Seth Simons is Not A Journalist
Just because you write the word journalist in your profile, doesn’t mean you actually are one.
Seth Simons is not a journalist. Anyone who cares about this saga he created between myself and his shameful attempt to shame me should know (By the way I’m fully aware no one cares). For the better part of 2 weeks Seth, who calls himself a comedy journalist, dug through my past to find about 5% of my work as a journalist that covered people, places and events in and around the vaccine and autism controversy. First and foremost a real journalist could make the distinction that I’m a non-story. You think someone who stumbles into a comedy club or someone who buys a ticket to see their favorite comedian is thinking about whether one of the owners once wrote articles about the link between vaccines and autism? The answer is no absolutely not.
Another reason he’s not a journalist is, if he was one he would know that by asking me the question “do you believe vaccines cause autism” it would mean I’d be giving up my objectivity. Any journalist who wants to be trusted and have a future wants to remain objective. I’m not a journalist anymore. I retired from the world of journalism some 10 years ago, but I will say aside from negative columns about the New York Rangers and New York Jets I remained objective. So let’s do a quick dive in so I don’t all bore you to tears.
THE ANTI-VAXX ACCUSATION
Last week Seth wrote what he thought was an expose about me potentially being an anti-vaxxer and supporting the anti-vax movement. In the same expose he tried to discredit the work of award winning journalist David Kirby, formerly of the NY Times. Removing myself from this for a second because I know that Seth has it in for me and there’s an emotional reason for him coming after me — here’s a guy who has never worked for a major news outlet in his life and he’s trying to discredit two people that did more in one piece than he’s done in his whole career. That being said, you can challenge David Kirby’s book Evidence of Harm, you are more than allowed. Thats not what Seth did, he went after his career. A quick search of David Kirby leads you to hundreds of perfectly credible articles equipped with sources and quotes from subjects that show he is in fact a journalist. He’s written several books, one just last week optioned to become a tv series called Death at Sea World.
Let’s stick to the book at the center of his attack. Evidence of Harm was a critically acclaimed New York Times Best Seller. Seth is claiming that a book so many people revered and consumed are all wrong for lending this author any credibility in what he wrote by buying his book. I know David. Not only was he diligent in writing this book he was extremely careful to remain objective. When you are covering autism there are what appears to be two sides. There’s the science community and the CDC and there are parents who feel neglected and confused.
Walk into any one of their households and you’ll see a family that has been in despair. They just want answers. It’s hard not to get sucked into their plight because of the way they have been treated. Parents are faced with adapting and figuring out how to be parents to a special needs child, but every where they turn they are disrespected. Everything they have to earn for their child is a fight. That includes healthcare, education, treatments and somehow coming up with the funds to cover it all. They all had a similar story. At around 18 months it was like a switch went off and they lost any speech they had developed. There was regression in every aspect and finally parents watched their son or daughter who at one time were so vibrant and alert slip through their fingers into the abyss that is autism.
Kirby’s book started to take shape after he read Autism: A Unique Type of Mercury Poisoning written by parents Sallie Bernard, Albert Enayati, B.S., Ch.E., M.S.M.E, Teresa Binstock, Heidi Roger, Lyn Redwood, R.N., M.S.N., C.R.N.P., Woody McGinnis, M.D. and originally published in a non-conventional medical journal called Medical Hypothesis in 1999. By then the medical industry and education system had been bombarded with new cases of autism at a rate they had never seen. To paraphrase a bunch of articles I had written at the time, the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Centers for Disease Control(CDC) had expressed that the rise can be attributed to better diagnosis. Within the first 3 years I covered this story educators were at a loss. To a person, special ed teachers, principals, district superintendents said they had never seen anything like it. Within that period of 3 years they had seen a rise of over 500% in kids with autism. They all referred to it as an epidemic. Epidemic was a word that never used by the science community when it came to autism, because it would be admitting that there was a non-genetic reason to a disorder. But facts were facts and educators from that time can tell you it may not have been classified as an epidemic but it sure felt like one.
