It's public knowledge that Rebel News/Ezra Levant lost both of the recent anti-SLAPP motions against him:
- https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2021/2021onsc1035/2021onsc1035.html
- https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2021/2021onsc1074/2021onsc1074.html
and one of the clear directives of that legislation (now that the intellectual defectives on the bench here in Ontario have finally figured out how the legislation works) is that the unsuccessful plaintiff is responsible for not only his own legal costs, but the full and unabridged amount of the costs of the successful defendant he tried to SLAPP.
I have heard from moderately (un)reliable sources that, in the case of Ezra's failed defamation action against the Al Jazeera news outlet, Al Jazeera is seeking $270,000 in costs; Rebel's counsel has apparently already indicated that his firm was paid over $50,000, which means that, in the end (and barring any major changes due to the inevitable appeal), Ezra/Rebel is quite possibly on the hook for some $320,000, and that doesn't take into account the same logic applied to Ezra's crushed action against Brendan Demelle and the Narwhal News Society, whose numbers would be pure speculation.
In entirely unrelated news, Rebel's David Menzies has apparently been instructed to go out and get himself arrested again, for the sake of another desperate fundraiser.
P.S. I have been advised that Ezra/Rebel will be appealing both smackdowns, which opens up the possibility that Ezra will end up owing substantially more since the anti-SLAPP costs structure applies to appeals as well.
Feel free to do the math.
RUMOURS ... It's worth mentioning that there are (as of yet) unsubstantiated rumours that white supremacy memorabilia enthusiast Keean "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" Bexte bailed on Rebel News because he saw all this money coming in and thought he deserved a larger slice of the pie, only to watch truckloads of all that dosh go (quite legally, apparently) to Ezra and his perpetual legal fees and judgments.
That seems to be a pattern, as Frank Magazine reported back in early 2017 how Rebel Media co-founder Brian Lilley might have jumped ship for the same reason:
In any event, given the amount of carefully-crafted fine print one finds all over Rebel News, it's likely that all of this is perfectly legal; on the other hand, one would certainly understand the quiet grumbling from the pixel-stained wretches toiling away at Der Rebel who watch hundreds of thousands of dollars rolling in month after month, and wondering when they're going to get their share.
9 comments:
The problem is that Ezra's drooling idiots audience will cheerfully pony up the $ like a gambling addict at a slot machine until they run out of money. Then they'll turn into frustrated orang-utans at the console ...
Even if they run out of money and The Rebel goes bankrupt, Ezra just starts his next grift - The Rebelling News Network ...
How does the Rebel have these kinds of cash reserves? The yokels putting $20 bills in KFC buckets can't cover these kinds of six figure judgments, can they?
Ezra doesn't care. Every defeat is just a trigger for another round of appeals. Since "Fight the Fines" now provide the Rebel with a Carte Blanche to raise money for its legal fees and write tax receipts for donations, these defeats are just new opportunities.
It does raise yet another interesting question, though. Ponder the following points.
Ezra has always bragged that the Rebel runs purely on revenue from its readers. To some degree, this is making a virtue of necessity - all their attempts to attract advertising or sponsorships have tanked miserably, and there are no programs that I'm aware of to subsidize sub-par alt-right group video blogs. Nevertheless, it's one of Ezra's proudest boasts.
However, there's nothing to say that a corporation can't be a "reader". Some years ago, the "Ethical Oil Foundation" - one of the other channels running into the coffers - admitted that they would not decline corporate contributions. So one does wonder how much of the Rebel's revenues are provided by Ezra's former clients in the oil and tobacco industries. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that their expensive trips to "cover" and deride UN conferences all seem to focus on anti-environmental or respiratory health issues. Probably just a coincidence.
Cannily, the Rebel doesn't seem to publish funding targets for most of its campaigns. It sets a number of donors which in fundraising terms is completely meaningless. It lets them brag about 15,000 donors, all of whom may have contributed a buck; it also lets them conceal major single, major contributions from donors who'd prefer not to be known. Which is fine, because the Rebel doesn't seem to screen its contributors to avoid conflict of interest.
They'll each individually pony up hundreds of dollars annually to Ezra's "Rebel" and then complain about how 0.0005% of their taxes supported a theatre festival somewhere that featured a play that bothered them.
[And, of course, billion dollar subsidies to the fossil fuels sector or to military missions overseas are not problems for these people at all.]
I really find it hard to believe that the "net value of the Rebel" was EVER "well into seven figures" by any credible method of valuation. In 2017, Ezra was probably pushing a model based on:
- a growth rate based on the first audited year, which of course would be huge. Great to show potential investors, but of course, it flattened shortly after, and then began a long decline as the better writers and smarter readers abandoned it.
- 1n 2017, Ezra would still have been projecting massive advertising and sponsorship revenues. None of that happened; even after the collapse of the Western Standard and the failure of Sun News, Ezra still hadn't figured out that deliberately offending huge chunks of the market isn't a big attractant for advertisers.
Of course, none of us really knows how many paying subscribers The Rebel has, nor how many people might contribute $5 or whatever to one of Ezra’s panic fundraisers. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make some educated estimates of the size of the audience, and get a sense of how much money they could bring in:
The CPC and provincial conservative parties routinely give a nod to The Rebel as a “reputable” source. So that tells us that broadly they have a potential market equivalent to the size of the CPC base - approximately 25% of the Canadian population. For the most part, The Rebel’s “pass the fried chicken bucket” around model is derived from the strategy the CPC uses, and that’s been fairly profitable for the CPC over the years.
Profitable enough to draw 7 figure amounts? Quite possible. Lucrative enough to fund all the shenanigans they get into? Perhaps. Even if it isn’t, I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if any shortfalls are being laundered the Rebel’s way through the conservative dark banking system via various “foundations’ etc.
I wonder about your suggestion that the CPC and provincial conservative parties view The Rebel as a “reputable” source. Ford, Kenney and O'Toole refuse to talk to them; O'Toole was furious when Ezra stitched together a series of e-mails from an O'Toole flunky and claimed it was an "Exclusive Interview".
Given the increase in volume and stridency of their funding pitches and the rapidly declining quality of their personnel (they appear to have promoted all their mumbling, inarticulate Gen-Z camerakiddies to the role of "reporter"), I think they're in trouble, although their new and mysterious partnership with the "Democracy Fund" may save the day. My guess would be corporate and political donations routed through the "Democracy Fund" (providing a corporate tax write off). "Fight the Fines" is only one conduit: you'll note that the objectives of the "Democracy Fund" include the following:
"To advance education by establishing a journalism placement program that provides post-secondary journalism students with opportunities to obtain on-the-job skills training required to complete their education program."
So without even the pretense of "Fight the Fines", the "Democracy Fund" can underwrite the Rebel's payroll costs and expenses related to this new crop of "journalism students" directly through grants or contributions.
It's a wonderful little closed loop. Disgusting, sleazy, and quite possibly legal.
Last commenter: I did write a recent piece about how Ezra is alienating even those batshit crazy conservatives he could have tried to appeal to:
https://canadiancynic.blogspot.com/2021/06/yeah-about-those-burning-bridges.html
The S.S. Ezra is getting to be a very small boat, indeed.
Anonymous @ 9:33:
Conservatism has become deeply cynical. I doubt that the parties themselves see The Rebel as "reputable", but they think their followers are stupid enough to believe The Rebel if they are told that The Rebel is reliable often enough.
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