He can stop making videos on The Completionist unless you really want to see someone cosplaying as a journalist list things he suspects the guy did but can’t prove (beyond the first video). There’s a reason that an actual journalist would want to get actual numbers behind the golf tournament, for instance, or consult with someone to see if maybe it’s totally ordinary for signatures to be missing from documents because they were e-filed, or perhaps make sure that their legal definitions came from something other than just the first hit that they found with a quick Google, but maybe that timeline doesn’t work for the World of Tanks promo slot he sold for his video. If the “bait” that he fell for in Jirard’s response was as damning as implied, it might be in his best interest to stop making videos about The Completionist.
What’s the factual issue with what he said about Jirard? Like for example, would you say any of the big blockquotes in this story are specifically untrue?
Edit: Buried way down in the thread is my response after watching the video. TL;DR I stopped watching when after faffing around for 30 minutes, the guy finally got to the point, and almost immediately said with a straight face, “The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error.”
Click the link in my comment. There is room for almost all of what he said to be true, but he didn’t prove it, and that’s a big problem, because there’s also room all of it or nearly all of it to be false. It’s why an actual reporter would get someone on the record to confirm a fact, consult with an expert, and be sure that the things they think are damning are actually damning. Meanwhile, he and OrdinaryGamers may have made some legal faux pas in the process of putting up videos that are sensationalist for clicks. Again, this doesn’t mean that their allegations are false. But it’s so, so important to actually prove it, because if they’re wrong, lies travel faster than the truth, and if they ever make a retraction (I doubt it), fewer people will actually hear it.
I asked about the specific claims in the story I linked to.
Claim #1 can be verified by watching Jirard’s video
Claim #2 can be verified by watching Jirard’s video
Claim #3 is a simple statement of logic, no factual assertion
Claim #4 is a statement of what’s in Jirard’s video, and an argument about how the law works, no factual assertion beyond what’s in the video
Claim #5 is a simple statement of logic (predicated on what’s in Jirard’s video)
Claim #6 is an assertion about what Jirard claims “constantly”; hard to verify without watching literally everything Jirard has published
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl’s you’re talking about. Your answer doesn’t give me a ton of confidence that you’re being precise in your allegations about Karl.
I haven’t watched your video and don’t plan to for a little while because of time reasons, but I’ll take a look. I am curious on the topic (why I asked you the question I did.) The only other thing I’ll say on the topic is, Karl’s been on the receiving end of a $100k+ lawsuit already from the subject of one of his videos; it’s possible that he’s saying irresponsible things without consulting with his lawyer who would otherwise advise him not to, but I think it’s unlikely.
I’ll start you off by saying that his “textbook definition of charity fraud” is not from a textbook, and you’ll find that and many other answers in the video I linked you. It’s long, but it’s chapter coded with timestamps, and while I didn’t skip it, the author gives you a sizable chunk on tax law that you can skip if it’s too dry.
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl’s you’re talking about. Your answer doesn’t give me a ton of confidence that you’re being precise in your allegations about Karl.
As far as I can tell, the only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that. Even that has a reasonable explanation from a legal perspective, and even that answer may not be good enough for the people who donated to Open Hand. As someone who just wanted to know the truth, whatever it was, there was no smoking gun in the next two Jobst videos I watched, and that’s the problem. Legally, the video I linked gets into far more about what they shouldn’t have said and why Jirard’s video was definitely heavily advised and/or drafted by actual lawyers (which even us non-experts suspected, even if we didn’t know why) who may have set up Jobst to fall for a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately sue him.
These two and a half videos from Jobst (I got fed up with his “this response is the worst thing ever” video) are the first I’ve ever watched from him, because it came up in my recommendations, and his reputation around Billy Mitchell and Wata preceded him. What I saw led me to believe that perhaps he just needs to be the guy who exposes people’s scummy secrets, but maybe this one actually ended before it got truly juicy, because life isn’t always as dramatic as what gets written for television, and then he just had to fill time in extra videos. Either way, I was not a fan of what I saw and decided to never watch a certain YouTuber again based on his videos; it just wasn’t Jirard…oh, and ordinary gamers was probably worse than Jobst.
he only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that
The assertion was that Jirard had confirmed that some of the money was spent on things that weren’t charity, and that the explanations Jirard gave for why it hadn’t been given to charity after years had passed were nonsense. All of that depends just on Jirard’s statements.