I mentioned to Seth in some tweets that he didn’t live through that. He couldn’t possibly understand the impact it had on our school districts. Within those first 3 years article after article was about how we were not ready for this. So tell me since our medical industry suddenly became better at diagnosing autism why didn’t they tell the rest of the world to be better prepared for it. Kirby’s book delves into the science, the politics and the drama that became what parents believe was a link between vaccine injury and autism. Despite Seth’s opinion the book was an objective piece, recognized by peers and touted by people on both sides of the coin. So in a 2000 plus word diatribe about me, he somehow took the body of work of another award winning journalist and tried to slander him as well.
I’ve educated you on Kirby’s work lets take a look at something Seth wrote:
As far as I can tell this is creative writing. I’m actually at a loss. When you search David Kirby we see award winning, best selling author and when you search Seth you get what you see above. Who’s fooling who here? Who’s really a journalist? Someone who spent their lifetime writing for major media outlets or some dude who’s biggest credit is “A Story About Tonight”. Before that Seth wrote pieces like who had the “best tweets of the week” for something called Paste Magazine. Before that he conducted puff piece interviews for splitsider.com which was eventually bought up by Vulture. Something else I caught in passing as I tried to find one actual news article Seth might have written, his bios are always inconsistent. I did quite a bit of moving as a writer, but if you read anything Seth wrote over the last 4 to 5 years it always says he’s somewhere else. Sometimes he’s in Maryland, then he’s in Brooklyn, then he’s in the Bay area which can only really mean San Francisco and now of course he boasts about living in Idaho. How many times does someone have to flame out in a city before realizing its not where you live thats the problem it’s actually you?
The last one actually says he’s a comedian. Our mystery man keeps getting less interesting. What I’m about to say is completely an assumption on my part, typically Seth creates a narrative about his subjects and then fills it in with semi-facts and slanderous bullshit, so I’m going say this might just be bullshit, but I have a feeling its as close to the truth as possible.
WHO IS SETH SIMONS?
Seth is a rich kid. Nothing wrong with that. As a kid I dreamed of being a rich kid. Somewhere along the line he started feeling guilty about the things that were handed to him. As as rich kids often do, they struggle to find a place in society or a way to step outside the shadow of a rich family, so Seth read a bunch. He studied philosophy, poetry, history etc… Anything that would help him find himself. He tried his hand at poetry, (he actually does post some of his poems). None of them are good, but A+ for trying. In one poem he’s talking about a father figure who made millions that he’s angry at. This wasn’t why I thought he grew up rich, it just confirms he doesn’t like his father. What confirmed my suspicions that he grew up a rich kid was when he went on the Comedy Cellar podcast and while arguing with owner Noam Dworman the following interaction occurred:
Noam asks “Do you think I’m racist”
Seth responds: “Of course you are racist. I’m racist. All white men are racist.”
Not only does this confirm to me that he grew up the way he grew up, but it also confirms he hates his Dad and himself. He feels guilty that he grew up with more. To make a statement in which you categorize a whole segment of the population as racist shows, that without a doubt, you are someone that can’t be trusted as a person and certainly can not be an objective journalist. He has an axe to grind and somewhere along the line he thought comedy would help him accept himself. I’m sure he tried to create a self-deprecating style where he could always point inward and show the world he could laugh at himself and all his advantages as a rich white kid. As typically happens within the first couple of years of trying standup you either commit yourself to performing every night or you fizzle out. Seth fizzled out, but in the process he started to resent the people that were successful at it.
