The Internet has a new whipping boy tonight as "Three Cups of Tea" author Greg Mortenson has pulled a James Frey and decided to make up stories to embellish his book and increase the impact they had on the rest of the book. Apparently real life wasn't real enough for Mortenson and now the the Internet is tearing him a new one. Needless to say, thanks to message boards, videos, blogs and comment sections, Mortenson is never going to be heard from in a serious manner again.
Mortenson claimed that he was captured by the Taliban in 1996 and not only somehow escaped but conveniently had this story that fit right into his story about Three Cups of Tea. That's a little convenient. A freebie one might say. That was just the hard life that Mortenson lived. We thought.
CBS News' 60 Minutes investigated the author who has become much more famous through this ordeal and found out that he probably wasn't actually captured by the Taliban. Yeah I'm gonna believe 60 Minutes since it would be very rare to run a story like this on your most widely renowned and trusted news program since Walter Cronkite left the air without reliable sources backing them up. And of course Mortenson is going to defend himself. His career's over if he admits the charges.
Luckily for Mortenson, Oprah didn't read his book or she'd be tearing him a new one like she did Frey.
Mortenson has become the number one Google trend and people are leveling obscenities at him that I can't repeat on a family friendly website like this. Rutgers students likely won't be happy as most honors students had to read his book when they entered the school a couple of years ago. Now if Six Questions of Socrates is fake, I'm gonna fall apart.
Jon Krakauer was one of his earliest backers and pulled his support after one of his stories that launched him to his current $30K per engagement status.
Mortenson is a fraud and his charity's been mismanaged and the Internet is going to have a field day. Just wait for tomorrow. If he doesn't become a meme or just get taken down and made fun of on the Internet by places like 4chan or Reddit or Peatman's Pals or somewhere else, I'll be a monkey's uncle.
This is the end of Greg Mortenson thanks to CBS News. Hopefully these fraud authors will have learned their lessons. If you're not interesting, we don't care about you. And if you make stuff up, we're going to hate you and tear you down. You decide which path you want to take.
Now let's let the Internet have its way.