That said, I can buy the idea that there were other allegations in the video that shouldn’t have been made because they’re not provable; I’ll watch your video.
a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately counter-sue
Counter-sue? Karl is suing Jirard? When did this happen?
There were no legal threats from Karl’s side to get lost in. There were statements about Jirard’s conduct, but no threats. I’m suddenly a lot more skeptical about what you’re saying, although I’ll still watch the video.
Okay, I’ve seen enough; I made it to 33:12. This video is way longer than it needs to be; Karl made some pretty specific allegations, which do line up with the legal definition of charity fraud (which is laid out in clear legalese in the video), if they’re true. The most critical part is the way Jirard repeatedly on stream made very specific statements about where the money was going to go, or had gone, that turned out not to be true by his own later admission. The video could have started at 28:29 with “what is fraud, and did it happen,” and done at most a couple minutes’ Cliffs Notes for the rest.
I waited and waited for this to be addressed.
At 31:02, he artfully excerpts a statement from Jobst saying the behavior was “unethical and almost certainly illegal,” by saying only the “certainly illegal” part. Those are two very different statements, and this was the first time my whoa-hold-the-fuck-up meter started to register.
At 31:30, he airs one of the statements by Jirard that’s not really an issue, and explains that as a general statement it’s not really an issue. How about the statements Karl took issue with? I was back in waiting mode.
At 33:04, he says, “The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error.”
Shut the fuck up Mr. Lawyer Man. You can’t make a whole half hour lead up about why the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding and what a great position Jirard is in since he never actually did any fraud, and then just casually drop that “Oh yeah and those the times he lied about where the money had gone he probably just made a mistake and it’s not a big deal.” Especially since part of the defense is, well we were waiting before we actually gave the money for it to be enough to be able to do X Y Z fancy thing.
I am not a lawyer. There may be some additional explanation that clarifies why they were “obvious miscommunications.” But I saw enough to satisfy my curiosity.
I think I got so mad that I spent half an hour of my life watching this, that I replied to myself. But my response (after watching most of the video) is up there.
Often, when I am covering a topic I lack familiarity or specificity with, I bring in an outside source—in the case of nonprofits, that meant talking to sources like lawyers and financial experts on the challenges that can face charities. (Lawyers, it should be noted, often don’t speak in absolutes about specific situations when talking to media outlets.)
Jobst didn’t do that, essentially meaning he was interpreting the documentation himself.
Citation needed. I don’t know that Karl consulted with a lawyer before making this video, but given that he’s right in the middle of getting sued and has spent over $100k on legal fees defending himself in that lawsuit, it’d be pretty surprising if he didn’t talk to his lawyer before making this video, but instead just sort of sprung it on him as a little surprise.
I’m curious what Ernie’s reason is for asserting specifically that he didn’t talk to a lawyer about his video.
I can take or leave Jobst’s claims of embezzlement—I think while Khalil probably spoke a bit too loosely during IndieLand, the format is a livestream and does lead to a lot of loose talk. Dude is filling time for hours, because that’s how the format works, and that lends itself to slip-ups. It doesn’t seem like he was being intentionally misleading, for the most part. But I do think that if Khalil decides to do another livestream like this in the future, he should probably cut out the middleman. It’s clear that what they were building towards struggled from an execution standpoint, and the use of a charity tied directly to Khalil has raised too many questions.
By saying that he’d donated money he hadn’t donated, he was just… filling time on his stream? “For the most part?” Doesn’t that aspect of the issue deserve a little more attention than this one dismissive paragraph?
(Edit: I expanded the quote to give full context. Contrast this against how Karl “not a bad journalist – far from it” Jobst actually showed quite a few exact clips of Jirard saying the things he was referencing to support his arguments with specifics, instead of just making vague statements about “slip-ups.”)
