When is 100% not really 100%? (Part one)

In today's episode of my posts leading up to my February 12 appeal against Ezra Levant regarding his 2016 Rebel Media Indiegogo fundraiser for Fort McMurray, I'm going to explain one of the more duplicitous aspects of that fundraiser, an aspect involving two seemingly-unrelated claims that Ezra was making throughout the life of that fundraiser and even for some time afterwards.

During the course of his May 2016 fundraiser, Ezra -- on numerous occasions -- made both of the following claims quite publicly:

1. that "100%" of all funds raised by his Indiegogo page would be turned over to the Red Cross, and
2. that he (Ezra) had made an initial donation of $10,000 to kick things off and as a public challenge to other media outlets to step up similarly.

While these two claims would seem to have little to do with one another, it turns out they collide later in a very awkward and embarrassing way.

Let's begin with the first claim -- that all (that is, "100%") of the funds raised via Rebel Media's Indiegogo page would be turned over to the Red Cross. Unsurprisingly, from the very beginning, that claim was met with overwhelming skepticism, as countless readers on social media pointed out the painfully obvious -- that in exchange for registering an Indiegogo fundraising page, you agree to turn over 5 per cent of all donations.

There is nothing untoward about this 5 per cent deduction; it is, in fact, Indiegogo's standard "processing fee" and is the basis of their business model -- put more simply, it's how they make a living. There is nothing secret about the processing fee; everyone knows about it and, more significantly, when you register an Indiegogo fundraiser page, you have to explicitly click that you accept the terms, which does indeed include the processing fee. In short, it is physically impossible to register an Indiegogo fundraiser and not know that they will collect their standard 5 per cent.

Despite the above, throughout the entire month of May 2016, both Ezra and other staffers at Rebel Media stubbornly stuck to their claim that "100%" of all funds raised via the Indiegogo page would reach the Red Cross.

To start things off, here's a snippet from the 2016 Indiegogo page:

In case you didn't catch the claim there, it is repeated elsewhere on that page:

And once you pop over to Twitter, the reassurances come fast and furious. There's this one:

and this one:

Most critically (and pay attention here), Ezra was even assuring people publicly about the 100% turnover when, in early June, he began tweeting at me personally. There's this tweet of Ezra's from the morning of June 5:

I could go on, but I think I've made my point; that in the face of month-long skepticism and criticism, Ezra Levant never, ever wavered in his insistence that the full "100%" of funds would go to the Red Cross and, more to the point, never, ever addressed numerous people on social media who directly and explicitly asked Ezra how that could be possible, given Indiegogo's 5 per cent processing fee. In any event, let's (temporarily) put this issue to the side and visit the other one.

In addition to his dogged insistence of "100%", Ezra (and others at Rebel Media) were also publicly bragging about how Ezra started things off with the very first donation of $10,000, ostensibly as a show of his bottomless humanitarianism and as a challenge to others to match his boundless generosity.

Right on the Indiegogo fundraiser page, one reads about Ezra's initial $10,000 "contribution":

Shortly thereafter on the morning of May 4, Ezra begins patting himself on the back for his generosity:

and, three minutes later, continues the self-congratulation with:

At this point, we need to recap because what happens next is quite stunning. Thus far, we've seen Ezra Levant, on numerous occasions and quite publicly during the course of his fundraiser, assure all donors to his Indiegogo page that:

1. he started things off with an initial donation of $10,000, and
2. the full 100% of collected donations would be turned over to the Red Cross

Keep these two claims in mind as you see what happens next, as it's quite something, because it was in the June 7, 2016 Statement of Claim from Ezra that I, for the very first time, saw the following claim from Ezra:

Go back and read that again slowly until you appreciate what Ezra is suddenly claiming -- for the very first time (and not publicly but only in his June 7, 2016 Statement of Claim to me), Ezra has changed his story dramatically, and is now taking the position that his initial $10,000 donation is, in fact, not a "donation" at all, but is reserved as some sort of Indiegogo slush fund to cover the 5 per cent Indiegogo processing fee that people had been telling him about for the last month and that had, of course, been deducted from every donation coming in.