As Seth bottoms out of standup he thinks to himself, I go to enough comedy shows and bar shows, I can review comedy. He starts to write puff pieces for various comedy sites. He even wrote one about Big Jay Oakerson just as his special Live at Webster Hall (which I produced) debut on Comedy Central, Seth conducted an interview for Splitsider.com. Imagine that. He went from this puff piece to somehow accusing Big Jay of misogyny and racism. What changed in that time I wonder? Certainly if he felt a way about Big Jay how could he bring himself to interview him with softball questions? I mean we already know he doesn’t expect a journalist to be objective and that they should always pick a side. His mediocre work as a “comedy journalist” led to nothing. He wasn’t a comedian. He wasn’t a comedy journalist. Now what?
Seth decides to become some kind of comedy activist. His first target are the UCB rooms and it’s culture. He writes about the treatment of the employees, how no one gets paid, harassment is rampant and there’s shitty people running it. No one picks up this story. No one really cares, because in most industries when you start out at the bottom it’s never really pleasant. I’m not saying its right, I’m just saying everyone goes through some shit to get to where they want to be, except for Seth obviously. No one is going to feel sorry for people paying for improv classes and getting mistreated.
Finally in 2019, with Seth’s desperation growing, he hones in on Shane Gillis. From his puff pieces, we know Seth is familiar with Big Jay Oakerson and the Legion of Skanks(LOS), but all of his bullshit accusations never sticks to him so he starts in on those around him. When Shane gets SNL, Seth who absorbs everything that has to do with LOS remembers a podcast where Shane makes what can he deemed racially irresponsible jokes about asians. If Shane was anyone months before his Saturday Night Live announcement, Seth is outing him then. But he wasn’t. He was just a comic coming up through the ranks like everyone else, not famous yet so therefore no one would care about a racially insensitive joke. With the announcement Seth quickly acted and duped a slate.com or some other bullshit platform to print his garbage. This was the moment he thought he would become the Ronan Farrow of comedy. He saw book deals in his future. He thought he was going to ride this story into a career, instead it led right into where he is now, writing a newsletter that maybe 100 people read once in a while.
So thats Seth. Maybe a few points are off, but for the most part he’s got hate in his heart because of who he is and where he came from. He writes about comedians because he was never accepted into the cliques. He was never accepted into the improv world and UCB. LOS being one of the biggest cliques at least in New York City received the worst of his wrath and of course UCB being the biggest improv franchise got it too. I’m not defending any actions by UCB from the past, there are even some things I agree on, but those pieces weren’t written objectively so the credibility gets tarnished. Just based on his UCB pieces and maybe the Shane story, if he was serious about being a comedy journalist he might have actually found a position somewhere. He could have convinced an editor that the comedy boom, the #metoo movement/cancel culture and the comedy podcast landscape were enough to create a position. If he cared about the craft of journalism he would have also convinced the editor, I’ll prove my worth, giving the editor the option of paying him an affordable salary or freelance fee. The problem is no editor can look beyond the way he writes and his irresponsible nature. The way he talks about and to subjects of his stories would be something that would never be tolerated at any major news outlet. It’s clear and transparent he hates the comedy industry and furthermore anyone he deems undeservingly successful. Which leads to me.
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Does the above read objective at all to you? How can you trust anyone to write about comedy who believes and writes something as ignorant as this statement? I’ve written for wire services, major newspapers, local newspapers, magazines, you name it. At any point in my career if I wrote anything as slanderous and irresponsible as the example above I’d never be offered another job. Any editor or publisher would see that and know immediately I was not a professional. Which makes sense because I’m sure thats why no responsible media outlet would hire this guy.
I already knew the first time I came into contact with Seth this is how he feels about me. He doesn’t know me. He’s never met me, yet he’s created an illusion that I’m some horrible guy. So I give Seth about an hour and a half of my time on a phone call one night. I express to him, if he was a comedy critic and wasn’t falsely claiming to be a journalist I wouldn’t care what he had to say. I’m a business owner in the entertainment industry so I understand I’m a potential target. Now because the LOS podcast is live at The Stand every Monday, Seth accuses me of promoting and facilitating rape culture and racism. Not only that but he accuses me of only catering to that fan base and inaccurately assumes that our whole clientele is made up of like minded individuals. Again an irresponsible statement from someone who can’t possibly be a journalist. So lets see … for 8 years plus my plan was to only cater to the Legion of Skanks’ fan base, out grow our old space because of them and then move into a space 3 times size and again only cater to their fanbase. The Stand is a restaurant and comedy venue. We’re open for brunch, lunch, dinner service and we offer comedy in multiple rooms each night, but yeah let me pin my hopes of success on one podcast. With all due respect to Luis J. Gomez and the boys, they don’t pay the bills.
