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GRIFT 2 SCAM

4/20 sparked by covid

SEE THREE

merri ok

see givesendgo trump coup legal defense

tag 721 grft

grift is crime adjacent: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump-struggles-explain-culture-lawlessness-around-him-n1237483

GRIFT IS EXTRACTION

see fear phobia hype

see don jr kim guilfoyle gold cpac

diet supplements (prevent covid]

SEE SENIOR CITIZENS DIRECT MAIL

note alt fact ~ expertise

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rww grift? 10 26

Lance Wallnau's Prophetic Gold And Silver Promotion Didn't Pay Off

Earlier this year, MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau staked his prophetic reputation on the promise that gold and silver prices would continue to rise. They didn't, so now he's using the price drop as a reason why now is "the best possible price to buy."

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'They'll take my house': Far-right pastor begs for $1M before he ends up 'on the street'

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Critics pounce as Trump turns 'official government website' into scheme for 'selling green cards'

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grift

Trump-aligned charity hosts auctions of "rescue" puppies previously purchased from puppy mills at Trump properties, proving they can even grift off puppies.

Medias News reports that Trump-aligned "Moms for America" has hosted a charity dog auction affiliated with "Big Dog Ranch Rescue," a Lara Trump-run dog rescue at Mar-A-Lago, Donald Trump's dinner club. Big Dog Ranch has previously been found to have purchased the dogs it claimed to have rescued from a puppy mill. This seems the opposite of rescuing a dog, but alternate facts.

IFrame Content

At the time, Laurie Simmons, CEO of Big Dog Ranch Rescue, defended the group's actions, stating they were unaware of the local ordinance when the violation occurred. Credible dog rescues know not to give money to puppy mills…

…"We didn't realize it was a local ordinance," Simmons told CBS12 News. Simmons acknowledged the dire conditions faced the animals in puppy mills, describing them as living "in horrible situations" and caged in a "dark barn," yet decided to fork over money to them anyway.

MTN

As Chairperson of Big Dog Ranch Rescue, Lara Trump was able to bring almost two million dollars in business to her father-in-law's weirdo supper club.

Internal Revenue Service filings show that the group has spent as much as $1,883,160 on fundraising costs at Mar-a-Lago and Trump's golf course 18 miles north in Jupiter starting in 2014. Lara Trump, the wife of Eric Trump, started being listed as a chairwoman for charity events in 2018, and the group's president, Lauren Simmons, visited the White House in 2019 for the signing of a bill addressing animal cruelty.

Late Friday night, Simmons issued a statement defending her association with Lara Trump, whom she described as a great advocate of dogs, and her use of Donald Trump's properties.

HuffPo

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AN 10 24

Anyone who signs an online political petition is likely to be bombarded with fundraising requests. Donation pitches can be quite aggressive in presidential elections, and convince voters to dig deep even if their finances are stretched thin.

In a report published on October 22, nine CNN journalists detail Republican fundraising that targets seniors who are giving away much more than they can afford to.

According to CNN, "More than 1000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens of contributors and their family members, show how deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans and misled those battling dementia or other cognitive impairments into giving away millions of dollars — far more than they ever intended. Some unintentionally joined the ranks of the top grassroots political donors in the country as they tapped into retirement savings and went into debt, contributing six-figure sums through thousands of transactions."

READ MORE:Researcher explains why 'dark' new GOP survey is 'keeping me up at night'

On X, formerly Twitter, Politico's Nicholas Wu highlights one of the examples described in the report: an 82-year-old woman "who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn't want to spend money on new ones" and "didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1000-square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.'"

CNN's report also describes "80-year-old communications engineer from Texas" who "had saved for decades, driving around in an old car and buying clothes from thrift stores so he'd have enough money to enjoy his retirement years."

"But as dementia robbed him of his reasoning abilities," CNN explains, "he began making online political donations over and over again — eventually telling his son he believed he was part of a network of political operatives communicating with key Republican leaders. In less than two years, the man became one of the country's largest grassroots supporters of the Republican Party, ultimately giving away nearly half a million dollars to former President Donald Trump and other candidates. Now, the savings account he spent his whole life building is practically empty."

According to CNN, the donors cited in the report "were often in their 80s and 90s."

READ MORE:How Trump could pull off 'a real coup' if he loses to Harris: report

"They included retired public workers, house cleaners and veterans, widows living alone, nursing home residents and people who donated more money than they paid for their homes, according to records and interviews," CNN explains. "The money they gave came from pensions, Social Security payments and retirement savings accounts meant to last decades."

CNN continues, "Donors took out new credit cards and mortgages to pay for the contributions. In some cases, they gave away most of their life savings. Their cell phones and email inboxes were so full of pleas for money that they missed photos of their grandkids and other important messages. At least one person continued to be charged for contributions after his death."

READ MORE:Donald 'let me believe' in abortion rights: Melania Trump

*Read CNN's full report at this link.

Officials have begged people to not spread misinformation about Hurricane Helene. YouTube has monetized it.

10/10/24

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/officials-have-begged-people-not-spread-misinformation-about-hurricane-helene-youtube-has) mma

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mma

The right-wing media is steeped in con culture

Laura Ingraham hawks gold by warning of economic disaster under Harris — but economists say Trump would be worse

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 10/01/24

When the going gets tough, right-wing commentators get grifting — though to be fair, they also rile up their audiences so they can profit off them in good times.

Take Laura Ingraham. On Tuesday morning, the Fox News host previewed the evening’s vice presidential debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. JD Vance by urging her X followers to buy gold and silver from her sponsor in order to avoid “a potential Harris/Walz disaster” to their personal finances.

Ingraham linked to a dedicated landing page featuring her endorsement of GoldPro, a precious metals investment company whose right-wing sponsors have included Ingraham’s Fox colleague Sean Hannity and Stew Peters, a white nationalist and antisemitic streamer who has called for the execution of journalists.

Ingraham’s LauraLikesGold.com testimonial states that “our current Administration has done nothing to make the lives of everyday American families better,” citing factors like “Rising Inflation,” “Increasing National debt,” and “a looming recession.”

“Will it ever get better?” she added. “Expert analysts are not hopeful, which is why I encourage you to learn how gold and silver can be a great way to hedge against these economic factors eating away at your nest egg.”

It is certainly amusing that in exchange for money, Ingraham is warning her audience both that former President Donald Trump may lose the 2024 presidential election and that even if he wins, his economic performance will prove so poor that they need to buy gold and silver as a hedge.

But Ingraham’s paid missive both defies what economists and other experts say about the relative merits of the plans put forward by Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump, and provides a stark example of how right-wing pundits enrich themselves on the backs of their followers.

Analyses: Trump’s plans would lead to higher deficits, higher inflation, and lower growth than Harris’

While Ingraham is urging followers to “protect yourself from a potential Harris/Walz disaster” by buying precious metals from her sponsor as a hedge against inflation, debt, and a recession, experts say that Trump is actually the bigger threat on all counts.

More than 400 economists and policymakers signed a letter last month endorsing Harris and touting her plans to “build a strong, pro-growth economy for all Americans.”

By contrast, the letter stated, Trump’s proposed policies — which include plans for massive tariffs on all imported goods, mass deportations, and reducing the independence of the Federal Reserve — “risk reigniting inflation and threaten the United States’ global standing and domestic economic stability. Nonpartisan researchers have predicted that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will lower GDP growth and increase the unemployment rate.”

The mass endorsement from economists came just weeks after 16 Nobel Prize winners released their own letter warning the American public of the devastating effects of Trump's second term agenda.

A new study from the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that “Trump’s promises would spike inflation and wipe out jobs,” according to CNN. The study concluded that Trump’s proposals, if implemented, would trigger a decline in employment of 2.7% to 9% by 2028; a spike in inflation to between 6% and 9.3% by 2026; and 2.8% to nearly 10% lower economic growth as measured by GDP by the end of a second Trump term.

An assessment of the candidates’ plans from Bloomberg News found that Trump’s tax plans would lead to higher national deficits and debt and higher inflation than would Harris’, while his immigration and trade proposals would hammer growth.

The financial model for right-wing media is built on what I’ve termed con culture: Outlets and commentators attract a loyal audience through political demagoguery, seal them into a bubble by attacking mainstream information sources that present contradictory narratives, and then bilk those marks for all they are worth.

They tell their audience that companies are liberal and corrupt — whether they sell children’s entertainment or razors or nicotine pouches — then offer their own alternatives.

They tell their audience that they can’t trust medical experts — then sell them out to quacks hawking fake cures for real medical conditions and dubious brain pills.

They tell their audience that economic doom is imminent — then peddle them survival food, scammy financial products, and, in Ingraham’s case, precious metals.

These arrangements can prove extremely lucrative for the pundits.

“Two media dealmakers who have been involved in negotiations between conservative media figures and the gold IRA industry said revenue from the companies can amount to as much as 10 percent of total earnings for some personalities … one said the biggest personalities stand to earn millions of dollars a year,” The Washington Post reported in an investigation last year into the right-wing media’s paid promotion of such companies.

Indeed, Trump himself personifies this type of grift. While running for president, he is currently pitching his followers cryptocurrency, watches priced at up to $100,000, his own version of the Bible, an array of pricey branded shoes, digital trading cards, and much, much more.

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The Longest Con tells the fascinating story of the partisan con artists who have corrupted conservative politics in our time, creating a toxic phenomenon that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, a bumptious fraud whose checkered career and tawdry retinue, including his presidential cabinet, have featured almost every variety of scam. But long before he appeared, Trump's path to power was blazed by the motley horde of swindlers and quacks who preceded him.

From the "professional anti-communists" (whose tactics even J. Edgar Hoover despised) to the "populist" grifters of the Tea Party movement and the religious charlatans of the "prosperity gospel" (who provided a pious front for Trump), the right-wing ripoff has remained remarkably consistent, even as personalities change and new technologies emerge: Stir up anger and resentment, demonize political opponents, promise vengeance, and collect donations from the gullible. It's a highly lucrative game that any unscrupulous charlatan can play, as many have - and they are named in these pages.

In an unsparing and often comic narrative, Joe Conason explores the right's long, steep descent into a movement whose principal aim is not to protect freedom or defend the Constitution, but merely to line the pockets of pretenders and blowhards whose malevolent tactics now endanger the nation.

Joe Conasonis an American journalist and commentator. He is editor-in-chief of The National Memo, a daily political newsletter, and a senior fellow at Type Media Center. His articles have appeared in many publications around the world, including The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Salon, and The American Prospect.He was executive editor of The New York Observer and a staff writer at The Village Voice. Two of his previous books, The Hunting of the President and Big Lies, were New York Times bestsellers.

MMA

These are the companies paying to advertise on RNC co-chair Lara Trump's podcast

WRITTEN BY JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES

PUBLISHED 06/18/24

On her podcast, RNC co-chair Lara Trump maintains a collection of conservative-branded utility, doomsday prep, and supplement company sponsors. Throughout her show, Trump has promoted election denial and conspiracy theories which claim that Democrats will try to steal the 2024 election.

In the 41 episodes between March 8, when she was elected co-chair, and June 12, Lara did ad reads for the following 8 sponsors: Association of Mature American Citizens, Patriot Mobile, MyPillow, Swiss America, Balance of Nature, ReadyWise, UpWellness, and Googipet.

The Association of Mature American Citizens — whose advocacy arm, AMAC Action, is a Project 2025 partner — publishes content to persuade members that the 2024 election will be stolen partially because of “universal mail-in voting,” a method that Trump has been trying to persuade skeptical Republican voters can now be trusted. Trump advertised for AMAC 16 times in this period.

Still of Lara Trump next to AMAC logo

CitationScreenshot of the April 4, 2024, edition of The Right View

Patriot Mobile is a Christian nationalist cell phone service provider with ties to figures who promote the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” or “the belief that Christians are called on to dominate the seven key ‘mountains’ of American life, including business, media, government and education.” Trump advertised for Patriot Mobile in all episodes, or 41 times, in this period.

Still of Lara Trump next to Patriot Mobile logo and above discount code

CitationScreenshot of the May 7, 2024, edition of The Right View

MyPillow is owned by election denier and Trump ally Mike Lindell, who is currently in the throes of two defamation lawsuits from voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems. Trump advertised for MyPillow 29 times in this period.

Still of Lara Trump next to MyPillow logo

CitationScreenshot of the May 9, 2024, edition of The Right View

Swiss America is a gold and silver trading company, for which Trump promotes “The Secret War on Cash,” a report warning consumers about Democrat lawmakers supposedly pushing for a “digital dollar that could allow the government to tell us what we can and cannot buy,” and teaching them how to protect themselves from such “threats facing our freedom and your hard-earned money.” Trump advertised for Swiss America 27 times in this period.

Still of Lara Trump above Swiss America logo

CitationScreenshot of the March 26, 2024, edition of The Right View

Balance of Nature is a supplement company. During the COVID-19 pandemic, advertising watchdog Truth in Advertising filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that the company was falsely claiming that its products could prevent coronavirus infection. Trump advertised for Balance of Nature 9 times in the allotted period.

Still of Lara Trump above the Balance of Nature logo

CitationScreenshot of the March 28, 2024, edition of The Right View

ReadyWise is an emergency food kit company. Trump advertised for it 12 times in this period.

Still of Lara Trump next to ReadyWise logo and discount code

CitationScreenshot of the June 5, 2024, edition of The Right View

UpWellness is a supplement company. Trump advertised for it 11 times in this period.

Still of Lara Trump next to UpWellness logo and discount code

CitationScreenshot of the May 29, 2024, edition of The Right View

Googipet is a dog-oriented supplement company. Trump advertised for it 17 times in this period.

Still of Lara Trump next to googipet logo

CitationScreenshot of the April 24, 2024, edition of The Right View

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mma 5 24 grift

Daily Wire announced the launch of a new “men’s lifestyle” company named Responsible Man on May 1, promoting its only current product — a men’s dietary supplement that it says is “designed to help … sharpen brain cognition” and that it suggests will help address what the outlet calls the “increasing health risk” of declining “sperm concentration.”

On April 30, The Daily Wire’s parent company Bentkey Ventures registered the assumed name “Daily Wire Ventures.” The next day, on May 1, it debuted Responsible Man, a new company for men’s health products.