Let me describe this another way -- having bragged for a month about his dizzying humanitarism, Ezra is finally (and quietly) admitting that he had been misleading donors that entire time, and that the only way he could technically continue claiming that 100% of donations would be turned over is to (here it comes) quietly go back and redefine his own $10,000 outlay as not a donation after all, but a backstop to cover the 5 per cent Indiegogo processing fee, the very problem he created by registering an Indiegogo fundraising page in the first place. But don't go away -- it gets worse.

Note in the above how Ezra describes his $10,000 no-longer-a-donation as a top-up "if Indiegogo took a fee for processing the donations."

If?

IF?

Ezra is now clearly trying to give the impression that he wasn't sure if there would be an Indiegogo processing fee, despite the fact that:

1. he has run Indiegogo fundraisers before
2. everyone was telling him about it
3. he would have had to accept the processing fee at the time of registration

But it gets worse (as you knew it would).

As you might expect, I pointed out this howling inconsistency in my Statement of Defence, at which point you will never believe what came back in Ezra's August 2016 Reply. I give you paragraph 4(a):

This is Ezra's rebuttal to my pointing out his spectacular historical revisionism as to his $10,000 "donation," and it represents the final duplicitous bit of sleight of hand since, as you can see, Ezra is finally admitting that, well, of course there is a processing fee associated with online fundraisers.

Pause, take a breath and think about all of the above as I recap the evolution of Ezra Levant's Indiegogo fundraiser.

1. First, Ezra assured everyone (in the face of overwhelming criticism and actual explanations) that he was donating the first $10,000, and that all donations would go to the Red Cross.
2. Subsequently, after being caught out misrepresenting the value of 100%, Ezra frantically went back in time and repurposed that $10,000 to be, not a donation, but a slush fund to cover the 5 per cent lost to Indiegogo, a problem Ezra in fact created in the first place.
3. Finally, after being caught out again, Ezra's Reply admitted what everyone had been telling him along -- that online fundraisers cost money and that Indiegogo had been taking their 5 per cent the entire time.

Quite simply, after having assured everyone regarding 100% for the entire month of May 2016, and refusing to listen to or address countless people trying to explain to him how his claim could not possibly be true, Ezra resolved his obvious deception by going back and redefining what his initial $10,000 was for. In short, Ezra was saying, "I can promise you that 100% is being turned over, as long as you let me redefine the words '100%' and 'donation'."

And if you think this is bad, it gets far, far worse in Part 2. So stay tuned.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I never said that, either.

In today's episode of what you need to know about my upcoming (February 12, Osgoode Hall, Toronto) appeal of 2017's s. 137.1 anti-SLAPP ruling against me, we're going to document all of the utterly fictional accusations made against me by Ezra Levant, and how those utterly fictional accusations ended up in the ruling against me, despite my actually proving that I had indeed never said any such things. For expediency, I will simply provide screenshots from my Supplementary Affidavit (SA) of May 2017, which will speed things up considerably.

It was early in that SA that I devoted an entire section to establishing that many of Ezra Levant's claims as to what I had said about his fundraiser were, to put it diplomatically, utter fabrications, and I set the stage thusly:

What the above represents are a collection of phrases gleaned from either Ezra's June 2016 Statement of Claim (SoC) against me, or his subsequent Reply, where Ezra is quite clearly claiming that I accused him of, among other things, "fraud", "embezzling", "cheating" and so on. These are admittedly serious accusations ... or they would be if I had indeed uttered any of that.

In order to prove that I had said precisely none of the above, I simply used Twitter's advanced search feature to search my own Twitter timeline from May 1, 2016 through to June 10, 2016 -- covering the entire time frame of Rebel Media's fundraiser with room to spare:

More importantly (and pay close attention to this, kids), I did not simply search for those precise phrases. Rather, so I could not be accused of selective searches or cherry-picking to get the search results I wanted, I widened the search parameters to look for every common variation of the impugned words, as I described here in the very next paragraph of the SA:

Make sure you appreciate how, in the above searches, I am going out of my way to track down not only the exact impugned words from Ezra's pleadings, but any and every common variation. I performed all of the above searches on my own Twitter timeline, and captured the results. And the results?

Nothing.

Nada.

Zip.

Squat.

Bupkus.

Quite simply, I established that I had, in fact, said absolutely none of any of the above about Ezra Levant or his Rebel Media fundraiser, and I entered all of that into evidence.

