Reading this article, the story sounds pretty wild. But I spent a weird amount of time with Martin Shkreli, and I’m not surprised the journalist fell in love w him

A few years back my team built an app called Blab. It was like clubhouse before clubhouse.

When he first joined the app I had no idea who he was. I just saw that his live streams instantly had 3-4K viewers. More than anyone on our tiny platform.

I googled him and it came up: “Martin Shkreli, most hated man in America”

I assumed he was bad news
And he was... but also he wasn’t.

He was a douchebag, but he was in on the joke. He was a dick, but he was also very entertaining.

In the mornings he would live stream himself analyzing stocks or walking through drug discovery pathways.
In the afternoon he’d let people call in and debate him live on air. A CNN reporter tried to get him to go on TV, he refused, and said debate me here on Blab, no edits, no tv time limits.

At night he’d host late night convos - and eventually fall asleep on cam
The guy was a pain in the ass but man he drove traffic.

We had big celebs like Tony Robbins, the Jonas brothers etc... he outperformed them all.

At one point he was bringing in 100k users per month directly to his channel. And Bc he was so entertaining, they stuck.
He also attracted a group of hackers who decided to DDOS us like crazy for 2 months because we allowed him on the platform.
He did some wild shit on blab.

One day he had to testify in front of congress.

His fans held a watch party of 4-5k attendees. In congress he just pleaded the 5th, but as soon as he left the courthouse, he called into the blab and started making fun of congressmen
You look at the guy and wonder - why would this journalist who was married fall in love with the pharma bro in prison?

But I saw it everyday. The guy has a weird charm. He was streaming live video on our app 10 hours a day, and people were hooked. So I’m not surprised!
Rip @blab !

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Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.
This is NONSENSE. The people who take photos with their books on instagram are known to be voracious readers who graciously take time to review books and recommend them to their followers. Part of their medium is to take elaborate, beautiful photos of books. Die mad, Guardian.


THEY DO READ THEM, YOU JUDGY, RACOON-PICKED TRASH BIN


If you come for Bookstagram, i will fight you.

In appreciation, here are some of my favourite bookstagrams of my books: (photos by lit_nerd37, mybookacademy, bookswrotemystory, and scorpio_books)