The Daily Wire is promoting Responsible Man as an alternative to “woke” companies and by fearmongering about some of the outlet’s frequent targets, namely gender-affirming care and drag queens, asking its readers, “Do you want to buy your men’s health products from a company that partners with drag queens and supports radical organizations that push gender procedures on children?” Responsible Man’s website uses similar language, promising its customers that “together, we can reclaim masculinity” and claiming that “Emerson’s Vitamins are a simple step towards improving yourself, creating order, and building the future.”

Video

CitationAd from Responsible Man's website

The Daily Wire’s promotion suggests Responsible Man’s products can help address various health issues, including the purported “increasing health risk” of declining “sperm concentration” worldwide, promising to help men stay healthy “for the survival of the human race.”

The company’s only product, a men’s multivitamin, is marketed as being “professionally engineered by medical doctors” to “support your immune system, maintain energy production, sharpen brain cognition, and support the health of your heart and muscles.”

Claims made by The Daily Wire’s new company are not FDA-approved

According to disclaimers on Responsible Man’s website, the claims made to promote the company’s vitamins “have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.” Multivitamins do not need to go through an evaluation process prior to entering the marketplace, and have generally proved ineffective in reducing the risk of heart disease and mental decline.

In the past, The Daily Wire has targeted certain medications used in gender-affirming care for trans youth for their use off-label without FDA approval, even though this is a common practice in prescribing pediatric medications. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh has been particularly fervent in wielding this point to target gender-affirming care.

The Daily Wire is promoting the new company by targeting Men’s Health magazine

The Daily Wire’s previous ventures into consumer goods have been framed in opposition to specific companies it deemed too “woke,” such as Harry’s Razors and Hershey’s Chocolate, for refusing to advertise with The Daily Wire and featuring a trans woman in an advertisement, respectively. (Jeremy’s Razors and Jeremy’s Chocolate, The Daily Wire’s answers to Harry’s and Hershey’s going “woke,” have received poor feedback from customers.)

The Daily Wire’s promotion of Responsible Man singles out for criticism Men’s Health, the largest men’s lifestyle magazine in the United States. Claiming that Men’s Health was “afraid of manhood itself,” The Daily Wire has declared itself “here to give you a better option.” The lone source of outrage cited by the outlet is a Men’s Health article from November 2021 on “LGBTQ+ Language and Media Literacy.”

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john Eastman, a right-wing attorney who is in serious legal trouble for his intensive efforts to help former President Donald Trump stay in power after losing the 2020 election, continues to raise funds for his legal defense fund from Trump’s religious-right supporters. Eastman was the featured speaker at an online event hosted Monday night by the Salt and Light Council, a group that promotes “biblical citizenship.”

Eastman portrayed himself as making a heroic stand for truth and against tyranny, as he did last fall while fighting efforts by the California Bar Association to have him disbarred. Eastman used that trial to make the case that his 2020 claims about election fraud and illegality were legitimate but had never been fully considered by the courts. The judge’s decision in the disbarment trial was expected by March 1.

During his Salt and Light presentation, Eastman promoted his page on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo, where people have contributed more than $630,000 to his legal defense fund so far. He said he’s “about a million in the hole beyond that right now,” adding that he thinks his total legal costs will run between $3 million and $3.5 million.

Eastman’s appearance made it clear that he remains as unrepentant about his work for Trump as he was last August, when he promoted debunked claims about the 2020 election and asserted that “the very existential threat that the country is under” justified his and Trump’s actions. On Monday’s Zoom call with Salt and Light activists, Eastman made similar claims. Citing the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln, Eastman said, “And now, in this century, this is the fight comparable to those—the defense of freedom.” He went on:

And will this great shining city on a hill that has been a beacon to the rest of the world continue to be that beacon of light? Or will we go into an age of darkness? I can’t imagine anything more important than that fight. And so here we are on the front lines, and let’s just make sure we’re as well armed for it as we can.

Eastman portrayed himself as a defiant warrior for freedom and the future of the country:

Our country is on a precipice of losing our freedoms. And for whatever reason, I’ve been cast in the forefront of this battle. I’m on the battle lines, I’m on the ramparts. And I consider it one of the greatest honors of my life to be in the front of this fight for freedom, and fighting against tyranny. And I will do, I will engage in that fight with every fiber of my being as long as I’m able.

And he seems to have no doubt that he is up to the task:

I’ve been fighting for principled positions for my whole career. I’ve got one of the best law degrees and academic careers you can have. I clerked at the Supreme Court of the United States. I was a dean. I’ve got the skill set, God has given me the skill set to be in a position to fight this probably, at least as well as anybody else in the country. And so that’s what I do. And I’ll do it, you know, I’ll do it with a law degree as long as I have it. And I’ll do it without the law degree if they try and take that away from me, because this is an important fight to have.

Eastman had harsh words for his opponents, whether he was talking about the people trying to impose “a one world order,” public school teachers who undermine parents’ authority, members of the congressional Jan. 6 committee, or officials seeking to silence people who question the official line on vaccines, critical race theory, or transgender youth:

The folks we’re dealing with are evil. They don’t consider destroying our country as collateral damage for their overall mission, they consider that icing on the cake for their overall mission. I mean, we have to understand that we are dealing with pure evil, and the way you gotta, just you got to arm yourselves in truth and light, salt and light.

He urged the Salt and Light activists to get their churches politically engaged:

Your congregations, that’s a massive force, get them engaged, sign them up to vote, get the voter guides out in their hands and let them know who the decent people are, and who the folks that are mouthing platitudes are, whether in the primary elections or the general election. Get them engaged. Get them educated. This is an army that cannot be stopped if we would just launch it.

Salt and Light Council founder and President Dran Reese portrayed the ongoing legal prosecutions over the 2020 election in spiritual terms, praying that God would “overcome the devil in this case around John Eastman and President Trump.”

Video excerpts (full video linked above):

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Following news that a session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting would be focused on the World Health Organization’s preparations for a potential epidemic of a currently unknown pathogen dubbed “Disease X,” right-wing media figures pushed conspiracy theories about a supposed plan to kill off “excess population” and fearmongered over the possibility of another pandemic and lockdowns. Some sought to capitalize on the fear by selling “medical emergency kits” that contain an unproven COVID-19 treatment.

because they “want less people.” Schlapp stated: “I think they must know something, and I’m not going to discount the fact that probably Disease X is a thing and could happen, and some people — as evil and dastardly as it sounds — thinks killing millions of people actually could be good for the rest of us who survive.” Additionally, host Chris Plante said that at the meeting, “globalists at Davos ... might not be preparing for imaginary situations, but rather assembling their next global power grab.” Newsmax, *Chris Plante The Right Squad*, [1/17/23; CNN, 12/16/23]

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...How Trump screwed working people to pay for his tax cuts for the rich... When Republicans were putting together Trump’s massive tax cut for himself and his billionaire buddies back in 2017, they wanted to squeeze an additional few billion out of average working people to pay for some of Trump’s billionaire tax cuts. So they ended, from 2017 to 2025, the deductability of “personal casualty” losses: things like money lost to scams, or homes destroyed by weirding weather. The result has been a wave of middle class people being wiped out after being scammed out of their life savings because now they can no longer deduct those stolen funds from their tax obligations but instead have to pay taxes on them as if they’d “stolen” the money themselves.}:

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far-right Portland, Oregon-based activist Jenny Donnelly is quietly using her experience as a multilevel marketer to recruit Evangelical women to the cause of Christian nationalism.

A recent Rolling Stone expose delved into how Donnelly —founder of the Her Voice Movement — has been working with pro-Trump pastors to organize a million-woman march in Washington, DC in October of 2024, close to Election Day. Donnelly's group is stridently against LGBTQ+ rights and seeks to outlaw abortion throughout the United States, and has ties to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) tradition. Followers of NAR churches believe that Christians have the responsibility to "subdue" the nations of the world to force Christian "dominion" as a way of bringing about the "end times" prophecy of Christ returning to earth. She warned in a recent speech that if Christians don't seize political power, it creates "a big vacuum for unrighteousness to take over."

"I looked [subdue] up in Hebrew; that word actually means ‘to take it under bondage,'" Donnelly said, quoting scripture that read "I commanded you to look at the Earth, and when it acts up, bring it under the bondage of the kingdom of God."

Donnelly is a seasoned marketing veteran, and was once touted as a "hall of fame" earner for Texas-based multilevel marketing company AdvoCare. While Donnelly herself claimed to have made more than seven figures from AdvoCare, other sellers weren't as fortunate: Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it had returned nearly $150 million to more than 220,000 people harmed by the company, claiming they were victims of a "pyramid scheme."

"To recruit people, the FTC alleged, AdvoCare and the other defendants told distributors to make exaggerated claims about how much money average people could make—as much as hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year," an FTC press release read. "The FTC alleged that distributors were told to create emotional narratives about how they gained financial success through AdvoCare and to instill fear in potential recruits that they would suffer from regrets later if they declined to invest in AdvoCare."

Donnelly went from selling AdvoCare to selling Christian nationalism with her company Teletestai Ministries. Rolling Stone reported that the company went from grossing $121,000 in 2018 to more than $1.5 million in 2021 as she became a leading figure opposing Covid-19n related restrictions. She's now recruiting women for her proposed DC march through a website dubbed the "Esther Network," which is named after a Biblical character who fought back against repression of Jewish people to the point where her chief enemy was impaled on a spike. The Esther Network solicits subscriptions for $40/month.

During a speech at the Portland convention center, Lou Engle — an NAR pastor allied with Donnelly and her group — railed against the "transgender demonic spirit," saying "tonight, I call forth Esther. For a time such as this."

READ MORE:'We're getting close': Ex-Trump official calls on fundamentalist Christians to 'heed the call to arms'

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Deepfake Warren Buffett is selling bitcoin scams to TikTok users | Media Matters for America

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some fraudsters prey on people's better instincts, using their compassion against them. Federal prosecutors allege that two men who were arrested on Thursday, August 17 did exactly that in elaborate fraud operations.

According to New York Times reporters Chris Cameron and David A. Fahrenthold, federal prosecutors allege that Richard Zeitlin and Robert Piaro "bilked small donors who had wanted to support causes such as aid for military veterans and breast cancer research."

Federal Southern District of New York prosecutor Damian Williams allege that Zeitlin and Piaro "exploited these important causes and the good intentions of everyday citizens."

Cameron and Fahrenthold report, "Mr. Zeitlin, 53, of Las Vegas, is charged with fraud, obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Mr. Piaro, 73, of Fredonia, Wisconsin is charged with wire fraud and mail fraud. Both face lengthy prison sentences if convicted. The indictments do not say that Mr. Zeitlin and Mr. Piaro were working together on the same scheme, though Mr. Williams said they had lied to and stolen from donors who thought they were giving to groups aiding veterans, law enforcement and the fight against breast cancer."

The reporters note that Southern District prosecutors allege that Zeitlin instructed his call center employees to tell donors they would be helping veterans by "getting them the medical needs the VA doesn't provide." And they allege that Piaro "made and authorized others to make fraudulent claims" about how donations to different political action committees would be spent."

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aha uniquely vulnerable to grift  b/c not soc med savvy, ppl get more conserv as age, easy to scare /hype thus con

no ln 7 23

How 'gold IRA' industry ads became a 'mainstay of right-wing media': report

Fox News' Laura Ingraham In July 2022 (Gage Skidmore).

Alex Henderson July 25, 2023

For many years, right-wing media outlets have been aggressively promoting gold as a safe haven for retirees. Anyone who has spent a lot of time consuming right-wing media, be it Fox News, Fox Business and Newsmax TV or AM talk radio, has likely come across gold commercials.

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In a report published by the Washington Post on July 25, journalists Jeremy B. Merrill and Hanna Kozlowska stress that the "gold retirement investment industry" has "become a mainstay of right-wing media."

"An analysis by The Post of political newsletters, social media, podcasts and a national database of television ads collected by the company AdImpact found that pitches to invest in gold coins are a daily presence in media that caters to a right-wing audience and often echo conservative talking points about looming economic and societal collapse," Merrill and Kozlowska explain. "The Post found no similar ads for gold retirement investments in mainstream or left-wing media sources in the databases."

READ MORE: Fox News' relationship with Turning Point USA is 'basically over': report

Lawsuits against "gold IRA" companies, according to Merrill and Kozlowska, are not uncommon. One of the companies that has been sued is Lear Capital, a Fox News advertiser that sells gold and silver coins.

The Washington Post reporters note that "over the past decade, more than 30 customers in 20 states have sued a dozen gold IRA companies."

Terry White, a disabled retiree, told the Post he invested $174,000 in gold coins with Lear and found out the company charges a 33 percent commission. White said he lost almost $80,000.

"For years," Merrill and Kozlowska report, "gold IRA industry advertising has echoed accusations against Democratic politicians commonly found in news segments on conservative outlets. The ads tout the coins as a safe haven from economic uncertainty and social upheaval. Most of the coins are manufactured by the Royal Canadian Mint, which says they're bullion — a kind of coin whose value is determined by the underlying metal. As such, they meet IRS rules for retirement investments."

READ MORE: 'They must comply': Newsmax employees subpoenaed in Smartmatic defamation lawsuit

According to Merrill and Kozlowska, an "analysis of ad data and financial records" shows that the"gold IRA" industry "spends millions of dollars a year to reach viewers of Fox, Newsmax and other conservative outlets."

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"Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani have promoted the coins," the Post reporters observe, "while ads for Lear's competitors have appeared on a podcast hosted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Newsmax broadcasts of former President Donald Trump's political rallies."

READ MORE: Tucker Carlson's Twitter viewership falling as battle with Fox News stalls: report

Find the Washington Post's full report at this link (subscription required).

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-reportedly-gave-vital-assistance-miles-guos-allegedly-fraudulent-schemes

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bannon pardon but state?

an 4 23

former president Donald Trump's border wall was used by an associate of his former campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, to fraudulently raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself. That associate has now been handed a four-year prison sentence.

Brian Kolfage, a veteran of the United States Air Force, reportedly admitted to conspiring to defraud those who contributed to an online campaign to build a wall along the border of Mexico. Bannon, who also served as a White House strategist under Trump, received a presidential pardon by Trump after being charged in connection with the same case, according to the Guardian.

"Bannon remains a prominent presence in far-right media and politics. In September, he was indicted in New York state court in Manhattan on money laundering and conspiracy charges over the planned wall," the outlet reported. "He pleaded not guilty. Trump's pardon of Bannon covered federal crimes but not alleged state crimes."