As one example, here's the search dialog related to "cheating":

and the result:

Here's the search dialog for "corruption":

and the result:

As one final example, let's show the result of searching for the word "fraud", which is arguably the most damning and defamatory accusation one might make:

the search result being a single tweet of mine in that time frame totally unrelated to Ezra Levant or Rebel Media:

Every one of the other searches produce precisely the same results -- nothing. Not a single match across every search, from which we are allowed to make some really disturbing observations.

First, it is now absolutely clear that all of Ezra's earlier accusations against me are total falsehoods. I said none of those things, and I proved it simply by searching my own Twitter timeline. Those search results are not open to dispute, which is why what happened subsequently is so jaw-droppingly stunning -- the  motion judge simply didn't care.

As you can clearly see, my Supplementary Affidavit listed all of the alleged defamatory phrases from Ezra's Statement of Claim and subsequent Reply, and also the comprehensive search results that established beyond any doubt that I never said those words (or even any common variation of those words) about either Ezra Levant or Rebel Media.

All of this evidence was placed before the motion judge, who ignored it utterly and proceeded to make numerous findings against me by simply copying and pasting from the Responding Party's pleadings:

and:

and:

and:

and, most ridiculously and egregiously:

particularly since the evidence before the motion judge proved conclusively the lack of any accusations of cheating or fraud. In short, I placed before the motion judge incontrovertible (and uncontested and uncontradicted) evidence that I had said none of those things and, to put it less than diplomatically, the motion judge didn't give a shit.

UPPITY DATE: It might be worth noting that, while Ezra was claiming that I was accusing him of various kinds of criminal behaviour, he conveniently ignores this tweet of mine from May 5, 2016 -- only two days after he started his fundraiser:

Quite so ... that would be me, clearly suggesting that there is nothing illegal I can see about Ezra Levant's fundraiser, unless there's something about filching other peoples' tax receipts that would be problematic. But other than that hypothetical, I believe readers can safely conclude that I am not accusing Ezra of breaking any laws. And yet, he fabricated all those accusations against me, anyway.

I'm sorry ... and you are?

In the midst of a number of lengthy and involved pieces I'm writing about my upcoming (February 12) s. 137.1 anti-SLAPP appeal against Ezra Levant, I thought I'd fire off a relatively short post, demonstrating yet again the deceptive and misleading way that Ezra Levant and Rebel Media marketed and ran their May 2016 Indiegogo fundraiser for the Red Cross and Fort McMurray.

Throughout the course of the fundraiser and in all the time since, Ezra Levant has intimated that his 2016 fundraiser was done with the approval of the Red Cross, that the Red Cross knew about it, thanked him for it, and so on. There were numerous examples of that sort of self-aggrandizement, such as this one from Ezra's 2016 Statement of Claim against me:

where, as you can see, Ezra is bragging that "The Red Cross was aware of the Fundraising Website and thanked the Plaintiff for his efforts." It all sounds perfectly co-operative ... except it didn't quite happen that way.

I have in my possession a number of e-mails that were exchanged between Rebel Media and the Red Cross regarding that fundraiser, the very first of which is a note from the Red Cross' Susan Larkin to Ezra, dated May 5, 2016, which is two days after the fundraiser started:

There are a number of interesting properties in that e-mail, but two that should jump off the page at you.

The first observation is that it's absolutely obvious that this is the first that the Red Cross' Larkin is hearing about Rebel's Red Cross Indiegogo page, making it obvious that Ezra Levant established that fundraiser and began collecting donations on behalf of the Red Cross, without the Red Cross' knowledge or permission (a point we shall return to shortly).

The second significant observation is that, while Larkin is diplomatically thanking Ezra for his assistance, she is also clearly pointing out that the Red Cross already has a well-established and proven infrastructure for taking donations (with existing hooks to automatically generate tax receipts and so on), and is just as clearly encouraging Ezra to contact her to take advantage of all of that rather than duplicating that effort.

In short, from that single e-mail above, we can safely conclude that:

1. Ezra Levant registered his 2016 Indiegogo fundraiser, ostensibly to raise money for the Red Cross, entirely without the Red Cross' knowledge or permission, and,
2. Upon hearing of Ezra's fundraiser, the immediately first response of the Red Cross was to contact him and suggest that they already had ways to do fundraising and that they would be happy to explain them to him.

