Potemkin Media, revisited.

In my continuing quest to chronicle the inexorable disintegration of the dumpster fire that is Rebel Media, we check in to see yet another rodent has fled the S.S. Crapfest.

From only last month, we still had 13 bloviating hacks hanging on for dear life:

And today? Ruh roh ...

Why, yes, it is the financially-incapacitated Katie Hopkins who's swiped a lifeboat and disappeared into the distance.

At this point, it's just a matter of time.

... and in closing, send money.

Another day, another plaintive screed from, this time, Rebel Media's Sheila Gunn Reid, holding out her chicken bucket and begging the rubes ^H^H^H^H^H supporters to toss in a few dollars so she can go to Poland and yell questions from the other side of a fence at diplomats who haven't the slightest interest in what she has to say:

But all this raises the obvious question -- after all this time, why isn't Rebel Media self-sustaining? After all, they've had over three years to develop and implement some sort of business model and yet, week after week, we hear Ezra or Sheila or David "The Menses" Menzies exhorting the yokels to open their wallets over and over and ... well, you get the idea. So what's the problem here?

One would think a viable business model for Der Rebel would be to simply sell advertising. After all, with over (as Ezra likes to boast) a million YouTube subscribers, surely one could appreciate that The Rebel has developed an audience, so why aren't advertisers lining up at Ezra's door to hand over cash for some prime real estate at Rebel's home page? And therein lies the problem.

I believe it's safe to say that Ezra and his assorted collection of racists, bigots, white nationalists and anti-Semites has become so unspeakably toxic that no one is willing to take a chance on being associated with them. I believe it's safe to say that Ezra had the opportunity to actually become an alternative media outlet (catering to the intellectually shortchanged, mind you) if only he had managed to restrain himself and not lash out savagely at anyone and everyone that crossed his path. Sadly, that was not to be, and The Rebel has, at this point, pretty much burned every conceivable bridge in terms of attracting paying advertisers. Ever.

Don't believe me? Take a look at Rebel Media's current home page, where you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the link for potential advertisers:

and if you click on that link, well, this is what you get:

That's right ... even Rebel Media appears to have accepted that they are so toxic, there's no point in even trying to attract advertisers.

Rebel Media loves to brag about its independence, that it takes no government money, and never will. But none of that principle ever prevented Ezra from making money off of advertisers; no, what prevented him was his inability to control himself, to the point where no one wants anything to do with him.

So the next time someone at The Rebel passes around the chicken bucket for donations, perhaps the proper response should be, "If you people weren't such reprehensible yobs, maybe you wouldn't need to be constantly asking us for help."

It's just a thought.

AFTERSNARK: The toxicity of the Rebel Media brand can be seen here, wherein the grownups at CFB Borden want nothing to do with even accepting charity from the Rebelers. It gets even funnier when a second military charity takes a pass.

Man, that's gotta sting.

The Rebel Media version of "Where Are They Now?"

Given recent entertaining developments, it behooves your humble correspondent to explain the etymology of the word "behooves." No, wait, that's not right. Actually, at this time, it seems only appropriate to take a look at the history of a number of ex-Rebelers to see what they're up to these days. And it is not a pretty sight.

Let's start with Gavin "10 Things I Hate About Goddamn Motherfucking Jews" (or something like that) McInnes. It appears that, with the FBI finally designating his Proud Boys as an "extremist group", Gavin has decided that pathetic, abject cowardice is the better part of valour, and has bailed (possibly to avoid legal liability, but that's just a guess).

Next up, the always coruscating Laura Loomer, she of the self-inflicted slashed tire:

Recently, Laura made news by finally getting her sorry ass permanently suspended from Twitter:

Moving on, we have the one, the only, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon ... that would be "Tommy Robinson", whose main claim to fame is to having been in prison once, and being too stupid to not understand you shouldn't break the law twice exactly the same way:

More recently, Tommy was refused a visa to enter the US to demean and denigrate Muslims. The U.S. will never appreciate the bullet it dodged.