The Guardian further said that Kolfage, who lost his legs and a hand in Iraq, pleaded guilty last year in the federal case to misappropriating money meant for the "We Build the Wall campaign."

"On Wednesday a US district judge, Analisa Torres, announced the 51-month sentence at a hearing in federal court in Manhattan," the Guardian wrote.

In 2021, it was reported that the theembattled "We Build the Wall" group admitted it couldn't pay lawyer fees despite raising millions of dollars.

Another former Bannon associate, Andrew Badolato, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison, according to the Guardian's article.

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aha funny they call us alarmists, but apocalypse economy collapse hype fear anger greed constant

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/grifters-gonna-grift.html

gold

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an 2 23 raw

A little-noticed nugget unearthed by the Jan. 6 committee found Donald Trump tried to profit off his election lies by trademarking one of his catchphrases about his loss.

The investigation dug up an email from former White House chief of staff Dan Scavino sent to Jared Kushner showing the former president wanted to obtain trademark protection for the phrase "rigged election," reported Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg.

“Hey Jared! POTUS wants to trademark/own rights to below, I don’t know who to see — or ask,” Scavino said in the email just days after the 2020 election.

Kushner then forwarded the message, titled "POTUS requests," to various White House aides urging them to take action.

“Guys — Can we do ASAP please?” Kushner said, highlighting the phrase "Rigged Election!" in the email.

Presumably, Goldberg wrote, the ex-president hoped to raise money by hawking merchandise based on his corrosive lie about the election while muscling other vendors out of the way.

"What’s especially galling about it is that Trump would have been profiting off an utter lie, a cynical political manipulation that threatened to undermine American democracy: the pretense that the 2020 election had been stolen from him," Goldberg wrote. "In the end, Trump did not successfully trademark the phrase, or perhaps was talked out of it by his lawyers. The rest of us can continue to sell 'Rigged Election' caps if we choose to."

---

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an 1 23 raw

Because major advertisers are avoiding Donald Trump's Truth Social, users are instead being exposed to a flood of ads from what the New York Times characterizes as "miracle cures, scams and fake merchandise," as the platform is forced to take what it can in an effort to survive.

That, in turn, has led to complaints aimed at the former president in his comment sections for allowing the forum to turn into a cesspool of ads from scam artists.

As the Times is reporting, Truth Social is almost devoid of ads from large corporations for a multitude of reasons that include the toxic rhetoric on the site, its small reach due to few users and the fact that the predominant demographic is not one that advertisers are trying to reach.

As the Times' Stuart Thompson wrote,"Ads from major brands are nonexistent on the site. Instead, the ads on Truth Social are for alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets, according to an analysis of hundreds of ads on the social network by The New York Times," before adding, "The ads reflect the difficulty that several far-right platforms, including Rumble and Gab, have faced in courting large brands, preventing the sites from tapping into some of the world’s largest ad budgets."

As the report notes, Truth Social was initially financed with $37 million from GOP donors, and is currently estimated to be burning through $1.7 million per month and money is running out because of problems with the Security Exchange Commission.

Upon its launch, Devin Nunes, the chief executive of Trump Media, announced major advertisers would flock to the site — which has not happened — and the gap has been filled by companies that are much less desirable.

Add to that, according to one advertiser, the money he has spent on Truth Social has gone nowhere when it comes to sales.

"Maxwell Finn, an online marketer, said in a YouTube video that he was one of Truth Social’s top advertisers, spending more than$150,000 on ads, including those for Trump-themed hats, shirts, coins and novelty bills. In the video, he called the ad platform 'frustrating' and 'bare bones,' adding that it lacked even basic functionality, forcing his company to manually track ad performance— a method that would prove impossible for advertisers with larger budgets," the report states with Finn explaining, "Do I think this is a platform where you can be spending tens of thousands of dollars a day, especially if you only have a few products? No, probably. The audience is just too small.”

As for those who are still advertising on the site, fans of the former president are furious that advertisers are not being vetted.

"Over time, the low-quality ads on Truth Social have irritated its own users, who have complained to Mr. Trump after repeatedly seeing the same disturbing images or after falling for misleading gimmicks," the Times is reporting before adding an example of one user complaining directly to Trump, "Can you not vet the ads on Truth? I’ve been scammed more than once.”

You can read more here.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/trump-organization-billed-secret-service/

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1m$ maralago BS

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/trumps-fundraiser/

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//NRA expose?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jan-6-committee-zeroes-in-on-trump-e2-80-99s-big-lie-fundraising

zoe takes lead;

no lnx

the Jan. 6 committee spent most of its second hearing Monday picking apart Trump’s relentless lies about the 2020 election outcome — lies he pursued despite findings from both his campaign staff and government investigators that the election results were legitimate.

But Monday’s hearing ended with an interesting change of topic: The panel zeroed in on Trump’s fundraising. Specifically, the committee found, Trump lied to his base in order to raise millions of dollars, and then used that money to pursue his own political and personal ends.

According to the committee’s senior investigative counsel Amanda Wick, it went like this: After Trump lost the 2020 election — and even after the “safe harbor date” that usually spells the end of election lawsuits —Trump and his campaign pursued a fundraising strategy based around a so-called “Election Integrity Fund”: A fund that they told donors would help “PROTECT THE INTEGRITY OF OUR ELECTION” in dozens of emails over several weeks.

But the Election Integrity Fund didn’t exist: Gary Coby, the campaign’s former digital director, agreed during a deposition that it was a “marketing tactic.” And the tactic worked: The committee found that Trump and his allies raised nearly $100 million in the first week after the election.

On Nov. 9, Trump created the “Save America PAC.” Wick said most of the money for the “Election Defense Fund” went to that account. And that PAC, in turn, made millions in donations to Trump-aligned groups: $1 million to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ charitable foundation, $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, which employed several former Trump administration officials, $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection, and over $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., the company that ran Trump’s White House Ellipse rally — the event that preceded the Capitol attack.

The campaign sent fundraising emails regularly, including one about 30 minutes before the Capitol was breached, Wick said.

...

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2 pled guilty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Build_the_Wall

we Build the Wall is an organization soliciting donations to build private sections of the wall along the Mexico–U.S. border. It started as a GoFundMe campaign by United States Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage in December 2018.[2] Kolfage announced the formation of a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization in January 2019.[3] By mid-2020, over $25 million had been raised[4][5] and a 3-mile (4.8 km) section of fence had been built.[6]^

Its advisory board includes politicians and activists with a hard-line stance on illegal immigration, including former secretary of state of Kansas Kris Kobach;[7] former congressman Tom Tancredo;[8]Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince; former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke;[9] and former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon,[5][10] who is chairman of the board.[11] On December 3, 2019, a Hidalgo County judge ordered the group to temporarily halt all construction due to its plans to build adjacent to the Rio Grande, which a lawyer for the National Butterfly Center argued would create a flooding risk. On January 9, 2020, a federal judge lifted the injunction, allowing construction to resume....

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/trump-jr/

news aggregator echo escalator grift extraction

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aha: ? maga q vaxxers self ID as good marks for grift, so they are targets for extraction?  will pay for simple immediate  solution?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/these-anti-vaxxers-and-wellness-influencers-have-been-applauding-putins-ukraine-invasion-report/

no lnx

These anti-vaxxers and ‘wellness influencers’ have been applauding Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion: report

Alex Henderson March 25, 2022

Support for Russian President Vladimir Putin is by no means universal on the America right. Many conservatives, from Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah to media Never Trumpers like The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and the Washington Post’s Max Boot, have been blistering critics of Putin — especially during the brutal invasion of Ukraine.

Yet in the MAGA cult, Putin has had his share of apologists — from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to “War Room” host Steve Bannon to former President Donald Trump. And Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler, in an article published on March 24, focuses on a bizarre trend: far-right anti-vaxxers and online “wellness influencers” who have become cheerleaders for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Butler previously reported on pro-Putin anti-vaxxers in a March 2 article, and since then, the Mother Jones journalist stresses,the “overlap” between pro-Putin propagandists and anti-vaxxers “has only grown.”

“(On March 19), the Toronto Star reported a startling correlation between vaccination status and beliefs about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Butler explains. “More than 80% of vaccinated Canadians said they believed their country should help defend Ukraine, compared to less than a quarter of unvaccinated people. This dynamic is especially pronounced in extremist spaces. Some of the anti-mandate trucker convoy chats on Telegram now seem dominated by Putin cheerleading.”

Some online “wellness influencers,” according to Butler, have been claiming that President Joe Biden is “trying to pull a fast one on them by painting Russia as the aggressor” in Ukraine.

“Should social media platforms flag influencers’ content as disinformation,” Butler observes, “it only serves to reinforce their belief that they are being punished for their righteous truth-telling. Some influencers have monetized their self-proclaimed martyrdom by sharing disinformation about Ukraine and hawking their own wellness items.”

twt

Instagram, according to Butler, is one of the social media platforms where pro-Putin anti-vaxxers and “wellness influencers” have been plentiful.

“Beyond the oils and the tinctures, influencers are selling something much more valuable: a sense offierce and uncompromising maternal identity,” Butler observes. “The account bios frequently mention natural childbirth, breastfeeding, and attachment parenting — and their posts and stories tie events in Ukraine back to defending their families from what they see as government overreach.”

Anti-vaxxers who are sympathetic to Putin, Butler writes, are also more likely to be influenced by the far-right pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon.

“Factions of anti-vaccine groups increasingly embraced COVID denialism and dabbled in QAnon,” Butler notes. “The Russians’ initial plan of dividing Americans had worked better than they could have possibly expected — so that by the time Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, anti-vaccine activists were primed to believe that Putin was the good guy.”

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aha: af1 is signifier of prez-ity? thus qanon used as proof he was still prez?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/03/donald-trump-supporters-new-plane/

see pix brochure/online poll]

Former President Donald Trump was flying from New Orleans back to Palm Beach when he was forced to make an emergency landing. Now, he's asking supporters to send him money.

In an email to supporters mere hours after the news broke on his travel issues, Trump was asking them to pay for Trump Force One.

"Do you remember Trump Force One?" the email asks. "Before becoming the greatest President of all time, I traveled the Country in my plane, known as Trump Force One. I have a very important update on my plane, but I need to trust that you won’t share it with anyone: my team is building a BRAND NEW Trump Force One."

According to the email, paid for bySave America JFC, the work on the plane has been "under wraps." He claims that the media doesn't know about it, which is false given the reports that he purchased a new engine for the plane and that it had to make an emergency landing last year in Nashville.

Trump's plane was his personal ride, likely paid for by his company. So, it's unclear if the campaign PAC will be paying for the repairs. If the PAC pays for the repairs it's unclear if that means the Trump Organization can use it for its travel.

The plane Trump was flying on that had the emergency landing over the weekend wasn't his, it was owned by a trustee out of Utah, the Washington Post reported.Trump Force One was repaired in New York after Trump announced last May that he would bring it back. The emergency landing in Nashville was a short stop and it was then flown to Louisiana for other repairs. Trump isn't using it, however.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/anna-delvey/

psych vuln

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aha yikes they are monetizing victimization, polarization, demonization see crensharrrrh vs mtg

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no lnx

How Mike Lindell and 'a mysterious dark money organization' pushed a bogus 'snake-oil treatment' for COVID-19

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell speaking at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, Gage Skidmore

Alex Henderson February 07, 2022

A variety of bogus “treatments” or “cures” for COVID-19 have been promoted in MAGA World, from hydroxychloroquine to oleandrin (an extract from the poisonous oleander plant). According to Daily Beast reporters Roger Sollenberger and William Bredderman, one of the companies that haspromoted oleandrin as a COVID-19 miracle cure is Propter Strategies— which has ties to two major allies of former President Donald Trump: MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon.

“It’s an all-too-familiar story at this point: A person pushing an unproven COVID-19 cure — and pushing back against the vaccines — pays the ultimate price for their skepticism,” Sollenberger and Bredderman report. “But this time, there’s a new wrinkle. It’s not just one person dabbling in COVID quackery with tragic results; it’s actually a mysterious dark money organization, with ties to influential MAGA figures like Steve Bannon and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.”

The organization, according Sollenberger and Bredderman, was Propter Strategies — and the person who became a “victim” of its “secretive work” was partner Kenneth Happel.

“To this day, Propter Strategies is a black hole, despite its high-profile connections and multi-million-dollar budget,” the Beast reporters explain. “Aside from Happel’s account, there is no evidence of Propter’s activities anywhere in the public record. And that might be with good reason: Those activities included hawking the snake-oil COVID treatment oleandrin at the highest levels of the government, as the pandemic’s lethal second wave peaked across the country.”

Happel, according to Sollenberger and Bredderman, is presently hospitalized with his second COVID-19 infection — and his wife died from COVID-19 in January.

“In a phone interview from his hospital bed, Happel, 72, remained unrepentant and defiant about the numerous baseless theories that quite likely landed him back in the hospital, and killed the wife he loved dearly,” Sollenberger and Bredderman write. “Happel still places hope in the pseudo-science that he, Propter Strategies, and Lindell had pushed so hard — a proprietary compound derived from oleander extract, which the pillow tycoon and at least one Propter official had invested in.”

Registration data, according to Sollenberger and Bredderman, shows that Happel is the owner of Proper’s website, needsp.us, and Happel has “confirmed” to the Beast “that the Propter Strategies cited on his page was, in fact, the same group linked to those leading MAGA figures.”

“Happel, a former Tea Party activist with an entrepreneurial history that intersects with biotechnology, recounted working on oleandrin in 2020 with Propter board member Andrew Whitney,” Sollenberger and Bredderman note. “A serial entrepreneur and former Bain Capital investor, Whitney was actually pulling oleandrin double-duty — he was on the board at the nonprofit Propter, as well as at Texas-based Phoenix Biotechnologies, whose research centered on the product. Happel also acknowledged the connection toLindell, who, it turns out, also holds a financial stake in Phoenix Biotechnologies.”

Whitney and Lindell, according to the Beast reporters, “paired up for a MAGA media parade” and promoted oleandrin “as a neglected medical miracle” on right-wing outlets such as Newsmax and Diamond & Silk’s YouTube show. And Lindell “confirmed he still has a financial stake in Phoenix.”