Quite simply, the e-mail from the Red Cross' Susan Larkin puts an entirely different spin on Ezra's relentless preening about how he was working with the Red Cross, how the Red Cross totally approved of his efforts and so on. But it's that first point that has quite a bit more behind it.

If you're wondering why Ezra would leap into a fundraiser for the Red Cross without even telling them or asking for their permission, one possible reason is that a lot of organizations have no interest in being associated with Rebel Media, even to the extent of refusing to take charity from them. If you think I joke, you can take the word of Rebel Media's own David Menzies, who wrote voluminously about how Rebel Media started an obviously politically-motivated fundraiser for soldiers at CFB Borden, and how that backfired spectacularly.

You can read the entire 100-page exchange of e-mails at that link, but you can satisfy yourself with this single e-mail near the top:

That single e-mail makes it abundantly obvious that:

1. CFB Borden had no knowledge of that Rebel Media fundraiser and had not given their permission, and,
2. CFB Borden realizes full well that the Rebel Media fundraiser has nothing to do with actual sympathy for soldiers, but is a cheap political tactic to try to embarrass the federal Liberals.

Under the circumstances, it's not really surprising that Rebel Media prefers to set up fundraisers without the intended recipient's knowledge or permission, since they already have a pretty good idea of the reception they're likely to get.

I just thought you needed to know all that.

P.S. I have an extensive collection of e-mails between various individuals at Rebel Media and their counterparts at the Red Cross regarding Ezra's 2016 Indiegogo fundraiser. Some of them are quite stunning and, if you stick around long enough, you'll get to see them.

No, that's not what I said.

In today's post regarding my upcoming appeal of the monumentally illogical s. 137.1 anti-SLAPP ruling against me, I'm going to once again talk about Ezra Levant's assurance that all donors to his May 2016 boutique Rebel Media fundraiser for Fort McMurray would receive charitable tax receipts and, in the process, I'm going to show how either Ezra or his lawyer chose to massively misrepresent something I said during his lawyer's October 2016 questioning of me for discovery. You'll see what I mean when we get to it.

From my previous post, you might remember that it was during a June 6, 2016 phone call with a representative of the Red Cross that I was, for the very first time, informed that the Red Cross did indeed have the ability to issue tax receipts on behalf of non-registered, third-party fundraisers, provided they were provided with sufficient information. Once I was told that, as you might recall, I immediately published that information, not once but twice. But there's a subtle detail that will shortly become important.

While, once I learned the above, I accepted that tax receipts would eventually be issued to those donors, I had not been provided with any evidence that those receipts had actually been issued. That is, I had not actually seen any tax receipts; I was simply taking the Red Cross' word that receipts would eventually happen at some point down the road. Keep all this in mind for what is about to happen.

It was early in that October 2016 questioning that Ezra's lawyer got around to asking about tax receipts, at which point I thought I made it sufficiently clear that, while I was prepared to believe tax receipts would go out, I had not seen any direct evidence of that -- I believe my position is clear from this part of the transcript:

Read the above carefully; I'm fairly confident that my position is clear that I am conceding that tax receipts will be issued, even though I have yet to see any physical evidence of that. It's not clear how you can misunderstand phrases such as, "I've seen no evidence of it" or "I have still not been presented with any evidence that that is happening," and I thought no more about it until Ezra's lawyer circled back later and asked about that issue a second time.

I thought I had been sufficiently clear the first time, so to have Ezra's lawyer ask me again as if he didn't understand me that first time made me slightly suspicious, which is why I deliberately answered even more forcefully that second time, as you can see here:

It's not clear how anyone can further misunderstand the above exchange, wherein Ezra's lawyer asks me if I have received evidence of tax receipts being issued, and I answer (one would think clearly and unambiguously), "I have not."

So, given the above exchanges during discovery, you can imagine my shock and disgust at receiving the Responding Party's subsequent May 2017 Motion Record, which contained the following unbelievable submission:

The above submission by the Responding Party is, of course, a flat-out, bald-faced lie, as that is quite clearly not what I said. This is not quibbling over semantics or trivial pedantry -- I never made that admission at any time during questioning, and I suspect that some of you can already guess where this is going.

