GRIFT 3
estb 10 24
SEE TRUMP CRYPTO SEE CORRUPT KLEPTO
see prepper infowars? seeds beck?
see trump trans 2 rfk kash WINE hegseth billy long
pRosperity white paula
SEE TALK RADIO AND SOC MED
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trump gold phones made in china?
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rww grift? 10 26
Lance Wallnau's Prophetic Gold And Silver Promotion Didn't Pay Off
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CONTEXT
RWW
07/10/2026
by
- Melissa Gira Grant @ The New Republic: ICE Is Hoping You Won’t Notice the Man Agents Killed In Texas
The administration may have changed its P.R. strategy for Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The violence hasn’t changed at all.
- Edgar Sandoval and Hamed Aleaziz @ The New York Times: Man Killed by Federal Agent in Houston Was Not the Target of ICE Search
Officials say agents believed a passenger resembled one suspect, but the encounter quickly escalated into a fatal shooting.
- Arelis R. Hernández @ The Washington Post: Migrants who saw man killed by ICE in Houston say he did not ram officers
Three men who were in the vehicle alongside Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are contesting the Department of Homeland Security’s account of the fatal shooting.
RWW
//
07/13/2026
by
While the number of killings by ICE officers is climbing, and DHS is sending agents to intimidate American citizens over social media posts critical of ICE officials, what’s “terrifying” to the Iowa Republican Party is criticism of Trump administration border czar Tom Homan.
An email sent from “MAGA Alerts” Monday morning carried the subject line, “What happened to Tom Homan today serves as a terrifying Reminder!”
The email began ominously:
Patriot:
Your immediate attention is required.
Please confirm you are in a safe and private place to correspond, ensuring no Democrats can read the following message over your shoulder.
When you are ready, please direct your undivided attention to the following:
Readers who click through once they’re in a secure location got this message:
At 8:58 AM, local time, a national MAGA alert was placed into effect under direct orders from Executive MAGA Leadership.
Tom Homan just said something on national television that has prompted Democrats to push for his immediate forced resignation as United States Border Czar.
What Homan said—more than a month ago on the right-wing outlet Newsmax—was that Democratic officials had “sold out” the country for political power by encouraging illegal immigration. It was inflammatory rhetoric, but certainly not the first time someone in Trump world has made that kind of accusation.
The fundraising letter then claimed falsely that Democrats were “dangerously close” to forcing Homan’s removal, adding, “All efforts and resources of the Democratic Party have been directed toward seeking his resignation.” There’s no evidence of that.
After a bit more inflammatory anti-immigration rhetoric, the email asks people to sign a petition defending Homan and to make a monthly contribution “to combat the Democrats’ ongoing attacks on President Trump and his administration.”
And there’s a bit of intimidation for anyone who might be hesitating:
Contributions to the email are being shared by the Republican Party of Iowa and Trump National Committee Joint Fundraising Committee.
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MADE 2.3B$ CRYPTO = LOSS FROM WALLETS
AN 7 26
In the wake of financial disclosures showing that President Donald Trump has profited wildly off his presidency over the past year, the Newsweek editors have published a detailed analysis in which they assert that he is “raking in eye-watering sums of money from cryptocurrency gamblers, most of whom were losers in this trade, and also his supporters.”
According to Newsweek, while his supporters theoretically set out to “drain the swamp” in corrupt Washington, “The truth is, MAGA always knew Trump was like this. In fact, it’s a big part of why they backed him in the first place.”
As Newsweek details, “Trump’s 2025 disclosure lists CIC Digital LLC, described as wholly owned by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust, receiving royalties from a license agreement with Celebration Coins and reports the amount as $635,068,835. The same filing reports $236.25 million in token-sale proceeds distributed by World Liberty Financial, plus $65.6 million from the sale of equity in its holding company. Those numbers are politically explosive… because they involve a sitting president, his family business network and an industry his administration is figuring out how to, and if it should, regulate.”
Critics say crypto is “a haven for criminals and scammers,” and Newsweek suggests it’s the most “Trumpian” of Trump’s grifts yet.
“The $TRUMP coin launched days before Trump returned to office and surged from under $10 to as high as $74.59 before falling back, with four-fifths of its supply held by CIC Digital and an entity called Fight Fight Fight,” explains Newsweek. “The coin described itself as ‘an expression of support,’ not an investment or a security — a distinction that should have cooled anyone foolish enough to be treating it as a retirement plan.”
Ultimately, “there were losses, though not for Trump. Roughly two-thirds of investors in the memecoin are underwater, according to the Wall Street Journal, and the Reuters tally put buyers’ collective losses near the family’s $2.3 billion in gains.”
As Newsweek notes, “No supporter deserves to be fleeced because a favorite leader put his name on a speculative asset,” but “the naivete defense has limits.” Experts and regulators have long warned not only about the “exceptionally volatile and speculative” nature of crypto, which poses a significant risk of total loss, but about the shady nature of Trump’s dealings. With that in mind, “a voter can call Trump’s crypto dealings unseemly all they like, but a speculator who bought a president-branded token after years of such warnings has a hard time arguing the house owed him a win.”
According to Newsweek, “It is easy to see the new crypto numbers as a betrayal of Trump’s voters, many of whom are struggling middle-and-working class voters who can never hope to own even a tiny fraction, if that, of what these deals alone made for him. But this is the kind of transaction many Trump supporters were primed to admire… The problem was not his instinct for aggressive self-interest, in Trump’s telling, but stupid leaders who failed to turn pursuit of self-interest into national advantage.”
Whether all the crypto corruption scandal will impact Trump depends on “how his voters parse it, especially those who bought the coin and experienced losses — as personal betrayal, or as the cost of playing near power. Will the Trump supporters among the two-thirds of memecoin buyers now sitting on losses begin to defect, or simply shrug and stay with him?”
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RWW 5 26
- Helen Lewis @ The Atlantic: The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet
A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right.
- Phil Williams @ News Channel 5: Andy Ogles now denies raising $25,000 from public for children's burial garden that was never built
Tennessee congressman's latest stories about GoFundMe: Money actually came from him and his family, spent on 'children with cancer.'
- Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: The Right’s Worst New Star Just Shot Someone
Meet “Chud the Builder.”
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MMA
Fox & Friends runs sponcon segment touting “Medical Emergency Kit” marketed to MAGA
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 05/12/26
Fox News ran a segment sponsored by The Wellness Company on Tuesday in which Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt and Dr. Peter McCullough — the lifestyle brand’s “chief scientific officer” and a one-time Fox regular — gushed over its “Medical Emergency Kit.”
“You are a genius,” Earhardt said after introducing McCullough, whose board certifications were apparently revoked over his false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines. “You’re a cardiologist. And then you said during COVID we need a better way. We need a kit with all of these drugs so that we can have them at the ready.”
McCullough touted the kit’s pre-prescribed medications to treat “dozens” of “common infections” as well as Lyme disease without seeing a doctor and having them diagnose your symptoms.
Under Earhardt’s gentle prodding, McCullough highlighted the kit’s benefits for vacationers; offered it up as a solution for accessing drugs manufactured overseas “when the shipping lanes are uncertain”; directed viewers to the company’s website to purchase it; and touted its affordable price, saying it’s “way cheaper than going to an urgent care.”
“It’s amazing,” Earhardt said at one point, “You have that idea that we all are like, Why didn't I think of that?”
Video
Citation
From the May 12, 2026, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
If you weren’t paying close attention, it was easy to miss Fox News’ disclosure that it was running sponsored content. At the beginning of the Fox & Friends segment, small text at the bottom of the screen read, “This segment is made possible by our sponsor: The Wellness Company.”
Fox subsequently posted the segment on its website.
Fox & Friends has run sponcon segments over the years on subjects like The Museum of the Bible, the hats worn at the Kentucky Derby, and GMC’s Hummer EV. But in taking money from a lifestyle brand to help sell its medical products to network viewers, Fox seems to have entered new territory.
Indeed, Fox’s segment serves as a testament to the right-wing con culture in which propagandists use ideological, often paranoid, political coverage to build trust with the movement’s rank-and-file, then get paid by people looking to cash in on their audience.
The Wellness Company tries to cash in on the right’s ivermectin craze
The Wellness Company — like other pill mills that use MAGA-inflected marketing to sell their product — fits perfectly into that ecosystem. Its Earhardt-approved “Medical Emergency Kit” retails for $299.99, including a “Free Doctor Consult” with one of TWC’s prescribing “licensed providers.”
Notably, while the product website touts the kit’s “8 life-saving prescriptions” and remedies for “30+ illnesses,” it highlights one medicine in particular — ivermectin. That’s the antiparasitic drug that Fox hosts and other right-wing media figures recklessly promoted during the COVID-19 pandemic as an alternative to the vaccines they claimed were ineffective and unsafe. They were wrong about ivermectin, as numerous studies found — but their rhetoric helped drive down vaccination rates on the right and create demand for ivermectin as a COVID-19 therapy, with deadly results.
The Wellness Company website
McCullough, like Earhardt, is a familiar face for the Fox audience — and thus a key validator for The Wellness Company’s product. An internist and cardiologist, he became a frequent presence on Fox during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, making at least 37 appearances on its weekday programs in 2021 and 2022.
McCullough used the network’s platform to undermine the public vaccination effort, tout the purported effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in treating the virus, and claim that an NFL player who was struck in the chest, collapsed on the field, and was diagnosed with cardiac arrest had suffered “vaccine-induced myocarditis.”
McCullough’s COVID-19 vaccine commentary made him an outcast in the medical community.