He misquotes me after the phone call saying I accused him of hurting my business. Something he repeated over and over and over and over again. But he was mistaken. I don’t believe Seth can hurt my business because again no one cares. What I did say is when someone deliberately tries to hurt my business thats where the concern is. Employees get shown something that they don’t understand. Questions arise like “why is this ‘journalist’ saying you are this or that?” It’s a disruption to my business because I have to let them know he is not a journalist but someone with an axe to grind. And of course he uses the term “FAKE NEWS” as if I’m Trump calling CNN out on some shit. But seriously in the this case it’s actual fake news. No one employs you. You are writing from a place of hate. You have no accountability. There is nothing news about what you do, but you pass it off as if it’s some well researched scathing report. Seth is the very definition of fake news. Just some dude who writes drivel on a blog and calls them articles.
BACK TO AUTISM
Last week Seth’s expose was read by no one. Aside from 3 of his fans attacking me on twitter, I received no hate mail or threats. No one cancelled their reservations at The Stand. No one called my business to complain about me. I’m not the fucking story. And if you were a journalist you’d know. So you want to come after my record. Ok I’ll jump into that too.
For as long as I was a journalist there was an epidemic like increase in cases of autism each year. Most of my articles were about families struggling to find services. At the time there were not enough private services to keep up with the demand and most of our school districts were in the dark about what to do and who to hire to get them to a place where they could even make a dent in this new found population of kids. Conveniently Seth left any of those articles out. When I read the paper written by parents I mentioned earlier, I started looking into it myself. As mentioned in a couple of tweets I wrote to Seth, if he really wanted to understand the autism/vaccine debate he should follow the money. He didn’t. As a matter of fact he did the opposite and just google searched whatever the NIH, CDC fed people at the time.
Over a 10 year career I’ve written at least 5 or 6 dozen pieces about this. The science says vaccines do not contribute to autism and that is indirectly true. I told Seth several times there are layers to this and honestly someone who is as lazy as he is wouldn’t be able to wrap his head around it. In short… When the Clintons entered the White House they did so with big contributions from pharmaceutical companies. There’s nothing strange about that as they have donated billions of dollars over the years to different campaigns. Within a small window however Hillary Clinton’s initiative for more childhood vaccines went unopposed. The message was more vaccines save lives, the lobbyist were happy and it was a win for medicine. The new vaccines were tested. They go through a rigorous process before they are approved by the FDA and are given the green light to be mass produced. Two glaring issues took shape. The amount of vaccines now being manufactured needed an increase in an ingredient called Thimerosal. It was a mercury based preservative that would allow vaccines to be mass produced with the ability to live on shelves for longer periods of time. It was first introduced to vaccines in the 1980s but now it needed to be increased for the amount of demand. The other issue — 30 new vaccines were introduced to a child’s schedule before the age of 6. Prior to that kids would see possibly any where between 6 and 10.
There was science lacking on how a child would react to multiple injections of vaccines in one day. As I was surprised to find out parents told me there would be visits where their child was given up to ten vaccines in one visit. I’ve gotten a flu shot before and by comparison I sometimes feel lethargic the rest of the day. There have been times where I’ve gotten sick with a fever shortly after. Thats me. An adult. We’re talking about babies, toddlers, brains that haven’t fully developed getting pumped with multiple vaccinations. Seth keeps asking this basic question do vaccines cause autism, do vaccines cause autism? And as I told him it’s not that simple.
