The above would represent a most ambitious, one million dollar initiative to, well, make Ezra, Rebel News and a small collection of Ezra's lawyer friends deliciously wealthy. And how does one justify making such an outrageous claim? Simple -- it's written into the very rules and regulations of the campaign.
Since its inception, Rebel's "Fight the Fines" campaign -- and its inevitable offspring -- have been absolutely up-front about one thing: you, the alleged victim, will never, ever, ever, ever see a penny of any of that dosh.
None. Zero. Squat.
That is not a debatable statement -- it is based on Ezra's own position that all of those campaigns are not to pay your fine; they are merely to pay lawyers to help you fight your fine:
And while all of that might sound laudable, make sure you understand the fundamental truism behind that, which is that everything collected -- every bit of it -- ends up in the pockets of Ezra, Rebel News and whatever lawyers Ezra has invited to divvy up all that cash. This claim is in no way contentious or arguable; rather, once again, it is based solely on Ezra's own description as you can read above. And if none of that money ever goes to any of the victims, there is only one other place for it to go -- Ezra and his friends. But we're not done here.
While we can occasionally see how much dosh is being extracted from Rube Nation, there appears to be no actual accounting of who is getting what. Put another way, while there may indeed be a coterie of lawyers working their fingers to the nubbies on all of this, there's nothing to guarantee that they're charging a reasonable fee for their efforts. For all we know, they might be charging the campaign $2,000 an hour, and no one would be the wiser. But here's the kicker.
As I read it (and I'm willing to be corrected), according to the strict rules of all of these fundraising campaigns, there is absolutely nothing to stop Ezra from waking up one morning and announcing, "Well, it's been fun, but I'm bored, the campaign's over and I'm keeping all the cash. Thanks for playing." According to everything I've ever read, Ezra is completely within his rights to not pay anything to the victims, not actually take any cases, and cancel this campaign at his convenience, keeping everything he's raised. And all of that would be perfectly legal. And if you think that's a ridiculous scenario, well, I have bad news.
As hard to believe as it might be, Ezra has done something similar to this before, when he was running the right-wing rag "Western Standard." It's all laid out here nicely, but let me summarize -- after pulling in a bunch of cash with a subscription drive, Ezra turned around and pulled the plug on the magazine ... and kept all the money. Subscribers were less than impressed:
So what does that prove? Only that on at least one occasion, Ezra Levant persuaded the terminally gullible to hand over their cash, at which point he pocketed it and walked off, leaving them holding his bag.
So what are the chances of that happening here? Who the hell knows? The only relevant observations one can make at this point are:
- Ezra has apparently done this before, and
- If he did it again, it would be perfectly legal and there is nothing donors could do about it.
I'm glad we had this little chat.
2 comments:
Is there any doubt that Ezra is personally taking a decent chunk of all that money (all legally)? I would think he's paying himself or Rebel News some sort of administrative fee, or whatever he wants to call it. I bet that's why you'll never see a proper accounting of all the money that came in -- it would show how much went straight into Ezra's pockets.
Over the last two years or so, we've seen Rebel staff online begging for donations to help them pay for busfares to Toronto, for a couple of thousand bucks to replace laptops, and other relatively small expenses that would normally represent a tiny fraction of any serious media operation's budget.
This most recent campaign is weirdly different, though. It seems the bizarre relationship between the Rebel and the "Democracy Fund" is proving shockingly lucrative. In just a couple of weeks, the "Fight Vaccine Passports" has netted almost three quarters of a million dollars to channel to lawyers. In an interesting switch, it now seems that the "Democracy Fund" is hiring these lawyers directly - somebody smells big bucks.
In what I'm sure is a pure coincidence, the GOP has focused much of its campaign for the midterms on vaccine "freedom", and is pouring huge bucks into supporting exactly the kind of suicidal "resistance" program that Ezra is now plugging. I'm sure the hundreds of thousands pouring into Ezra's campaign coffers are all from Canadian sources (because, of course, Ezra has ALWAYS complained about foreign money funding lobbying); but it does make one wonder how a readership that had trouble coughing up busfare for two "reporters" suddenly found a $730,000 to pay Ezra's pet legalists?
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