His former employer, Baylor Scott & White Health, filed a lawsuit against him in 2021, citing “irreparable reputational and business harm” caused by McCullough being identified with his former Baylor titles in interviews (the parties apparently reached a settlement in 2023).
Then in 2022, the credentialing committee of the American Board of Internal Medicine recommended stripping McCullough of his certifications over his vaccine claims. The Journal of Medicine reported in January 2025 that ABIM’s look-up tool identified McCullough’s certifications in internal medicine and cardiovascular disease as “Not Certified, Revoked,” which remains their current status.
But as The Daily Beast reported in a 2023 profile of The Wellness Company, McCullough became “a hero in anti-vaxx circles” — and thus an attractive business partner for Foster Coulson and Dave Lopez, the “Trumpworld-linked investors” who founded TWC that year. They were joined by other “disreputable medical professionals,” including TWC “Chief Epidemiologist” Dr. Harvey Risch, another veteran of Fox's crusade against the COVID-19 vaccine campaign.
As the Beast detailed, the group was “hawking a Goop-like lifestyle brand—complete with supplements, podcasts, telehealth, and even a dating service—to conservative audiences with the help of far-right influencers.”
The company has tried to tap into the right-wing fearmongering of the day. When conspiracy theorists warned in 2024 about a plan to kill off “excess population” through the hypothetical pathogen “Disease X,” The Wellness Company ran sponsored content at outlets like Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit pointing to its “Medical Emergency Kit” as a remedy.
Over the past few months, ads for TWC have also run on the right-wing podcast shows of Candace Owens and Jack Posobiec.
But now with a sponsored Fox & Friends segment, TWC is taking that act to a much bigger audience — one they are counting on to trust the testimonials from McCullough and Earhardt.
//
:{09/13/21
:{12/30/21
01/18/24
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AN 5 26
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman calls right-wing politics “deadly” — and predicts that “MAGA Will Kill Many Americans,” by the thousands, driven by greed and willful ignorance.
Krugman goes one step further, arguing outright that this is not by accident:
“Does MAGA want to see thousands of Americans die prematurely from smoking and refusal to get vaccinated? Yes,” he writes.
He argues that the right’s decades-long opposition to health care is driven by greed, especially from “wealthy donors unwilling to pay taxes to help others in need.”
Krugman points to Tuesday’s decision by Trump’s FDA to allow blueberry and mango-flavored vapes, which critics warn will increase use among the young.
Why?
“Trump is reportedly hoping that support for vaping will win back support from young men,” Krugman writes — a constituency the president has been losing during his second term in office.
There’s also the recent decision, again by Trump’s FDA, to block the release of studies finding the COVID-19 and shingles vaccines safe, with side effects rare.
“Beyond this,” he continues, “right-wing politics in America often goes hand in hand with hostility to science in general and medical science in particular. The deadly linkage between reactionary politics and rejection of science was obvious during the Covid pandemic.”
Krugman also implicates greed in the anti-vaccine movement, saying that “quack medicine is big business.”
“Right-wing radio and social media have long relied on peddlers of snake oil for a large part of their revenue. So much of the attack on medical science can be seen as financially motivated,” he writes.
Ideological willful ignorance plays a part as well — driven by the alliance between oligarchs and white Christian nationalism, the latter of which is “deeply hostile to Enlightenment values, modern science very much included.”
To prove his point, Krugman points to the widely-reported resurgence of measles, that was seen as eliminated from the United States decades ago, thanks to vaccines. Now, many parents are choosing to forego vaccinating their children against this highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.
He adds to that the refusal of many red states to expand Medicaid, a program largely paid for by the federal government under the Affordable Care Act.
The data bear him out. Life expectancy in “Trump-leaning” states trails blue states significantly.
There’s “a strong, clear negative correlation between Trump-leaning orientation and low life expectancy at the state level,” Krugman writes. “Deep red states like Alabama and West Virginia have life expectancy comparable to, say, Kazakhstan.”
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an 4 26
Country star team launches MAGA-coded, 'faith-based' perfume - Alternet.org
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another gop crook
an 2 26
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the president of conservative insurgency group the Georgia Republican Assembly has been hit with a $500k fine for his part in a massive Ponzi scheme that primarily afflicted Republican donors.
The office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger alleges that Nathaniel Darnell “used religion and shared political views to recruit some of his clients and steered them toward investments in First Liberty,” the force behind the scam that has either incriminated or victimized whole sectors of Georgia’s MAGA and Tea Party movements.
In addition to the hefty fine and a “cease and desist” order for conducting business, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office also referred Darnell to a district attorney for potential criminal prosecution over allegations he deceived investors in First Liberty Building & Loan.
“It’s the latest fallout from the collapse of First Liberty, a failed lender that federal regulators have labeled a $140 million Ponzi scheme, and a sign that the state’s investigation is spreading to more people and firms that were in its orbit,” reports AJC.
Darnell, who previously worked for notable Republican politicians and was once executive director of the Cobb County Republican Party, sold unregistered First Liberty investments to nearly four dozen clients without telling his employer, Bankers Life Advisory Services, according to the complaint. He also concealed from clients and his employer that he earned commissions totaling “nearly $250,000 over several years.”
Georgia Republicans are loathe to denounce the Ponzi scheme connected to Republican financier and First Liberty founder Brant Frost IV, despite the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accusing Frost IV of orchestrating the scheme that funneled millions to his family in under the pretense of boosting far-right politicians. Federal authorities have since frozen the company’s assets.
Meanwhile, state investigators, including President Donald Trump’s nemesis, Raffensperger — a Republican — is pursuing his own investigations into campaign finance issues and alleging violations of state securities laws. The state ethics commission, also, has joined the fight, charging the Georgia Republican Assembly PAC with “61 civil violations of state campaign finance laws, accusing it of illegally trying to sway elections,” according to the AJC. The Commission later added the Georgia Republican Assembly — led by Darnell — as a defendant.
The AJC reports victims include Republicans like 93-year-old retiree Jay McMaster, who heard about First Liberty Building & Loan and it’s MAGA crusade on conservative radio.
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AN 1 25
Scammers are taking advantage of President Donald Trump's MAGA base by selling them products without ever actually fulfilling their orders.
That's according to a Wednesday article by Jezebel's Jim Vorel, who wrote that numerous products marketed to pro-Trump conservatives are frequently accused by those same customers of ignoring them after taking their money. Vorel focused mostly on customer reviews for MAGA-branded alcoholic beverages, though he noted that scammers targeting MAGA customers do so through a variety of products.
"Here’s the thing about grifters in this mold: They truly don’t care who they’re stealing from, and the ideology they’re wearing ends the moment the mark is no longer buying, or the ideology is no longer selling," he wrote. "They will steal from anyone, or appropriate any image, personality or movement without permission, in order to move some units."
Vorel observed that one product dubbed "Tears of the Left" — which proclaims to be a Kentucky-made bourbon that sells for $100 complete with a tear-shaped whiskey stone — has a Facebook page that is rife with irate consumer reviews. Some reviewers wrote about their frustrations with the company's customer service, saying they had yet to receive an estimated shipping date despite making their order several weeks prior.
"One of the people lodging their complaint even notes that the company’s tracking information claims that the $100 bottle of what is no doubt cheaply sourced bourbon was already delivered to him, when it never actually was. Would you believe that no one has been responding to his repeated inquiries about that?" Vorel wrote. "By the end of the post, he’s already settling into exactly the frame of mind that a grifter prizes above all: Annoyance, but resignation. When your political tribe is more important to you than defending your rights as a consumer, that makes you the perfect mark — someone who will lodge a testy complaint, but take it no further than that."
The Jezebel writer also asserted that President Donald Trump also participates in the practice of grifting MAGA customers out of their money, pointing to his cryptocurrency "memecoin" that quickly lost most of its value not long after it was publicly introduced in January of last year. While the $TRUMP coin was initially valued at more than $27, it sells for just $4.95 today.
:{"Even when Trump is stealing directly from his most ardent supporters, they’re all too happy to keep falling for the same con, over and over," Vorel wrote.
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an 12 25
Estimates on President Donald Trump's net worth vary, but according to Forbes, it went from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion in September 2025. In the past — before he became a prominent figure in U.S. politics — Trump's profits came primarily from his real estate assets. But Trump expanded his business activities with the tech-oriented Trump Media & Technology Group (which is separate from the Trump Organization and announced a merger with TAE Technologies in December) and Trump Mobile.
The family-owned Trump Mobile (which is run by President Trump's sons Eric and Don Jr.) planned to release a gold-colored smartphone by the end of 2025 and sell it for $499. But according to The Guardian's Joanna Partridge, the phone's release is facing a likely delay.
"The Trump Organization licensed its name to launch a mobile service and the device in June, in the latest monetization of his presidency by a family business empire now run by Trump's sons," Partridge reports in an article published on December 31. "In the latest setback for the project, Trump Mobile said there was a 'strong possibility' the handset would not be delivered this month, the Financial Times reported. The company's customer service team told the FT that the recent government shutdown had disrupted shipments."
Trump Mobile is using overtly political messaging to market the T1 smartphone, describing it as "proudly American."
"Etched with an American flag," Partridge observes, "the T1 was initially promised in August — and the website still states it will be released 'later this year.' Customers are required to pay a $100 payment to pre-order the device. The T1 launch came shortly after Trump criticized Apple over its plans to move the production of iPhones destined for the U.S. market from China to India."
Partridge notes, however, that considering the "low levels of domestic smartphone production in the U.S.," it "remains unclear who could manufacture the T1 handset."