Here’s the other part I learned over the years. Each child is different. For instance I grew up with severe allergies and my brother was the opposite. Our immune systems are different. When kids with autism were given blood tests in the majority of cases there was a significantly higher level of mercury found in their blood stream than typical children. Before you jump to conclusions, that doesn’t mean vaccines cause autism, it just means there are kids that are clearly more susceptible to mercury poisoning than others. It means their bodies were having a hard time excreting toxins, not just mercury but other medals as well. Again this isn’t a conspiracy. This science is out there for anyone to consume.
Seth mentioned Dr. Andrew Wakefield in his piece. Wakefield was run out of England for his belief that there was some type of link. He lost everything. He was separated from his wife and kids for 5 years, while Wakefield came to the States after literally being banished. They made leaving the country for his family virtually impossible. At any time Wakefield could have just said fuck it, I wanna see my wife and kids, I’ll admit I was wrong and deal with the consequences. He sacrificed his entire future based on the idea that there was more to this. Wakefield would go on find a diagnosis in many of his autism patients called leaky-gut syndrome. Leaky-gut was caused by mercury poisoning and essentially caused enormous pain within a child. The pain was so severe that it led to regression in children under the age of 6. Wakefield found that if you treat the gut, you’ll be able to help these children a lot more on their path to recovery.
Not buying it? Ok thats fine. Again layers. The paper written by parents mentioned above sparked something called the Simpsonwood conference. Reps from the CDC, NIH, HHS, IOM, FDA and various other government health organizations came together to discuss this new controversy. For the first time this internationally accepted vaccine program which was marveled and adopted by other countries, was being questioned. They struggled to figure out what the actual effects of thimerosal were to vaccines over time. The transcripts of this conference were leaked and while they didn’t admit a link, they sure were questioning if enough research, science or testing was actually conducted in order for the vaccine program to be safe. Whenever our government has an issue with vaccines they first go to the Institute of Medicine (IOM) which is a group of medical advisors put together to, for a lack of a better word “advise” other medical branches of the government. At least at that time the problem with that was most of the board was made up of former executive officers from pharmaceutical companies.
The IOM is also responsible for telling the other branches what science needs to be conducted and/or what science takes more of a precedent. You don’t have to be a medical professional or a scientist to see whats wrong with this picture. How can we hold our government agencies at their word that we are safe if the people with the most to lose basically run the IOM? Big Pharma isn’t stupid. They litter government agencies with all kinds of former reps. There is an I scratch your back you scratch my back mentality.
The vaccine schedule was something that was suggested. It wasn’t mandatory or a law for that matter. It was basically the IOM telling the Academy of American Pediatrics (AAP) to tell their doctors this is the schedule they should follow with their patients. Again no science behind the schedule. There was nothing that said this is when you take this vaccine and why, so the schedule became a “suggested schedule”. In Seth’s piece he loved including something I wrote called “10 Common Sense Tips to Vaccinating Your Child” ….
First, this piece is a sidebar to a whole deeper article about the “suggested schedule”. We often used sidebars at Spectrum Magazine as a way of breaking up content. It looked nice graphically and for the most part they were a quick informative accompaniment to a bigger article. Secondly we talked to over a hundred pediatricians who gave us feedback on the vaccine schedule they created and follow. Because it’s suggested it is often up to the doctor to implement the type of schedule he/she wants to follow. Another source of this piece was Dr. Bob Sears a well respected pediatrician who has written several books while having an active practice. Dr. Sears has written many times about how vaccines can and should be given separately. There is no scientific reason to load up a child with 3 or more vaccines in one day.
Any pediatrician will tell you that every month they get visited by pharma reps who like to give out free samples, take them to expensive lunches and dinners, rounds of golf, etc … all in the name of keeping relations. But really whats happening is those reps are monitoring pediatricians. They want to make sure those vaccines are going in fast and early and fuck all that separation jazz. You scratch our back we’ll scratch yours.
