Why Is Pando’s Sarah Lacy Leading An Anti-Male Smear Campaign Against Uber?

Sarah Lacy is the owner of Pando, a tech news site that bills itself as “the site of record for Silicon Valley.” For the past couple of years, Lacy and her colleagues have been waging a war against the ridesharing company Uber based primarily on the supposed “misogyny” of its CEO, Travis Kalanick. Pando’s campaign came to a head recently after Uber’s Emil Michael revealed that the company was planning to fund investigations into Lacy and other SJW journalists known for leading harassment campaigns:

According to BuzzFeed News, Uber’s Emil Michael was at a dinner in New York on Nov. 14 where he detailed a plan to spend “a million dollars” to hire a team that would help it fight bad press. Michael reportedly said Uber would be justified in looking into the personal lives and families of journalists in order to strike back. The executive apparently believed the dinner was an off-the-record event, though BuzzFeed said it was never told not to report on the dinner.

In the typical fashion of SJWs, Lacy panicked, claiming that Uber was targeting her children, and even went so far as to hire a bodyguard. The story has become so big that Senator Al Franken (D-MN) sent a letter to Kalanick demanding to know more about Uber’s “smear campaign” against Pando. The SJW tech media has closed ranks around Lacy; even Valleywag, whose scrapes with Pando are well known, came out against Uber.

Lacy’s histrionics are yet another example of the hypocrisy of SJW journalists. It’s perfectly acceptable for writers like Lacy, The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey, Jezebel’s Jia Tolentino, or Gawker’s Dayna Evans to ruin peoples’ lives with politically correct lynch mobs, but when their own tactics are turned against them, these fearless reporters suddenly cry foul. While there are fair criticisms to be made of the way Uber and other Silicon Valley start-ups do business, Lacy’s conduct suggests she and Pando are leading this witch-hunt for more sinister reasons.

Sarah Lacy’s History Of Anti-Male Bigotry

Sarah Lacy has a long record of making bigoted comments against men, white men in particular. A month ago, she published an article decrying Uber’s “asshole culture,” prompted by a French advertising campaign in which Uber used attractive, scantily-clad women to push their service:

We shared this in our News Ticker already, but I still can’t believe that an office of Uber — a company valued at $18 billion and held up as a bastion of modern entrepreneurship — posted an ad that encouraged, played on, and celebrated treating women who may choose to drive cars to make extra money like hookers.

Lacy hysterically claimed that the campaign was evidence that Uber didn’t take the safety of its female drivers and passengers seriously—because men who enjoy attractive women are apparently a threat—and huffily declared that she was deleting the Uber app from her phone because of it:

So, I’m turning that advice on myself: I’ve finally deleted Uber from my phone. For one thing, I increasingly don’t feel safe as a woman taking it, frequently late at night and alone. I’ve got a good solid alternative in Lyft, and life is too precious for me to put mine at risk.

And at some point, an asshole culture just goes too far.

Indeed, Lacy has a well-documented hatred and fear of normal male sexuality. She and other Pando writers have frequently whined about Travis Kalanick’s comments on how Uber has helped him get laid with numerous girls:

…Or maybe people talk about Uber in a douchey way because, when talking to journalists, the CEO of Uber says things that make him sound like a tremendous, unapologetic douche.

Lacy is yet another in the long line of female reporters who complain about the “sexist” or “bro” culture of Silicon Valley startups. In a PandoQuarterly article on “the great big Silicon Valley asshole game,” she attempted to shame Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel for “sexist” comments he made in private emails to his friends. She also harped on the claims of sexual harassment against Tinder CMO Justin Mateen, among other things. In another article, Lacy also praised notorious man-hater Sinead O’Connor’s comments on the so-called “woman problem” in tech.

Paul Carr, Pando’s editorial director and a close friend of Lacy’s, also appears to be motivated by SJW ideology. For example, in an article last month, Carr referred to the owners of Mack Tactics, a Mystery Method ripoff PUA firm, as “gross” (a term used by SJWs for anything that upsets their delicate feelings), and also took umbrage at the firm’s advice that “every encounter with a woman is an opportunity.” Indeed, Carr spent more time attacking Mack Tactics and PUAs then discussing co-founder Ronen Olshansky’s legitimately objectionable public behavior:

Today, Macktactics.com points to a gross-but-unremarkable “dating tips” website but, when Olshansky went in to business with the site’s authors, it had one purpose: to teach men how to use the methods of police hostage negotiation to pick up women. (If you have a strong stomach, you can find most of the previous versions of the site on Archive.org)

It’s clear that both Lacy and Carr’s primary motivation in attacking Uber is not the company’s questionable business practices, but their own hatred and discomfort with healthy male sexuality. Additionally, they also seem to be motivated by envy that they themselves can’t achieve the level of success that Kalanick has. This must be especially bruising to Carr, whose most recent start-up, the subscription magazine NSFWCORP, had to be bought out by Pando after failing to turn a profit in two years of operation.

