Illustration by Johnny Ryan
Back in 2009, VICE celebrated its 15th anniversary by putting out a 1994-themed issue of our magazine and pretending it was actually a lost issue from 1994.
Yesterday, in 2015, YourNewsWire.com, a vaguely paranoid website, published a post about an “eerie 1994 article taken from VICE magazine,” featuring a cartoon by the incomparable Johnny Ryan that shows Beavis and Butthead in turbans flying planes into the Twin Towers. The site calls calls it “eerie” because the assumption is that “What Is Al Qaeda?” really is something VICE wrote in 1994. Says YourNewsWire:
Videos by VICE
Could the article with accompanying picture, written some 7 years before the actual September 11th attacks, be some kind of hint of what was to come by the powers that be? Or is it all a massive coincidence?
Someone call Alex Jones!
Someone did call Alex Jones, all the way back in 2012. The “thought criminal against big brother” did a whole segment on his show about the 100 percent not real article we wrote in 2009 that struggled to figure out what the connection between VICE and 9/11 might be.
What made that whole episode so funny was that Jones wasn’t the first to fall for it. Back in 2011, a group called “Pilots for 9/11 Truth” got wind of our connection to the perpetrators of the largest act of terrorism in human history. Apart from the fact that it implied that we at VICE were in some way guilty of mass murder, that was funny too.
But it’s starting to get less funny. A while ago, we stuck a note at the bottom of the original fake parodic article cluing confused readers in to the fact that we’re pulling shenanigans. In order to find a way to get tricked again, YourNewsWire author Sean Adl-Tabatabai dug up a six-year-old hard copy of the magazine (which didn’t have a note, of course) and took a photo of it. At some point he apparently went online and found one of our articles that explained the joke, but it appears he doesn’t believe us.
We don’t know how to make this clearer: That article was written in 2009. At the time, VICE thought it would be funny to pretend it was written in 1994. Or, to put it another way: The article where we “predicted” 9/11 is faker than the human suit George W. Bush wears to disguise his reptilian form. Got it?
But that article isn’t going anywhere. People can keep falling into that trap all they want. This isn’t fun for us anymore, but we’re masochists.
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