Tony Ortega and The Underground Bunker

Tony Ortega is a former employee of the Village Voice—a publication which found itself in hot water when it was revealed they’d been advertising the services of known sex-traffickers in their seedy ‘Backpage’ section.

Ortega now runs the Underground Bunker blog. Billing itself as the go-to zone for (eye-rolling sensationalized, bigoted, anti-religious) rants, it gives away Ortega’s game. How much clearer can it be that this supposedly “legitimate” blog is nothing but a bully pulpit from which Ortega can indulge his intolerance disguised as social outrage and foist off entirely fabricated nonsense as “breaking news”?

Sources in the journalist community consider Tony Ortega a developer of false leads, and let’s be clear Ortega is not a real journalist and here is why. When evaluating information, we are often admonished to “consider the source.” In the case of Tony Ortega, the warning applies not only to the content of his blogs but also to Ortega personally and the “publications” for which he worked.

Alternative papers are free weekly publications that earn revenue most often through the sale of the kind of advertising that reputable newspapers won’t permit – adult bookstores, strip clubs, classifieds with strong sexual content, etc. In between the trash, they slip in tabloid-style articles, promoted as “edgy” or “daring” when, in truth, they are simply fabrications sensationalized by low credibility writers like Ortega. While some of these “papers” make an effort to rise above the rest, most are gutter rags that all too often define “alternative news” as a slanderous substitution of the facts.

Ortega has spent his life practicing this excuse for journalism within the New Times Media and the Village Voice Media franchise of alternative papers. This platform has suited him well, for Ortega wrote for sleazy tabloids like he was born to it, a disposition that was in evidence as far back as high school.

[Header image: John Rickard]

Tony Ortega: Betrayal

Tony Ortega

It was early in the spring of 2007 when the Village Voice made a huge miscalculation. That was when they installed Tony Ortega as Editor-in-Chief of the alt-weekly rag. The entire paper would fold shortly thereafter — coming as a surprise to absolutely no one familiar with Tony Ortega’s work.

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Muddying the Water

When people think of “arguments,” often their first thought is of shouting matches riddled with personal attacks, at least that’s what you think if you’ve spent any amount of time listening to Tony Ortega. It’s a little ironic, since personal attacks run contrary to rational arguments.

In logic and rhetoric, a personal attack

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The Boarder Guard and the Backpage Trans Illegal

Just when you think there are no new depths of depravity to plumb, Backpage proves once more there is no bar to low for it to sink.

In a story that reads like the sort of poorly written fiction one might find on Tony Ortega’s crackpot blog, it was reported over the weekend that a

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Idiot-syncratic Behavior

There are times when the behavior of a person displays signs of some sort of obsessiveness. In most cases this is something other people might shrug off as odd or eccentric and not think anything else about it.

Of course there are outliers. These are the sorry lot for whom their obsessions provide

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Tony Ortega’s Priorities

This has been an interesting month for Tony Ortega-watchers. From the isolated confines of his homemade blog, what started out as a story of an angry old man furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as a hobby has morphed over the years into that of an angry unemployed man, furiously scribbling his hateful rhetoric as

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Tony Ortega’s “Bunker” Mentality

Throughout history, unscrupulous and unethical operators have employed propaganda to dehumanize their perceived enemies. In this, Tony Ortega’s continued attacks against those he wants you to see as the “enemy” is nothing new.

It’s an age old technique Tony Ortega is using to trick his followers into believing that his perceived enemy is

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Murder Trial’s Damning Backpage Connection

Last week we first reported to you about a man in Boston who killed his young, elementary school teacher wife, and how the prosecution has been seeking to use his texting with Backpage prostitutes to establish a probable timeline of the murder.

While this isn’t the sort of Backpage story we typically cover

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No Free Pass For Bullies and Bigots

Peter Griffiths

A while back we blew the whistle on a strange, rarely seen co-conspirator of Tony Ortega’s named Peter Griffiths. He made the news when he was nailed by authorities in Ireland for publicly harassing members of the Church of Scientology.

The case was a text book example of exactly how Tony Ortega’s

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Tony’s Twitter Tantrum

By now we all know that Tony Ortega, with his impotent rage and seeming endless capacity to be loudly un-self aware in the public square, rushes to capitalize on any and everything he thinks he can fool people into believing supports his narrow-minded world-view.

So it is not wholly unexpected that Twitter’s lone

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Tracking Killers Through Backpage

An explosive new murder case brewing in Boston, Massachusetts is shedding new light on the Backpage criminal empire today.

Cellphone records are being used by local and federal authorities as evidence in proceedings against a man from a sleepy suburb of the city who police say killed his young wife, a beloved elementary

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