And now, our next contestant ... say hello to the always-execrable Lauren Southern who, mixed in with all the other ways she is a total bitch, managed to be so utterly racist that she was banned from entering the UK:

And to round out this collection of grifters, hucksters and snake oil salespeople, we finally get around to Faith Goldy who, while she's somehow managed to avoid being arrested, charged, indicted or the like, managed to be too neo-Nazi for even Rebel Media (if that is even physically possible):

Check back in a few months from now to see if the police blotter has grown at all.

BONUS TRACK: Apparently, Tommy Robinson gets around:

The continuing collapse of Rebel Media.

It's been almost a year since your humble correspondent documented the sad yet entertaining collapse of Ezra Levant's boutique media outlet, Rebel Media, which behooves us to check in on same and see how much further Canada's "Rebel Commander" has fallen. It is not a pretty sight.

From 16 vacuous yobs as of the end of January of 2018, we are now down to 13:

but that doesn't begin to tell the story.

It's educational to identify the rats that fled the foundering S.S. Rebel -- Tommy Robinson (possibly destined for a UK prison in the near future), Eric Duhaime, Christopher Wilson, Alexander Jones, Mark Latham, John Cardillo, Lucy Brown, and the utterly vacuous Holly Nicholas, replaced by a new assortment of hacks, shills and propagandists. But this is still not the whole story.

As before, it's instructional to look a bit closer to see which of the above 13 can legitimately claim to be producing anything on a regular basis, and the picture is not a healthy one.

Rebeler Rob Shimshock does not seem to be holding up his end productivity-wise, producing only six pieces in the last five months:

Even worse, Rebeler Tanveer Ahmed seems to have gone missing in action sometime last July:

Even superstar acquisition and bankruptcy looking for a place to happen Katie Hopkins seems to have fallen off a cliff sometime last month:

As for new arrivals, well, say hello to smoldering hunk of Alberta manhood Keean Bexte:

whose main claim to fame seems to be the love affair with white nationalism required to hang out at Rebel Media these days:

In any event, once one discards the mostly (if not entirely) unproductive "journalists" at Rebel, what one is left with is, charitably, maybe nine people keeping the lights on. This is quite the comedown from the heady days of Ezra bragging about 50 staff members:

One suspects the Rebel Media Christmas party this year is going to be a quiet affair in a Motel 6 in Oshawa, featuring a pre-packaged tray of cold cuts and cheese cubes from Safeway, and a 24-pack of Dr. Pepper to wash it down.

That's if all nine of those people are still there.

AFTERSNARK: It's hilarious to see newbie Keean Bexte sporting the pompous title of "Calgary Mission Specialist." One is reminded of ...

JUXTAPOSE!

Media outlet that relentlessly misinforms millennials now mocks millennials for being misinformed.

P.S.: Send money.

One wonders if diehard supporters of Rebel Media are getting at all tired of their donations being used to keep Rebelers out of prison.

Well, that didn't last long.

Whoopsie:

Being "de-platformed" to deprive someone of their right to free speech ... yeah, that must just fucking suck.

AFTERSNARK: I will leave it to my readers to ponder the irony of someone who runs his own media outlet and brags of over one million YouTube Subscribers of being "de-platformed."

FURTHER MUSINGS: What are the chances that this cruise was a total fiction from the beginning, meant only for political propaganda purposes after it was cancelled due to possible "violence by extremist opponents?"

I'm just asking.

WHILE WE'RE HERE, there's a certain hypocrisy in Rebel Media whining about being de-platformed, given that Rebel has a long and inglorious history of boycotting anyone that happens to disagree with them. One can see their history of boycotts against (among others) Tim Hortons, Earls Restaurant, Porter Airlines, and Whistler Blackcomb.

It takes some nerve to announce one boycott after another, then whine about being "de-platformed." I suspect the irony is lost on some of these people.