I have more I’d like to say about other things in this article, but honestly most of it is just beside the point. Like I said, the actual situation is actually extremely extremely simple. Seeing these huge videos or articles, which talk about charity fraud but spend almost all their runtime dealing at incredible length with issues other than “Did Jirard commit the technical definition of charity fraud?”, actually specifically emphasizing that it wasn’t a big deal if he did for the short time they touch on it, seems very weird.
(Edit: I could actually sympathize a lot more with the “Karl went too far” narrative before I spent so much time on things people are posting in this thread. It’s definitely true that he’s not a journalist and he makes money running a flashy Youtube channel; I could easily believe that he publicly attacked a couple of genuinely awful people like Billy Mitchell and it worked well, and he sort of got carried away looking for the next target, and then went too far in his Completionist video. I’d only ever really heard Karl’s side of the story, and I didn’t care about the topic enough to look into it any more. But these two attempts at defending what Jirard did are genuinely ridiculous.)
Video: Whoa whoa whoa, there’s a very technical definition of charity fraud; you have to operate a charity and make false statements about what you’re doing with the money (subject to a few additional caveats and restrictions.) This is a terribly irresponsible thing Jobst is saying without having proof of it or understanding the law as well as I do.
You: “There was no smoking gun” “He didn’t prove it”
Also video: Those times Jirard clearly said untrue things about what was happening to the money, well hey, anyone could make that type of obvious innocent mistake
The first video showed the money hadn’t moved. Correct, we can observe that from his research. The second video alleged more money was missing, alleged embezzlement and fraud, because he guessed that some money from a golf tournament wasn’t accounted for. The problem here is that he has no hard numbers for how much money, no source to say that something malicious happened and was hidden, etc. Please recognize the difference here.
The video was phrased with reasonable doubt, while often juxtaposed against a tweet from someone to show why a reasonable person would think so.
Update: Moon took down his video, and posted this, saying among other things “Karl is right: I didn’t engage with the entire body of evidence, thereby getting crucial facts wrong.”
He can stop making videos on The Completionist unless you really want to see someone cosplaying as a journalist list things he suspects the guy did but can’t prove (beyond the first video). There’s a reason that an actual journalist would want to get actual numbers behind the golf tournament, for instance, or consult with someone to see if maybe it’s totally ordinary for signatures to be missing from documents because they were e-filed, or perhaps make sure that their legal definitions came from something other than just the first hit that they found with a quick Google, but maybe that timeline doesn’t work for the World of Tanks promo slot he sold for his video. If the “bait” that he fell for in Jirard’s response was as damning as implied, it might be in his best interest to stop making videos about The Completionist.
What’s the factual issue with what he said about Jirard? Like for example, would you say any of the big blockquotes in this story are specifically untrue?
Edit: Buried way down in the thread is my response after watching the video. TL;DR I stopped watching when after faffing around for 30 minutes, the guy finally got to the point, and almost immediately said with a straight face, “The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error.”
Click the link in my comment. There is room for almost all of what he said to be true, but he didn’t prove it, and that’s a big problem, because there’s also room all of it or nearly all of it to be false. It’s why an actual reporter would get someone on the record to confirm a fact, consult with an expert, and be sure that the things they think are damning are actually damning. Meanwhile, he and OrdinaryGamers may have made some legal faux pas in the process of putting up videos that are sensationalist for clicks. Again, this doesn’t mean that their allegations are false. But it’s so, so important to actually prove it, because if they’re wrong, lies travel faster than the truth, and if they ever make a retraction (I doubt it), fewer people will actually hear it.
I asked about the specific claims in the story I linked to.
