The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The ‘Investigative Journalist’ Grift and the Dangerous ‘Viral’ Style of Ian Carroll

Posted on | March 9, 2025 | Comments Off on The ‘Investigative Journalist’ Grift and the Dangerous ‘Viral’ Style of Ian Carroll

Y’all remember Barrett Brown, don’t you? He first popped onto my radar in late 2009. Just about the time I was finished with the Charles Johnson/LGF affair, Barrett Brown decides to do some kind of thing “exposing” me as a dangerous neo-Confederate white supremacist, to which my basic response was: I’m watching you, boy. About three years later, after he had made a name for himself as the spokesman for the “Anonymous” hacker conspiracy, Barrett Brown had a meltdown on YouTube, threatening an FBI agent and eventually earning himself a stint in federal prison. We don’t hear much about Barrett Brown these days; last year he published a memoir that didn’t do anything to revive his career as a self-proclaimed “investigative journalist.” Anyway . . .

So everybody now is talking about Ian Carroll, who was a guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, and the chatter on X was sufficiently annoying that I found myself wondering, “Who the fuck is this guy?”

Good luck finding any actual biography of Ian Carroll. You can find denunciations of him, or find hagiography of him, but like the basic stuff — age, hometown, education, career background — just doesn’t seem to exist. If you can turn it up with a Google search, please put the result in the comments. Meanwhile, this is from a Substack article about him:

“I was a GameStop investor right after that initial short squeeze moment in the limelight,” he says in a sit-down interview with Robert Breedlove. “And I was pretty ignorant, like I was just a dude snowboarding, and rock climbing, and running around the woods up in the Northwest with political opinions that were given to me that I didn’t really have any basis for.” His journey into investigative journalism only took root when events such as Covid-19, the 2020 elections, and the GameStop ordeal primed him to question everything. From the corruption of the financial system, the concentration of power in a handful of news media conglomerates, and how the whole market is built out of lies, Carroll’s passions quickly shifted away from his teaching background toward wanting to help disseminate all of the information he was independently learning with an engaged audience.
While many investigative journalists are known to privately conduct research into a particular topic of interest before organizing and publishing their findings in a column, book, or commentary that informs readers and viewers alike, Carroll’s process is a little different. And that may be the reason why his research intensive work rapidly amassed approximately 300,000 followers per month in his first few months of sharing his deep-dives on TikTok.

In an era when what gets labeled a “conspiracy theory” this week turns out to be established fact next week, we can understand the market demand for “deep dives on TikTok” about such topics, but excuse me for noticing the resemblance between Ian Carroll’s oeuvre and the kind of stuff you used to see in Lyndon Larouche pamphlets. It cannot be classified as “right” or “left,” reflecting a worldview (and appealing to an audience) that is not ideologically coherent, defined mainly by an attitude of suspicion. Some might label it “populist,” but as I consider myself a populist, I don’t want to get lumped into a category with this stuff.

It’s easy to go “viral” on TikTok if you look like you’re auditioning for the role of Jack Sparrow in a remake of Pirates of the Caribbean, OK? And Ian Carroll has a regular-guy vibe that is appealing — up until you realize he is describing Israel as Jeffrey Epstein’s “handlers.”

See, Pam Bondi is part of the Zionist plot to conceal the REAL TRUTH that Jeffrey Epstein was an “asset” of the Mossad, and insofar as you refuse to agree with this claim, you’re part of the cover-up, too!

Do I know what may be in the FBI’s Epstein files? No, I don’t, and neither does Ian Carroll, but he’s read a book by Whitney Webb that purports to expose links between Epstein and the “intelligence community,” which for all I know may actually be the case, but isn’t it a stretch to claim that U.S. aid to Israel constitutes payment to Esptein’s “handlers”?

Much of the speculation around Epstein stems from a 2019 article by Vicky Ward in the Daily Beast. It involves Alexander Acosta, who was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida in the George W. Bush administration, and who became Secretary of Labor in the first Trump administration. Acosta was the federal prosecutor who made what was called a “sweetheart deal” with Epstein in 2007, under which federal charges were dropped in exchange for Epstein agreeing to plead guilty to two state charges in Florida, for which he served a total of 13 months in county jail. Vicky Ward had “spent many months” in 2002 working on a Vanity Fair story about Epstein, and says her publisher Graydon Carter was pressured directly by Epstein to exclude from the resulting feature article any mention of Epstein’s notorious sexual appetites.

Ward’s 2019 Daily Beast article begins thus:

A couple of years ago, I was interviewing a former senior White House official when the name Jeffrey Epstein came up.
Unaware of my personal history with Epstein, this person assured me that the New York financier was no serious harm to anyone. He was a good guy. A charming guy. Useful, too. He knew a lot of rich Arabs, including the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and, further, he had clever ideas about creating bond issues for them. “OK, so he has a girl problem,” this person threw on, almost as an afterthought.
Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.
“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta.

Pause for a minute and think about 2019. This was three years after Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton and, for a lot of people, the name Jeffrey Epstein was associated with Bill Clinton. The Democrat pushback against any attempt by Republicans to exploit this scandal was to point out that it was under a Republican administration (George W. Bush) that Epstein got his “sweetheart deal,” and Alexander Acosta’s role in that deal eventually forced him to resign as Trump’s Labor Secretary. So part of what Ward was doing with this 2019 article — published just after Epstein was again arrested on sex-trafficking charges — was making sure that everybody remembered that Republican angle to the story.

Now look closely at the sourcing of Ward’s story — it is at best third-hand, involving an unnamed “former senior White House official,” who says that this business about how somebody told Acosta that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” was what Acosta told “the Trump transition team” when they’d asked him about the plea deal circa 2016-2017.