Because it was in the absurd ruling against me that the motion judge simply copied and pasted that submission without bothering to check its accuracy, which is how I ended up with a ruling against me that contained the following bit of sheer fiction:

To recap, then:

1. I was asked directly by Ezra's lawyer if I had seen any actual evidence of tax receipts;
2. I clearly and unambiguously said I had not;
3. The Responding Party (either Ezra or his lawyer) deliberately misrepresented my response in their Motion Record;
4. The motion judge mindlessly copied and pasted that misrepresentation into her eventual ruling.

I'll have more to say about Ezra's lawyer's questioning of me in October of 2017, but the above should be adequate to demonstrate the horrifically inaccurate and misleading representation of what I actually said.

You keep using that word "incoherent" ...

Since I have, on occasion over the last many months, criticized the 2017 anti-SLAPP ruling against me, it is only fair that I back this up with actual documentation from the ruling itself, so between now and my appeal on February 12, I plan on posting a small number of blog entries wherein I will establish exactly this. I will attempt to be dispassionate and professional about this, but I suspect I can be forgiven if I let my occasional frustration with the astonishing dumbassitude of that ruling seep through every so often. And so, to work.

One of the issues regarding Rebel Media's fundraiser for the Red Cross was whether donors were entitled to charitable tax receipts, and whether or not they would be getting said receipts. First things first -- those donors were not entitled to tax receipts. (This will be the subject of a subsequent blog post, but whether those donors were eligible for tax receipts is a settled issue -- they weren't. Period. End of that discussion.)

During the entirety of the Rebel Media fundraiser during the month of May, 2016, Ezra Levant (and others at Rebel Media) assured one and all that donors would get tax receipts, despite at no time explaining how that could be possible. So that's the first data point to keep in mind -- while Ezra and others were adamant that donors would get receipts, they never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever explained how that could be accomplished, given that neither Ezra Levant nor Rebel Media was a registered charity with Canada Revenue Agency (a limitation Ezra actually admitted to prior to his fundraiser).

Even as late as June 5, 2016 (after the fundraiser was, in fact, over), Ezra was still insisting that tax receipts would be forthcoming, addressing me by name on Twitter:

Before we go any further, make sure you appreciate the import of that tweet -- Ezra is again claiming that receipts will be delivered, and he is politely asking me to correct the record. And note the date -- June 5.

It was at this point that, in order to resolve this situation one way or the other, I personally contacted the Red Cross the very next morning (June 6) and asked whether they were going to furnish tax receipts for Rebel Media fundraiser donors. I had contacted them previously to ask that question, but was told that, due to (understandable) privacy regulations, they could not give me that information. This time, however, I persisted, at which point the Red Cross rep admitted that, yes, the Red Cross was capable of issuing receipts to third-party fundraiser donors, as long as all the donor information was provided. (Side note: the Red Cross did not actually confirm that those donors would get tax receipts; they confirmed only that they could work with third-party fundraisers to accomplish that, but I accepted that as enough of a confirmation.)

Note well the significance of that phone call -- this was the very first time that I had received official corroboration from the Red Cross that tax receipts were a possibility. During the entire month of May, while Ezra insisted that tax receipts would be issued by the Red Cross, neither he nor anyone else at Rebel Media had provided a single shred of documentation from the Red Cross that the Red Cross had agreed to do this; it was only after my repeated calls to the Red Cross that, on June 6, they finally broke down and admitted that, yes, tax receipts could be issued, at which point I swung into action.

Pay careful attention to this tweet I published literally after getting off the phone with the Red Cross:

Yes, that would be your humble scribe, publicly "correcting the record" on the morning of June 6, exactly as Ezra asked me to. In case anyone missed that correction, I published a second correction early the next morning -- note the date and time of 4:35 AM, June 7:

So let's recap what's happened up to that point:

• June 5: Ezra continues to insist that tax receipts are forthcoming, and asks me publicly to correct the record, despite never having provided any evidence of this claim whatever
• I contact the Red Cross the morning of June 6, whereupon they confirm that, sure, that can be done
• I publicly correct the record immediately on June 6
• I publicly correct the record a second time on the morning of June 7

As the kids today say, you won't believe what happened next.

During the afternoon of that very same June 7 (literally, later that very same day), I received Ezra's Statement of Claim, suing me for $95,000 for defamation.