Claim #1 can be verified by watching Jirard’s video
Claim #2 can be verified by watching Jirard’s video
Claim #3 is a simple statement of logic, no factual assertion
Claim #4 is a statement of what’s in Jirard’s video, and an argument about how the law works, no factual assertion beyond what’s in the video
Claim #5 is a simple statement of logic (predicated on what’s in Jirard’s video)
Claim #6 is an assertion about what Jirard claims “constantly”; hard to verify without watching literally everything Jirard has published
Literally nothing in the story I linked had anything to do with anything not in the public record. I was asking about those specific claims to get a sense of what exact statements of Karl’s you’re talking about. Your answer doesn’t give me a ton of confidence that you’re being precise in your allegations about Karl.
I haven’t watched your video and don’t plan to for a little while because of time reasons, but I’ll take a look. I am curious on the topic (why I asked you the question I did.) The only other thing I’ll say on the topic is, Karl’s been on the receiving end of a $100k+ lawsuit already from the subject of one of his videos; it’s possible that he’s saying irresponsible things without consulting with his lawyer who would otherwise advise him not to, but I think it’s unlikely.
I’ll start you off by saying that his “textbook definition of charity fraud” is not from a textbook, and you’ll find that and many other answers in the video I linked you. It’s long, but it’s chapter coded with timestamps, and while I didn’t skip it, the author gives you a sizable chunk on tax law that you can skip if it’s too dry.
As far as I can tell, the only thing he actually proved was that approximately $600k sat in a bank account that most people probably believed was being moved along more judiciously than that. Even that has a reasonable explanation from a legal perspective, and even that answer may not be good enough for the people who donated to Open Hand. As someone who just wanted to know the truth, whatever it was, there was no smoking gun in the next two Jobst videos I watched, and that’s the problem. Legally, the video I linked gets into far more about what they shouldn’t have said and why Jirard’s video was definitely heavily advised and/or drafted by actual lawyers (which even us non-experts suspected, even if we didn’t know why) who may have set up Jobst to fall for a trap allowing Jirard to legitimately sue him.
These two and a half videos from Jobst (I got fed up with his “this response is the worst thing ever” video) are the first I’ve ever watched from him, because it came up in my recommendations, and his reputation around Billy Mitchell and Wata preceded him. What I saw led me to believe that perhaps he just needs to be the guy who exposes people’s scummy secrets, but maybe this one actually ended before it got truly juicy, because life isn’t always as dramatic as what gets written for television, and then he just had to fill time in extra videos. Either way, I was not a fan of what I saw and decided to never watch a certain YouTuber again based on his videos; it just wasn’t Jirard…oh, and ordinary gamers was probably worse than Jobst.
The assertion was that Jirard had confirmed that some of the money was spent on things that weren’t charity, and that the explanations Jirard gave for why it hadn’t been given to charity after years had passed were nonsense. All of that depends just on Jirard’s statements.
That said, I can buy the idea that there were other allegations in the video that shouldn’t have been made because they’re not provable; I’ll watch your video.
Counter-sue? Karl is suing Jirard? When did this happen?
You’re right, miswording on my part. I got lost in the legal threats back and forth. I’ll correct it.
There were no legal threats from Karl’s side to get lost in. There were statements about Jirard’s conduct, but no threats. I’m suddenly a lot more skeptical about what you’re saying, although I’ll still watch the video.
Okay, I’ve seen enough; I made it to 33:12. This video is way longer than it needs to be; Karl made some pretty specific allegations, which do line up with the legal definition of charity fraud (which is laid out in clear legalese in the video), if they’re true. The most critical part is the way Jirard repeatedly on stream made very specific statements about where the money was going to go, or had gone, that turned out not to be true by his own later admission. The video could have started at 28:29 with “what is fraud, and did it happen,” and done at most a couple minutes’ Cliffs Notes for the rest.
I waited and waited for this to be addressed.
At 31:02, he artfully excerpts a statement from Jobst saying the behavior was “unethical and almost certainly illegal,” by saying only the “certainly illegal” part. Those are two very different statements, and this was the first time my whoa-hold-the-fuck-up meter started to register.
At 31:30, he airs one of the statements by Jirard that’s not really an issue, and explains that as a general statement it’s not really an issue. How about the statements Karl took issue with? I was back in waiting mode.