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interesting that currency based on trust, ~ gubmint, fox raison detre hate dems

no lnx

Steve Bannon is pushing an anti-Biden cryptocurrency — but a new report sounds the alarm about hidden risks

Alex Henderson January 19, 2022

Steve Bannon, host of the “War Room” podcast and former White House chief strategist under President Donald Trump, has been promoting his involvement in $FJB — a new cryptocurrency aimed at MAGA Republicans who hate President Joe Biden. But reporters Ali Breland and David Corn, in an article published by Mother Jones this week, warn that according to tech experts, $FJB could pose risks for investors.

The FJB in $FJB stands for “fuck Joe Biden.” Bannon, on his podcast, has called $FJB a “currency for the MAGA movement” — and his MAGA ally Boris Epshteyn has described it as a way to “let your feelings, your primal disapproval, your primal disgust with Biden be heard.”

Breland and Corn point out that starting a cryptocurrency is “surprisingly easy.” Making it profitable for investors, however, is another matter.

“$FJB buyers might want to beware,” Breland and Corn warn. “Not only does every purchase bolster the value of Bannon’s and Epshteyn’s holdings, crypto experts say the currency is designed in a way that affords its operators an unusual amount of discretion in blocking owners of coins from selling their tokens — a power that could cause problems for investors.”

READ: 'Incredibly dumb': Former federal prosecutor mocks Eric Trump for telling NY AG 'we are prosecuting you'

Mother Jones interviewed tech expert Simon de la Rouvier for the article, and he is advising caution.

“The code for $FJB allows the currency’s operators to manually lock an owner’s token balance, an unusual practice in a space that aims to avoid centralized authority,” Breland and Corn explain. “This would prevent an owner from selling coins, according to Simon de la Rouvier, who reviewed the code for Mother Jones. De la Rouvier is a digital artist and co-author of ERC-20, a coding standard used to program contracts on the Ethereum blockchain — which supports Ether, a cryptocurrency second only to Bitcoin in market capitalization.”

According to de la Rouvier, the owners of $FJB are exempt from its restrictions. De la Rouvier told Mother Jones, “They can transfer as much as they want, whenever.”

In a chat on the messaging app Discord, Breland and Corn report, an $FJB user complained, “My wallet has been locked now for the 4th time. This time it’s locked by the new owners of $FJB. It’s an anxious time. (I’m) waiting for answers.”

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pledged not run 3rd term broke pledge;

ppr edit: https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/ron-johnson-grifter/

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11 2 mma

The House of Representatives is opening an investigation into a network of right-wing organizations that have pushed anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which have become a right-wing cause célèbre as discredited alternatives to vaccines or conventional treatments for COVID-19.

The Intercept reported Monday that theHouse Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisishas requested documents from the right-wing group America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) and the telemedicine provider SpeakWithAnMD about their business practices. The committee also “wrote to the Federal Trade Commission requesting that the agency investigate whether these companies are in violation of federal laws.”

“Attempts to monetize coronavirus misinformation have eroded public confidence in proven treatments and prevention measures and hindered efforts to control the pandemic,” committee chair Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC)wrote in his letter to AFLDS. “Some Americans who have been influenced by misinformation have chosen not to get vaccinated, delayed receiving evidence-based treatment, and ingested unapproved substances in harmful quantities.”

The Intercept previously reported two months of leaked patient records that showed the partnership between AFLD and SpeakWithAnMD had pulled in millions of dollars from over 70,000 customers. Such proceeds could not have been possible without the long history of right-wing media outlets like Fox News first pushing discredited alternative treatments for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine throughout 2020 and ivermectin in 2021.

Two major fixtures of right-wing media have set up this medial grift: Capitol riot participant Dr. Simone Gold — whose organization AFLDS has multiple links to the QAnon movement — as well as far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi who set up SpeakWithAnMD.

Gold’s long political involvement in the COVID-19 pandemic began with an organization, “A Doctor a Day,” started in May 2020 in coordination between the Trump campaign and the right-wing Council for National Policy to create an astroturf organization of doctors to support the Trump administration’s plans for a premature economic reopening. The was immediately promoted on Fox News, which also gave positive coverage to AFLDS’ continued activities in promoting hydroxychloroquine, which Gold claimed was a “cure” for the virus.

Right-wing media personalities also fervently defended another AFLDS figure, Dr. Stella Immanuel, after videos and online posts surfaced in which she had made various statements “regarding the medical use of alien DNA and the gynecological effects of having sex with demons and witches while sleeping.” More recently, she's pushed QAnon related conspiracy theories while attending a QAnon conference.

Gold also appeared on Newsmax in December 2020, ahead of the wider public vaccine rollout, and discouraged viewers from getting the vaccine: “Do you want to be part of an experimental medical trial? Do you want to be tracked and traced?” (The vaccines, of course, had already undergone rigorous testing.}December 17, 2020, edition of Newsmax's National Report

Gold later participated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and was seen on video reading a speech from inside the Rotunda in which she denounced the “experimental, biological agent deceptively named a vaccine” and the “massive medical establishment.”She was later arrested and indicted and is currently charged with multiple counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and disorderly conduct. (She told The Washington Post she regrets being there.)

Time reported in August that SpeakWithAnMD had been set up by Corsi, a longtime peddler of far-right conspiracy theories, including the QAnon movement and racist “birther” theories against former President Barack Obama. In 2020, Corsi started making false claims against the development of the COVID-19 vaccines and in favor of discredited alternative drugs.

Time further reported that hundreds of customers had reported paying the $90 fee through America’s Frontline Doctors, only to never actually receive the promised drugs or consultation services. Time also found that while booking a consultation directly through SpeakWithAnMD cost $59.99, the referrals linked through AFLDS cost $90, implying a possibility that Gold’s group could’ve been pocketing $30 per patient. (AFLDS declined to comment to Time on this question.)

And while SpeakWithAnMD claims that it has “Over 20 Years in Business,” NBC News also reported that the site was**“​​created in March 2020.**” The website also appears to have only one purpose in mind — to peddle debunked drugs for COVID-19 instead of the vaccines or other legitimate treatments: “On a SpeakWithAnMD.com intake form viewed by NBC News, prospective patients are asked, ‘What medication do you prefer?’ The user is then presented with three options: ‘Ivermectin,’ ‘Hydroxychloroquine’ or ‘Not sure.’”

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an hunter kos 10 21

Here's an entire New York Times story about a genuinely bad, malevolent person. It's not framed that way, of course, because Neutrality, but the Times tossed a reporter in the direction of Great Falls, Montana, to give us another report from the Trumpian underbelly of America and once again, it's a paranoid, conspiracy-obsessed, strategically dishonest sh-tshow that explains a lot about why the True Americans nesting comfortably in Trumpism have steadily been gravitating toward fascism as a matter of natural course.

The Times story is a long explainer about Rae Grulkowski and her quest to keep local civic-minded Montana residents from getting a token amount of federal funds by designating a chunk of the state a "national heritage area." It's a largely meaningless designation that provides minor federal funds to help preserve local points of interest and boost history-minded tourism.A bunch of Montana folks got a bee in their bonnets about it, part of the general True American suspicion that the federal government is evil and just out to trick people (thanks again, Ronald Jackass Reagan), and it became the local version of critical race theory, and hydrocorto-whateveritall, and ingesting horse dewormer because some friend of a friend of a cousin of an Online Influencer said horse paste cures gunshot wounds or whatever the latest version of that theory is.

But here's the thing: Rae Grulkowski—hero of the paranoid Montana class and partial impetus for Montana's reporter-attacking Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte's theatrical ban on the federal government from creating any such heritage designation in the state—attacked the civic-minded proposal by lying her ass off, constantly, inventing or perpetuating a web of fabricated claims that the tourism designation would, in the Times'telling, "forbid landowners to build sheds, drill wells, or use fertilizers." It would ban septic systems! It would raise taxes!

And it was all utter bullshit. As the Times noted and gave evidence of, Grulkowski was lying about all of it.

It was a local campaign dependent on crafting outright propaganda against something she didn't personally like, disseminating it to people who didn't give a damn whether it was true or it was false, rallying a crowd of like-minded liars to attack the opposition with furious disinformation, and turning it into the nextFarm Bureau and Republican paranoia campaign in which allies compared the National Heritage Area program to Hitler and nobody involved can stammer their way through any plausible defense of the nonsensical claims they're making.

So then, what are we to make of this? Well, Grulkowski and her allies are flat-out liars, that's for sure. They have disseminated provably false information as a political strategy, and local Republican (Trump) voters snorted it all up like ideological cocaine.Team Lying Bullshit has done its level best to make the lives of those evil civic do-gooders miserable.

It's only in the very last quarter of the story that we get to the kicker that explains all the rest of it: Rae Grulkowski is apparently a "QAnon" devotee, according to The New York Times. She claims to believe in conspiracies about "child trafficking that leads to everything," and believes that Donald Trump won the November election even though he most demonstrably got flattened, and thinks Black Lives Matter supporters were the actual culprits behind the Jan. 6 insurrection, and there we go. She appears to be someone who read a lot of hoaxes on Facebook and turned them into a personality, just one of a new "movement" of Americans radicalized by a single company's eagerness to monetize the nation's most deep-seated paranoias.

Well of course someone who believes an assortment of the most malevolent, antisemitic, racist, pro-fascist conspiracy theories being passed around the internet is going to be similarly loose when inventing anti-government reasons to oppose whatever her neighbors are doing. But—and this is the crux of the Times story and the lesson to be taken from all of this—it worked.

It worked, because of course it did. The propaganda effort was overwhelmingly successful, enough to gain the support of conservative state lawmakers who did not give a damn whether the claims were true. Nobody involved appears to have given a damn whether they were promoting lies. The invention of propaganda was the core strategy: taking a minor civic issue and turning it, through lies, into a new conservative touchstone.

The lying part is the most consequential "value" at play here. "Heritage" designations have nothing to do with any of it. Nobody gives a flying damn whether or not local historic landmarks get new plaques or whether they don't. The important part is for local Republicanism to stick it to anyone who tries to do an inch of good by inventing whatever lies are necessary to do it.

In battling a largely meaningless recognition of the area's rich history, Grulkowski was following the playbook of Steve Bannon, and Stephen Miller, and Donald Trump himself. It is the fascist playbook: If the facts are against your beliefs, ignore those facts and lie. Create new "facts" that will galvanize the movement despite their fraudulence; rather than seeking the consent of the governed by explaining why the movement's ideas will solve current problems, manufacture a new reality in which the "problems" are whatever hoaxes the movement needs to produce in order to justify taking whatever actions the movement wants to take.

We are in a world of danger when flagrant political lies can so swiftly result in success rather than condemnation. That is the endgame to all of this. If a government can be established that governs the nation through fraud—and it is happening, in each Republican-held state using provably false election hoaxes to justify new voting restrictions, and in the establishment of Facebook as the nation's new news source, one in which false information is treated by the company as marketable entertainment rather than a poison, and in the pre-disgraced thug of a Montana governor adopting ananti-government propaganda campaign to attack a federal government program instituted by Ronald Reagan himself as a supposed secret attack on True American rights—then elections are already irrelevant.

Central to battling all of it, however, is to recognize that Rae Grulkowski disseminated lies in order to attack an action she didn't like; she did so while wallowing in an absolute sea of other lies. She succeeded in mustering a populist revolt against better people and better ideas by lying, outright, about the thing she was fighting against.Now, says the Times, she has further political ambitions, given that her equally toxic and cowardly neighbors proved to be so furiously supportive of her campaign of lies.

This is a person who should be scorned. This is a person who should be shunned, boycotted, considered a crackpot, and treated with universal contempt. This is a person who is attacking democracy itself, by attacking it at its root premise: Whatever civic challenges are presented to the voters, they must be based on truth. Democracy is meaningless, is absolutely meaningless, if each election is a competition not of competing solutions to civic problems but of the inventiveness of each campaign in creating new hoaxes and convincing the governed to believe them.

Instead, we get national debates over whether some of the most infamously dishonest people in government have been treated too roughly if private restaurant owners do not want to serve them. The pressure is not to shun liars as anti-American, anti-democracy propagandists seeking to manipulate public opinion through rampant dishonesty, but whether we are allowed to direct any scorn their way at all.

How did it come to this?

The short answer might be Bernard Goldberg. Goldberg was one of those who made a name for himself insisting that American journalism was intrinsically "biased" against conservatives, a claim which is now taken as a central movement tenet because it fits pleasingly with every other movement theme of displacement and victimhood. The evidence for this "bias," even decades into the claims, was almost always an assertion that because conservative ideologues were not given exposure equal to actual issue experts, it amounted to oppressing the conservative "side" of an argument.

Ideological claims, in other words, were being shortchanged because journalists were looking to scientists, medical experts, historical data, and other providers of hard facts rather than letting lobbyists, think-tank heads, and other professional political provocateurs speak with equal authority and at equal volume.

From there conservatism moved to a very successful crusade to reformulate "news" so that facts were always debatable, so long as there was a single professional spinner who could be paid to claim they were. The cable networks, especially, transitioned from that into new forms that rarely gave scientists or other experts a voice at all, preferring instead to pit one pre-determined ideologue against another for orchestrated spats in which nobody could beproven to have lied because the segment would be over before any actual journalist or expert could even phone the studio.

We moved on to public bellowing about "the elites must respect my beliefs," where "beliefs" consisted of believing that climate scientists were sabotaging world government or, eventually, that livestock dewormer was a miracle cure for a pandemic hospitals themselves could not keep up with.

But it was the Goldberg camp that insisted that liars and propagandists should not just be heard from but also treated with respect.That if there was a conflict between facts and conservatism, then it was biased to highlight one over the other. It was treated as a given, from the beginning, that conservatism was a counter to scientific and policy expertise. It was treated as a given that conservatism was the rightful and just opposition to such expertise.

We have reached that conservative promised land. All of the news now follows the formula of pitting ideologue against ideologue, the facts wedged in somewhere—or not, depending on the journalist—but with no reproach given to those who insist that the facts are something else. The paid propagandists and crafters of outlandish, impossible lies are now treated with impeccable respect by the media. The American people are taught to treat professional liars as dignified combatants—nay, true Americans, speaking powerful emotions in the face of uncomfortable, irritating data.