There is a reason why hearsay is inadmissable as evidence in court.

Vicky Ward’s source says Acosta says somebody told him Epstein was “intelligence,” and that’s why Epstein got his “sweetheart deal.”

This may actually be true, of course, but it’s not proof.

Far be it from me to deny that in 2007, when Epstein and his lawyers were desperate to get him off the hook, they played every card they had in their hands, leveraging every connection Epstein had made over the years of his association with powerful people. Could it be that someone in the “intelligence community” (e.g., John Brennan) exerted pressure on the Justice Department to go easy on Epstein because of whatever value he had as an “asset”? Certainly this is possible, but there is a lack of specificity to the story as we have it. Who was it that told Acosta “Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”? Has this person ever been identified by name? Has some congressional committee called Acosta to testify under oath about this? If so, how did I miss that?

Maybe there’s something in Whitney Webb’s book that nails this down, but excuse my skepticism, because if it were known as a fact that Epstein’s “intelligence” value was behind that 2007 plea deal, I’m pretty sure the full story — naming names, citing court documents — would be atop the results for any Google search on the subject.

Look, I spent a decade as an assistant editor on the national desk at The Washington Times and know a thing or two about investigative journalism, OK? At times, my job was to serve as a go-between with reporters and senior editors. My bosses would read the draft of a story and say, “Hey, we need more to back this up — can we get a source to go on the record?” So I’d go back to the reporter to explain this problem, and see what could be done, then go back to my bosses to let them know the situation — were we going to have the story nailed down in time for the next day’s paper, or should it be taken off the schedule? Based on that experience, I can assure you that if I had OK’d a story as thinly sourced as Vicky Ward’s tale about Acosta and the “intelligence” angle on Esptein, Wes Pruden would have fired me and kicked me down the stairs.

The whole thing hangs on an anonymous source telling a story he claims to have heard second-hand — Wes Pruden would not be amused.

How far is it from actual investigative journalism to what Ian Carroll is doing with his TikTok videos claiming that Pam Bondi is engaged in a cover-up to protect Epstein’s Israeli “handlers”? Sure, you can get a lot of online traffic making claims like that, especially with your Pirates of the Caribbean look and your regular-guy “just asking questions” style, but it’s not really journalism. Part of the problem, of course, is that the mainstream media have so damaged their own credibility that the entire business of journalism is in disrepute. When the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Associated Press have all been exposed as partisan propaganda operations, who can you trust? If many thousands of people put their faith in a “viral” TikTok video by a guy making shadowy insinuations about “Zionists,” whose fault is that?

I’m one of a handful of people who both (a) once worked for Wes Pruden and (b) was personal friends with Andrew Breitbart, and when you add in (c) my @rsmccain account was one of the first banned by Twitter — and still banned to this day — my credentials as an alternative media personality are pretty solid. So why am I not chatting with Joe Rogan?

Am I the victim of a conspiracy? Are they — and you know who they are, right? — trying to suppress the truth? Maybe I should start posting TikTok videos blaming the Mossad and the CIA for every random nuisance in my life. Unfortunately, I don’t have that swashbuckling Pirates of the Caribbean look, and my voice is an Appalachian twang, so there’s zero chance of my becoming a “viral” TikTok sensation.

Instead, I’m here where I’ve always been, and I’m worried that people on “our” side (because, whatever his faults, Ian Carroll is on the MAGA bandwagon) are doing an “edgy” thing of flirting with Jew-haters because that’s how you attract alienated young people in an era when pro-Hamas rallies are all the rage in the Ivy League. This is dangerous, and while I try to avoid playing “hate speech” hall-monitor (being hate-listed by the SPLC myself), nevertheless I am not blind to what’s going on.

People need to wake the hell up. The stakes are very high.

UPDATE: One thing we must be aware of is that “ops” are going on everywhere, all the time. If it’s not the CIA running an op, it’s MI5, or the GRU, or various Chinese agencies, etc. That whole thing about “Russian interference” in the 2016 election was a sort of meta-op — an op about an op — and it can be difficult to know if today’s “News” is actually somebody’s propaganda operation. At times I wonder if some of the commenters on this blog are actually foreign intelligence operatives, as for example the one below who says this:

Whitney Webb has never done any research. She simply does a copy and paste of Ryan Dawson’s work amd calls it her own. Israel is a criminal enerprise and a virulent enemy of the United States. There are reams of publicly available documents proving this.
If you give half a shit about the truth, you can find Dawson’s work and learn something about this subject.

Ah, so I could “learn something” from the work of Ryan Dawson. Well, let me see what Ryan Dawson has to say, for example:

Or this, for example:

Ryan Dawson is a fair and objective reporter, said nobody ever.

Let me encourage readers to investigate for themselves exactly who Ryan Dawson is. The accusation that Whitney Webb has been doing “a copy and paste of Ryan Dawson’s work” is certainly interesting, and by “interesting,” of course I mean, potentially libelous.

Maybe I should order Whitney Webb’s books from Amazon, and see whether it’s fair to accuse her of plagiarizing a Holocaust denier, but the real point I wish to make is that we do not know what other people’s motives are. If Jeffrey Epstein was on the Mossad’s payroll, who else is on the payrolls of foreign intelligence agencies? And if some journalists are actually paid government operatives (which is what the USAID revelations seem to show), then shouldn’t we be suspicious when a guy nobody ever heard of before 2020 suddenly becomes a “viral” phenomenon by repeating wild conspiracy theories? Some of y’all may be overdue for the 30,000-mile maintenance checkup on your bullshit detectors, but mine is quite finely tuned, thank you.



 

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Category: Conspiracy Theories

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