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an 12 25
NYT slammed after giving Erika Kirk a platform for 'anti-feminist grift'
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RWW
11/24/2025
by
In yet another fundraising pitch in which President Donald Trump tells supporters that God saved him from an assassin’s bullet so Trump could save America, the president enlists supporters in his much-discussed desire to get into heaven.
“I want to try and get to heaven,” starts an email sent to supporters on Sunday. He describes being on stage in Butler, Pennsylvania and “feeling the hand of God tilt my head at the very last millisecond.”
“He didn’t save me for a participation trophy,” the email says. “He saved me because I have a date with Heaven and the only way I earn my place there is by finishing the mission He spared me for: saving America.”
The idea that Trump can only “earn” a place in heaven by successfully enacting his agenda as president is contrary to core Christian teachings about grace, faith, and salvation. But it seems to be a rhetorical advice he deploys to appear spiritually humble and appeal to his conservative Christian supporters.
It also suggests that if Trump can only succeed as president with a continuous flow of contributions, then sending him cash could actually be helping get him into heaven.
Another Trump fundraising email sent earlier in the day on Sunday came with the subject line, “I was born to do this.” It also opens with a religious claim about his assassination attempt: “On July 13th, Faith shielded me from an assassin’s bullet.”
The email denounced the “radical left” that he charged with “trying to block our America-First agenda.”
“They hate our Faith. They mock our values. They want to crush our Freedom,” the email said. “I will NEVER let that happen.”
“This is the moment every patriot has prayed for. This is why he spared me. This is why we won.”
Trump’s email signs off with, “For God. For Family. For Freedom. For America.”
Meanwhile, MAGA zealot and religious-right pundit Eric Metaxas cannot stop talking about Trump’s recent offhand remark at a Mar-a-Lago wedding that Metaxas might be the guy that gets him into heaven. Video of the incident shared on Metaxas’s social media accounts has racked up millions of views.
“Did you hear what President Trump said to me?!?!?!” gushed the subject line of a Metaxas email last Tuesday. He urged supporters to share media coverage of the event.
Later in the week Metaxas devoted part of his show to talking about the video and complaining about people whose response was to criticize Metaxas for not using the moment to give Trump a gospel message. In response to those critics, Metaxas went beyond saying it was noisy and a wedding and not the right time; he accused those critics of not trusting the Lord or the Holy Spirit to take care of Trump’s salvation.
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prompted by no kings fail? mamdami?
mma
10/23/2025
by
President Donald Trump has launched a new “Anti Communist Club,” a fundraising gimmick that doubles as a smear campaign against his political opponents, who he calls communists and the “radical left.”
The message sent to Trump supporters makes a mockery of MAGA leaders’ recent disingenuous warnings about the dangers of divisive rhetoric:
After careful consideration, I want to present you with the ANTI-COMMUNIST CLUB Membership! It’s the highest honor I can bestow upon such an important supporter who DESPISES the radical left!
This membership is not just for anyone; YOU qualified because your profile showed you HEAVILY DESPISE known Communists like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and AOC!
Trump’s message says that would-be members must “PROVE you’re a TOP MAGA PATRIOT, and not a slimeball communist” by answering a few questions. The questions in Trump’s quiz lay the groundwork for justifying attacks on freedom of speech and academic freedom in pursuit of his “anti communist” mission. In addition to a couple questions about China, the quiz includes these:
Do you AGREE that Communism has NO PLACE in the United States of America?
- YES – It’s evil and un-American
- NO – I side with the Radical Left (disqualifies membership)
Do you SUPPORT President Trump’s plan to BAN Marxist indoctrination in schools and universities?
- YES – Save our children
- NO – Let the Left brainwash them
Should anyone caught BURNING the American flag be PUNISHED?
- YES – 100%
- NO – Free speech for Communists
Do you AGREE that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris pushed a SOFT COMMUNIST AGENDA on our country?
- Absolutely
- Not sure
- No – I trusted them (disqualifies membership)
Would you SUPPORT President Trump declaring a National Anti-Communist Day to honor those who fought tyranny?
- YES
- NO
Which slogan BEST represents YOU?
- GOD, GUNS, FREEDOM
- COMMUNISM, CHAOS, CONTROL
Donations sent by MAGA supporters who want to join Trump’s new “club” go to Never Surrender Inc., Trump’s leadership PAC, which reported nearly $40 million cash on hand at the end of June.
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AN 10 25
'Biblical jabberwocky': How Trump’s 'prosperity gospel hucksterism' is robbing his followers blind
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rfk2
Calley Means
- Identity: Calley Means is a healthcare reform advocate and a co-founder of the wellness company Truemed.
- Political role: He has served as a special advisor to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and has been involved in the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) initiative.
- Criticism of the healthcare system: Means is known for criticizing what he sees as a corrupt U.S. healthcare system that profits from treating illness rather than promoting wellness.
Truemed
- Function: Truemed is a telehealth platform that helps users get "Letters of Medical Necessity" (LMNs) from licensed practitioners.
- HSA/FSA use: The LMNs allow customers to use their pre-tax Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) or Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) to pay for "proactive health investments" and wellness products that normally wouldn't qualify as medical expenses, such as gym memberships, supplements, and fitness equipment.
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mma
TikTok Shop is selling supplements made by Plandemic filmmaker
For $29 on TikTok, you can buy a supplement to “bulletproof your immune system” and “surround it with piranhas” from a company that pushes medical misinformation
Written by Abbie Richards
Research contributions from Alex Kaplan
:{Published 09/25/25
On TikTok Shop, users can now purchase a supplement that will purportedly “bulletproof your immune system.” The product was “founded” by a group that includes Mikki Willis, who has falsely claimed that measles is a “bioweapon” and said he has been “working with” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Willis is also known for creating the viral film Plandemic, which pushed conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
TikTok Shop’s policies prohibit the sale of “medicinal supplements,” including “unlicensed medicines, herbal or homeopathic products, and those making health claims.” But that isn’t stopping the creators of Fierce Immunity from selling their supplement on the platform and suggesting that people who take it “don’t get sick.”
Fierce Immunity is a supplement claiming to “supercharge your immune system”
Fierce Immunity is billed as “a synergistic blend of bioactive compounds, precision-engineered to supercharge your immune system” and “a powerful blend of Vitamin D, Zinc Ascorbate, Quercetin, Hesperidin, and L-Arginine designed to fortify your immune system, reduce inflammation, and support rapid recovery.”
The supplement was created by a group that includes medical misinformers, and it was reportedly formulated with an “AI technology,” known as Swarm Intelligence. Fierce Immunity is also the first item listed in parent company Rebel Lion’s “Measles Protocol.” As part of the protocol, Rebel Lion claims Fierce Immunity works as “both prevention and response in times of viral threat.”
Health care experts have said that while some people can benefit from a vitamin D supplement, most people do not need vitamin D supplements because they get sufficient vitamin D from their diet and lifestyle. And while zinc plays a role in immune health, supplements are usually necessary only for people with zinc deficiency. In fact, some experts say excessive zinc levels can actually be “dangerous to your health.”
In small print, Fierce Immunity's website admits, “Fierce Immunity is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. … You should not use the information contained herein for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, or prescribing any medication.”
Rebel Lion is selling and promoting Fierce Immunity on TikTok
Rebel Lion is selling Fierce Immunity on TikTok Shop, even though the platform prohibits the sale of “unlicensed medicines, herbal or homeopathic products, and those making health claims.” In fact, the company is selling the product on the platform at half of its usual price of $58 a bottle.
On its TikTok account, Rebel Lion has posted videos of people making some bold claims about Fierce Immunity, such as saying it will “bulletproof your immune system” and “lock it down, supercharge it, and surround it with piranhas,” “It shields my immunity. I don’t get sick,” and “Two years ago I began taking Fierce Immunity … and in that two years, I haven’t been sick, not even a sniffle.” In another video, a man is repeatedly hitting a tire in a gym with a voiceover saying, “After six weeks of constant gut issues, I tried Fierce Immunity and in just two days, my discomfort vanished.”
In Rebel Lion webinars on YouTube, the commentary about Fierce Immunity gets even wilder. In a webinar dedicated to the “Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak,” Rebel Lion co-founder Chris Roy said that “nobody that I know that’s taking Fierce Immunity is getting sick.” Roy also claimed that his friend’s sister “had breast cancer — stage four — and started taking Fierce Immunity and within about a month they said her tumors are shrinking.”
Fierce Immunity is being sold by a company led by medical misinformers
According to Rebel Lion's website, Fierce Immunity was “founded by Mikki Willis, Chris Roy, and JP Sears.” Willis and Sears both have histories of spreading medical misinformation.
Willis is the creator of the viral film Plandemic, which Wired reported was a “widely debunked pseudo-documentary” that “suggested Covid-19 was released to profit those in positions of authority and that vaccines were ineffectual.” During Rebel Lion's “The Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak” webinar, he falsely claimed that measles is a “bioweapon” that has “been manipulated and targeted towards a community that is a threat because of their natural way of living.” In February, Willis also claimed that he had “been working with RFK Jr.” and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “for over a decade.”
Willis is still sowing doubt and mistrust around the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. During the Rebel Lion webinar, Willis encouraged viewers to share an upcoming video with their friends and family who still trust vaccines and linked his father’s heart issues to vaccines:
MIKKI WILLIS: I was getting calls from these people that were severely injured. They were the first ones to line up for the COVID-19 vaccines. And they were manipulated and coerced into doing that for whatever reason. We’ve been following them on their journey of healing for the past four years. They went from perfectly healthy to confined to a wheelchair, having to have breathing apparatuses just so they can breathe, to having seizures every 30 minutes, some of them severely injured from being perfectly healthy.
