ridiculous costumes.
Yes, that did happen, Jill.
We had a big party to celebrate moving to New York and I thought it would be funny to rent big huge costumes like Garfield with the big heads but not wear the big heads.
So it's just a little human head and this big costume with the tail and you can't tell who the character is.
And that was funny but we were new to cocaine because we were new to being able to afford it and we just sat there grinding our jaws staring at people.
That is a true, one of the few true facts in Jill's book.
Alright, number nine.
As the founders of Voice told the story, Soinsky's cash injection, which made him the majority owner, financed the magazine's relocation to New York.
So yeah, that's just a minor one.
Soinsky was not a majority owner.
He only owned 25%.
But he injected tons of money into it.
Too much money, I thought, which is all well documented in my book.
Just like on Shark Tank, where they say, I'll invest this for this percent, but I'm also going to handle growing the company.
Number 10.
With the move to New York, they would have to rename the magazine or risk getting sued by the Village Voice.
Now, I know for a fact that Jill read my book.
This is all in my book.
So her brain is like a sieve.
Not only is she too lazy to tell the truth, but when she hears the truth, it just sort of falls out of one ear and drips down onto her Calvin Klein cardigan.
Yeah, we had already been vice since 94.
Six.
We moved to New York in 99.
And that lie I told about the Village Voice, I told it in 96.
That's when all the press went nuts.
So, that's just another.
Like, it wouldn't be that expensive to pay some student fact-checker to go through this.
And they could have called me, and I would have said all this on the phone.
Number 11.
Okay, so this is interesting.
She's now, she's kind of nebulous about dates sometimes.
So it won't be an obvious mistake and it helps her sort of frame her stupid narrative like Vice was always misogynist at its roots.
And no, I don't use the word misogynistic because I fucking hate that word.
Misogynist is a noun and an adjective.
So don't say misogynistic.
And it breaks my heart that the word terroristic Is in legal documents.
Because it should just be terrorist.
Terrorist is also an adjective.
A terrorist act.
Anyway.
I've even heard communistic if you want to get really mad.
Okay, if advertisers remained wary of the magazine, so she's talking about how we left Soinsky because he turned out to be a fraud and we were broke back to zero and every time people talk about vice, you know, oh we made our money from a government grant from these Haitians or we stole this and stole that, it's sort of like the history of America.
Okay, slavery did build up a lot of revenue but after the Civil War, Uh, the country was flat broke.
So all that slavery money was gone.
And they had to rebuild it from less than scratch.
Same with vice.
Whatever money we got, whatever things you don't think we deserved, was all gone in 2002.
When we were broke.
So she's talking about 2002 and she said and I was talking about how Shane and Saroosh had to bust their ass trying to get You know all this debt dealt with we owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
We owed $300,000 to international lawyers because Sawinski was trying to get the logo globally trademarked Which is a good thing, but it's very expensive.
And then when he vanished, we're stuck with the bill.
And we don't owe some random kid.
We owe international lawyers.
So Shane had to deal with all that shit.
So did Sroosh.
And I got to keep making the content.
So I think some resentment may have built up during then because it was a fun, really fun time for me when we were broke and it was a horrible time for them.
I was so glad to be away from that Shark Tank dude because it wasn't real.
It was, it wasn't real.
It was fun.
It was real, but it wasn't real fun.
So here's her sentence that's number 11.
If advertisers remained wary of the magazine, the hipsters loved it.
It was much edgier than BuzzFeed with its cuddly no-haters ethos.
It was a shameless assertion of masculine ID.
What?
The epitome of a new brand of North American lad culture.
That's totally fucking false.
It was the farthest thing from a lad mag.
Back in 2002 it was like the vice guy to friendship and how to dump a guy and fashion big huge fashion shoots do's and don'ts was not lad mag there was no hot chicks there was that sort of vice girl thing we did that wasn't in it anymore there was no like centerfold it was goofy hipster culture and that was gender free it was definitely as female as it was male
But the big mistake here, number 11, is that she's talking about how BuzzFeed and Vice were neck and neck.
She's four years off!
BuzzFeed didn't exist till 2006.
Fucking ridiculous, huh?
That's a very simple mistake.
I'm ignoring her being lied to on page 48.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Ignoring all this.
I have in my notes things like, what?
Like this one.
While Smith had grown up relatively poor, Jones was heir to the multi-billion dollar Spiegel Catalog fortune.
Shane grew up middle class.
Our dads worked together.
We were in the dictionary under middle class kids.
So he did not grow up relatively poor.
But I let it go.
Because maybe he told her that.
So that's how generous I am with these lies.
And there's also a common lie that Spike Jonze said, hey man, you guys are doing all this content, you should bring a video camera.
That never happened.
It's just a good way to sell Spike Jones as the head of the, of the creative director of the thing.
And then here's a really weird thing that I didn't include.
She goes off about when Vice first started doing video and we were called VBS, Vice Broadcasting Service.
I think that's because I was pushing Vice TV and, uh, I think there was the split was already in the cards and they didn't want to get into some copyright and they thought Gavin's running Vice TV.
Let's run VBS TV.
I was pitching a show with Johnny Knoxville that was Jackass 60 Minutes, and that was right when I was leaving.
And then they go, they gave me a pitch of 60 Minutes meets Jackass, recalls the MTV exec.
That was me!
I pitched that.