Just based on what I’ve written above is there enough for you to say “maybe we should take a deeper look into this?” No? Ok here are the last two points. Seth tried to debunk vaccine court as an admission from our government that vaccines can cause injury. But you can’t debunk it, the fact it exists is our government telling you vaccine injury is real. The court was created in 2004 so that the government can settle vaccine injured cases. In 2008 the first case of vaccine injury causing autism was settled. It was the first time the government admitted to an autism/vaccine link. But there was a caveat. The language in the settlement stated that the child had some kind of pre-existing condition, this triggered the vaccine to lead to injury eventually contributing to a diagnosis of autism. The child was Hannah Poling, her father was Jon Poling and he is a neurologist, exactly the type of doctor you see before being handed the autism diagnosis. Seth pointed to the language and the science here again, but should we just ignore a neurologist who says my daughter began regressing after she received a group of vaccines in one day? He’s not some quack doctor he’s a well respected neurologist. The pre-existing condition was a compromised immune system.
Which takes us back to the point mentioned earlier. Some kids can process a vaccine faster and better than another child can. The question from Seth again was “DO VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM?” Well Seth as you can see its not something I can answer. I am just a journalist. A journalist who wrote a bunch articles about autism. I’m not the story. I’m not supposed to tell you if I believe autism is caused by vaccines. I’m supposed to write about it. Inform you. And then you decide if it in fact does or doesn’t. That includes writing about people like Jenny McCarthy. She unlike me is a story. I also wrote pieces about Amanda Peete who teamed up with the CDC on a campaign to combat Jenny’s movement. He didn’t mention any of those pieces.
Finally through the 2000s thimerosal was quietly removed from vaccines. At first it was removed as a preservative and eventually removed altogether as part of a filtration process. The autism numbers have leveled off. We haven’t seen a jump from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 166 within a five year period. Use that information however you want. To have an explosion of one disorder from the mid-nineties to about 2010 with no real answers as to why is a mystery that remains unsolved despite what consensus science says. In that same time period we’ve seen an explosion in childhood asthma, ADD, ADHD, allergies and other learning disorders. Yes some of it can be chalked up to a better diagnosis process, but science still feels like it only answers the one question, do vaccines cause autism, according to science, no. But what about all those other questions?
Autism was my beat for almost a decade. The biggest question within the autism community was, what was the reason for the spike in numbers. There were parents, medical professionals and educators who felt there was some kind of chemical distortion that may have contributed to it. But anyone who questioned science was labeled an anti-vaxxer. You don’t ignore thousands of people because consensus science says there is no link. The majority of these families had multiple children with autism. Despite their fears they continued to trust our government and vaccinated their kids. What do you say to them? Many were blatantly told they were crazy. No one within our medical and science community said: ok, let’s look into these other avenues and see what we find. These parents needed reassurance and they never received it. Our government medical agencies are supposed to settle our fears not feed into them. As much as they believed there was no link between vaccines and autism they were never willing to explore the aspects that most parents were concerned about. It wasn’t the first time in our history we questioned science. Specifically in this case it wasn’t questioning the science it was asking: How come we are not funding more science? Who was behind the science? Who was paying for the science? Politically, who used the existing science for economic gain? I can’t tell you how many times I was conducting an interview with a government agency when a press officer would come on and say the interview had to end. There were road blocks every where I went and there were clear cover ups.
I have every article I’ve ever written on the subject. In 2009 I left Spectrum Magazine, which I helped create to pursue a career in entertainment. A few months later my publisher Evelyn Ain was diagnosed with cancer. In addition to caring for a severely autistic son, she had to fight for her life. The sacrifice unfortunately was the magazine. A lot of the online content wasn’t saved, but we rarely uploaded the entire contents of the magazine online anyway. I was tempted to start scanning articles but then after writing the portion where this guy with absolutely no credentials is attacking David Kirby, I was reminded how ridiculous it all was. He has nothing to stand on other than “consensus science”. He chose to pull from low hanging fruit. Anyone questioning science and medicine can easily be painted as some sort of villain. He refused to acknowledge all the pieces I wrote about children abused in homes, schools and facilities in the United States or the articles I wrote about children with developmental disabilities in 3rd world countries taken from their homes and locked up in cages.