And so we’ve witnessed that firsthand. And that movie, when it comes out, share it like crazy because I have been saying, that’s the movie that ends the debate. If you have family members, friends, whoever it is that are still in denial just because maybe they got vaccinated and they’re OK, which, thank God, so many people are. My father and mother-in-law both, I don’t know, two or three vaccines — they’re fine. My father, three vaccines, three heart attacks — I just put him in hospice care.
In the description of the “ Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak” webinar, Rebel Lion describes the video as an “urgent discussion … unpacking the latest measles outbreak in Texas and exposing what mainstream media refuses to report,” including questions like “Is this a mutated bioweapon?” and “Are vaccinated individuals more vulnerable?”
Journalists have described Sears as a “conservative, anti-vaccine comic” and “the clown prince of wellness.” In his comedy sketches, Sears has implied that vaccines cause autism, that COVID-19 boosters are intended to depopulate the world, and that mRNA vaccines are ineffective.
Roy, who owns the “Rebel Lion” trademark, doesn’t seem to have a significant history as a public persona online. Instead, he seems to bring the marketing expertise to the Rebel Lion project.
In May, Rebel Lion released a film that featured Dr. Ben Edwards and Dr. Richard Bartlett, who have downplayed the threat of measles, and Pierre Kory, whose certification was revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine for his promotion of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19.
Edwards reportedly treated measles patients in Texas, including children, with cod liver oil while reportedly having an active measles infection himself.
Bartlett has suggested that the measles vaccine could cause measles and that reporting on the rise in measles is a “misinformation, disinformation campaign to character-assassinate RFK and the Make America Healthy Again movement.” During the “Real Story Behind the Measles Outbreak” webinar, Willis asked Bartlett: “Should we stop all measles vaccines and let children get natural immunity?” Bartlett didn’t seem to answer the answer directly, but he said: “Parents deserve to know all the information. … We’re supposed to as doctors give informed consent. As far as vaccines, it’s again an individual decision. Traditional vaccines made with a live virus or a live weakened virus make sense to me. But there’s a risk. They’re live measles viruses. Live measles viruses cause measles.” He added that “every risk of measles can happen with the MR vaccine. And you’re not gonna hear that on CNN.”
During the May film, Kory argued that “measles is essentially just a rash. It was one of the most common childhood illnesses. It’s not lethal by any stretch of the imagination. Over 90% of kids with measles will suffer no complications. And the few that do, those complications are easily treatable.”
The Centers for Disease Control has been clear: Measles “isn't just a little rash.” In fact, the CDC says that 1 in 5 people who get measles will be hospitalized, and 1 in 20 children with measles will get pneumonia, which is “the most common cause of death from measles in young children.” A 2024 study also estimated that measles vaccines averted over 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023.
Medical misinformers often sow doubt around vaccines and then profit from anxious consumers
Fierce Immunity offers something of a window into a larger industry in which grifters profit off fear and medical misinformation, seeding distrust in lifesaving vaccines while simultaneously selling bogus solutions.
Immediately after stoking fear about COVID-19 vaccines in the Rebel Lion webinar, Willis said, “This is why we created Fierce Immunity.” Roy added that when measles started breaking out, “that was the beginning of the conversation — was we were getting so many people asking us what they should do, what they should take, how should they build their immune system. Because we know … it all starts with the immune system.”
This sort of approach is also seen elsewhere in the medical misinformation space. For instance, a 2024 study from the University of Washington documented how wellness influencers leveraged anti-vaccine messaging for profit, using it to sell products including heavy metal detox sprays and supplements, homeschooling resources, and “off-grid” supplies. And during the pandemic, right-wing media figures and anti-vaccine activists peddled ivermectin as a miracle drug, even though it is ineffective at treating COVID-19.
Rebel Lion’s “Measles Protocol” also includes Budesonide, which the American Academy of Pediatrics has said is “not a recommended nor effective treatment for measles,” and an “antimicrobial oral rinse that reduces viral and bacterial load in the mouth.”
//
TikTok Shop is selling black market Ozempic, performance enhancement drugs, and cosmetic filler
10/22/24 2:04 PM EDT
06/27/25 10:02 AM EDT
09/09/25
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rww
09/23/2025
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Donald Trump’s religious-right allies have not been shy about claiming that he was anointed by God to lead the United States. It’s been going on since Trump’s first presidential campaign and gained new intensity since Trump survived an assassination attempt last year. Trump has been happy to amplify his supporters’ claim that he was chosen—and saved—by God to carry out a divine mission as president.
Now Trump, a relentless fundraiser, has adopted a fundraising tactic employed by his spiritual and political adviser, White House aide Paula White. White is a proponent of the prosperity gospel, with a track record of promising supporters that they can obtain spiritual blessings by sending her money. Prosperity preachers call this “sowing a seed of faith,” and many Christians consider White and the prosperity gospel heretical.
But it seems to bring in the bucks, so it’s not entirely surprising that Trump has decided to borrow the rhetorical device. In an email sent to MAGA supporters today, Trump tells supporters, “I need you NOW” and urges them to send him money to defeat the “radical left” on which he has declared war:
And remember this – when you give, you are not just contributing to a political cause. You are sowing a SEED OF FAITH into the future of our Nation.
The Bible tells us faith as small as a mustard seed can move mountains. And together, our faith will move America back to GOD. Back to TRUTH. Back to GREATNESS.
Trump’s email opens with the kind of rhetoric employed by religious-right operatives who portray those who disagree with them as enemies of God:
Since the day I returned to the White House, I have felt the mighty hand of God guiding this movement. His Word reminds us: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”*
The enemies of freedom thought they could break us with lies, with courts, with endless persecution – but they were WRONG.
The virtual merger between the evangelical right and the MAGA movement was on display at last weekend’s gathering in honor of the murdered MAGA activist Charlie Kirk, which was partly an evangelical worship service, partly a MAGA rally, and partly a call to war against “the left,” the “forces of evil,” and the movement’s enemies. While Kirk’s widow and successor as head of TPUSA Erika Kirk said she forgave his killer and talked about the Christian imperative to love one’s enemies, she was followed to the microphone by Trump who, in addition to his typical litany of grievances, directly contradicted her when he said he does not love his opponents but hates them, thus giving the event’s massive audience permission to ignore her call to Christian conscience and embrace his call to war.
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BULWARK 9 25
Yet ANOTHER Right-Wing Payola Media Scandal!
This time, the allegations involve paying influencers to post positively about India, a country increasingly in MAGA’s crosshairs.
Sep 08, 2025
*Welcome back to False Flag! A few years ago, heterodox conservative professor Jordan Peterson vowed to launch Peterson Academy, an online, accredited college that would offer “a high-level, university-quality equivalent” degree for just $2,000.
*Last week, a YouTube investigation into the Peterson Academy was
. It revealed price increases, nonexistent exams, and disappointed students starting to suspect that they had paid the annual $399 fee just to watch a couple videotaped lectures.
*With Peterson’s daughter now in charge of the “school” and Peterson himself taking a break from public life, I think traditional academia can rest safely—well, however safe they can feel in the Trump 2.0 era.
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AN 7 25
Progressive firebrand and former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan recently debated "20 far-right Republicans" as part of the Jubilee series "Surrounded." One of them went way beyond identifying as conservative and admitted to being an outright "fascist."
When Hasan asked Connor, who goes by "Pinesap" online, if he considered himself a fascist, he replied, "Yeah, I am."
Connor also told Hasan he supports "autocracy" and said, "I, frankly, don't care being called a Nazi at all."
READ MORE:This White House lie shows they know Trump is in trouble
According to the Daily Beast's Ewan Palmer, Connor says he was fired from his job after publicly making those statements and "has launched a fundraising page on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site" that has "faced criticism for hosting extremist causes."
On his GiveSendGo page, Connor writes, "I'm raising money as an emergency fund and for other expenses while I look for a new job. Unfortunately, voicing fully legal traditional right-wing political views results in real consequences. This is cancel culture and political discrimination on full display."
Connor's fundraising campaign is drawing a lot of responses on X, formerly Twitter.
Attorney Ari Cohn wrote, "The pathetic grifty crybabyness of 'I said I am a fascist and lost my job, give me money' is just wild. So f—————— soft. Have fun not getting any insurance/benefits from the government because you're too busy begging for handouts instead of applying for a new job, loser."
READ MORE:The implications of Rupert Murdoch toppling Donald Trump are head-spinning
X user Chris America mockingly posted, "OPer: I was fired for going on Jubilee and saying that I was a facist! My first amendment rights! Business: Thanks to the same GOP, we can fire you for any reason to protect ourselves. GOPer: The woke people did this to me! I need to raise money now! Grift. Grift. Grift."
X user Keith Edwards tweeted, "The literal fascist who got exposed on Jubilee has been fired from his job. Love that for him."
Edwards also wrote, "he doesn't believe in the First Amendment, so."
Another user Stanislav Birko posted, "This loser coming out as fascist on television thanks to Hasan and then raising more than 20 grand (seemingly in much less than a day) due to getting fired perfectly encapsulates the political moment we are living in."
X user Kennedy Pivnick wrote, "Ok but the actual answer is that unless he worked for the government or a company running a company town, no it isn't First Amendment stuff."
Similarly, Rob Braun posted, "First Amendment protects your right to free speech, he won’t be arrested or jailed. But most states are at will employment and can fire you for any reason they see fit."
READ MORE:'Frantic' Karoline Leavitt suggests new scapegoat to take the fall for Trump’s Epstein mess
*Watch the Mehdi Hasan video below or at this link.