Sarah Lacy Employs Mark Ames Who Admitted Sex With A 15-Year-Old

One of Pando’s most notable contributors is Mark Ames, best known for co-founding the satirical Moscow biweekly The Exile. In his 2000 memoir The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, co-authored with Matt Taibbi, Ames bragged about having sex with a 15-year old girl:

When I went back into the TV room, Andy pulled me aside with a worried grin on his face.

“Dude, do you realize…. do you know how old that Natasha is?” he said.

“Sixteen?”

“No! No, she’s fif-teen! Fif-teen!” Right then, my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely. I sat down next to her on the couch and fed her another double martini with pineapple juice, and asked her to take off her clothes now, to prepare for the Jacuzzi.

Several paragraphs later, Ames also bragged about how he bullied one of his girlfriends into an abortion by threatening to murder her:

Right then, I stared at Katya with a look—I’m not sure how it appeared to her, but in my mind, I was starting to contemplate two courses of action: murder, or AWOL.

“What will you do, kill me?” she said, laughing nervously.

“Maybe, yeah,” I replied. “I’ll throw you off my balcony. I’ll make it look like an accident.”

She started to cry, but I was relentless. I told her that if she had the child, she would be killing me, so it was an act of self-defense. And if I didn’t kill her, then I would flee Moscow and she’d never find me… I was relentless. I attacked her the Russian way: I wore her down for hours during the night, KGB interrogation-style.

[…]

At 5:30 the next morning, Katya, acting the martyr, quietly slipped out of my apartment, made a beeline to the abortion clinic, and sucked the little fucker out.

Whenever Ames is confronted about these excerpts, he claims that the book was “satire” and that none of the stories in it actually happened. Both Paul Carr and fellow Pando contributor and ex-Exile editor Yasha Levine have repeated this claim:

Ames’s claims that his Exile writings were all fiction—or that he always billed them as fiction—is a lie. Not only does The Exile’s copyright page contain a notice that the book is “nonfiction,” the back cover proudly describes it as “the inside story of how the tabloid came to be.” I scanned these images from my copy of the book:

Additionally, in a 2010 Vanity Fair profile of The Exile, The Wall Street Journal’s Alan Cullison was quoted saying that Ames is “absolutely truthful, even about the most shameful things in his life.” Vanity Fair also quoted Newsweek’s Owen Matthews as saying that Ames “has that quality of brutal honesty.” The profile, frequently touted by Ames and Levine as a good introduction to what The Exile was about, makes no mention of The Exile book’s content being fake.

There are two possible explanations here. One is that The Exile is a true story and Sarah Lacy is employing an admitted statutory rapist who threatens to murder his pregnant girlfriends, which makes her accusations of “misogyny” against Kalanick and Uber absolutely hollow. The other is that the book is made up and Lacy is employing a liar and serial fabricator who has no business writing for any news organization. If the latter, Carr and Levine are also complicit in Ames’s fraud.

Follow The Money

SJW smear campaigns are almost always motivated by money, whether it’s Gawker Media targeting the CTO of their competitor Business Insider for his “offensive” Tweets, to anti-white race hustler Suey Park promoting herself through bogus campaigns like #CancelColbert. In this case, Pando’s investors include Marc Andreessen, who is also a major investor in Uber’s chief competitor, Lyft.

While both Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr have tried to deny the Lyft connection, claiming that Pando shares more investors with Uber, a cursory glance shows that Pando’s coverage of Lyft has been considerably more positive than their Uber coverage. For example, in her article on Uber’s “asshole culture,” Lacy announced that she would be using Lyft instead, and she also wrote a hagiographic piece on Lyft’s business model six months ago. Carr has also written his fair share of articles sucking up to Lyft.

Assuming that Lacy and Carr are telling the truth about money not playing a role in their Uber coverage, it’s clear that they are attempting to play favorites and promote Lyft over Uber because of their SJW beliefs. This is the exact opposite of what journalists are supposed to do.

Turnabout Is Fair Play

Journalism in the social media age is defined by angry witch-hunts lead by aggrieved individuals. As Ryan Holiday wrote in Trust Me, I’m Lying, the Internet-driven rapid-fire news cycle means that publications benefit from making their articles as inflammatory as possible, damn the actual facts. From Pando to Gawker to The Washington Post, most reporting is propaganda in disguise, advanced by damaged writers with axes to grind.

SJW journalists like Sarah Lacy and her hatchet boy Paul Carr view themselves as crusading warriors for truth, when in reality they are just as corrupt—if not more so—than the “dudebros” they lambaste. They position themselves as our moral superiors, arrogantly lecturing us about “sexism” and rooting through the private lives of their enemies, all the while zealously keeping anyone from finding the skeletons in their closets. And as Franken’s intervention shows, there are many in the government who will eagerly help them in their harassment campaigns. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If Lacy and Carr get their way, no one.

If Lacy and her ilk want to engage in hysteria-driven smear campaigns against “racists” and “misogynists,” they should get used to their victims doing the same to them. As it stands, there’s enough evidence to condemn Lacy and Pando without any serious digging. Her own words—and the actions of her employees—show her to be a misandrist bigot and monstrous hypocrite who can dish it out but can’t take it.

Read More: Ezra Klein’s Anti-Male Hatred On Vox

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