(WMR)—What does a prediction of a ricin attack on the United States, North Korea, Dennis Rodman, and punk rock fans have in common? The answer is a bizarre but well-funded magazine and documentary production company called “Vice,” which has alternated its headquarters between Montreal and Brooklyn.
Vice has been billed as the “Rolling Stone” for the modern era. However, its deep pockets and involvement in the world’s hottest trouble spots has some observers believing it is yet another George Soros-financed operation to destabilize honest journalism with unmitigated trash and disinformation. It has debuted on HBO with a news documentary program that is about as full of facts as other cable offerings like “Ancient Aliens” and “Pawn Stars.”
After hosting a trip to North Korea by former basketball star Dennis Rodman and members of the Harlem Globetrotters, where Rodman pronounced his never-ending love for Kim Jong Un, Vice’s HBO show, which is hosted by HBO’s Bill Maher, featured a segment on North Korean women smuggled out of North Korea into Laos and in danger of being forced into the sex trade. The picture of Vice as a double-dealing disinformation outlet becomes clearer.
Vice’s visit to Pyongyang came after one by Google boss Eric Schmidt and his Google Ideas guru Jared Cohen. Cohen is a veteran of the State Department’s involvement with “themed revolutions” and the “Arab Spring” uprisings. Cohen is yet another of Soros’s many well-paid operatives who search the world for destabilization opportunities. Although Schmidt and Cohen did not get an audience with young Kim, their presence in North Korea likely had more to do with sizing up support for the real faction governing North Korea: the military clique of Kim’s aunt and uncle, Kim Kyong-hui and Jang Sung-taek, which has received the covert backing of Israel and the Mossad.
Vice’s documentary crew has also traveled into the jungles of the Philippines to report on the long-simmering Muslim rebellion in that nation, as well as to Iran and Liberia. And in another sign that Vice is nothing more than a new form of Soros-financed propaganda, CNN’s “globalized” Fareed Zakaria is a consultant to the program.
Vice was founded in 1994 as a free magazine called the Voice of Montreal by McGill University alum Suroosh Alvi, a former heroin addict; Shane Smith; and Gavin McInnes. The initial operating revenue for the magazine came from a Canadian government program that provided funds for start-up firms by individuals who were on public welfare. Although Smith claims he grew up a socialist—he obviously benefited from a “socialist” welfare-to-work program—he has decried socialism. His colleague, McInnes, writing for The American Conservative, claimed “It’s getting cooler to be conservative.” McInnes has also expressed his pride for being white and has claimed that immigration serves to dilute Western culture and an “English-speaking way of life.”
The popularity of Vice was based on fraudulent accounts of meetings between the magazine and MTV, a non-existent lawsuit against Vice by The Village Voice, and pumping up the value of their magazine by claiming false investments from business tycoons. One of those falsely named as an investor was Montreal animation software mogul Richard Szawlinski who eventually tossed a few hundred thousand dollars at the magazine. Many of Vice’s stories could have attracted such noted fabulist journalists as Janet Cooke, formerly of The Washington Post, and Jayson Blair, formerly of The New York Times, in that they were faked interviews with street hoodlums who claimed to have committed such heinous acts as setting the homeless on fire. It is fitting that Fareed Zakaria would hook up with such an outfit. His CNN colleague, John King, jumped the gun by announcing that the authorities had arrested the Boston marathon bomber, a report quickly discounted by the FBI.
Vice has expanded to include a record label that features punk, rap, and heavy metal bands. It should be noted that one of the methods cited by the architect of CIA provocation Gene Sharp is the use of public music performances to undermine the state. The magazine also published Montreal, New York, and London editions with plans to expand to Iraq (yes, Iraq), Russia, and Thailand. It also owns the British fashion magazine i-D. Smell George Soros yet? Maybe we can throw Rupert Murdoch into the mix, as well. Murdoch is a fan of Vice having tweeted last year: “Who’s heard of VICE media? Wild, interesting effort to interest millennials who don’t read or watch established media. Global success.”
Vice’s true colors have shown through with its feature, “The Vice Guide to Shagging Muslims.” Maybe it can lead off its Baghdad edition with that as a cover article. If not that, maybe the one in a recent issue idolizing two American Jews who now live on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank. If Vice’s reporters are ever killed in Iraq, the State Department will condemn the action but not the provocation. Vice has also featured an article on men masturbating on women’s faces, “Bukkake on My Face: Welcome to the Ancient Tradition of the Japanese Facial.”
Vice also provided two journalists to cover the weird travels of anti-virus software entrepreneur John McAfee from Belize to Guatemala. McAfee, who was on the lam from Belizean authorities who wanted to question him over the murder of his American neighbor, Gregory Faull, in Ambergris Caye, claimed to have eluded the Belize police by using a body double who was traveling on a passport from where? North Korea of all places. McAfee claimed his double had been arrested in Mexico in a “pre-planned misbehavior” operation while traveling on a passport issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Somehow the body double was released from prison and allowed to rejoin McAfee in Belize to help him in his escape from the country into Guatemala and eventually, back to the United States. For some three days, while he was in hiding from the law and in the jungles of Belize and shoving a tampon up his nose to look like a “Guatemalan” souvenir salesman, McAfee was accompanied by a two-man crew from Vice. It must have been some scene in a series of “safe shacks” in the middle of the Belize jungle—a team of fakes and frauds on the run from an evil Third World security agency. The stuff of fiction. Exactly.
And Vice must have gotten McAfee on tape with his most far out story: that Belize was secretly training Hezbollah terrorists in a camp deep in the jungles and they were preparing to launch a deadly ricin bio-terrorist attack on the United States. Moreover, the Hezbollah members, who were being given new identities in the Belize training camp, were being smuggled into the United States with the help of the Mexican Zetas drug cartel. It turns out a ricin attack was launched by U.S. mail. But the perpetrator wasn’t Hezbollah or the Zetas. Rather it was an Elvis and Johnny Cash impersonator from Tupelo, Mississippi named Kevin Curtis. McAfee must be kicking himself in the ass right now for not being able to come up with a whackier story than the Hezbollah/Belize yarn.
Meanwhile, journalism, already at its lowest ebb since the war-mongering days of William Randolph Hearst, has sunk to even new depths.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2013 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