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an 625
Busted: Lawsuit against Christian finance guru over 'righteous living' policy gets green light
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AN 625
Critics pounce as Trump turns 'official government website' into scheme for 'selling green cards'
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an 5 25
During President Donald Trump's four months back in the White House, tech CEOs who were critical of him in the past — including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos — have been trying to make peace with him. And Tesla/SpaceX/X.com CEO Elon Musk is among Trump's close allies.
Trump clearly views the tech world as an opportunity to make money. And in an article published by The Guardian on May 30, Brisbane, Australia-based journalist Matt Shea describes one of Trump's ways to fleece "gullible young men" via "fake money."
Trump, according to the article, is pushing a "get-rich-quick scheme."
READ MORE:QAnon follower gets 3 years for threatening to ‘execute’ AZ governor Katie Hobbs
Trump, in 2025, is much more bullish on cryptocurrencies, include memecoins, than he was in the past. Shea, in his article, makes it clear that he has a low opinion of the technology — and argues that Trump-related memecoins will be profitable for Trump himself more than those who buy them.
Describing cryptocurrencies as nonsense and memecoins as "consciously" nonsense, Shea writes, "In their essence, memecoins distill the attention economy into a tradable asset, monetizing the ebb and flow of viral internet hype. This has created a system in which the biggest attention-seekers on the planet — Logan Paul, Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, Donald Trump — can bleed their followers for profit. The more controversial they are, the more viral they are; and the more viral they are, the more their memecoins increase in value."
"Most memecoins," according to Shea, "end up making money for the person who makes them as a 'rug pull' or a 'pump and dump'" — although in the long run, they aren't a good investment for those who buy them.
David Gerard, author of the book "Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain," described memecoins as "fake money," telling The Guardian, "They own the fake money, but they can't sell it until it's unlocked in tranches. Note that the limits are artificial. I mean, they could just 'print' more."
READ MORE:Inside Ron Johnson's barrage of baffling lies
Journalist Sander Lutz describes memecoins as a "scam," arguing that some people are willing be scammed.
Lutz told The Guardian, "Another way of defining a memecoin is a cryptocurrency token that has an acknowledged inherent lack of value. The crypto world, outside of memecoins, is full of so many people who are trying to pitch you on tokens that are 'actually really profound' or 'represent a stake' in some kind of 'useful network,' but are equally worthless. What makes memecoins different is that there's none of that noise…. Crypto has been an ever-escalating series of get-rich-quick schemes, where a whole bunch of people think that they're smarter operators than the previous operator — and generally, they're not….. They think they'll hear about these scams before the rug is pulled — but actually, they're the suckers."
Lutz added, "Crypto is full of people who think they're the scammer, not the sucker."
READ MORE:Behind the half-baked arguments flailing bully Trump uses to attack public media
*Read Matt Shea's full article for The Guardian at this link.
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an 525
Political commentator and campaign advisor Lindy Li stumbled in an interview with journalist Tara Palmeri after Palmeri challenged details of the former Democratic strategist's new book and Li’s claim that she knows “exactly where the bodies are buried.”
“Republican convert Lindy Li claims she has an explosive book that will take down the Democratic establishment … but gets enraged when asked very simple questions about why she kept fighting for them all along,” Palmeri posted on X.
“It’s a convenient time to become a conservative,” Palmeri
, before noting Li used to work as a Democratic "surrogate" and even sent tweets "calling Republicans ‘murderers.’”
READ MORE: 'An embarrassment': Marjorie Taylor Greene buried over her committee hearing meltdown
“Are you saying Americans aren’t allowed to change their minds?” Li challenged.
Palmeri responded with “Who did you vote for?” in November.
Li did not answer.
“If you’re gonna stand up and speak for other people as a surrogate, if you’re gonna work for a campaign, and then come out with a book — like, you should believe what you’re saying,” Palmeri
. “If you didn’t believe in it then how are we supposed to believe you now?”
READ MORE:Trump has a 'real problem' as Republicans warn against 'illegal' funding scheme
“I don’t need you to believe me,” Li replied. “I have the receipts.”
Li then ticked down previously circulated claims that former Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign paid celebrities and personal friends to advocate for her presidential campaign. But Palmeri called into question other sections of Li’s book, including the first few pages of a rough draft claiming the campaign worker was given free rein of the White House and was taking phone calls in the Lincoln bedroom.
“I’m working with a ghostwriter,” Li replied. “That was his first draft. I did not write that line. Are you trying to ambush me?”
“But if it’s a fact, it’s a fact,” Palmeri
. “If you wrote it, you were probably going to publish it, right? … Why would you write that and not publish it?”
READ MORE:'Repelled by the guy': Why this critical GOP base is turning on Trump
Palmeri said Li’s ghostwriter, Matt Mouat, later called Palmeri and said “he’d added the ‘Lincoln Bedroom detail’ because he had heard that big donors had access to the room.”
‘Inside Elections’ Deputy Editor and former NBC News and CNN journalist Jacob Rubashkin called the interview among the ”most cringe-worthy I’ve watched in a while, but the moment where ... Palmeri asked [Lindy] Li to explain why she said Biden gave her ‘free rein of the White House’ is particularly brutal.”
Author John Pavlovitz said on X that he “knew Lindy Li” and had “worked closely with her on a huge Kamala [Harris] fundraiser.”
“She endorsed my book and I considered her a friend. The second the election was decided, she immediately pivoted to Trump and started trying to rebrand herself as a victim of the ‘Dem cult,’" Pavlovitz wrote. “She is such a complete fraud who has lost any moral compass she had. It’s been heartbreaking and infuriating to witness. … At some point, you either have convictions or you don't.”
READ MORE:'Concept of a plan': Trump hypes 'major trade deal' with UK — experts say it’s not
Former Democratic Party Chair Jaime Harrison called Li’s duplicity, “Hilarious,” and hit back at her claims that she approached Harrison with concerns about the party.
“… In this interview Lying Lindy name checks [Democratic Party Chairman Ken Martin] and me to say that she expressed to us her concerns. Haha! You want to know what her 'concerns' were?”
Harrison then posted a receipt of his own: Li’s letter saying, “Hi! Thanks so much for inviting me! Is it possible to join the photo line/clutch with the Vice President for this rally?”
Democratic strategist and Sirius XM radio host Max Burns noted Li’s passionate reaction to questions throughout the interview.
“The quickest way to anger a grifter is to call out the grift,” Burns wrote on X.
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// TESLER WH COMMERCIAL, LUTNICK HYPES STOCK
AN 3 25
In a departure from tradition, The White House “is soliciting corporate sponsors for this year’s Easter Egg Roll,” CNN reported Sunday.
According to reporter Betsy Klein, “sponsorship offers range from $75,000 to $200,000, with the promise of logo and branding opportunities.”
In a series of tweets Sunday, Klein posted a "9-page pitch document" she obtained outlining the various sponsorship tiers, which states a $200,000 “investment” will offer sponsors “branding for a key area or activation,” “choice of Meet & Greet or White House Tour" and 150 tickets to the White House Easter Egg Roll.
Klein reports the White House is working with the outside production company Harbinger to solicit sponsors. “All money raised by Harbinger will go to the White House Historical Association,” Klein reports.
As the reporter notes, “the solicitation for sponsorships marks an unprecedented offering of corporate branding opportunities on White House grounds running counter to long-established regulations prohibiting the use of public office for private gain.”
“A former official involved in planning the event” told CNN, “This is not your grandmother’s Easter Egg Roll where people lined up outside the gate and go and roll an egg and get a little gift bag and walk out.”
“This is an enterprise,” the former official said.
Former White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, who viewed the document, said it “wouldn’t have gotten through Counsel’s Office.”
“That would have been vetoed in about 30 seconds in my day,” he said. “We’re not running this like a football stadium where you get all logos all over the place for kicking money.”
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an 2 25
Trump appointed Pastor Paula White-Cain as head of his “Faith Office” last week, a controversial figure due to her belief that faith is transactional. She has had a long relationship with Trump, helping him appeal to the religious right throughout his political career. Daniel N. Gullotta outlines what her leadership looks like in a piece at the Bulwark published Wednesday.
“While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, in our hospitals, and in our public squares,. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.”
“White-Cain has long held that Trump was divinely chosen to lead the nation and that he is engaged in an ongoing battle against demonic forces,” Gullotta writes. In 2019, she said that Christians who voted against Trump would have to “stand accountable before God one day.” In 2020, she said "demonic confederacies" were trying to steal the election.
READ MORE:'Worse than I feared': Pastor unleashes plan to fight 'heretical Christian nationalism'
Gullotta is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
“She advocates a kind of “hard”prosperity gospel that makes the case for faith in explicitly transactional terms, with material rewards for personal fidelity sometimes quite clearly enumerated,” Gullotta writes. “Befitting her spiritual theme, her ministry fuses entertainment, self-help, and economic empowerment, making her a singular figure in the American religious landscape.
Like Trump, White-Cain -- who is married to Jonathan Cain of the band Journey -- believes that wealth is a measure of success.
Gullotta points out that the prosperity gospel is not popular among mainstream Christianity. “Most Christian traditionsreject andcondemn the prosperity gospel on theological, ethical, and biblical grounds; within mainstream evangelicalism, it is often labeled a heresy. Where is the room for essential Christian doctrines such as suffering, grace, and God’s sovereignty in a paradigm that puts success above all? The movement White-Cain represents has a reputation for corruption and the exploitation of the vulnerable, who are promised divine rewards in exchange for financial contributions.”