No fucking credit.
I don't get no respect.
And then this is just a dumb thing where she says that David Cross and I in the first... Yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry, I forgot something.
So she talks about how we were out to monetize YouTube, one of the first to get on YouTube.
That's just a flat-out lie.
That helps her story as she talks about pursuing YouTube.
No one was pursuing YouTube back then.
We were selling them as DVDs.
And that was, we thought that was going to be the future.
MTV did too.
They said, let's start a DVD service where you get one a month in the mail.
Nothing to do with YouTube.
But that's not in this book.
This book's all about us learning that in the early days of YouTube, how to manipulate it and make money out of it.
Just a totally false tangent narrative that has nothing to do with the truth.
But I didn't even include that.
Um, number 12, uh, in 2008, The Breaking Point with McInnes finally arrived.
He too would be given a parachute, albeit a more, far more modest one.
Says who?
Jill, you have no idea what I got paid.
And then I went on to land a contract with Fox News.
Also false.
I would never got any paperwork from Fox News.
I was always just a guest on the show.
That's why I left after eight years because I kept seeing other people get contracts like Joanne Nosocinski for being gorgeous, Kat Timpf for being breathtaking, Tyrus for being ethnically ambiguous and never offering anything of consequence to say.
Tyrus for me was the breaking point.
I realized Fox News is more concerned with getting their female and minority numbers up than they are with contributors.
So after hosting Red Eye umpteenth times and making the most popular Hannity appearances that went viral, I said, this is fucking bullshit.
Doesn't Tyrus kind of look like if Sully from Monsters, Inc.
turned into a real guy?
If you shaved Sully, that's what Tyrus would be.
Yeah.
Well, other people were calling him Grape Ape, which you're not allowed to do because of what happened with Roseanne.
But yes, he does look like a giant cartoon.
And I've made it clear that I quit Fox because of him.
He was the straw that broke the back.
And he tweets out, fucking hater.
And I thought, yeah, that's exactly what I am.
I am jealous, and I hate him.
It's sort of like when Anthony Cumia, they'd call him a Howard Stern wannabe.
And he'd go, yeah, that's the guy who makes $90 million a year at the top of his game in radio?
Yes, I want to be that.
No, I'm not a shock jock that was inspired by the biggest shock jock of all time.
That's stupid.
That's how he made his debut, right?
He went on Howard Stern and he did a funny imitation because he was in a band and they did a song for Stern.
Yes.
The way he got in there was doing an impression of Jackie Martling.
It was a Jackie Martling impression contest.
That's the way he got an Opie and Anthony.
No, we're both right.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
The way he got an Opie show was doing an OJ Simpson song.
Tyrus looks like a baby.
You know those magnet things where you use iron filings to make a different face?
So his beard is an iron filing magnet toy, and he looks like someone photoshopped a baby on a giant, annoying wrestler with tribal tattoos.
All his tattoos look like he got them on the same day, too.
Right, yeah.
Like, okay, I'm gonna be a tattooed guy.
Dude, one more thing, he looks like, him and Dante Nero, if they sit next to each other, looks like a bebop and rocksteady from Ninja Turtles.
So yeah, my contempt for Tyrus is totally petty and everything bad you think it is.
But yeah, I did not line a contract, so that's number 12.
And then she just says, she says that she met me after, this is like probably 2010 when we met, and she just says, his hurt and anger were palpable.
Says who?
This is another thing.
Jim Gode taught me this.
Never get into someone's head.
So never say this politician seethed with anger unless you know him.
Unless you know for a fact he felt that way.
You can only say appeared to seethe with anger.
But lazy journalists do this all the time.
They say that he was hurt and angry.
Says who, bitch?
All right.
Number 13.
We got 20.
We got another 7 to go.
Some were repelled.
She's talking about McInnes' extremism.
That's me.
We offended some establishment partners.
That's true.
One was the absence of women employees.
Some were repelled by McInnes and Smith, who openly recruited women to work for the magazines with the intention of pursuing them at the office.
That's just, that's the biggest lie in the book and that's when I wrote libel next to it because I'm considering taking legal action.
We recruited women with the intention of pursuing them at the office?
What kind of fucking insane allegation is that?
That is patently false.
First of all, I only hired people dealing with editorial, and secondly, my only concern with editorial was, can they write?
Are they funny?
Can they come up with good ideas?
That is a very, very rare talent.
It's like being a pro skateboarder, or a good boxer, or being funny.
I would say maybe 5% of people can be good magazine writers.
And even that feels generous.
As far as women go, sorry if this sounds sexist, but my experience has been, Maybe 1% of the women who apply to write for a magazine have what it takes.
Amy Kellner was a reluctant writer.
She wanted to do more art.
I think she's the photo editor of the New York Times Magazine now.
She's always more into art than writing, but she just had it.
And I was not remotely attracted to her, never will be.
But I went, finally, it seems so easy to me to write stupid funny articles, like 10 animals that suck, and then just writing about a dog and saying, look at his face.
His whole face is basically a nose.
That's a funny thing to say, and that's an article I wrote, and I just couldn't get women to come up with stuff like that.
Like, just really irreverent stupid humor.
They'd always write in this faux, not just women, but a lot of young writers, they don't have enough personality, so they subsume Hunter S. Thompson's personality.
And they go, woke up two hours late for the interview, totally hungover, stumbled into the hotel while I was meeting Ghostface Killer, the top rapper from the Wu-Tang Clan who has over seven top hits, blah blah blah blah blah.
I pulled off my sunglasses and was almost blinded by the sunlight.
Ghostface was feeling similar.
And you're just like, dude, fuck off.
No one cares about you.
Just talk about Ghostface.
Actually, you know what?
I'm getting back into the magazine zone here.
My thing about music interviews, especially rap, was I'd say to the writer, I want my mom to want to read this.
And my point was, if you're writing about Ghostface Killer, his fans are already happy now.
I love this guy, and he's in the magazine.
We already have them.
They're reading it.
So now appeal to someone who doesn't care.
Talk about Staten Island, where he's from, and the crime there, and how Staten Island has changed, and what it was like going up there in the 80s, and what it's like now.
That kind of thing.
Anyway, wow, that was a long tangent.
But this idea, I think she's talking about back in the newsprint days when I'd have the vice girl, yes, that was a way to court women, but they weren't employees.
That was exactly the same as the page three girl, where you'd have a hot chick.
It's a thing we did for a while in the early 90s.
It was not indicative of lad mags.
They were always clothed, by the way, in these pictures.
In fact, if you look back at the old issues, the vice girl was kind of feminist.
It was like, this chick's kind of cool and she'd have like combat boots on a bicycle riding to work.
It wasn't like this, look at these tits.
But yeah, we would try to court them and I definitely did bed a lot of vice girls over the years.
Just a great conversation starter.
But the idea that our actual employees were there just to be fucked is Fucking insane.
And then she says, uh, Terry Richardson, who had been tainted by at least seven sexual harassment allegations since 2001.
I've written extensively about Terry Richardson and Dove Charney, uh, getting framed.
I mean, they both had their careers completely flushed down the toilet for sexual assault allegations, and they were patently false.
Um...
And their careers are over.
Like, they're ruined because of these things.
And Dove, one girl said she was raped.
What was her name?
Kimbra Lowe?
He had pictures of the sexual encounter.
Of her having a great time because he would photograph his sex.
Minor detail there, lady.
And then the other one, I forget her name, Hispanic girl, she said that it was quid pro quo and she was forced to have sex with him just to keep her job.
And Dove had all these texts of her saying, uh, I want to be your sex slave.
I want to eat your ass.
This is after, um, she had already left.
So you can't claim quid pro quo when you don't work there anymore.
Anyway, so that's, what do we got here?
Oh yeah, she says, she's saying that the sexual allegations, seven sexual allegations since 2001, those allegations were all 2010.
So she's got a date wrong there.
So that's 13 and 14.
And this is because I know Terry Richardson.
If I didn't know Terry Richardson and wasn't friends with him and wasn't there for all of this fucking bullshit, I would have just glossed over that article and that is the point of this podcast.
As you're glossing over allegations about people, those of us in the know are freaking the fuck out.
Oh yeah, this one is ridiculous, and I didn't even list it.
She says, Vice's site only had about 200,000 unique visitors a day, plus the nascent audience on YouTube.
McInnes had to laugh.
His former best friend has bullshitted his way into the Times.
And she's talking about Shane, a feature that Shane did in 2007 in the New York Times.
This is a crucial one, and I didn't include it on my list.
But we have been in the Times a million times, most notably the front page of the style section in 2003.
So she has me sitting here laughing and going, Shane bullshitted his way into the totally awesome New York Times that I really respect and think is an accomplishment.
Lady, your own book says that we were in there in 2003, and you have me laughing that Shane made it in 2007?
Now that, I could hear myself getting boring.
But I think that's relevant because I didn't include it.
So we're up to 14 major mistakes in The Merchants, the other merchants of truth.
I should do a whole thing on BuzzFeed and the Peretti family and how corrupt that guy Justin Peretti is.
He would take on other people's personalities, build a website for them, and then email people as that person.
He did it with some dating competitor and our favorite gunman, John Lott.
He created a website.
Where he said he was John Lott and started contacting people as John Lott saying that he's full of shit and don't listen to any of my articles.
Where is it here?
Yeah, John Lott, BuzzFeed and me.
The incredible thing the site's CEO did not tell you.
Justin Peretti.
Hey, my mouse is dead, buddy.
Ryan?
One trade?
Yeah.
Oh, wait, there's this one.
OK, can you do that, please?
I'm trying to do a podcast here.
You're giving me all these homework assignments.
All right, so I skipped ahead.
I didn't read the BuzzFeed shit.
I could not care less about BuzzFeed.
So I jumped over to Chapter 6, Vice 2.
Here's something that's finally true.
Vice's cool had been so associated with the provocations and antics of Gavin McInnes.
That's totally true.
I was so cool.
Vice's cool was wrapped up in my antics.
I think she put in stuff like that because she knows I'm a writer and people are always wary of shitting on writers because they're wary of being seen in the history books as a cunt, which I am.
So they want to kiss ass a little bit.
So I'll go easy on them.
I'm not going easy on Jill Abramson.
She wrote a book with 20 major lies in it.
That sounded really very gavvy, didn't it?
20 major lies?
There's a lot of lies in this book.
It's like, dude, you're a liar!
Way to go, Lie-McLeinstein!
Jeez!
That's how I talk?
Well, not that high-pitched.
You got some bass.
It was McInnes.
This is number 14.
It was McInnes to whom, by the way folks at home, little side note speaking of writing, whom is a douche word?
It's not used.
Yes, it's grammatically correct.
No, you're not wrong to use it.
But it is being phased out as a word.
It's on its deathbed.
And now, when you use the word whom, you're seen as a cock.
It was McInnes to whom Morton had originally written an application that read like a fan letter gushing over his adoration of Vice magazine.
This is patently false, and you can read all about this in Thomas Morton's review of her book called News to Me, which is on Medium.
So that's 14.
What do I got here?
This is a note I'm just going to read to you.
So, yeah, I've already talked about this.
How they take allegations from 2017 and they glom them onto random bullshit in the 90s and pretend this has been a pattern.
Yeah, I've already talked about this, how they take allegations from 2017 and they glom them onto random bullshit in the 90s and pretend this has been a pattern.
A, Vice was never sexist when I was there, and B, I'm dubious of the sexual harassment shit they got into in '16 and '17.
I have no idea because I wasn't there, but after seeing piles and piles of Mattress Girl bullshit, Like everyone, I'm Dubious, and by the way, false rape accusers, you really fucked over women.
When I was, like seven years ago even, that recent, if I heard someone had been raped, it was like, oh shit, get in the car, let's put on the ski masks, get the baseball bats, we gotta go beat the shit out of this rapist.
That was just a given.
You never heard false rape allegations.
You'd hear about it, and they'd be crying and begging you not to go kill the guy.
That was how you heard about rape.
Or any kind of woman getting abused.
It was always, please don't, don't wreck his life.
Don't kill him.
It's over.
I don't, I just want to move on.
Now, you hear that, you hear about mental abuses and stuff, and you go, yeah, I'm going to have to hear the whole story.
And that's a terrible thing to say.
It's a terrible way to be.
Uh, where's this mouse, dude?
All right.
Number 15.
This it?
Oh, this is it.
Yep, that's it.
Mouses have not improved.
No.
Like this big, stupid, clunky, PC-looking thing?
Microsoft is way better than these stupid Apple things that are always dying of batteries and fucking up.
Hold your hand better.
More ergonomic is the term.
All right, number 15.
Please don't hang up this podcast.
Am I boring the people at home?
I think it's riveting, but go ahead.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
This is how you get through a workday, folks.
Hire a yes man.
Just kiss your ass all day.
It's like a, here's what she said, here's the truth.
It's very instinctive.
What I'm trying to do is not talk about myself and Vice, I'm just using that because I know both of those things intimately.
What I'm trying to talk about is when you read a seemingly non-fiction book, or watch a documentary, or read an article, please know that the odds are very high you're dealing with a half-assed, bullshit, drunk story.
This story, like calling Shane an editor and saying lad mag, it sounds exactly the way people talk in bars.
When you go and Google it on your phone later and you go, that was fucking not even close to true.
All right, number 15.
So they're talking about Thomas Morton baby balls.
He flipped open an article called The Vice Guy Departing, accompanied by a boldly uncensored photographic spread that featured a topless transsexual manually stimulating a fully naked man while a young woman snorted a line of cocaine off his genitals.
All right.
We were a free magazine.
Do you think that we could have a tranny getting his balls diddled?
Also, this sentence doesn't make any sense.
So it's a topless transsexual manually stimulating a fully naked man.
If he's stimulating this man, how can you do coke off his dick?
The dick's in someone else's hands.
So was the manually stimulating tickling his balls?
Then you should have said tickling his balls, tickling his testicles.
We could never have that.
And by the way, I think I'm the only person that has every vice.
I don't have everyone after I left in 08, but I have the newsprint, first issue.
I think it's got some like black chick on it with a big afro.
It's like a blaxploitation thing.
I have every single one bound.
I believe I'm the only person in the world.
So while these people bullshit about the vice guy departing, I have that issue, leather bound, in my office.
And I can pull that up.
There's no topless transsexual.
You can't sexually stimulate a penis while also doing cocaine off it, obviously.
There's a lot of these, by the way, a lot of these mistakes, you can just read the book yourself and not even know, and it contradicts itself.
Like that earlier one I said, where she says, McInnes laughed.
His buddy had finally made it to the Times in 2007 after they'd already been there in 2003.
they'd already been there in 2003, four years earlier.
Didn't anyone read this book first?
When I put my books out, they get proofread, and people call me and go, wait a minute, you said you were in Ottawa then?
Ottawa is in Canada, you said this is in the chapter of the American years.
Oops, better move that to the Canada years, sorry, thanks for catching that error.
Oh, here's just this one I didn't include, because I'm not positive, but she talks about the Brooklyn office.
Everyone crammed together.
Nope, it was a massive loft.
The bathroom wall is decorated with Dashno Polaroids.
That's possible.
And an organ, discarded from an old recording studio, placed randomly in the middle of the floor.
I guess she means like an old organ, like a record player that you wind up with that big ear thing that amplifies the sound.
I've never, I don't think I've ever seen one of those in real life.
I've seen a lot of pictures of those things, but I'm not sure I've ever touched one, let alone had one in my office.
And the way the office worked, there was no sort of area you could stick that in.
There was sort of an eating place in the, I separated the office into, editorial was in one half, then there was a wall, and there was advertising and the record label on the other half.
