Julian Assange likes to boast that WikiLeaks has a “perfect record” of “accurate vetting.” But if Assange’s Twitter account is any indication, Assange can’t even spot a ridiculous parody of “edginess” when he sees it.




Rob Rousseau, a freelance writer from Montreal, created some fake Ricky Gervais quotes and posted them to Twitter earlier today. They’re the kind of thing that a dull middle school student might find thought-provoking. Well, a dull middle school student and Julian Assange.

The WikiLeaks founder saw one of the fake Gervais quotes and posted it to his own Twitter account, apparently in earnest.


“It bothers me that the intelligence of animals is measured by how willing they are to obey the commands of a human,” the fake quote says. “Same goes for students in schools, innit?”

In reality, the graphic was made by Rousseau to show just how tired and unoriginal the entire Ricky Gervais schtick is. This “deep thought” was literally just scraped from Reddit. Gizmodo reached out to Rousseau to ask him about what it feels like to have your own ridiculous parody of Gervais repurposed as some kind of profound truth.

“Like everyone, I find his ‘Do I offend you, yeah?’ persona to be incredibly irritating, so I thought it would be funny to make some fake standup shots using obnoxious, banal posts I found on some of the more edgelord subbreddits (/r/atheism, /r/Im14andthisisdeep mainly),” Rousseau told Gizmodo by email.


“I have no idea how it made its way to Assange, but he apparently finds Gervais’ comedy indistinguishable from edgy Tumblr content written by teenagers, which is amazing,” said Rousseau.

Rousseau made others, including one about how it makes more sense to idolize The Joker than it does to idolize Batman.


Again, Assange loves to brag about just how perfect he is when it comes to vetting the material he releases. But when you can’t spot an obvious parody, you might not be equipped with the best bullshit detector. Being able to sniff out bullshit is kind of important when you’re helping to swing elections and sow chaos at the highest levels of government.




Gizmodo has reached out to Assange on the off chance that he’s actually in on the joke. Is it possible that Assange understands that Rousseau is making fun of this “edgy” thinking? For what it’s worth, Rousseau doesn’t think Assange understands that the image is meant to make fun of Gervais and this immature way of understanding the world.


“There’s no way Assange is tweeting it ironically,” said Rousseau. “Look at the comments, his followers are like ‘Wow, so true’ etc.”