READ MORE:Trump’s new 'White House Faith Office' pick claimed 'demonic' forces stole 2020 election
Indeed, theologian Michael Horton wrote in the *Washington Post* last month that “Evangelicals should be deeply troubled by Donald Trump’s attempt to mainstream heresy,” naming White-Cain in the article.
Trump and White-Cain met in 2002 after Trump saw her on television. Soon, she was giving him guidance and helping him curry favor with the religious right. “When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, White-Cain helped him navigate his relationship with religious voters, a bloc initially skeptical of the celebrity playboy,” Gullotta writes.
Mixed reactions to her appointment, Gullotta writes, show that Trump’s Christian base is not monolithic. “The reality is that Donald Trump’s Christian supporters are an uneasy alliance of factions that often disagree with one another and that each support him for different reasons and in pursuit of different goals,” he writes.
“It is maximally fitting for Paula White to be the chosen religious representative of a regime fueled by a naked pursuit of profit,” Malcolm Foley, a special adviser to the president of Baylor University and the author of The Anti-Greed Gospel, told the Bulwark.
READ MORE:Apocalypse Now: Extreme interpretation of Christian nationalism now guides Pentagon policy
:{“This is without question Trump's worst appointment. There's no defending this. Virtually any Protestant minister would be better,” podcaster and academic Anthony Stine, who is Catholic, posted on X.
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an 2 25
After President Donald Trump announced, on Saturday, February 1, tariffs of 25 percent on all goods entering the United States from Canada and Mexico, stock futures plummeted. Trump subsequently agreed to delay those tariffs by 30 days.
According to Bloomberg News reporter Muyao Shen, World Liberty Financial (WLFI) — a crypto-oriented project launched in October 2024 and connected to members of the Trump family — "appears to have added tens of millions of dollars' worth of the Ether cryptocurrency after crypto markets crashed during the weekend as the U.S. president briefly imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada."
On Monday, February 3, the president's son Eric Trump (executive vice president of the Trump Organization) tweeted, "In my opinion, it's a great time to add $ETH. You can thank me later."
READ MORE:**There's an emerging blue-state nightmare**
But Eric Trump later edited that post, removing the second sentence.
In an article published by Bloomberg News on February 4, Shen reports, "Since the launch of World Liberty in October, market observers have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest for the Trumps given the administration's sway over regulations. Typically, a promise of a return on an investment such as what Eric Trump first alluded to could cause scrutiny from regulators such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which has often seen that as indicating an asset is a security that the agency should regulate."
Shen notes that on February 3, "digital wallets belonging to World Liberty" added "about 21,177 Ether tokens in net inflows worth about $55 million, according to blockchain data analytics firm Nansen — a figure which includes both purchases as well as the conversion of an Ether derivative to the cryptocurrency."
"Between January 18 and February 1," Shen explains, "Nansen also estimated that World Liberty's digital wallets in total received net inflow of Ether worth about $340 million before the funds were sent to wallets belonging to Coinbase Prime…. World Liberty has been promoted as a DeFi lending platform, though it hasn't become operational yet. Its purchases of a number of niche tokens in the past have put the firm at the center of the crypto market's discussion."
READ MORE:**What should Democrats in Congress be doing about Trump's coup?**
*Read the full Bloomberg News article at this link (subscription required).
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an ah 1 25
During his second inauguration on Monday, January 20, President Donald Trump was surrounded by a who's-who of billionaire tech CEOs — including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and X's Elon Musk. Zuckerberg and Bezos were critical of Trump in the past, but they made a concerted effort to reach out to him after he won the 2024 election. And Musk, now the richest man in the world, is among Trump's top allies.
Trump critics have been using the word "oligarchy" to describe Trump's alliance with top tech CEOs. But Salon's Amanda Marcotte, in a blistering article published the day after Trump's inauguration, isn't sure the word "oligarchy" applies — as the inauguration, she argues, felt more like a gathering of scammers and grifters.
"The farcical nature of the inauguration was a fitting reminder that everything about the MAGA movement is a scam," Marcotte writes. "The weekend before the inauguration, Trump cashed in on his cultists' faith with a grift so obvious it would make Jim Bakker blush: releasing meme coins named after himself and his wife. Judd Legum of Popular Info summed up the move with, 'Trump has turned the inauguration itself into a brazen grift, launching a meme coin hours before being sworn in.'"
READ MORE:**Trump Inauguration dubbed 'a coronation of our country's descent into oligarchy'**
Marcotte continues, "Big words like 'oligarchy' are being thrown around in the face of the tech billionaire's row at the inauguration, but that may be giving them too much credit. What attracts these vultures is the stench of scam that exudes from Trump. There was once a time when Silicon Valley made money by creating useful products people wanted, but that time has passed. We're now in the era where the entire internet looks like an e-mail to your grandmother from a purported Nigerian prince who will marry her in exchange for her Social Security checks."
The Salon journalist notes that the Biden Administration had a history of "waging war on corporate scammers, suing them for junk fees," but laments that "those efforts will be killed or canceled with Trump's return."
"Above all else," Marcotte warns, "Trump is here to be the handmaiden for a whole new era of scamminess. However miserable your consumer experience was before, wait until these already-wealthy vampires snake their hands further into your pockets…. There was once a time when the conservative argument behind 'capitalism works' would be something about free markets and competition creating prosperity for all."
Marcotte continues, "Now, the mask is fully off, and we see what this slogan really means: rich people get all the money, and the rest of us can suck eggs — if you can even find them anymore at the supermarket."
READ MORE:**'Operation Aurora': Denver suburb on edge as Trump takes office**
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AN 12 24
'Melania grift': Incoming first lady hawks her Christmas 'collectibles' in Fox interview
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an 12 24
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to run the Internal Revenue Service, former Rep. Billy Long, didn't serve on the House committee tasked with writing tax policy during his six terms in office, and his lack of relevant experience is likely "exactly what Trump was looking for," according to one economic justice advocate.
Progressive lawmakers joined advocates on Wednesday in denouncing Trump's selection of Long, who since leaving office in 2023 has promoted a tax credit that's been riddled with fraud and who spent his time in the House pushing to abolish the very agency he's been chosen to run.
As a Republican congressman from Missouri, Long repeatedly sponsored legislation to dismantle the IRS, which under President Joe Biden has recovered at least $1 billion from wealthy people who previously evaded taxes.
He also co-sponsored legislation to repeal all estate taxes, which are overwhelmingly paid by the wealthiest households, but "said almost nothing on the floor regarding taxes, the IRS, and taxation during his 12 years in Congress," said John Bresnahan of Punchbowl News.
Long's limited experience with tax policy "ought to set off alarm bells," saidSen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who pointed to "vastly improved taxpayer service" under the leadership of IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, who Biden chose to replace Trump's nominee from his first term, Charles Rettig, after Rettig served his full term.
Werfel has "set up a tremendous direct-file system, and begun badly needed crackdowns on ultra-wealthy tax cheats who rip off law-abiding Americans," said Wyden. "If Trump fires Mr. Werfel, it won't be to improve on his work; it'll be to install somebody Trump can control as he meddles with the IRS."
The appointment is likely to commence an "open season for tax cheats," said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative.
Since leaving office, Long haspromoted the Employee Retention Tax Credit (ERTC), a pandemic-era credit that was intended to incentivize employers to continue paying workers during the economic shutdown when the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States.
He has worked to help businesses claim the credit from the IRS, but fraudulent and improper claims have so permeated the program that the IRS stopped processing new claims temporarily. The U.S. House passed a bill to entirely halt ERTC claims, but it has been stalled in the Senate.
"These ERTC mills that have popped up over the last few years are essentially fraud on an industrial scale, conning small businesses and ripping off American taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars," said Wyden. "I'm going to have a lot of questions about Mr. Long's role in this business, first and foremost why the American people ought to trust somebody involved with a fraud-ridden industry to run an agency that's tasked with rooting out fraud."
Wyden also pointed out that Long has not been named in a "typical nomination like you'd see after every presidential election." Werfel's term was set to go until November 2027, and the IRS typically operates as a nonpartisan agency.
"Replacing Commissioner Werfel with over three years remaining in his term is a terrible mistake," said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.). "He has done an excellent job rebuilding the IRS, boosting customer service, and enhancing enforcement aimed at wealthy tax evaders. Removing him will clearly signal Trump's intention to make the agency less responsive to the American people, while giving a green light to wealthy tax cheats to evade their fair share of the tax burden."
"Trump's nominee has clearly stated that he wants to abolish the IRS," added Beyer. "The change Trump proposes in IRS leadership would be a gift to tax cheats and a blow to anyone who believes it is important to rein in deficits."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) added that Trump's nomination of Long signals "the weaponization of the tax agency."
"If he's confirmed," she said, "taxpayers can expect longer wait times for customer service, a more complicated process to file taxes, and free rein for the rich and powerful to continue rigging the system at the expense of everyone else."
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grift? see prepper infowars? seeds beck?
an 11 24
The Oath Keepers were among the far-fight groups involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. And on May 25, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that two prominent figures in the militia group — founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs — had been sentenced to federal prison on seditious conspiracy charges.
But the Oath Keepers remain active in 2024. During an early November interview with Wired, Oath Keepers ally Jim Arroyo described preparations for a possible civil war.
Arroyo told Wired, "The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world. I'm training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies."
READ MORE:[Inside a Georgia election official’s months-long push to make it easier to challenge the 2024 results
Jim Arroyo and his wife Janet Arroyo operate the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, an Oath Keepers spinoff in Arizona. And both of them, according to Wired reporters David Gilbert and Tess Owen, believe that Democrats are planning to steal the 2024 election from GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Jim Arroyo told Wired, "They want to take him out so that he can't get back in the White House."