Now on that side there was a coffee table you could eat lunch, but there was no real middle of the floor.
So that's just a lie, but I didn't even include that.
So we're up to 15.
And again, these pages I'm listing, there's at least three per page.
So like page 44 has one, page 45 has three, this page 150 has one too.
The next page has another two.
So it's averaging about two a page.
And I'm not, I didn't, that's not including BuzzFeed or the Times or the Post.
I'm sure someone intimately familiar with those would have similar numbers.
So Vice is just a quarter of this book.
I counted 20 major errors and lies.
Let's assume that the others are just as bad.
That's 20 times four.
You have 80 major mistakes in a book.
All right.
Oh yeah, she goes, it was a big deal when Gawker even noticed us.
I didn't include that, but I underlined it.
We were always bigger than Gawker.
Gawker was a fucking little blog.
A blog was a tiny part of Vice.
Gawker was us maybe in 1996, but by the time it was the time she's writing about, like 2005 when Morton was there, Gawker was just some silly little blog we didn't pay attention to.
We had 10 times the employees.
Anyway, lie number 16, she says Baby Balls wrote the do's and don'ts.
Nope, that was Andy Capper who took over the do's and don'ts and didn't do a very good job and later they just abandoned it.
Oh, here's number 17.
They even designed an edition of Do's and Don'ts action figures including one of Baby Balls in a light blue striped golf shirt and snug fitting corduroys.
This is, uh, they're talking about after I left and saying they loved Baby Balls so much they made dolls of him?
No!
I've got the dolls right here behind me and on my desk in my studio and I made those dolls when Thomas first started there and I chose the name Baby Balls as a shout out to him.
It's got nothing to do with post-Gavin Weiss.
So she just, this is an interesting example too that might sound boring at first glance, but the fact that, that does sound cool.
Oh, they liked him so much, they even made action figures of him.
But that's not true.
I made the action figure years before.
This is the kind of lazy writing where you just go, something sounds good, and you just make it a fact.
Dude, I think it was fifth or sixth grade or something like that, and we had to interview our classmate, and then they had to write a biography about us.
And I was so pissed that I was taken off the record.
I said I liked...
I got in trouble at school because I was funny and I sometimes got into fights.
And then I was like, I like the Power Rangers and I like another cartoon.
She's like, well, Ryan is violent because he watches Power Rangers.
I was like, you fucking bitch.
And I'd never been more pissed at that age before.
Hmm.
And this is very similar.
It's like you're hearing garbage about you.
That's that's that's not as bad because that's a theory.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
This is just a lie that they designed in addition of do's and don'ts action figures.
Wish you could have used Jim Goad's advice.
Don't get inside my head.
Yeah, we should contact her.
Let's track her down.
Is she one of the fat black ladies who used to sit on you?
No, this was when I moved out of the Bronx.
All right, number 18.
A watershed moment in the magazine's evolution came in November 2005, when the month's theme was immersionism.
I left in 2008, and I coined the term immersionism.
And, uh... Wait a minute, this might not be a mistake.
A watershed moment in the magazine's evolution came in November 2005 when the month's theme was immersionism.
I left in 08.
I turned to... Yeah, that's not a mistake.
Shit.
We're back down to 19.
Fudge.
So that was number 18, but I'm erasing it because that's true.
She didn't credit me.
Is that what my beef is?
Oh yeah, oh no, that still counts, because she's talking about post-Gavin Vice, and she's saying 2005.
So even her own reporting says I left in 08, but she's talking about post-Gavin in 2005.
So sorry, that's back.
We're back to 08.
So this is how lazy it is.
I mean, she can just read her own book and fact check it.
And she talks about how they had Thomas Morton live with a Dominican family.
And that was my idea.
I sent him there.
I invented the concept of immersionism.
And I got it.
Well, I didn't invent the concept, sorry.
I invented the word.
But I got it from Barbara Ehrenreich.
Her book, Nickel and Dimed, where she'd heard so much about what it's like to be working class.
And she said, I'm just going to try it.
Now, her book has some problems.
She ignored illegal aliens.
And she ignored the concept of sleeping on a couch while you get your shit together.
Her whole thing was like, can I, on a waitress's salary, eventually get first and last month's rent and live a living wage?
And she can't.
And her point was that we don't pay our blue collars enough, our waitresses enough.
That's basically true, but there's a lot of holes in her book.
Like, she neglected that your friend will put you up for a while while you get on your feet and save up money.
Anyway, sorry.
Um, so that's my concept and I thought this was an interesting thing.
She talks about, uh, she talks about Thomas Morton's discoveries when he lived with Latinos.
It was Dominicans in Washington Heights and there was a drunk son who sleeps in bed all day and they all watch too much TV and they're, they're very clean and they're very religious and there's a real unity.
In the building where it's all like one big happy family and he was kind of jealous of that It was a really interesting article.
I thought and I wish more people would do this, but they don't in fact I would say since I had Thomas do that we've become much less immersionist and People don't they write about the proud boys having never met them.
They just cite this SPLC.
They write about all these Protests and they weren't even there.
They talk about a riot at a talk and they weren't at the talk like when I did that Otoyama Gucci talk I think only one journalist actually went to the talk the rest just regurgitated the talking points from the DNC So there could be a whole book there on immersionism and the lack of it.
In fact, there is it's called coming apart by Charles Murray anyway Uh, this is a little side note.