Nor does he mention the rest of my career where I covered, sports, crime, courts and the list goes on. He didn’t bother to look into an award winning series I did on cyber pedophiles way before there was a Chris Hanson and To Catch A Predator. He doesn’t mention all the amazing people I worked with along the way and all the journalists I had the pleasure of mentoring and growing with, among a few Joseph Kellard, Kim Acevedo, Katherine Burns Olson, Kelly Dobson, Anthony Rifalato, Elizabeth McBreen, Keith Grant, Chris Munzing, Alan Krawitz, Warren Woodberry Jr., Hector Flores, Nicole Falco and those that mentored me like Mark Kriegel, John Hanc, John Marzulli, David Weir, Barry Baum, Neil Abner, Michael Katz, Vic Ziegel, Bill Mitchell, Paula Evans, Dave Gerardi and many more. I challenge Seth to put together a list of people that still call him for advice or to brainstorm about a piece they are working on. I doubt there is anyone.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Since March I’ve gone back and forth with Seth on twitter. Our differences are primarily his view on comedy and that he is not journalist. At times it was amusing to me how much this guy hated me. He has been obsessed with finding something on me to take me down and score some kind of victory. I felt as long as he was focused on me he wasn’t focused on the comedy community that seemed to need a break from his irresponsible inquisition on comedians. Recently he wrote about the LOS podcast broadcasting inside The Stand. He watched about 20 minutes of footage and determined our employees weren’t doing their job and keeping people safe. He claimed we were violating state and city COVID rules having a live performance inside our venue. Seth can’t be a journalist from his dark room in whatever state he’s in now. Any self respecting journalist knows you can’t do it that way. If you want to truly get a story you have to be in the trenches. You have to physically be there any way you can. He had no witnesses, nor did he have sources who were there, no quotes, just his beady little eyes locked on a screen. You can’t calL yourself a journalist and put out a piece that claims your words are factual when you have nothing to support the claims. He was grasping at straws to out us any way he could. He’s content to write about something he deemed was an infraction but doesn’t see the bigger problem at hand.
New York is lacking leadership. It’s a real problem. He assumes we want to open our business at 25% and greedily make money by throwing caution to the wind and having a podcast ongoing while people eat. What he doesn’t realize is our business is not making money. We opened with the goal of trying to keep our staff employed and together. We’re trying not to discontinue healthcare to employees who qualify and desperately need it now more than ever. We’re doing our best to stay afloat so that there is a future. If the state told us to close we would. Just like we did in March. If remaining closed was an option we would have done it, but it’s not. We’ve got a governor who has a hard-on for comedy clubs because of a few bad apples. I get it, but it sucks for everyone else. We’re talking about hundreds of jobs at stake while we watch bowling alleys open at 50% capacity.
Seth would point to consensus science just like he did with autism as to why Bowling Alleys are open. Is it science when every state seems to be making up the rules as they go along? 20 people and a comedian on stage in a room that holds 10 times that amount, how is that putting anyone any more at risk? Explain to us so that we can understand and don’t just say science says. It’s not an acceptable answer. There’s clearly politics at play here. It something you can see with open eyes if you take off the science blinders.
I doubt anyone made it to the end of this piece. But if you did I want to thank you. You are a trooper. Hopefully anyone who has followed the drama understands where I’m coming from and how Seth is poison to an industry that doesn’t need him. He’s not Ronan Farrow. He’s not an activist. He’s certainly not a journalist. So before you go reading anything he writes and think its fact just remember it’s all coming from a place of hate.
As a special treat I’ll leave you with an excerpt from yet another one of Seth’s disturbing poems:
