GARBAGE: The Daily Beast publishes hitpiece attacking Tim Pool over someone's cat

YouTuber and “left-leaning” journalist Tim Pool has become the subject of some odd controversy over the fate of his website, Subverse (later SCNR, pronounced “scanner”) after Pool and two of his business partners, Emily Molli and Rocco Castoro, had a falling out.

Leading with an incendiary headline, the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer describes how Pool’s website collapsed “amid allegations he took a cat hostage.” But the real story, as Sommer himself chronicles, is far from interesting – detailing interpersonal, behind-the-scenes drama that is of little interest to anyone, including Pool’s 1.24 million-strong following on YouTube.

Counting myself as an occasional viewer and a curator of weird and interesting happenings on the Internet, the headline piqued my interest. But it let me down. The kidnapped cat story mentioned in the headline is all thunder, signifying nothing.

The most interesting (or seemingly interesting) thing about the story happens when Emily Molli, a journalist, in the middle of filming the Jan. 6 riot when she receives an urgent voice mail from Pool demanding she call him back. Sommer writes:

“You need to call me back right now,” a person whose voice closely resembles Pool’s said in the message, which was shared with The Daily Beast. “I don’t know what you did, but this is beyond serious.”

It might be serious to those involved in the story, but it isn’t of any business to the reader, regardless of who they may be. The issue in question relates to a cryptic tweet Castoro had made about the trio’s business, in which the former Pool confidante threatened to make a labor dispute against Pool over how he ran their company, which the Daily Beast gleefully details, much to no one’s interest. Pool then removed Molli and Castoro’s access to their jointly-controlled YouTube channel.

Sommer writes:

In a labor complaint filed in California, Castoro alleges that Pool “made irrational and angry threats and demands,” demanding that Molli give him the footage Molli shot of the riot. Castoro told The Daily Beast that Molli shot footage during the riot of several Pool associates, including [Alex] Jones.

“We can only assume he did not want something specifically that was happening at the Capitol to be filmed by Emily that day,” Castoro writes in the labor complaint.

For her part, Molli said she refused to visit Pool’s house to pick up her cat, fearing that Pool was “going to try and take my footage.”

That doesn’t make any sense. You can make copies of video footage.

Molli told the Daily Beast that she tried to regain custody of the cat by asking Ian Crossland, who works with Pool, to bring her cat to her. He refused and told her to swing by and pick it up.

“She is in good hands until you take her,” Crossland allegedly said.

Molli refused to go to his house, fearing some unspecified threat. The Daily Beast makes the implication that Pool, like tens of millions of Americans, is known to own firearms. The publication seems to suggest that Pool may behave irrationally in the event of a confrontation with Molli, quoting Molli’s characterization of him as being “terrified of cities, because he thinks antifa is going to attack him.”

She also says she refused to send anyone else to pick up the cat, because “Tim freaks a lot of people out, and telling people you have to go to Tim’s compound in the middle of Maryland freaks people out.”

“I live in the DC area, the political hotspot, and am not worried about antifa,” Pool told the author, who details how communication between Pool and Molli broke down due to their ongoing civil dispute.

She eventually got the cat back. But I’ll never get back the time I spent reading the article or writing this piece.