Thomas Morton moved to New York on September 10th 2001, to attend NYU, since then he has spent the last two decades balls-deep in the asphalt trenches of gonzo journalism, cementing his status as a foundational pillar of the old-school, ink-stained Vice magazine machine. Walking through the door via a summer internship back in 2004, Morton carved out a legacy by throwing himself directly into the crosshairs of American absurdity—infiltrating religious cults, eating himself sick in competitive binge-eating rings, and boldly becoming the first non-Juggalo ever to document the surreal subculture circus at the Gathering of the Juggalos. As Vice mutated from a raw-nerve print zine into an online leviathan and video powerhouse (VBS.tv, HBO’s Vice news magazine, and VICELAND’s pop-anthropology odyssey Balls Deep), Morton was its grinning, fearless shock-troop correspondent, chasing down stories from the Brazilian Amazon to the front lines of weird America. After a fifteen-year run that ended with the empire’s corporate collapse, Morton didn’t just fade into the background; he turned the lens back on the very institution that birthed him, hosting the shattering 2024 documentary It’s Not Funny Anymore: Vice to Proud Boys, which hunted down the dark, radicalized pipeline connecting his old mentor and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes to extremist right-wing infamy.
we recently sat down for a cold-call chin-wag on behalf of Chainsaw—our loud, jagged antidote to the sanitized corporate husk that Vice eventually devolved into—we didn’t even bother unpacking the stale magazine lore; instead, we just let the tape roll on a sprawling, unfiltered bender of a conversation that pinballed wildly from the eccentric quirks of regional American dialects to the glorious, battered garage-punk sounds of the Gris Gris and King Khan and the Barbecue Show. It was the kind of loose, greasy-spoon dialogue that reminds you why words both spoken and written, still matter. We launched Chainsaw precisely to slash through the modern noise and bring back that reckless, unfiltered spirit of 90s and 2000s print rebellion, and looking at the landscape, I honestly don’t see how we could pull this off properly without a heavy-hitter like Thomas in our corner moving forward.
Chainsaw Magazine 