And, after hounding media relentlessly into giving respect to professional fraudsters, the conservative movement itself has now shed from itself everything but the professional fraudsters. The lies are the movement; the movement is defined by the lies, and shifts as rapidly as required to adopt new ones. tucker 1/6 false flag]

You need not look at anything beyond the last election to see that. Respecting, or actively propagating, the anti-American hoax that claims Republicans secretly "won" the last election only to have it stolen by invisible forces, is now a requirement inside the so-called "conservative" movement.Trump lied constantly, about everything, in genuinely malevolent ways, and he was a product of both Bernard Goldberg's insistence that sneering know-nothings be given media respect and the shouter who finally erased all further attempts to pretend Republicanism was anything but a collection of spite-based antipathies and hoaxes.

But Rae Grulkowski is, genuinely, a bad person. Steve Bannon is a liar, a propagandist, and a hack. Stephen Miller is a white nationalist who crafts propaganda demonizing immigrants to justify brutality against them. Mitch McConnell is a relentless liar, one who flaunts his absolute contempt for whatever ideal he blustered about a month, a week, or a day beforehand in order to invent an entirely opposing one. Sarah Huckabee Sanders promoted fraudulent information as a professional, and ideological, career move. Donald Trump is quite possibly the most loathsome sack of malignant neuroses to ever have shuffled through Washington and that is saying something.

Creating hoaxes for the purpose of manipulating public opinion is contemptible, evil behavior. It deserves fury. It deserves the scorn of the entire nation; journalism, and political media especially, should have such seething contempt for the propagandists that exposure of each lie and value judgments about those that perpetrate them should be, as they once were, the profession's central ambition.

It is not enough to point out that this or that person is fabricating a hoax in order to deceive their fellow Americans into holding a new political position. Those that do so are enemies of democracy. They are, in the true sense of the word, anti-American. They are frauds. They are doing direct harm to their neighbors, their towns, their states, their nation. They are ideological soldiers seeking to do harm to the government by taking, from the public, the ability to use their vote as means of steering that government. They are anti-civil rights. Their propaganda is stealing democracy by stealing votes by stealing political debate itself so that voters simply cannot discern what government is doing, what the parties are doing, what the issues are, where the dangers are, and where the future catastrophes lie.

These are all bad, evil, rotten people who need to be shunned with ferocity. They do not warrant respect. They do not warrant civil treatment. They do not warrant malicious burbles about how dare Americans seek consequences for their fraud; newspaper editors should be devoting themselves to identifying each face and name and lie and treating them as public enemy, not both sides denizen.

These are the footsoldiers that will end democracy, if we cannot throw them from our civic spaces and treat them with the contempt that hoax promoters deserve. These are not the days of tar and feathers, but they can certainly be the days of belittlement, consequences, and public reproach. These are the vapid, self-serving cowards whose lies spur domestic terrorists to violence, and who kill Americans by the thousands by pushing fraudulent information about a deadly pandemic. These are not people who lie of happenstance or impulse, but people who specifically seek to bend government through a pattern of anti-American deceit.

There is no neutrality to be had in reporting like this. Someone who manipulates American politics by lying to the American public is acting with malevolence; reporters should feel a civic duty not just to expose them, but to strip them of the usual deference and pleasantries. Treat propagandists with more scorn than those who craft financial hoaxes to prey on the elderly, or those who hide the deadly effects of a product so that they may sell more of them. The propagandists are attacking the soul of our very democracy. To hell with them. Shun them and those who enable their plots out of greed, ideology, or apathy.

Conservatism has now reached Bernard Goldberg's promised land in which facts and malevolent fictions are treated as equals. The movement itself has become a mass of hoaxes cowering under a red hat. If it cannot be condemned as a fraud, it will grow in power until it strips all truth from around us.

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1021 AN

According to a report from Mother Jones, the PAC created by Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) with great fanfare and a national tour has already blown through what money it had and now is close to broke.

As Russ Choma reports, the publicity-seeking lawmakers started up the Put America First PACand then launched what turned into a troubled "America First" tour -- that saw events canceled or moved multiple times due to problems securing venues -- which, in turn, burned through their early cash donations.

According to Choma, "Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz both have a knack for ginning up outrage and stealing headlines. All this sound and fury is assumed to hoover up dollars from the riled up grassroots, but that's not true, according to the most recent campaign finance filings, " adding, "Despite the two spending the summer barnstorming the country on a grand fundraising swing they dubbed the America First tour, (the moniker adopted after scraping the "Anglo-Saxon" caucus), neither Greene nor Gaetz lived up to expectations on the fundraising end. And, just six months after founding it, the joint fundraising committee they launched to drive their tour is nearly broke."

As the report details, the two lawmakers' PAC raised $360,000 initially but donations dropped off and a recent filing shows a meager $13,000 on hand.

Choma reports that Greene is having her own fundraising issues as well.

"While Greene is definitely more successful—in her short Congressional career she's raised more than $8.8 million—the most recent numbers filed by her own campaign show her fundraising totals are increasingly eaten up by the costs of chasing donors and paying off the operatives and professional fundraising consultants and vendors that she hires," he reported.

As for Gaetz... "Gaetz campaign's latest filing shows that his fundraising has all but dried up. He raised just $527,000 from July 1 to September 30. He spent far more—$627,000—trying to raise that money. In another parallel to Greene, Gaetz's biggest expenses are direct mail and paying fundraising consulting costs to his vendors. In fact, those two things ate up more than 60 percent of his donations," Choma reported.

You can read more here.

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https://theintercept.com/2021/09/28/covid-telehealth-hydroxychloroquine-ivermectin-hacked/

a  NETWORK OF health care providers pocketed millions of dollars selling hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and online consultations, according to hacked data provided to The Intercept. The data show that vast sums of money are being extracted from people concerned about or suffering from Covid-19 but resistant to vaccinations or other recommendations of public health authorities.

America’s Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group founded last year to promote pro-Trump doctors during the coronavirus pandemic, is working in tandem with a small network of health care companies to sow distrust in the Covid-19 vaccine, dupe tens of thousands of people into seeking ineffective treatments for the disease, and then sell consultations and millions of dollars’ worth of those medications. The data indicate patients spent at least $15 million — and potentially much more — on consultations and medications combined.

 Intercept has obtained hundreds of thousands of records from two companies, CadenceHealth.us and Ravkoo, revealing just how the lucrative operation works. America’s Frontline Doctors, or AFLDS, has been spreading highly politicized misinformation about Covid-19 since the summer of 2020 and refers its many followers to its telemedicine partner SpeakWithAnMD.com, which uses Cadence Health as a platform. People who sign up then pay $90 for a phone consultation with “AFLDS-trained physicians” who prescribe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to prevent and treat Covid-19. The drugs are delivered by Ravkoo, a service that works with local pharmacies to ship drugs to patients’ doors. Of course, that’s if patients ever get the consultation; many customers told Time they never received the call after paying.

The data from the Cadence Health and Ravkoo sites was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous hacker who said the sites were “hilariously easy” to hack, despite promises of patient privacy. It was corroborated by comparing it to publicly available information. The Intercept is not publishing any individual patient data and has taken steps to secure the data. After The Intercept reached out, Cadence Health’s Roque Espinal-Valdez said he shut the platform down, not wanting any part in profiting off of Covid-19 “quackery.”...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/gop-grifters/

The Hartmann Report.

Trump just unleashed an unhinged, barely coherent rant about the possibility President Biden might reveal what was going on in the White House on January 6th, the day Trump tried to finally end, once and for all, any possibility of governmental oversight of his ongoing criminal career. He believed he could follow in the footsteps of grifters before him who've taken control of and then drained dry countries from Hungary to Russia, Brazil to Turkey and The Philippines.

Thus it surprises nobody to discover that when Donald Trump and the people around him learned, in mid-November of 2020, that there was absolutely no meaningful voter fraud in that month's election, they chose, instead of acknowledging the truth, to go ahead with a plan to raise over $200 million dollars (and counting). That even today "President Trump" is sending out one or two fundraising emails a day, each one with thetiny "make this a recurring donation" box pre-checked.

Grifters occupy a unique niche in the world of criminals: they avoid direct violence, but live and act only to enrich themselves, whether it's with money, sex, power or all three. They're typically high-functioning sociopaths who sneer at the rules of civilized society the rest of us take seriously.

Republican appointees on the US Supreme Court cracked open the door for professional grifters in 1976 when, for the first time in American history,the Court redefined politicians taking money from billionaires away from being "political corruption" and "bribery"—what such behavior had been called since the beginning of the republic—to instead say it was a mere "exercise of free speech" on the part of the morbidly rich.

Two years after the Buckley decision, in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell (author of the infamous 1971 Powell Memo) pushed the door even farther open when he wrote for the Republican majority a decision granting giant corporations the same "free speech right"to own politicians inBoston v Bellotti.

And in 2010, withCitizens United, Republican appointees on the Court didn't just blow the doors open; they tore down the entire building of "good government" in America, reaffirming that any billionaire or corporation that wanted to own their very own pet politician—or, if rich enough, own an entire political party—was totally legal and not at all corrupt.

Which is why Richard Nixon, who resigned in 1974, was one of the last Republican politicians who actually believed that politics in America had something to do with governing the nation (even if he did it poorly). Ever since then, the GOP has been composed almost exclusively of professional grifters (which is a somewhat different type of cat from an ordinary criminal like Nixon who just took bribes, blackmailed people and lied about it all).

Grifters occupy a unique niche in the world of criminals: they avoid direct violence, but live and act only to enrich themselves, whether it's with money, sex, power or all three. They're typically high-functioning sociopaths who sneer at the rules of civilized society the rest of us take seriously. They combine the not-uncommon skill set of being charming and great salesmen and storytellers, but have no conscience or respect for the truth.

Grifters believe they're the only "real" people in the world and all the rest of us are here for their entertainment, satisfaction or to pluck clean of whatever we have that they want. They view us as cardboard cutouts; their pains and loves and desires are real while ours are merely background noise.

And the entire Republican Party has become one giant in-crowd of professional grifters, most all of them getting rich, getting famous and/or getting laid in the process.

Ronald Reagan grew up during the Great Depression, became a Democrat who loved FDR, and once believed in government and that hard work and talent would get him ahead. Then Nancy Davis introduced him to her wealthy father, who let Ronnie in on the grift. Shill for General Electric and the GOPand he could marry Nancy, get rich, and might even have a bright political future. He was the first professional grifter president of the modern era.

Newt Gingrich was primed for the grift, screaming about Bill Clinton having an affair with Monica while porking Calista down the hall and fending off calls from his then-second wife. He got into the grift in a big way when he rolled out his "Contract With America" that was almost entirely tax cuts for giant corporations and the morbidly rich. Hell, he's still in on it; I'm getting an email almost every week from Trump with Gingrich's picture and signature asking for money.

Paul Ryan pimped tax cuts for the obscenely rich his entire career, knowing when he left office there's be massive paychecks waiting for him the rest of his life.

Dick Cheneyknew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein not only had nothing to do with 9/11 but actively hated and hunted down Bin Laden's Al Qaeda operatives so he could imprison or kill them. But Cheney had run Halliburton into trouble, betting that if he picked up Dresser Industries on the cheap that the Clinton administration would cover their asbestos liability. When he lost that bet and Halliburton was in trouble, a nice war with billions in no-bid contracts for the oil-company-turned-defense-contractor was just the grift he needed to both bail him out and make him fabulously rich.

Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia both knew that if any other federal judge were to go quail hunting with a defendant before the Court three weeks before trial or allow his spouse to take hundreds of thousands a year from a think tank with business before the Court, there would be hell to pay. But they were in on the grift and simply exempted themselves from the Federal Code of Judicial Conduct. Hell, they helped write the grift with Citizens United.

Since Citizens United the Republican grift has fully gone party-wide and even picked up a few Democrats along the way.

Some members of Congress get rich with money fromBig Pharma, others choose to make their money with Big Oil or Big Coal, others are deeply in the pockets of airlines, telcom companies, the tobacco industry, banks, insurance companies or the food and hospitality monopolies.

Some Republicans even ran day-trading operations on insider information out of their offices until then-Democratic Congressman Brian Baird tipped off the world on my show and Air America'sMajority Report 14 years ago.

They all believe, as Bob Dylan famously sang, "You've gotta serve somebody." And the "somebody" they all choose to serve are always the ones who pay the most.

Which is why it only makes sense that the Republican Party would put up a lifelong grifter as their nominee for president in 2016. And that he'd surround himself with grifters like Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who Forbes magazine said would, by any measure, "rank among the biggest grifters in American history," having scammed business partners out of at least $120 million.

Everybody in the GOP is either stuffing their "Leadership PACs" with money they can dip into after they leave office, living high on the hog, using their position to become famous or get into the pants of underage girls, or preparing for their well-feathered-nest after leaving politics.

I've been running aconteston my radio show since it started in 2003 offering a prize to anybody who can identify even one single piece of legislation that was originally sponsored by a Republican, passed Congress with a Republican majority, and was signed into law by a Republican president that primarily helped average working people or poor people instead of the rich or giant corporations.

Nobody has ever won the prize, and I'm betting nobody ever will.

This is not to say the Democratic Party doesn't have its share of grifters (two publicity-hungry senators come to mind). After all, when the Supreme Court legalized political grifting they didn't limit it to one party or the other.

But the single largest caucus in the Democratic Party is the Congressional Progressive Caucus (co-founded by Bernie Sanders) and its members generally refuse corporate PAC money and don't usually hang out with lobbyists. Former co-chair of the Caucus, Representative Mark Pocan, has joked on my show that "they say there are three Big Pharma lobbyists for every member of Congress, but I have no idea who mine are."

While Democrats are trying to legislate around the corrupting landmines laid by conservatives on the Supreme Court, Republicans are expanding on Donald Trump's "voter fraud" and "antifa" griftsto raise money and consolidate their own power in the face of an American electorate that's starting to figure out their game.

Trump and a handful of his grifter buddies who were up for full-out treason thought they could pull off the ultimate grift and seize the trillions in assets of the entire country. They only failed, we're learning, by a whisker.

Next time we may not be so lucky. Congress must grift-proof our politics by getting billionaire and corporate money out of politics, as Democrats tried to do when the House of Representatives passed the For The People Actthat arguably Democratic grifters Manchin and Sinema are blocking in the Senate.

Perhaps the 2022 election will bring Democrats a large enough progressive majority that they can work around their own grifters. Or maybe it'll signal the death knell of the republic.

To an extent largely unprecedented in American history, that decision will be in the hands of activists and voters like you and me. We have a big job ahead of us.