He mused and focused on peculiar details, like the fact that they soaked their junk mail in the sink before throwing it away.
This shows how bourgeois she is.
Puerto Ricans, poor people, food stamps people, people in the projects, they don't soak their fucking junk mail, you lazy bitch.
They soak their pizza boxes.
Pizza boxes don't fit in the garbage, so you put them next to the garbage.
If you do that, you are feeding roaches.
The only way to prevent roaches and rats is to kill the food supply.
That means if you live in the projects in Washington Heights, Dominican building, You probably have roaches and rats everywhere.
If your apartment is impeccable, then you won't have any pests, they'll just go next door.
So what they do is they soak their pizza boxes, not junk mail, rich lady, and then they roll them up into a tube and they throw the tube in the garbage that's locked, that's closed, so roaches can't feed on the pizza boxes.
That's what Baby Balls learned by immersing himself in the culture.
And she just ignored that because she's a rich Upper East Side chick.
Number 19.
Baby Balls had survived his first embed as a reporter.
He would keep managing the website.
He wasn't managing it until after I left.
He started working there in 05.
So that's just another blatant error.
The weird thing is she spoke to Thomas Morton.
Like she's read my book that has all the dates laid out chronologically.
Everything is totally accurate in that book.
The story of Vice from inception to when I left is all there.
She still makes all these mistakes.
And then she spoke to me twice for maybe four hours at a time.
And she spoke to Thomas, and I assume it was a similar amount of time.
Still, it's everything totally wrong.
Uh, now we're up to page 155, and it's all post-me now, so I didn't really read it because I can't verify anything.
But she talks about Sawinski.
Uh, I did skim it, though, and I saw that she talks about way after I left, Smith started his own advertising agency.
It was dubbed Advice.
Advice goes way the fuck back to, I think, 2004?
and so she's uh five years off again like it's a big deal being a few months off i think when you're writing a detailed account of someone's progression as a merchant of truth but to be five fucking years off like that's worse than high school i'm beginning to think jill abramson was fired from the new york times because pinch Arthur Salzberger Jr.
discovered she is a total and utter amateur who has no clue what she's doing and is basically only qualified to write puppy diaries.
I'm not exaggerating.
By the way, Nadine Jeleno was the woman who ran Advice, and she was a good friend.
I've known her my whole life, basically.
Shane and I used to go to her club, Banana Mascuri's Punk Club in Ottawa, and she died of lung cancer.
Now she did smoke, but her doctor said it had nothing to do with that.
It was just a weird, genetic, unfortunate luck that they usually only see in Southeast Asian women.
Like Thai women get this, this predilection for lung cancer, whether they smoke or not.
And she got it.
And I was there in her deathbed, where she had this massive thing helping her breathe.
And there's a lung machine.
There, and it says, it has a stat on the machine live that's 70-30.
And that means the machine is doing 70% of your breathing, you're doing 30%.
And that number kept going up.
And she wanted it reversed.
The only way she was going to get out of there was 30-70.
And she could write notes, she can't talk because she has that big mouth thing on.
She'd write notes, and she'd write notes to her mother like, I'm not ready to die.
And you know what she did to me?
She, uh, Shane has a 26 million dollar mansion, apparently, allegedly.
And so she put she waves me over because we'd I'd known Shane since we were all been friends since we were 13 She pulls me over she googles that announcement and then turns her computer to show me Wow pretty cool Fucking with me right until her last days anyway She's dead now so you can just say that you can move her company that she started with us and make it any way you want What's this
Here's just a random line I didn't list because it's not necessarily disproval, but she talks about Morton and starting his world traveling for the vice guy to travel or whatever.
And then she just writes, nearby in Brooklyn, where he still lived, Gavin McInnes, his bitter breakup with Alvian Smith, still a sore subject, was gagging.
Yeah.
I was dry heaving apparently.
She just throws that in there.
Like, Joe, you have to write, was probably gagging.
Or was likely gagging.
You can't just throw me dry heaving into the middle of your fucking book.
What a weirdie.
Gavin looked outside from his penthouse window in Williamsburg and shed a tear.
His wife called him.
Are you okay?
Fuck you, he said.
He was mad.
Wait, what's this?
I just saw the word Vice Canada.
That's probably a lie.
So I've only really read the parts that were about my time at Vice.
So we're up to 20, folks.
This is the last one.
This is just a weird one.
When I first met with Gavin, he was careful what he said, but his bitterness and anger at Smith were still raw.
That's the third time she's just said that I would, I met her at a bar.
I met her at Doc, not Doc Holidays.
What was it called?
Skinny Dennis.
A great, great day drunk bar, kind of country themed.
One time I was at that bar, by the way, and about four people, black people walked in and they looked around and they saw the decor, which the decor was a really cool idea.
It's owned by an FDNY guy.
This guy's get their ridiculous pensions of a hundred grand a year when they turn 40 and then they just open a bar.
He drove down to some southern place like Tennessee and just went to garage sales with a big U-Haul and bought a bunch of crap.
An old cowboy boot, some fucking dumb picture of hee-haw.
And then lugged it all back to Williamsburg and nailed it to the walls.
Including actual building materials like corrugated tin and stuff.
Like the tin ceiling.
Not corrugated but that patterned tin.
And out of context, it looks really cool and really authentic.