During the interview, Jim Arroyo claimed that the left is uniquely violent in the United States — and the Wired reporters noted the violence of January 6, 2021. But Jim Arroyo believes the debunked conspiracy theory that the January 6 rioters were undercover leftists.
Jim Arroyo told Wired, "The main concern right now is the potential of civil unrest because of the election. Whoever wins, one side's going to be pissed off, and the other side, the radical-left side, is going to be more pissed, and they're more known for burning cities to the ground when they don't get their way."
READ MORE:['Trump is toast': Why Michael Moore is 'confident' Harris will win
*Read Wired's full interview with Jim Arroyo at this link (subscription required).
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an 10 24
alternet-no lnx
Revealed: Deceptive political ads thrived on Facebook in run-up to 2024 election
Craig Silverman, Propublica, And Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center For Digital Journalism October 31, 2024
Reporting Highlights
Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.
Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.
Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.
Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising “$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required” just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.
In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden’s well-known cadence assured viewers that “this isn’t a loan with strings attached.”
There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.
Klotz’s page ran more than 300 of these ads before ProPublica contacted the weather forecaster in late August. Through a spokesperson, Klotz said that his page had been hacked and he was locked out. “I had no idea that ads were being run until you reached out.”
Klotz’s page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta’s stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP’s report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow’s investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.
The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.
The ads are only a fraction of the more than $115 billion Meta earns annually in advertising revenue. But at just over $25 million in total lifetime spend, the networks collectively rank as the 11th-largest all-time advertiser on Meta for U.S. elections or social issues ads since the company began sharing data in 2018. The company’s failure to block these scams consistently highlights how one of the world’s largest platforms struggles to protect its users from fraud and deliver on its nearly decadelong promise to prevent deceptive political ads.
Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people’s personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.
The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. “The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!” read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.
More than 13,000 ads deployed divisive political rhetoric or false claims to promote unofficial Trump merchandise.
Meta removed some of the ads after initially approving them, the investigation found, but it failed to catch thousands of others with similar or even identical content. In many cases, even after removing the violating ads, it allowed the associated Facebook pages and accounts to continue operating, enabling the parent networks to spawn new pages and ads.
Meta requires ads related to elections or social issues like health care and immigration to include “paid for by” disclaimers that identify the person or entity behind the ads. But its rules for verifying advertisers and publicly disclosing who paid for such ads are less stringent than those of its main competitor, Google, ProPublica and Tow found. Many of the disclaimers on Facebook ads listed nonexistent entities.
A Meta spokesperson said it invests heavily in trust and safety and uses a mix of humans and technology to review election and social issues ads.
“We welcome ProPublica’s investigation into this scam activity, which included deceptive ads promoting Affordable Care Act tax credits and government-funded rent subsidies,” spokesperson Margarita Franklin said in an emailed statement. “... [A]s part of our ongoing work against scams, impersonation and spam, our enforcement systems had already detected and disabled a large portion of the Pages — and we reviewed and took action against the remainder of these Pages for various policy violations.”
Our analysis showed that while Meta had removed some pages and ads, its enforcement often lagged or was haphazard. Prior to being contacted by ProPublica and Tow, Meta had taken action against roughly 140 pages affiliated with these eight networks, representing less than half of the total identified in the investigation.
By then, the ads on those pages had been shown hundreds of millions of times, resulting in financial losses for an untold number of people.
Meta ultimately removed a substantial portion of pages flagged by this investigation. But after that enforcement, ProPublica and the Tow Center found that four of the networks ran more than 5,000 ads in October. Patriot Democracy alone activated two pages a day on average in the first half of this month.
“Their enforcement here is just super spotty and inconsistent, and they’re not actually attacking root problems,” said Jeff Allen, the chief research officer of the Integrity Institute, a nonprofit organization for trust and safety professionals.
He said networks like Patriot Democracy exploit the fact that a single Facebook page can be connected to multiple ad accounts and user profiles, creating a complex challenge for enforcement. “But these cracks have existed for the past eight years,” said Allen, a former Meta data scientist who worked on integrity issues before departing in 2019.
“There are a lot of gaps in the system, and Facebook’s overall strategy is to play Whac-A-Mole.”
Franklin noted that scammers use a variety of tactics to conceal their activity. Meta constantly updates its detection and enforcement systems and works with industry and law enforcement partners to combat fraudulent activity, she said.
“This is a highly adversarial space, and we continue to update our enforcement systems to respond to evolving scammer behavior,” Franklin said. She added that Meta has taken legal action against several operators.
Meta’s Rules
Misleading election ads have posed a challenge for Meta since at least 2016, when Russian trolls purchased thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Amid public outcry and pressure from Congress, Meta has created special rules for political and social issues advertisers, launched a public Ad Library to archive such ads and hired additional people to review ads. An integrity team has been tasked with enforcing Meta’s community and advertising standards.
In 2022 and 2023, Meta laid off over 20,000 employees, including members of its integrity team. The company said it has more than 40,000 people working on safety and security around the world, an increase since 2020. It declined to say whether it has more people working on election ad reviews this cycle compared with the last presidential election.
One of the team’s key responsibilities is to verify that election and social issues advertisers are who they say they are, and that their ads adhere to the company’s rules. Since 2019, Meta has required political and social issues advertisers to submit an Employer Identification Number, a government or military website and an associated email address, or a Federal Election Commission registration number.
Meta also allowed state and local organizations and candidates who aren’t federally registered to run ads by providing a corresponding website and email address, a “valid” phone number and a mail-deliverable address. It later relaxed the rules to allow advertisers to simply display the name of their Facebook page as the entity that paid for the ad.
Google, Meta’s main U.S. election ads competitor, doesn’t have similar carve-outs for ad disclaimers. It accepts only an FEC registration number, state elections ID or EIN to verify an organization. Google’s political ad disclaimers list the organization name or the name of a person who completed the ID verification process.
Franklin said Meta has rules to ensure that page name disclaimers aren't abused. The company’s guidelines say that regardless of how much information advertisers disclose, the ads must “Accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible for the ad.” But more than 100,000 ads identified by ProPublica and the Tow Center did not.
Patriot Democracy
The “paid for by” disclaimers on the ads that mysteriously started appearing on weather forecaster Klotz’s hijacked page listed “Klotz Policy Group” as the advertiser. Klotz Policy Group is not affiliated with Adam Klotz, and the email and website address in the disclaimer do not point to a dedicated website. The group is also not listed in OpenCorporates or other business registration databases.
The advertiser disclaimer information for Klotz’s page listed the email admin@patriotdemocracy.com and the website patriotdemocracy.com/klotzpolicygroup. That URL led to a page that promoted dental coverage for Medicare recipients and used the branding of a site called Saving Tips Daily. Similar URLs with the patriotdemocracy.com domain appeared across other pages in the network, which enabled ProPublica, Tow and the Tech Transparency Project to link them to the same network. (For more details on how the ads and networks were identified, see the methodology section at the end of this story.)
Patriot Democracy is the biggest of the eight networks identified during the course of the investigation and has been active on Meta’s platforms for nearly five years. It includes 232 pages that have spent more than $13 million on more than 110,000 ads.
Allen said operations like Patriot Democracy spend millions on Meta ads because it helps them find victims.
“If they gave over $10 million to Facebook, then they may have extracted $15 million from American seniors with this garbage,” he said. “The harms add up.”
The pages often have official-sounding names such as “Government Cash Program,” “US Financial Relief” and “USA Stimulus Fund,” and their ad disclaimers list organization names that do not correspond to registered entities or websites.
Meta also allowed the page owners to falsely identify themselves as affiliated with the federal government. If a user looked up the page details of “Government Cash Program,” they would see a notation showing that it’s a “Government Website.” US Financial Relief is listed as a “Government organization.” More than 20 pages claimed to be a “Public Service.”
One of the most common types of ads run by Patriot Democracy pages is for Trump merchandise, including coins, flags and hats.
One of these ads ensnared Sam Roberson, a 57-year-old Texas resident, last month. While browsing Facebook, Roberson was drawn to an offer for a Trump coin from a page called Stars and Stripes Supply. The coin was embossed with an image of the former president raising his fist after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. One click took him to the site patriotprosnetwork.com, where Roberson paid $39.99 for 11 coins that he planned to give to his grandkids. He received the coins. But two weeks later, his card was charged another $29.99.
Roberson told ProPublica that he didn’t realize that he had signed up for a subscription. He contacted customer support to request a refund, but is skeptical the company will follow through.
“With these knuckleheads and how deep they are dug in, I may end up having to cancel the card,” he said.
When ProPublica called the site’s customer service line, a person who did not give their name said that customers who choose the “VIP” checkout option receive a discount on their purchases and are automatically enrolled in a monthly membership. The spokesperson said that customers are informed on the site and by email “how they got involved [in the membership] and how they can cancel.”
They said that someone else from the company could answer questions about advertising but hung up when asked how often they receive customer complaints about the membership fee.
ProPublica also sent an email with detailed questions about the coin offer and the subscription but did not receive a response.
The Stars and Stripes Supply page spent over $700,000 on Meta ads for Trump merchandise and ran ads as recently as Sept. 28 before it was removed by Meta. The page and the store have received online complaints about the billing scheme. It’s unclear who controls the page or the store, or how they are connected.
In addition to the billing schemes, the Trump merchandise ads often draw clicks with false claims and divisive language. Stars and Stripes Supply ran ads for Trump and JD Vance yard signs that falsely claimed “liberal activists are ripping Trump-Vance yard signs from the ground, sparking a wave of controversy across the nation.”