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bitcoin dude, not secure

https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/have-you-seen-the-maga-inspired-freedom-phone-here-s-why-you-should-stay-as-far-away-from-it-as-possible/

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We Build the Wall' co-founder faces another indictment on tax charge

Meaghan Ellis

July 09, 2021

The Florida man who served as the co-founder of the "We Build The Wall" project has been indicted on another charge for tax fraud, according to a report from the Associated Press. The latest charges are in addition...

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an 721

The COVID-19 pandemic reached yet another grim milestone recently when, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the worldwide death count passed 4 million. The country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths is still the United States, where more than 606,000 people have died from the novel coronavirus. Sadly, some people have done their part to add to the misery the pandemic has inflicted, and journalist Tom McKay calls them out in an article published by Gizmodo this week.

In his article, which is headlined "The Worst Charlatans of the COVID-19 Pandemic," McKay laments, "For some people, crisis is an opportunity — more specifically, an opportunity to blow up their own profile by preying on people's fears, making baseless claims, grabbing resources intended for others, and being generally dishonest, disingenuous, or greedy. A comprehensive list of those matching this archetype over the grueling months of the COVID-19 pandemic would be far too large to relay in full. But it would include a former president, medical professionals spreading exaggerated or simply fabricated claims about how best to fight the virus, amateur statisticians claiming their analyses proved the virus wasn't dangerous, fraudsters, far-right activists looking to convert influence into money, and wealthy businesses that filled their coffers."

McKay goes on to list seven people who added to the misery, noting that he is excluding former President Donald Trump from the list "out of fairness to the other contenders."

One is French microbiologist Didier Raoult, who pushed the false claim that hydroxychloroquine (an anti-malaria drug) was a miracle treatment for COVID-19 — a claim that Trump echoed repeatedly in 2020. McKay notes that "global trials of hydroxychloroquine failed to find any benefit for COVID-19 patients."

Others on McKay's list include Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a Cleveland-based anti-vaxxer, and anti-maskers such as Dr. Stella Immanuel and the Dorr Brothers. McKay also slams Robert Kennedy, Jr. (nephew of President John F. Kennedy) as an anti-vaxxer and cites Alex Berenson as a source of anti-vaccine disinformation

Although McKay's list is dominated by individuals, he slams big businesses that abused the Paycheck Protection Program.

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621 an

A fundraising group, under the direction of a One America News Network (OAN) host, is now footing the bill to cover travel expenses for out-of-state Republican legislators to tour the botched election audit currently underway in Maricopa County, Ariz.

According to Talking Points Memo, Voices and Votes is the group led by Christina Bobb, a former Trump administration official who currently works as a host for the One America News Network (OAN). Back in April, Bobb gradually became more vocal about the group's fundraising efforts noting that it had surpassed the $150,000 milestone.

At the time, pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood confirmed to the publication that his own group Fight Back had also contributed $50,000 to Voices and Votes. His admission came as he admitted that he had personally spent time with Doug Logan, the CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the top contractor conducting the audit. At that time, Wood claimed Logan told him he was "working on the investigation into election fraud."

At one point, she also incorporated an on-air campaign to promote fundraising efforts for the group.

"Voice and Votes is an organization that I started, and I'm working to help other state senators get a close-up view of the Arizona audit," Bobb said. "If you'd like to help fund other state senators to get an up-close and personal view of the Arizona audit, you can donate at VoicesandVotes.org."

Now, those funds are being utilized to help Republican lawmakers travel to the state so they can get a firsthand experience of how the audit is being conducted which may influence future audits in similar fashion in other states.

While many Republican legislators have expressed interest in touring the audit, there are a number of reasons why there are concerns about this. The audit may not be the best reference to model after as it is being conducted by an inexperienced firm. It has also been a subject of intense scrutiny over the last several weeks.

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RRU dead again

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/betsy-devos/

kos

Reagan National University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, is no longer an accredited university. To anyone with half an education, this is no surprise. The only reason the school had received accreditation in the first place was because under previous Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the dubious Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools (ACICS) was resurrected to give it the distinction. This is a school that USA Today investigated and found had "no students, no faculty and no classrooms."

On June 2, the Biden administration's Education Department announced that Reagan National University lost its accreditation and would no longer receive federal funds for the no students, no classrooms, and no faculty that it never had. In fact, Deputy Undersecretary for Education Jordan Matsudaira wrote that ACICS would no longer be recognized as a worthwhile arbiter of which schools should and should not receive federal funds. "ACICS's significant and systemic non-compliance with multiple regulatory recognition criteria leaves me no reasonable option but to terminate its recognition, effective immediately."

After the ACICS had accredited ITT Tech, Corinthian Colleges, and Brightwood College—all for-profit schools that closed after stealing billions from students and cheating them out of an education—President Barack Obama stripped the agency of its powers. DeVos and Donald Trump then reinstated the disgraced agency's powers, and one of the first places ACICS accredited was the student and faculty-free Reagan National University. As *USA Today* found when they investigated the school last year:

The university's president – Harold Harris, per the school's website – was similarly invisible. University presidents often serve as an institution's public face. The only face on Reagan National's site was the institution's namesake U.S. president. The president of the university on the South Dakota business license was listed as "Xuanhua Fan."

Only the best people. The Biden administration's move means that about 60 colleges that received their accreditation from ACICS will now have "18 months to find a new accreditor if they want to keep accessing federal money." For its part, ACICS told the press that it will be appealing this decision and, according to a statement put on ACICS' website:

ACICS will appeal the SDO decision to the Secretary. We have worked too hard over the past five years to strengthen our organization, our accountability, our procedures, and accreditation criteria not to fight this decision. All that we ask is that a decision regarding our continued recognition be driven by the improvements we have made and our effectiveness as an accreditor today, not by policy priorities and outside pressure from political activists. Every accreditor should be given that opportunity. And every accreditor should be deeply concerned if our appeal to the Secretary is denied.

I mean, accrediting a school with no faculty and no student body is "no bueno." (That's first-year, high school language Spanish for "no good.") Maybe ACICS will give me accreditation as a Spanish language teacher? They shouldn't, but they just might!

Career staffers at the Education Department concluded in January that the ACICS had done a poor job of training employees to conduct site visits, failed to address conflicts of interest and lacked the finances to sustain itself in the long term. Months later, the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity in an 11-to-1 vote recommended the council be stripped of its authority.

The DeVos Education Department, like the rest of the Trump administration, seemed driven entirely by billionaire profiteering, using fearmongering and white supremacist dive and conquer tactics. Students, as a rule, disliked DeVos' ideas because it's hard to respect an adult who doesn't respect you. Like many in the last swamp-filled administration, DeVos seemed to either be so ignorant that she treated students like they did not know any better, or treated them that way because she thought they were unintelligent. Maybe it isn't a binary. Maybe she's just so ignorant that she believes everyone else is more ignorant than she?

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more surprise donations for trump BD 621an

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/joe-biden-gop/

biden not good for gop $raising; mtg called him socialist fail 621 an

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inevitable scam?

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a corp that hired pvt security, sold rights to another corp oann, which is being sued for libel but raising dark $ for audit?? ~ trans b/c proprietary, NDA's

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/arizona-audit-oan/

ah

no twt

With devotees of former Present Donald Trump currently conducting a blatantly partisan audit of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County, Arizona, One America News Network has been offering glowing coverage of that event. Journalist Sarah Mimms, in an article published by BuzzFeed News on May 18, examines the connection between OAN employees and the audit — which was ordered by Republicans in the Arizona State Senate and is being conducted by the Florida-based firm Cyber Ninjas, whose founder Doug Logan is a far-right Trump supporters who pushed the former president's false claims of voter fraud in 2020.

"Two reporters at One America News, a far-right TV station, are running a dark money organization that they say is helping fund a counter-reality 'audit' that former President Donald Trump and his supporters believe will overturn Arizona's 2020 election results in his favor," Mimms explains. "What's more, one of those reporters, Christina Bobb, is the network's most visible correspondent covering the very 'audit' that she is helping scare up money for on OAN's airwaves, while she and the network enjoy unique access to the process where private contractors and volunteers are searching for fraud and have examined ballots for nonexistent watermarks and 'bamboo fibers.' OAN has a deal as the exclusive livestream partner for the audit."

Bobb hosts a program on OAN called "Weekly Briefing," and Mimms points out that on April 9, she tweeted that she had founded a group devoted to promoting the audit: Voices and Votes. According to Bobb, the group raised $150,000 that day.

"According to its website," Mimms observes, "Voices and Votes is run by Bobb as the CEO and president, as well as OAN's White House correspondent Chanel Rion, who is listed as the chief marketing officer, and Courtland Sykes, Rion's fiancé, who is listed as the group's chief operations officer."[twt dANGEROUSLY UNDERFUNDED"

although the Maricopa County audit is being slammed as a joke by Trump's critics on both the left and the right, legitimate audits or recounts of the election results in Arizona have been conducted — and they showed that now-President Joe Biden won Arizona fair and square. Biden's Arizona victory was reported by the decision desk at Fox News on Election Night 2020 and was later certified by conservative Republican Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.

Mimms explains why the current Maricopa County audit is a "farce," noting, "It's important to pause here and note that the audit itself is not really an audit at all. What happened is the Arizona Senate, which is controlled by 16 Republicans to 14 Democrats, sent a subpoena to Maricopa County — which was upheld by a judge, forcing the county to hand over 2.1 million ballots,as well as vote tabulators and a bunch of election data. The 'audit,' which is being run by outside contractors hired by the Senate, will have no force or effect on the 2020 election results; Joe Biden is president, andArizona already did an audit of Maricopa County in the presidential race and didn't find a single ballot discrepancy.The county itself, which is not involved in the current Senate audit either, also hired two independent firms to review its elections equipment in February, which came back clean as well."

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/bitclout-the-dystopian-crypto-based-social-app-popularized-by-stop-the-steal-leader-ali-alexander/

bitClout: The Dystopian Crypto-Based Social App Popularized by ‘Stop The Steal’ Leader Ali Alexander

ByKarim Zidan | April 21, 2021 12:49 pm

Website of the BitClout social media network with sing up button on the smartphone screen. (Viktollio / Shutterstock.com)]

“The future of social media just got a lifeline.”

These were the words spoken by Ali Alexander, the far-right organizer behind the so-called Stop the Steal movement, during a recent interview on”The Reality Operating System” YouTube show. Dressed in his signature plain orange sweater and seated against a beige backdrop that gave no hints as to his whereabouts, Alexander spoke about BitClout, a decentralized social media platform developed on blockchain technology that allows users to buy and sell tokens based on people’s reputations or “clout.” Creators and celebrities can monetize their internet presence by allowing their fans to invest in their “creator coins,” while general users can speculate and invest in people and posts to drive up their value as they would on the stock market.

In a nutshell, BitClout is a combination of Twitter, Patreon, and Robinhood—a one-stop shop that provides a social media platform and crypto-exchange for influencers and content creators.

Alexander’s fascination with BitClout is unsurprising. The application serves as an alternative to mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, both of which have banned his accounts after the events of Jan. 6. And while sites such as Parler and Gab have fashioned themselves as censorship-free alternatives to Twitter, BitClout stands out because of its decentralized nature. According to BitClout’s official website, the application has “no company behind it—just coins and code.”

“It is the most exciting thing I have seen on the internet—ever,” Alexander, who refers to himself as “The BitClout Oracle,” explained during the interview. “This is going places.” 

While BitClout has excited users clamoring for a censorship-resistant social media platform,  the application has already courted plenty of controversy since its launch in March 2021. The start-up has been criticized for prepopulating its network with some 15,000 accounts created around popular Twitter profiles without their account-holder’s permission, allowing users to invest in coins for people like Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, YouTube sensation Mr. Beast, and Ariana Grande.

BitClout’s commodification of individuals is eerily dystopian. It also raises questions about the future of decentralized social media and the people who profit off it.

A Decentralized, Dystopian Social Space

When a Twitter user informed William Shatner, the renowned Canadian actor best known icon for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the original “Star Trek” series, that he had an account on BitClout, the actor was not impressed.

“It’s a scam and I’ve not authorized my name or likeness to be used,” Shatner wrote on Twitter in March. “So if you see my name or photo there it’s not been authorized.” 

Shatner, whose coin price is currently valued at $553 despite never signing up for an account, is not the only public figure to complain about BitClout’s controversial tactics. Other celebrities have complained about having their likeness monetized without their permission, while prominent crypto law firm Anderson Kill P.C. sent a cease-and-desist letter to the BitClout’s alleged founder on behalf of their client Brandon Curtis, the chief research officer at decentralized cryptocurrency exchange Radar Relay, for using his private information without his consent.

“Adopting Bitcoin’s aesthetic to raise VC funding to carry out unethical and blatantly illegal schemes like BitClout: not cool,” Curtis tweeted.

...

https://www.alternet.org/2021/04/qanon-exposed/

Q is exposed. Will he face consequences?

Lindsay Beyerstein April 16, 2021

no lnx

A month before the sacking and looting of the United States Capitol on January 6, Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the FBI for an updated assessment of the threat posed by QAnon. At a hearing on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray assured the committee that the report would be available shortly.

A lot has happened since 2019, when the bureau flagged QAnon as a threat after a number of sensational QAnon-related crimes, including an armed assault on a pizzeria, a blockade of the bridge over the Hoover Dam and the murder of a mob boss.QAnon went on to back Donald Trump's Big Lie of a stolen election. Worse came to worst when insurgents in full Q regalia fought their way into the Capitol in a bid to throw out a free and fair election. Q hasn't been heard from since December 8, but the FBI has plenty of material to incorporate into its new QAnon threat assessment.

Another development in this sordid saga was the March release of Cullen Hoback's documentary Q: Into the Storm, which strongly suggests that the impresario of QAnon is Ron Watkins, the degenerate failson of the owner of the notorious 8kun message board. Which is … more or less what most knowledgeable observers thought all along.

The documentary lays out a strong circumstantial case that Watkins wrested control of QAnon by establishing his board, then known as 8chan, as Q's exclusive online home, booting the original Q, and assuming the old Q's digital identity. Hoback follows Watkins and his father Jim to the Capitol on January 6. The filmmaker shows how Watkins reinvented himself as a bogus "election security" expert and fomented voter fraud conspiracy theories on right-wing media. It was Watkins who seemed to bring down the curtain on Inauguration Day, urging the conspiracy's faithful to go back to their lives and focus on the "friends and happy memories" they'd made along the way.