Like to have a really fancy Willie Nelson piggy bank is easy, right?
You just go on Amazon.
But to have a 40-year-old one that has a chip out of it, you're never gonna see that in Williamsburg.
So it's a really cool idea for a bar.
Anyway, it looks country and there's dudes with tattoos in there.
They're sort of hipsters with the big beards.
Hipsters sort of split in 2004, 2005.
And it went super gay, wimpy, metrosexual.
Homo, polyamorous, ambiguous, trans person.
And then super macho, biker vest, big beard, slick back hair, tons of tattoos, biker boots.
All estrogen in one, all testosterone in the other.
So anyway, it's just a bunch of hipsters who are rich kids dressed as bikers.
And these four black people walked into the bar and I was looking at them and they look around and go, uh oh, and walk out backwards.
Like they walked into some saloon.
Dude, you're in the wealthiest place.
It's more expensive to rent an apartment in Williamsburg than it is in Soho.
Maybe Tribeca's more money, but I know when we wanted to open a restaurant, The Cardinal, we couldn't afford the retail space, the restaurant space in Williamsburg, so we opened it on B and 4th, because it was cheaper to be in the East Village than it was to be in Williamsburg.
Anyway, what a fucking long tangent that was.
But yeah, we met in there, drinking Makers.
You think I was sitting there seething, talking to some old rich Jewish Upper West Side fake Connecticut Droner.
So Gavin, your anger at Smith is still raw.
Palpable.
Palpable.
It's palpable.
I can see her gagging.
More recently in August 2017, we sat side by side in an Irish bar across the street from Rebel's studio in Manhattan's Garment District.
Wow.
Yeah, I didn't include that one because technically I did shoot Rebel videos there.
Yeah.
But it's not Rebel's studio.
They don't have a studio in Manhattan.
You could literally ask John and be like, who's studio is this?
Yeah, that's just a lie.
But I didn't include it because I have shot stuff there, so fine.
Let's call it Rebels Manhattan Studio.
She says of me, with his man in the White House and his personal brand back in demand, he was a lot jollier.
As before, he was nattily dressed in a suit, cutting a very different figure from the drunken shirtless brawler I'd seen in countless videos, such as his recent tirade, 10 Reasons I Hate the Jews.
There's number 20.
Uh, it's not called that, Jill.
The video was called 10 Things I Hate About the Goddamn Jews.
It was an homage to Jewish people.
You've clearly seen it if you saw that I was wearing, it wasn't a t-shirt, it was a string vest, and I had a cigarette in my mouth, and it was obviously satirical.
I shouldn't have done it because it's followed me ever since, but it was clearly a joke.
It was actually an homage to a Robert Crumb comic strip called When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America.
And he basically mocked anti-Semitic tropes.
And he drew what anti-Semites say and made it look like there's all these goyim sex slaves and the evil Jew is stealing all the money.
And it was a mockery of anti-Semitism.
And I was clearly doing that because I was working for Ezra Levant.
I was in Israel.
Like, you honestly believe that Ezra has a news team and they bring along one token anti-Semite to shit on Israel the whole time he's there and deny the Holocaust?
Jesus Christ.
I mean, I made that misleading title, as many of my titles are misleading, like Divorce Your Wife and Heroin is Cool, etc, etc.
to lampoon lazy people who never looked past the headline.
But I ended up the victim of the satire because people didn't look past the headline.
And it just became, oh, Gavin's a proud anti-Semite.
Like, put your thinking cap on.
Don't you think it's kind of unusual that this guy wrote 10 things I hate about the goddamn Jews?
Could you be more obviously kidding?
Anyway, that's number 20 because she changed it to 10 reasons I hate the Jews.
That's number 20.
So there we have it, folks.
20 major mistakes, and I've only read less than 25% of the book.
So I don't think it's absurd to multiply 20 by 4 and say there are likely 80.
There's likely another 60 terrible errors in this.
I think it's the worst book I've ever read.
Definitely as far as accuracy goes.
And even out of all the articles about Vice, there's always a mistake on them.
But this is the worst Vice reporting I've ever read.
I'd be interested to hear from that dickweed Justin Peretti about how... Jonah Peretti.
You sure?
Yep.
Just looked it up.
Okay.
Yeah, you're right.
Sorry.
Jonah Peretti.
I assume that you totally skewered his history too.
Jill, boomers in general, all reporters around, you can't just shape the story the way you want it to come out.
Ideally, your job is like a scientist.
If a scientist thinks that coffee is causing staph infections, and he discovers that actually the hot caffeine going up your nose burns a lot of bacteria and actually helps prevent staph infections, you have to abandon the original hypothesis because it's not true.
But more and more reporting is like what Jill just wrote, where she starts at the end and has a theory like, there's always been an undercurrent of misogyny, and it came frothing to a head towards the end of 2016.
And then, so you come up with that, and then you go backwards and start filling in the dots, start just cramming things in, moving entire decades around.
That's called fiction.
And sure, it makes for a great story.
I thought Braveheart was a really cool movie.
But it was clear when we watched Braveheart that there was exaggerations and there was liberties.
You can't call your book Merchants of Truth and make historical fiction.
This book is fiction.
And the fact that she's not totally ridiculed... Actually, you know what?
I just forgot about one we should end with.
She was doing a press conference about the book and instead of showing attrition She, contrition I guess I should have said and instead of apologizing she has doubled down and The lies are actually increasing now.