Pause and let that sink in. Seriously, ponder what just happened here.

Having asked me to correct the record on June 5, and after I did exactly what he asked on June 6 and early morning June 7, Ezra sued me later that day on June 7. And while I'm sure you can appreciate the absurdity of that timeline (more on that in a subsequent post), that's not why we're here. No, we're here for something much more bizarre.

It might be tempting to think that perhaps Ezra just didn't see those tweets of mine correcting the record (as he had asked), and sued without being aware of them. That would be a mistake, as Ezra in fact referred explicitly to both of them in his June 7 Statement of Claim:

That's right -- in Ezra's Statement of Claim that I received on the afternoon of June 7, 2016, he refers directly to a tweet of mine correcting the record that was published on the morning of June 7, 2016. Take a minute and think of the frantic timeline required to deliver a Statement of Claim that incorporates information that was published earlier that same day. But that's still not why we're here, so let's continue.

Appreciate first that, in the above snippet from Ezra's Statement of Claim, he clearly and unambiguously admits that I corrected the record. If you don't see that, go back and read it again. Read it as many times as you need to to make sure you see that Ezra is admitting that. And in case you're not convinced, Ezra admits it a second time elsewhere in that very same Statement of Claim:

Now, let's recap once again:

• On June 5, Ezra asks me to correct the record regarding tax receipts
• On both June 6 and early June 7, after getting credible confirmation from the Red Cross, I do exactly and precisely that
• During the afternoon of June 7, I receive Ezra's Statement of Claim, wherein he admits (not once but twice) that, yes, I did indeed publicly correct the record regarding tax receipts

And this is (finally) where the silliness comes in, as all of the above was placed in evidence before the motion judge, who nonetheless made the following mind-numbingly, nad-grindingly, thigh-suckingly baffling finding:

Head. Desk.

You seriously need to take a minute and read that slowly, and appreciate the utter lack of contact with reality that that paragraph represents. It's not just that the motion judge ignored all the evidence placed in front of her but, astonishingly, she made a finding that the plaintiff Ezra Levant was not even asking for. As a final recap, then, digest slowly the utter madness of what happened here:

• On June 5, Ezra Levant (having never, not once, provided any actual proof of this assertion) asked me to correct the record regarding tax receipts.
• Due solely to my own efforts in badgering the Red Cross about this, on June 6, I publicly corrected the record regarding tax receipts.
• In case anyone missed it, on June 7, I publicly corrected the record a second time regarding tax receipts.
• In his Statement of Claim of June 7, Ezra Levant openly admitted that I had indeed corrected the record regarding tax receipts.
• Notwithstanding all of the above, the motion judge in this anti-SLAPP motion ruled against me, having found (among other things) that I had not corrected the record.

The mind reels.

SIDE NOTE: It's not enough that the motion judge made that bizarre finding once -- no, she managed to repeat herself twice more in her ruling, making the same unsubstantiated and clearly incorrect finding elsewhere:

There will be more bizarreness in upcoming posts, and if you think the above is just plain weird, you haven't seen anything yet.

Legal stuff about to go down.

For quite some time, I've been unusually restrained regarding my ongoing legal slapfest with one Ezra Levant, but things will soon be coming to a head regarding the s. 137.1 anti-SLAPP judgment against me from back in 2017, and that thing will be my appeal, which will be heard this coming February 12, 2019, in Toronto at the Court of Appeal for Ontario, in historical Osgoode Hall:

I'm going to leave it at that for the time being, but feel free to check back on occasion for ongoing developments.

This has been going on now for over two and a half years, and I'm feeling moderately confident that it will soon be over. That is all.

Potemkin Media, revisited.

[UPDATED JAN 5, 2019, SEE BELOW.]

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, Dec 6, 2018? 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.

UPPITY DATE, JAN 5, 2019:  What did I say about "just a matter of time?"

Now gone would be one Tanveer Ahmed, who's grabbed a life preserver and launched himself off the poop deck of the S.S. Ratfuck, hoping to avoid the inevitable whirlpool.

We'll check in next month.

AFTERSNARK: Given that Rob Shimshock seems to have taken a powder lately:

I predict he's the next rodent of unusual size who will vanish quietly from the increasingly-listing S.S. Rubble. Let's watch ...

... 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 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 ...