A page called Truly American ran a video ad for a “free” Trump flag and coin offer that was narrated by a female voice claiming to be Melania Trump. “Today we see free thinkers and independent voices like gay conservatives and Log Cabin Republicans silenced, censored and bullied by cancel-culture mobs. Donald stood against this and they tried to silence him for good,” the voice intoned, as the ad showed an image of Trump with his bloodied ear.
It’s unclear who ultimately controls the Patriot Democracy pages and associated Instagram accounts or who paid for the ads. Along with listing fake advertiser names, Patriot Democracy ad disclaimers show addresses that often correspond to WeWork co-working spaces or UPS stores. And the phone numbers, which are shared among multiple pages, led to generic voicemail messages — with one exception.
A man who answered one number said he’d never run ads on Meta and didn’t know why his phone number was listed. He said he was on his way to court and asked the reporter to call back later. He did not answer a subsequent call, and the phone number was soon disconnected.
The ownership information for patriotdemocracy.com and its related domains is also private, making it impossible to know who registered the domain. Meta did not answer specific questions about the network.
Before ProPublica and Tow reached out, Meta had removed less than half of Patriot Democracy pages for violating its advertising standards. It also failed to take action against the larger network, even after some of its pages were exposed in earlier reports by Forbes and researchers at Syracuse University.
Of the more than 110,000 ads on Patriot Democracy pages identified by ProPublica and Tow, Meta stopped just over 7,000, or roughly 6%, from running for violating standards. These ads were shown nearly 60 million times before Meta took action. Meta also consistently failed to detect and remove copies of ads it had previously banned due to policy violations, according to the analysis.
Franklin said Meta uses a variety of automated approaches to detect and remove duplicate ads. This includes training systems to recognize the images and videos used in previously removed ads in order to prevent them from running again. It also looks at a variety of signals, including user and payment information and the devices used to access accounts, to restrict or ban people who break its rules, she said.
One of the most popular lures used by Patriot Democracy and other networks is the promise of free government cash.
More than 30,000 ads across the networks identified by ProPublica and Tow falsely claimed that nearly all Americans could receive government subsidies or are eligible for a “FREE Health Insurance Program.” People who clicked were often directed to unethical insurance agents who altered their existing ACA plan details or signed them up for plans they weren’t eligible for, pocketing a commission in the process. These ads were shown to users at least 38 million times.
The scheme has caused victims to lose their existing ACA health insurance or to be hit with unexpected tax bills from the IRS. In those cases, the agent falsely reported a lower income to enroll clients and secure a commission. In response to the surge in fraudulent enrollments, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers the ACA, implemented stricter rules this summer for insurance agents.
A CMS spokesperson declined to comment on specific ads or platforms. But insurance marketers and other industry experts told ProPublica that Facebook ads are a scammer’s preferred method for ensnaring victims. Meta declined to comment on whether it’s in touch with CMS.
“It’s clear from speaking with a lot of different consumers that were ripped off that the Facebook ads played a big part,” said Jason Doss, an Atlanta lawyer who filed a class-action suit against a group of companies and individuals who allegedly used online ads, high-pressure insurance call centers and other methods to commit mass ACA enrollment fraud. The companies have moved to dismiss the case, citing a lack of jurisdiction and failure to show that any laws were broken, among other defenses. “We deny the allegations made and will be defending the case,” the CEO of one company named in the suit told ProPublica. The suit is ongoing.
Since 2021, Google has required U.S. health insurance advertisers to verify their identity and license status prior to running ads. Meta does not have this requirement. The company did not respond to questions about health insurance advertisers.
Taking on a Network
Meta’s failure to stop deceptive ads about government programs has forced some state and local officials to step in.
In January 2023, investigators in the Alaska Division of Insurance received complaints from consumers who said they were shown misleading ads on Facebook.
The ads used the state seal of Alaska and in some cases a photo of the governor to falsely claim that the state was offering new funeral and burial benefits. “The State of Alaska approved NEW affordable Funeral programs, designed to cover 100% final expenses up to 25,000 or more. Not just a portion,” read one ad.
As with other types of deceptive ads, the burial ads tricked people into filling out a form. In this case, they often ended up on the phone with someone trying to sell life insurance.
Alex Romero, Alaska’s chief insurance investigator, was alarmed. There weren’t any “new” state benefits. It’s also illegal in Alaska, and just about every state, to use a state seal without permission.
Searching the Meta Ad Library, he found hundreds of deceptive ads that used state seals. Romero warned his fellow state insurance investigators on a scheduled conference call soon after his discovery. “There was a proliferation of advertising using the same deceptive marketing,” Romero told ProPublica.
Around the same time, officials in Ventura County, California, were alerted to the unauthorized use of its county seal in Facebook ads. A local news outlet sent the county examples of burial insurance ads that used the Ventura County seal. Tiffany North, the county counsel, began an inquiry. She and Romero connected last spring and realized the same person was connected to the Facebook ads: a lead-generation marketer and insurance broker named Abel Medina.
Public records show that Medina, 35, owns companies such as Heartwork Global and Kontrol LLC, which have run election and social issues ads on several Facebook pages.
Romero said his research showed that Kontrol LLC was a key source of Facebook ads with state seals and images of governors. “Practically every state, a bunch of counties, several cities, they’re all getting tagged by this guy Medina,” he said.
Two other companies, Final Expense Authority LLC and American Benefits & Services LLC, ran similar ads on some of the same Facebook pages, ProPublica and Tow found. Their websites had text that was nearly identical to text on Heartwork Global’s site.
Corporate records show that Final Expense Authority LLC is registered to Tiffani Panyanouvong, a 24-year-old former insurance broker. She told ProPublica that Medina registered the entity in her name without her permission when they were dating.
American Benefits & Services LLC is registered in Delaware and does not publicly list an owner. Panyanouvong said that Medina used that company and Final Expense Authority to run ads on Meta and that she “had nothing to do with his lead-generation services.”
“This is all because of him, and I was just his girlfriend at the time,” Panyanouvong told ProPublica in a WhatsApp message. “And he used me as another person to hide behind to get through the Facebook advertising loop holes.”
On his LinkedIn profile, Medina touts his Facebook ad expertise. He says he generated “$1.6 Million in sales in under eight months with only Facebook Final Expense Media Buying and growing other verticals.”
He’s also teaching others how to do it — for a fee. His profile points to a website, Scale Kontrol, which promises to help clients create a “cash cow advertising machine” by using Facebook ads to generate customer leads. The site also assures customers that it knows “work arounds” to avoid having ads “flagged, banned, restricted.”
Medina did not respond to phone messages or to a detailed list of questions sent to three email addresses, his Facebook account and a home address.
ProPublica and Tow found that the four companies have operated at least 40 Facebook pages and spent $2.1 million on more than 21,000 election and issues ads. Thousands of ads reviewed by ProPublica and Tow across pages linked to the companies made deceptive claims and appeared to break one or more Meta rules.
The pages used deepfake audio of Biden to make false claims about government subsidies, ran deceptive auto insurance ads that promoted nonexistent “Biden Gas Relief Checks” using images of a U.S. Treasury check, and falsely claimed that “The State has approved a NEW Mortgage Protection Plan that protects your home and family in the event of an unexpected tragedy.” No such state plan exists.
Prior to being contacted by ProPublica, Meta had removed about half of the pages. Ten pages connected to these companies ran ads in the last three months.
In March 2023, North sent a cease-and-desist letter to Final Expense Authority. “Your use of the County’s official seal and your actions in misleading the public are unauthorized and unlawful,” she wrote.
The following month, Romero sent a similar letter to Medina, Panyanouvong and three of the companies. It cited five criminal and civil statutes that the state of Alaska believed they had violated and demanded they stop running ads with the state seal and images of the governor.
North and Romero said the ads with their respective seals stopped soon after the letters were sent. (Neither contacted Meta directly, telling ProPublica they focused on the companies running the ads.)
Final Expense Authority, the company registered to Panyanouvong, is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Monterey County district attorney’s office over its use of the California county’s seal. Emily Hickok, Monterey County’s chief deputy district attorney, confirmed the investigation to ProPublica and said her office reported the ads to Meta in February. She declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.
Panyanouvong’s California insurance license was revoked in January. An attorney for the state Department of Insurance cited the use of Ventura County and Alaska seals in ads, among other alleged violations, state records show. Due to a prior criminal conviction for petty theft, records show that in 2019 Medina received a California insurance license on a probationary basis. It has been inactive since last November. He holds an active license in Texas.
Panyanouvong, who now works as a waitress, said she hopes to get her license back. “I’m pretty disheartened about this matter constantly haunting me,” she said.
The California Department of Insurance declined to comment on any investigations into the companies. “While we do not comment on open investigations, deceptive advertising on social media platforms can be a cause for licensing action or criminal prosecution,” it said in a statement to ProPublica.
Meta removed all of the active pages linked to the four companies after ProPublica and Tow shared them. It declined to say whether it had taken additional action. But as recently as early October, an ad from American Benefits & Services offered $100K to homeowners: “Claim cash back with these new home owners benefits programs that just became available.”
Still Locked Out
After ProPublica emailed Klotz, the meteorologist, in August to ask about the ads running via his page, his employer, Fox News, contacted Meta to get the ads removed and to restore his access. His verified page continued running ads promising easy money to Americans until early October. As of this week, he still doesn’t have access to his page.
“As far as I know the account is still hacked and in their control,” Klotz said.
Methodology
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