I mean, I guess I should sue her right?
It's 20 enough for a lawsuit They're all provable.
I kind of only have room in my mind for one lawsuit at a time.
But maybe I should sue her.
And the publisher.
Who's the publisher here?
Simon & Schuster, my old publisher.
Yeah, that's weird.
My old publisher was very strict about everything I wrote in the book.
He even made me change names of people when it was true.
Okay, so, we're gonna end with this.
I'll turn it up.
This is her doing some pretentious press conference thingamadoodle.
You know, when you're Jill Abramson, you don't have to hire a publicist.
You just sort of do the gambit.
Yeah, we are, and of course they weren't.
And he ran back to Vice's headquarters in Brooklyn and began ordering video equipment.
But that meant that Vice dove into video journalism This is all bullshit of course, but I'm gonna fast forward to the part about me You hear that sort of Connecticut drama Somebody taught their parrot how to write books or something.
If New Yorker Magazine was an accent, that's what the accent would be.
It wasn't exactly a destination of choice for a female journalist.
of their former female employees told me, this was in the early days in New York, that she came back from lunch and found the three founders in diapers on the floor, sucking on bottles, I guess. - What the fuck is she talking about? I guess. - What the fuck is she talking about?
If that happened, then it was clearly for a photo shoot where they were talking about vice babies.
Wait a minute now.
There was an article called three men and a baby, and it was about me and how I'm the baby.
Um, And I wonder if she's talking about that.
No, I can't find it.
But I think that was an illustration.
But anyway, I don't remember that.
But if that happened, it was clearly for a photo shoot for some kind of joke where we were calling ourselves babies.
The implication here is that it was somehow sexual and that we were like writhing around on the floor.
Yeah, like a cult, a weird sex cult, where we have like talcum powder on our balls and we're like, come on in Julia, we're just talking our balls, we made doo-doo in our diapers, will you change our diapers?
Like what the fuck are you talking about?
It's just blatant sensationalism and lies.
And I think these boomers, they feel so disenfranchised that instead of having a rational mind, they're like, yeah, I would imagine.
I mean, classic young racists, that's what they do.
Okay, so she admits it was a photo shoot.
So what's the point?
If it's a photo shoot, what's your beef, lady?
You had funny pictures taken of you?
How sexist is that?
Those poor women, they must have been gagging.
That's a fucking lie!
That's not even true?
They got their, I think, two millionth subscriber on YouTube.
He walked around the office naked.
Oh.
That's a fucking lie.
That's not even true?
That's a blatant lie.
Holy shit.
I haven't watched this whole thing.
Shane and Saroosh were never ones to be nude.
I don't know if they weren't happy with their equipment down there or something, but they were never naked.
Even when I lived alone with Shane, and he was walking back from the shower to his bedroom, he'd have a towel covering his dick.
I, on the other hand, have never given a flying fuck about nudity, and once, for a lark, That had nothing to do with two million subscribers, nothing.
I ran streaking around the office completely nude, screaming something.
Um, it was obviously totally asexual.
Everyone laughed their head off.
It was not meant to be seductive.
I didn't go up to a girl at her desk and go, hello, what are you doing later?
It was just dumb, you know, like soccer hooligan.
And to alleviate the boredom and, and I don't know, make everyone laugh.
I ran through the editorial and the advertising and then out the front door completely naked.
Nothing to do with anything but cracking people up.
And that becomes Shane?
I wonder if he's pissed.
That might reunite us.
Maybe Sarush and Shane and I will get back together in a class action lawsuit against this lying cow.
So this guy mistakes Shane for me and says, didn't he write under pseudonyms?
And then she says, no, that was Gavin.
And look how she describes me.
This is a woman that I've spoken to for eight hours.
The early main writer was a fellow named Gavin McGinnis, and under the rubric of truth is always more bizarre than fiction.
Gavin McGinnis most recently was the founder of a white nationalist group called the Proud Boys, which, you know, he had a fistfight, Gavin, in New York and got arrested.
and But anyway, Gavin was the original You see that?
Oh my god.
So that's number 21 and it goes off the book and into her press conference.
I was never arrested, Jill.
I actually emailed her this after and she didn't respond.
The Proud Boys are not a white nationalist group.
Everything you read about them is wrong.
And that night, no one was arrested, actually.
That's because Antifa didn't press charges.
You can see this at officialproudboys.com.
Proud Boy Mag, they talk about this and they break down what happened that night.
Yeah, there was nothing to arrest.
It was a fight where Antifa said, no, we don't want to press charges.
We started it, whatever.
They didn't say we started it, but that's what it means when you say, I'm not pressing charges.
However, it was politicized the next day, and ten guys were arrested for that brawl.
I wasn't even there.
Arrested for fistfights.
In the rubric of truth is always stranger than fiction, Gavin McGinnis started a white nationalist group called the Proud Boys, and he was arrested with his shirt off.
You know, swastika tattoos, and he was burning colored children on 84th Street with a tiki torch.
He's also raped many elderly women.
He was behind Charlottesville.
He actually had Heather Heyer killed.
And he's responsible for most shootings and the trans suicide rate.
Which is unfortunate, you know.
But truth is stranger than fiction.
And nothing is stranger than Boomer's ability to ignore common sense and just swallow whatever shit gets thrown in their face.
