The first examination will be of the ubiquitous "Save Artur" campaign, wherein Rebel News appears to have raised well in excess of one million dollars exclusively for the legal defense of professional victim "Pastor" Artur Pawlowski, whose crime was to ... get fined for violating pandemic lockdown restrictions.
That's it. Nothing more.
In short, more than a cool million has been collected and disbursed in order to aggressively defend someone who could have avoided all of this by just obeying the same lockdown regulations that everyone was obeying. Which leads one to wonder ... could that million-plus have been better spent elsewhere? Perhaps on a down payment on a commercial property?
The second curious example I have written about before is Ezra Levant's insistence that he is going to spend over $300,000 (of other peoples' money, naturally) to fight a total of ... $3,000 in fines for election spending violations. I am not making this up:
So, just to be clear, Ezra Levant and/or Rebel News have pulled in what appears to be a cool mil and a half, and are determined to spend all of it because a) one guy didn't feel like limiting his public gatherings, and b) Ezra doesn't feel like paying $3,000 in totally justified fines.
So here's my question to all of Ezra's inevitable donors to buy him a building: Are you not getting tired of paying all of Ezra's bills, particularly when you see how much money is rolling into Rebel News, and having absolutely no idea where any of it is going?
Are you not getting tired of doing things like paying off Rebel's previous $380,000 bank loan, and buying his interns expensive computers, and now flat-out buying him a building, when it seems like he never puts in any of his own money?
And are you not just the slightest bit irked to realize that Ezra is pouring what appears to be millions into ridiculously trivial legal cases, when all that money could have probably bought him a commercial property outright?
And yet, in the end, dear donors, you will end up buying Ezra a building, because it's what you do. You really are that stupid.
BOUNTY, ANYONE? Anonymous correspondent suggests someone should offer a monetary bounty for a full, unredacted copy of Ezra's RBC mortgage application. That is an evil idea. I love it.
6 comments:
Anyone who contributes to Rebel is too brain dead to see they are being fleeced....however given that they are Rebel fan boys I'm not concerned that the fools are being separated from their money.
Was that $380K loan actually from a bank? That was another super-weird situation where Ezra was like "umm...some friends of ours lent us money, and now they're demanding we pay it back immediately."
ROD: I wrote about all of that weirdness back here: https://canadiancynic.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-weirdness-of-rebel-news-loan-part_15.html
I did enjoy the reference in the phone call to Ezra's willingness to "put his own skin in the game". Given that he's asking his long suffering readership to buy him an office building in downtown Calgary, which will henceforth generate rental income, dividends, leverage and equity for Ezra or whatever holding company he invents to hold the shares, that seems like the least he can do.
It's a grift - like all of Ezra's "fundraisers". At the end of the day, the goal is more about raising money that he can shovel into his own pockets.
The odds of Ezra ever buying an office building for The Rebel using income from The Rebel's operations are between zero and slightly less than zero. There's simply no way that he's got a business model that anyone is going to believe has a 25+ year lifespan to it.
The only way he gets to do this is if he, and a coalition of RWnut operations all get together to buy the property. Speculating out loud, there's a few of them out there that could be interested - JCCF comes to mind, as do the "business" operations of a couple of other well known conservative grifter types that hang out on the fringes of the UCP.
I know that the moral, ethical, financial and business flaws in Ezra's bewildering arsenal of grifts-in-progress are as obvious as the pimples on their pubescent team of "journalists". But it should be noted that once again Ezra's solicitation for his "buy me a cah-cow building" fund instructs donors to send their cheques or e-transfers directly to 'donations' at the Rebel, which is the same generic pot of money they use for just about all their solicitations, include their various lawsuits, appeals to buy equipment, plane tickets, or other ordinary operating expenses. So folks who donate through that channel have absolutely NO idea what their contribution is going to be spent on.
Also noted: the Rebel provides no actual financial target for this initiative (VERY unusual for a capital fundraising program) - instead they illustrate target "number of donations", which of course, is utterly meaningless - 100 donations of $1.00 look a lot more impressive than a $100 donation.
This campaign has the earmarks of something that's being rushed into action before the end of the fiscal year - there's no actual campaign or program, no coherent strategy that's been thought through...just a clumsy, dishonest last minute panicky pitch. One could speculate this is to drive up the appearance of revenues for a dismal 2020 and make the Rebel appear a little more appetizing to investors by showing a spike in the last month, allowing Ezra to claim that "revenues have exploded by ___% in just the last month!!"
It will be a most entertaining few months, I think.
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