At 33:04, he says, “The times where Jirard has stated that funding has occurred might be obvious miscommunications or simple misstatements. Human error.”
Shut the fuck up Mr. Lawyer Man. You can’t make a whole half hour lead up about why the whole thing is a huge misunderstanding and what a great position Jirard is in since he never actually did any fraud, and then just casually drop that “Oh yeah and those the times he lied about where the money had gone he probably just made a mistake and it’s not a big deal.” Especially since part of the defense is, well we were waiting before we actually gave the money for it to be enough to be able to do X Y Z fancy thing.
I am not a lawyer. There may be some additional explanation that clarifies why they were “obvious miscommunications.” But I saw enough to satisfy my curiosity.
I think I got so mad that I spent half an hour of my life watching this, that I replied to myself. But my response (after watching most of the video) is up there.
I like Ernie Smith’s take:
https://tedium.co/2023/12/12/the-completionist-open-hand-foundation-nonprofit-context/
Citation needed. I don’t know that Karl consulted with a lawyer before making this video, but given that he’s right in the middle of getting sued and has spent over $100k on legal fees defending himself in that lawsuit, it’d be pretty surprising if he didn’t talk to his lawyer before making this video, but instead just sort of sprung it on him as a little surprise.
I’m curious what Ernie’s reason is for asserting specifically that he didn’t talk to a lawyer about his video.
By saying that he’d donated money he hadn’t donated, he was just… filling time on his stream? “For the most part?” Doesn’t that aspect of the issue deserve a little more attention than this one dismissive paragraph?
(Edit: I expanded the quote to give full context. Contrast this against how Karl “not a bad journalist – far from it” Jobst actually showed quite a few exact clips of Jirard saying the things he was referencing to support his arguments with specifics, instead of just making vague statements about “slip-ups.”)
I have more I’d like to say about other things in this article, but honestly most of it is just beside the point. Like I said, the actual situation is actually extremely extremely simple. Seeing these huge videos or articles, which talk about charity fraud but spend almost all their runtime dealing at incredible length with issues other than “Did Jirard commit the technical definition of charity fraud?”, actually specifically emphasizing that it wasn’t a big deal if he did for the short time they touch on it, seems very weird.
(Edit: I could actually sympathize a lot more with the “Karl went too far” narrative before I spent so much time on things people are posting in this thread. It’s definitely true that he’s not a journalist and he makes money running a flashy Youtube channel; I could easily believe that he publicly attacked a couple of genuinely awful people like Billy Mitchell and it worked well, and he sort of got carried away looking for the next target, and then went too far in his Completionist video. I’d only ever really heard Karl’s side of the story, and I didn’t care about the topic enough to look into it any more. But these two attempts at defending what Jirard did are genuinely ridiculous.)
Taking issue with how Jobst constructed his videos to attack Jirard is not the same as defending Jirard.
Jobst: He seems to have committed charity fraud
Video: Whoa whoa whoa, there’s a very technical definition of charity fraud; you have to operate a charity and make false statements about what you’re doing with the money (subject to a few additional caveats and restrictions.) This is a terribly irresponsible thing Jobst is saying without having proof of it or understanding the law as well as I do.
You: “There was no smoking gun” “He didn’t prove it”
Also video: Those times Jirard clearly said untrue things about what was happening to the money, well hey, anyone could make that type of obvious innocent mistake
The first video showed the money hadn’t moved. Correct, we can observe that from his research. The second video alleged more money was missing, alleged embezzlement and fraud, because he guessed that some money from a golf tournament wasn’t accounted for. The problem here is that he has no hard numbers for how much money, no source to say that something malicious happened and was hidden, etc. Please recognize the difference here.
The video was phrased with reasonable doubt, while often juxtaposed against a tweet from someone to show why a reasonable person would think so.
Update: Moon took down his video, and posted this, saying among other things “Karl is right: I didn’t engage with the entire body of evidence, thereby getting crucial facts wrong.”
Noted. Then perhaps no legal faux pas or reason for him to stop making videos about The Completionist.