What sets the documentary apart is that Hoback extracts the closest thing to a confession from Watkins that we're ever likely to get. Watkins tells Hoback that he's been anonymously posting on the QResearch message board for the last three years, teaching ordinary people to do intelligence work—which is exactly what Q did. Watkins hastily adds he never did so as Q. Hoback obviously doesn't believe him.

I leave it to the reader to decide if a "confession" from a professional liar is any more reliable than a denial from a professional liar. Either way, Q: Into the Storm has solidified the conventional wisdom that Ron Watkins is the main architect of Q.

The Watkins' main antagonist in the film, Frederick Brennan, is now calling for the arrest of Ron Watkins and Jim Watkins for their role in the QAnon conspiracy. United States Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, may have been inspired by the documentary when he asked Wray whether Watkins and his father could face charges for their role in promoting a conspiracy theory that inspired an insurrection against the United States and numerous acts of violence. To his credit, Wray said the FBI was focused on investigating violent plots, rather than policing speech online.

Even if it could be proven that Watkins is the ringleader of QAnon, he doesn't seem to have broken any laws. LARPing1 is not a crime, except perhaps against good taste.

The central theme of QAnon ideology is the glorification of political violence. The anons are awaiting "The Storm," a cleansing political purge in which the military will liquidate tens of thousands of Q's enemies and seize control of the government. As repellent and toxic as this belief is, it's legally protected speech. The First Amendment protects the right to wish that the military would overthrow the government someday.

A speaker only crosses the line if they're inciting imminent lawless action—i.e., telling people to violently overthrow the government right this minute. QAnon was crucial in popularizing the Big Lie that spurred the insurgency, but Q's writings are far too elliptical and non-directive to count as an concretely inciting. To put it more bluntly, they don't make enough sense. For the most part, Q spits out a bunch of riddles, acronyms and leading questions, and his fans read what they want into them.

A big part of running a site like 8kun is fielding requests from law enforcement to take down illegal content that users have posted, such as child porn and death threats, so Watkins probably has a solid grasp of the boundaries of free expression online.

The Watkins' nemesis, Frederick Brennan, argues that Ron Watkins and Jim Watkins should be arrested for impersonating federal agents. This legal argument seems far-fetched. Q certainly invited the inference that he was a national security big-shot, but Q was as vague about his fictional credentials as he was about everything else.

Moreover, the federal law against impersonating an officer of the United States is designed to be used against impostors who usurp the authority of the federal government to coerce their victims. Classic examples include the kidnapper who flashes a fake FBI badge to convince his victim she's under arrest, or the con artist who poses as an IRS auditor and demands a pensioner's Social Security number. Implying you're a government agent for internet clout probably doesn't cut it, even if said clout helps you raise money or sell ads. That's because the suckers are forking over that cash freely, and not because you ordered them to do so in the name of the state.

As satisfying as it would be to see Ron Watkins and Jim Watkins in handcuffs, it wouldn't solve the underlying problem, namely, that millions of Americans remain in the grip of right-wing conspiracy culture, including most of the GOP. Prosecuting the architects of this pathetic scheme would only validate their sense of persecution.

===

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Psychotic' fundraising tactics show how unhinged the Republican Party has become: columnist

Alex Henderson

April 08, 2021

Media outlets ranging from the New York Times to The Bulwark have recently reported on some of the more extreme, heavy-handed fundraising tactics that former President Donald Trump and his allies in the National...

an ME 221

QAnon believes are known for circulating misinformation campaigns but now it appears they have been duped by fraudsters on social media.

According to The Daily Beast, impersonators of former President Donald Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump managed to dupe QAnon believes who flocked to the private social media platform Telegram after more than 70,000 QAnon believers were exiled from mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

Due to Telegram's end-to-end encryption capability, users have a better chance of having conversations without them being screenshotted or made public which would likely serve as an advantage of right-wing extremists. In a matter of days, QAnon believers were joined by prominent right-wing conservatives and they thought they'd finally found a platform they could use to get their message across.

The publication reports:

Many of the Telegram newcomers found that some of MAGAworld's biggest stars had joined them. Donald Trump himself was on the app, amassing more than 200,000 followers within a few days. So was Melania Trump, posting herself to Telegram as "Lady Melania Trump." Air Force General John Hyten joined the app and began issuing cryptic, QAnon-style pronouncements that thrilled believers eager to see President Joe Biden arrested and Trump returned to power.

However, things did not work out in QAnon believers' favor. All of the accounts claiming to be top members of Trumpworld were fake.

In addition to the fake Trump family accounts, the publication reports that the top, fake account belonged to a hoaxer impersonating former Air Force general Lt. Gen Tom McInerney, who has emerged as a conspiracy theorist who frequently appears on Alex Jones's InfoWars show. McInerney, a highly influential right-wing voice, also contributed to the birther conspiracy Trump pushed about former President Barack Obama.

Although McInerney confirmed back in January that the fake account was not his, that has not stopped it from garnering more than 158,000 followers on the strength of the real former general's reputation. While the publication notes that the account holder does not appear to have ulterior motives, there are still concerns about the rise of fake accounts on social media platforms. Now, some QAnon believers are also wondering about the reason behind the fake accounts.

"Someone somewhere is trying to mind f**k us," QAnon believer Jordan Sather said in a Telegram post.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.mediamatters.org/january-6-insurrection/stop-steal-organizer-ali-alexander-still-making-money-using-online

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/psychopath/

new study published in the latest edition of "Personality and Individual Differences" highlights the relationship between psychopathic tendencies, pathological personality traits and prejudicial views. Research :{suggests people with "calloused, }::{deceitful, and manipulative interpersonal styles"}::{ are more prone to align with the beliefs of right-wing authoritarianism}:, according to PsyPost.

Sandeep Roy, a doctoral candidate with a major-applied focus on clinical psychology at the University of North Texas, explained the correlation between the two.

"My interest in the relationship between pathological personality traits, such as those captured by psychopathy, and prejudicial tendencies originated from my experiences working with offenders in the Arizona correctional system prior to graduate school," said Roy.

He added, "I noticed offenders who were elevated in psychopathic propensities, as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R; Hare, 2003), frequently used racial epithets to denigrate me and other staff. When I began studying this personality disorder more in my graduate training, I noticed a paucity of literature relating psychopathy to prejudice."

Roy went on to explain what inspired his research as he noted his concern about the uptick in "hate-based violence" in recent years. The study focused on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-Short Form (SRP-SF) which broke psychopathy into four distinct categories: "a manipulative and deceptive interpersonal style, callousness and lack of empathy, impulsivity, and overt antisocial tendencies."

"Given the increase in hate-based violence in the last few years, I wanted to explore if certain personality traits traditionally studied in the realm of clinical psychology may be predictive of prejudice and provide empirical research on this understudied topic," he explained. "Psychopathy is particularly relevant to prejudice given that facets of the disorder, such as callousness or lack of empathy, are predictive of prejudicial tendencies."

The latest research findings are said to align with previous studies conducted in Austria which highlighted how some people with seemingly "dark" personality traits had an increased likelihood to support right-wing political views and beliefs.

Roy's research also noted a direct correlation between psychopathic tendencies judgmental views. During an interview with with the publication, Roy further explained his findings.

Roy said, "The findings of the study suggest that psychopathic traits, particularly the calloused and deceptive traits, are robustly associated with the tendency to prefer a society that keeps marginalized groups low in status and power and are also predictive of the propensity to use aggression towards violators of traditional social norms, both of which are salient predictors of a variety of prejudicial attitudes."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/rudy-giuliani-2649560392/

grifter bitcoin cigars utube

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// grover

no twt

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/aoc-twitter-abc-veritas/

walter  kos

Racial disparities in society are only accentuated by emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, all inequities in our society have just been exposed that much more by the current crisis. Our system is a capitalist one that has relied on racism and concentration of capital and wealth to control a massive population of have nots. One of the symptoms of this racism is that small businesses owned by Black and Latino Americans have been frozen out of an already rigged process of COVID-19 stimulus relief. This is due in part to the fact that historically and presently, people of color have a considerably harder time getting loans from banks.

Not having a relationship with a bank makes getting Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) stimulus money considerably harder and as a result, while small businesses in general have been mostly kept out of the Republican, big business-focused package, it has been much harder on businesses of color. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.) Already undercapitalized, Black-owned businesses weren't going to ask for the large amounts that other bigger small businesses were going to ask for—and banks make bigger fees on bigger loans. NBC News' Olivia Solonpointed out that while fiscal conservative, anti-"welfare" crusaders like the fake news makers over at Project Veritas decry the big government spending of the CARES package, they didn't seem to have an issue with taking more than half a million of taxpayer money to keep their lights on.

The "non-profit" organization, most recently known for hyping up a completely empty and veryquickly debunked election fraud "exclusive," received $558,900 in PPP stimulus, according to searchppp.com.The right-wing, make-em-up investigative organization is fronted by James O'Keefe—a sort of older version of pathetic GOP fraudster Jacob Wohl. He's best known for hiring people to say they were sexually assaulted in order to discredit real victims of sexual assault. It's this kind of dirtbaggery that gets Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' ultra right-wing wife to present you with an award at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. (True story.)

democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez boosted this story, synthesizing the racism and hypocrisy wrapped up in a holiday season bow.

This led to some right-wingers rubbing their tiny braincells together to attack Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for selling $58 "Tax the Rich" sweatshirts on her campaign's website. Unfortunately, there's math and the small factor of paying workers living wages. Not everything can be made for cheap in China, guys who seem to want to have a trade war with China but don't understand how costs work....

aoc: Black-owned small businesses were widely shut out from accessing PPP loans, yet right-wing disinfo org PV took half a million in public money while decrying direct federal assistance as “radical socialism.”

Republicanism in a nutshell.

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// to TP grift after BO 2008? // direct mail hype /fear forever?

the weeks following Joe Biden's victory, right-wing media figures grifted their followers by asking for money to supposedly help President Donald Trump stage a coup and overturn the results. 

Over the years we have documented how right-wing personalities have frequently scammed their audiences. So it’s no surprise that right-wingers have seized on Trump’s lies about the “stolen” 2020 election to get money from readers.

Here are a few examples of email solicitations that Media Matters has received relating to false claims of stolen election or voter fraud after Biden was elected.

==

aha/doh link to soc med

https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/after-patreons-ban-qanon-creators-are-using-these-platforms-make-money

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an 1020 alex h

bunch of grifters’: Ronald Reagan’s son slams modern GOP for ‘degrading’ the values it once espoused

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aha see newsletters How to benefit from the coming crash hits both greed and fear emotion, Sr cits and gop sensitive to threat, this allows concrete action to mitigate

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannons-dodgy-nonprofit-teamed-up-with-company-linked-to-gold-scammers

no lnx db teads

Steve Bannon’s Dodgy Nonprofit Teamed Up With Company Linked to Accused Gold Scammers

DIGGING DEEPER

Platinum Advertising, which worked for Bannon’s Citizens of the American Republic, tied to firm accused of defrauding seniors of $185 million.

William Bredderman

Researcher

Published Sep. 27, 2020

When former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s nonprofit sought to restore an American golden age, it turned to a company with connections to a consortium that allegedly strip-mined the retirement accounts of elderly conservatives, The Daily Beast has discovered.

Bannon’s “economic nationalist” group Citizens of the American Republic hired the Wyoming-based firm Platinum Advertising Corporation in 2018 to handle its “websites/social media,” Internal Revenue Service records show. A tangle of corporate and legal documents ties Platinum Advertising to TMTE Inc.—a precious metal dealer accused on Friday of fraudulently extracting $185 million from senior citizens by selling them overpriced bullion.

The massive joint action the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission and 30 states announced against TMTE alleged that the Los Angeles-based company had suckered 1,600 mostly silver-haired victims into sinking their life savings into precious metals sold at up to 300 percent of their market value. The charges are familiar to anybody who has followed the long trail of news reports and regulatory actions describing how TMTE—which has variously used the monikers Access Unlimited, TEM, Chase Metals, and Metals.com—cashed in on the right-wing paranoia of the Trump era.

Even prior to the CFTC-led case on Friday, a dozen states, including Alabama and Kentucky, had accused TMTE of posing as an investment adviser and bilking senior citizens of their assets. Articles in Quartz last year detailed how the company used a combination of politically themed Facebook ads, talk radio spots, misleading websites, and high-pressure telephone sales tactics to target right-leaning, Fox News-viewing retirees and convince them to purchase gold and silver at hugely inflated rates. These efforts often involved overt biblical appeals, or echoed the rhetoric of President Donald Trump and Republican pundits by invoking the threat “liberals” and the “Deep State” supposedly posed to the economy and to the victims’ personal finances.

“Metals[.com] reached potential investors through advertisements on Facebook, conservative talk radio show, and conservative-leaning financial newsletters,” Colorado Securities Commissioner Tung Chan told The Daily Beast. “They targeted these ads at potential investors at or near retirement age with conservative political leanings.”

These echo findings in Missouri, Arkansas, and Nevada that TMTE relied on ominous advertising, “scare tactics,” and “misstatements and omitted information” to sell marked-up coins to vulnerable people aged 60 and up. Despite signing multiple cease-and-desist deals and disgorging millions of dollars, TMTE has publicly denied ever committing fraud.

Citizens of the American Republic’s bank-shot association with TMTE, which has never before been revealed, is just the latest problematic partnership for Bannon, who was caught up in a two-count federal indictment alleging fraud at a separate nonprofit, We Build the Wall, Inc. But the ties between the former Breitbart chairman and TMTE are less direct and more complex than his relationship to the alleged private border wall grifting operation.

The most recent tax forms Citizens of the American Republic filed with the Internal Revenue Service show it paid Platinum Advertising Corporation $143,655 in 2018 to shape its web presence. Platinum Advertising’s filings in Wyoming reveal little, beyond that the company registered in that jurisdiction in 2018. Gerald Pitts was listed as its secretary and director. Pitts runs Wyoming Corporate Services, which has filed paperwork in the notoriously opaque state for dozens of clients, including TMTE.

