Unhappiness in pastor-land? Rebel News may have some unhappy clients.

Trying to make a long story short, I have heard (with no actual corroborating proof) that at least a couple of Rebel News' high-profile and publicity-obsessed "Fight the Fines" clients -- notably the ubiquitous Christian pastors that always seem to make the headlines -- are getting increasingly unhappy about how all of this freedom-loving civil rights idiocy is playing out for them. More specifically, they seem to be finally cluing in as to what the end game is here, and they don't like what they see.

To recap, while Ezra and Rebel News continue to relentlessly describe this campaign as defending civil rights and freedomitude and libertiness and religious freedomness and libertitude, the terms and conditions of the campaign make it absolutely and unambiguously clear that neither Ezra nor Rebel News will, under any circumstances, pay the fines for any of these people. That is, the financial assistance is limited entirely (more on this soon) to handing sacks of cash to lawyers to represent them, but when it comes to the eventual fines, those fines will be fully and completely the responsibility of the respective defendants, and I have heard mutterings that some of the defendants have finally figured this out and don't like where this is headed.

The problem here is that these defendants are -- how can I put this diplomatically? -- having their nutsacks handed to them in court:

so unless something changes drastically, said defendants are going to have to pay any and all fines themselves -- Der Rebel has made that abundantly clear -- and some of those defendants are reportedly unhappy about the possibility that they have, in fact, been used all this time for publicity and fundraising, only to have to suck it up and open their wallets in the end. But wait ... it gets worse.

In addition to possible fines, said defendants may also get towel-snapped in the nads with substantial costs, as can be read here recently, wherein a church in Waterloo, Ontario was assessed legal costs that actually exceeded their fine -- another ugly possibility that said defendants never took seriously until they began losing all these hearings:

But wait ... it gets worse one more time, as there is talk about actual jail time for some of these folks, and you can be sure that if that happens, no one at Der Rebel is going to offer to go to the slammer for any of these people.

Quite simply, from what I hear, the Christian pastors who have been getting all this press were more than happy to be rock stars and get on TV and whine idiotically about religious persecution and a "war on Christianity" on a regular basis, but now that the rulings are coming down against them, they're finally starting to grok how badly this might end for them, and if/when that happens, Ezra and Rebel News have made it shriekingly clear that they will have no obligation to those folks, who are now on their own, having served their purposes as, well, fundraising fodder.

If this is how things turn out, it will be a very expensive lesson indeed.

FAILURE IS INDEED AN OPTION: I'll be returning to this point in my followup to this piece, but it's worth noting that everyone involved with Rebel News' ill-conceived "Fight the Fines" campaign knew -- they absolutely knew -- that any Charter challenge to pandemic lockdown regulations was going to crash and burn. Unless they were complete idiots (not out of the question), they knew this, since it says so right in the first paragraph:

Right there, in the very first paragraph so you can't possibly miss it, you are told (in no uncertain terms) that your rights and freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits ... as can be demonstrably justified ..." In other words, there is no unequivocal or unconditional freedom of any goddamned thing if it can be reasonably shown that curtailing that freedom can be defended in the public interest. And, trust me, I have had numerous people who know what they're talking about tell me that putting limits on dumbfuck religious wingnuts acting as plague rats is pretty easy to justify.

So I'll say that once more, just so there is no confusion -- everyone involved with Rebel's "Fight the Fines" campaign knew from the beginning that they were going to lose these Charter arguments. We'll finish this train of thought tomorrow so ... stay tuned.

IT GETS SO MUCH BETTER: Based on a combination of feedback from commenters and private correspondents, it seems fairly clear that the current crop of defendants in Rebel's "Fight the Fines" campaign are absolutely fucked for three reasons, and here they are.

First, these are not regular defendants that unintentionally violated pandemic lockdown regulations, oh no. Rather, these are arrogant, self-obsessed religious lunatics who took every opportunity to announce, loud and proud, how they were ignoring provincial health regulations because, you know, fuck the courts and they felt like being all freedom and liberty and outright challenging the legal system to do something about so come and get me, copper. And, apparently, the courts are less than impressed with defendants who come before them who already have a history of suggesting that judges can stick their law books sideways. So even before those dingbats show up in court, judges will be well aware of their contemptuous and dismissive attitude to their authority. But it doesn't end there.

As I mentioned above, there was zero chance that any argument based on the Charter was going to succeed, and all of the associated lawyers would absolutely know that, and judges are further unimpressed with lawyers who come before them, spouting arguments that they are well aware are complete crap. The court will normally consider this a truly annoying waste of its time, and is not going to have a lot of sympathy for lawyers who are presenting an argument they clearly know is rubbish. But here's the capper.

From what I've been told, judges are really, really, really unimpressed with lawyers who make one argument in court, then hie themselves in front of a camera and blatantly misrepresent what just went down.So it's not going to sit well with the judiciary for one of Ezra Levant's lawyers to yammer on about Charter rights in court, then in front of a camera 10 minutes later shriek hysterically about how there is a "war on Christianity" and bitch and whine about Justin Trudeau's "persecution of Christians." And I have been assured, judges will be aware of that sort of douchebaggery and they will not take it well.

Add all that together and it's relatively safe to assume that Ezra's attention-seeking Christian pastors are not going to fare well, and jail time is a distinct possibility.