But Platinum Advertising—named for one of the priciest precious metals on Earth—also registered an affiliate in March of this year in California, where TMTE operates. And the registration statement bears the name and distinctive signature of Conor O’Reilly, whose LinkedIn profile shows he was employed full-time during that period as in-house counsel and compliance officer to Metals.com. Among his listed responsibilities were “reviewing, revising, and approving any legal work done on behalf of the company” and “the formation of various entities.”

O’Reilly’s signature also marks the cease-and-desist and rescission agreements that TMTE and its affiliates agreed to in Colorado and Texas in 2019. In May 2020, two months after registering Platinum Advertising in the Golden State, he Docusigned a consent order with the Missouri secretary of state, again identifying himself as TMTE’s counsel and compliance officer.

TMTE’s attorney, Charles Harder—who has also recently represented Trump and his family—initially denied any link between TMTE and Platinum Advertising, even going so far as to suggest the latter company may not be real.

“Today is the first day that TMTE has ever heard of the existence of ‘Platinum Advertising Corp.’ (assuming that it exists),” he wrote in an email. “TMTE knows nothing about it and, again, is not in any way affiliated with it.”

Confronted with the evidence of O’Reilly’s involvement in Platinum, Harder asserted that the lawyer “was not exclusive to TMTE—he also did legal work separate from, and completely unaffiliated with, TMTE.”

This claim contradicts all publicly available evidence regarding O’Reilly, who did not reply to calls or emails from The Daily Beast. His LinkedIn profile characterizes his employment arrangement with Metals.com as “full-time” and “in-house,” and does not list any other work as an attorney. O’Reilly was admitted to the bar in December 2018, just one month before he began his job at Metals.com, and he is the only person by that name licensed to practice law in California.

During negotiations with the Texas State Securities Board in 2019, O’Reilly presented himself as an important official at TMTE.

“He represented that he had the authority to contractually bind the company,” said Enforcement Division Director Joseph Rotunda. “We are not talking about a low-level employee.”

Rotunda told The Daily Beast he was familiar with Platinum Advertising, but could not say whether it was involved in any criminal scheme, due to the ongoing legal actions.

[Steve Bannon Is Behind Bogus Study That China Created COVID  https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-linked-groups-push-study-claiming-china-manufactured-covid

STUDY BUDDY

Adam Rawnsley,

Lachlan Markay]

Further, all other legal documents bearing O’Reilly’s name or signature are traceable to TMTE or one or more of its principals. The only corporate entity besides Platinum Advertising he has registered at the state level is USA Marketing Inc., another California affiliate of a Wyoming company originally incorporated by Pitts. USA Marketing uses the same Golden State address, inside Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Towers complex, as Platinum Advertising.

Wyomingfilings from late 2019 list Graham Norris, a Utah-based lawyer, as USA Marketing’s “director.” Norris, who frequently works with Pitts, was listed as TMTE’s CEO, CFO, and secretary in a 2018 filing in California. A 2019 lawsuit brought by former executive vice president of sales at Chase Metals identified Norris as one of that company’s three principals.

In May this year O’Reilly applied for a trademark on behalf of another Wyoming-based precious metals-slinging company called Capital Today, Inc.

Capital Today’s state-level corporate filings are highly similar to Platinum Advertising’s. In Wyoming, both initially usedGerald Pitts as their registration agent, then switched to the Cloud Peak Law Group. In California, both firms used the exact same Wyoming address, the exact same California address, and the exact same agent for service of process—an Ethan D. Kirschner of Culver City, who did not respond to requests for comment.

Finally, the trademark application O’Reilly filed for Capital Today, which operates USAMint.com, used the address 8383 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 700, in Beverly Hills. Metals.com identified this location as one of its two in its correspondence with the Missouri secretary of state’s Securities Division, and the aforementioned lawsuit brought by the ex-sales executive described the Wilshire Boulevard suite as Chase Metals’ “principal business location.”

This also happens to be the address of Tower Equity—the investment firm founded by Norris’s fellow TMTE principals Lucas Asher and Simon Batashvili, which was also named and seized in the joint federal-state action on TMTE on Friday. All of this strongly indicates a nexus between Platinum Inc. and firms tied to TMTE—strongly enough that, when confronted with this evidence, a representative for TMTE walked back part of Harder’s statement in part.

The representative admitted that O’Reilly in fact had registered Platinum Advertising on the metal dealer’s behalf. However, they insisted that TMTE had only acquired the company as a “shelf entity” for future use in 2020, and that it was unaware of Platinum Advertising’s work for Bannon before and that the firm has not done any work with him since. Platinum Advertising, they maintained, currently has no assets, no employees, and has never had any business dealings during the time TMTE owned it. In fact, they asserted that the principals of TMTE had never even heard of Platinum Advertising before The Daily Beast inquired about it.

The TMTE representative declined to provide any documentation or on-the-record statements to substantiate these claims, and even suggested that Bannon might have hired another Platinum Advertising based in Wyoming. However, the state’s business records show only one entity of that name—the same one O’Reilly signed for in California.

In the TMTE representative’s version of events—at least, the version that lines up with the available documentary evidence—Bannon contracted Platinum Advertising to handle web and social media outreach for his conservative nonprofit. Then, sometime afterward,TMTE—which sells precious metals, including platinum, by targeting conservative voters on the web and through social media—happened to purchase the same company completely unaware of its history. Despite being completely empty and inactive, Platinum was somehow known to the Texas State Securities Board even when it was unknown to TMTE’s principals.

A representative for Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, did not answer repeated requests for comment.

Bannon has picked up a number of unsavory associates since his unceremonious exit from the White House in 2017. The Daily Beast revealed in June that the distributor of his podcast War Room is a longtime white-collar criminal. The former Goldman Sachs banker and Hollywood producer also launched several ventures with Guo Wengui, a billionaire Chinese national accused of an array of crimes in his home country, all of which he denies. Two of these entities have recently funded and promoted a dubious study asserting COVID-19 originated in a government lab in Wuhan.

It was on Wengui’s yacht that federal authorities arrested Bannon on fraud charges related to We Build the Wall Inc., itself a joint project with disabled war veteran, conservative activist, and serial entrepreneur Brian Kolfage—who has also been accused of misappropriating funds.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/how-a-con-artist-scammed-the-u-s-government-from-the-shadows/

no lnx

Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly September 17, 2020

On October 23rd, Garrison Courtney will be sentenced in court after pleading guilty to an elaborate fraud scheme that raked in at least $4.4 million from federal contractors. The tale reads like a Hollywood script. Courtney had a relatively undistinguished career as a spokesperson for the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But apparently he studied up on spycraft and, as his high school drama teacher suggested, “Sometimes I think I trained him too well as an actor.”

Courtney presented himself to unwitting private companies as a CIA agent who could steer contracts their way if they gave him a salary and an office. To back up his story, Courtney produced memos on the letterhead of various federal agencies spelling out authorization for what he was doing and containing the forged signatures of high-level government officials. He also recruited current and former military leaders to a task force he named “Alpha214” and used them as unwitting props to validate his claims.

Incredibly, the now 44-year-old  built enough of a reputation to actually place himself inside the National Institutes of Health as a watchdog over the allocation of no-bid contracts. What you have at that point is the proverbial fox inside the henhouse. But by that time, the scheme had started to unravel.

Some of the heroes of this story were lawyers at the companies Courtney swindled who began asking why they weren’t being paid under the contracts they had signed.

Navid Keshavarz-Nia was another hero. He had done cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. After several months of working with Courtney, he  fired off a resignation letter from Alpha214, distributed to its members, and addressed Courtney directly: “It is clear that I have been deliberately deceived, lied to and criminally victimized by you based on your numerous false statements.” At about the same time, the Justice Department began an investigation.

It’s not hard to figure out how this fraud could work. You take a skilled con artist and add it to the feeding frenzy for government contracts. Combine that toxic mix with something my colleague Gilad Edelman wrote for the Washington Monthly three years ago.

While the number of federal employees has basically flatlined for a half-century, the government has ballooned if you include another group in your tally: private contractors. As the size and scope of federal programs grew, but the number of civil servants stayed fixed, that labor had to get done by someone. Congress’s answer has increasingly been to contract with the private sector…

Very few Americans realize that this exact trend—using contractors to hide the true size and cost of a government mission—is not even close to being limited to the military. It’s ubiquitous. There has been a de facto political cap on federal workers since the 1970s, and every administration since at least Jimmy Carter’s has used contractors to get around it. Bill Clinton, who announced that “the era of big government is over,” harvested the end of the Cold War to cut 400,000 federal jobs, mostly in defense. But big government was only over if you ignored the contracting workforce, which kept rising by the hundreds of thousands. The Bush administration took things to another level, as contracting morphed from a way to sneakily expand government to an ideological goal in itself.

There are lessons from this tale that go beyond the importance of holding an individual like Courtney accountable for his crimes. Here’s how Edleman summarized the situation:

The key is to transcend the false choice of big government versus small government. The real choice is between a transparent and relatively competent big government of civil servants and a dysfunctional shadow big government of private contractors.

Whenever our government operates in the shadows, exploitation by con artists like Courtney is possible.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-grifter-in-the-oval-office-is-ripping-off-his-donors-and-the-american-people/

==

to be fair, WH sez will colect and pt out inaccuracies, which is SOP fair, but they haven't yet?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-house-threatens-journalist-with-a-dossier-over-report-exposing-trumps-self-dealing/

no lnx twt

white House threatens journalist with a ‘dossier’ over report exposing Trump’s self-dealing

Written by Alex Henderson August 27, 2020

During his 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised that he would “completely isolate” himself from the Trump Organization if elected president. But the Washington Post and other media outlets have done a great deal of reporting on the many ways in which Trump’s properties — from Mar-a-Lago in South Florida to his hotels and golf resorts around the world — have profited from his presidency. Some of that reporting can be found in an article that was written by reporters David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey and Joshua Partlow and published by the Post on Thursday morning, and one of the article’s revelations is thata White House spokesman resented the Post’s investigation so much that he was willing to threaten Fahrenthold with a “dossier.”

In a written statement to the Post, the journalists report, Deere said: “The Washington Post is blatantly interfering with the business relationships of the Trump Organization, and it must stop. Please be advised that we are building up a very large ‘dossier’ on the many false David Fahrenthold and others stories as they are a disgrace to journalism and the American people.”

:{:{}:

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[[Manuel Roig-Franzia

:{:{}:

@RoigFranzia

Here are the only 3 lines needed for the @Fahrenthold dossier: “One of America’s greatest journalists. Irreproachable ethics and scrupulously fair. End of dossier.”

David Fahrenthold

@Fahrenthold

Sadly, the White House is exempt from FOIA (I wish it wasn't -- i'd like to see what the White House has paid to Trump properties from its own budget).

But if you know anything about a dossier the White House has supposedly compiled on me, let me know (or send me a copy)! https://twitter.com/htsuka/status/1299039276085075970]]

}:

In that statement, Deere insisted that Trump has “turned over the day-to-day responsibilities of running the company, though he was not required to, (and) has sacrificed billions of dollars.” But Fahrenthold, Dawsey and Partlow, in their article, make it abundantly clear how much Trump’s businesses have profited from Trump’s presidency.

“Trump has now visited his own properties 270 times as president, according to a Washington Post tally — with another visit planned for Thursday, when he is scheduled to meet GOP donors at his Washington hotel,” the Post reporters explain. “Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office. At least $570,000 came as a result of the president’s travel, according to a Post analysis.”

One of the Trump Organization’s profitable customers, according to Fahrenthold, Dawsey and Partlow, has been the U.S. Secret Service.

“New federal spending documents obtained by the Post via a public-records lawsuit give more detail about how the Trump Organization charged the Secret Service — a kind of captive customer, required to follow Trump everywhere,” the reporters note. “In addition to the rentals at Mar-a-Lago, the documents show that the Trump Organization charged daily ‘resort fees’ to Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Pence in Las Vegas and, in another instance, asked agents to pay a $1300 ‘furniture removal charge’ during a presidential visit to a Trump resort in Scotland.”

The Post journalists observe that Trump can cause his businesses to profit — at the expense of U.S. taxpayers — merely by setting foot in them.

“The most frequent way Trump is known to have helped his properties has been just to visit them, with the vast, big-spending presidential entourage in tow,” they explain.

Noah Bookbinder, executive director of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Post, “One would think that if he was trying to completely isolate himself from his businesses, he wouldn’t talk about his business —  he wouldn’t promote his business, he wouldn’t go to his businesses…. (But) his businesses have been a constant presence in his presidency. No, the idea that he was going to isolate himself completely — it’s been quite the opposite.”

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520 aha; strange how much grift around god, guns, patriotism, televangelist, NRA, hype/ fear good for fundraising cf direct mail funding fr vigurie

aha: fraud often targets older ppl who might be less web savvy, but it's also easier to scare them; conservatives in general are easier to trigger re threat; if in an info silo/bubble easier to scare and harder for them to get better/~ info

aha wall grift: fear involved b/c we ned protective barrier to keep THEM POC mex rapists out; but wife in Hamptons said about WINNING which means have money and pref fame; LOSERS deserve their fate, not smart hardworking thus moral, thus do anything /crime to not be in lower cat;

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trms

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/too-much-right-sees-conservative-base-marks-n1237637

the conservative group called We Build the Wall presented donors with a relatively straightforward idea: it would collect private donations and use the money to build barriers along the U.S./Mexico border. On the surface, the pitch was effective: the outfit raised $25 million for the venture, and donors were assured that every penny would go toward wall construction.

Below the surface, according to federal prosecutors, the operation was a scam. As part of a broad criminal indictment, which included charges against former White House strategist Steve Bannon, prosecutors alleged money was used to pay for "home renovations, payments towards a boat, a luxury S.U.V., a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, personal tax payments and credit card debt."

As jarring as these accusations are, there's also a degree of familiarity to the circumstances. As the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg noted in her new column:

Bannon's arrest comes just two weeks after New York's attorney general sought to dissolve the National Rifle Association, claiming that its leadership "looted" it. On Thursday, Politico reported that Jerry Falwell Jr., recently suspended as president of Liberty University, has "repeatedly used a 164-foot yacht owned by NASCAR mogul Rick Hendrick for family vacations after the university committed to a lucrative sponsorship deal with Hendrick Motorsports."

The trifecta is neatly tied together with a common thread: the NRA, Jerry Falwell, and We Build The Wall each stand accused of, among other things, swindling unsuspecting conservatives who put their trust in powerful political voices on the right.

But if the allegations prove true, the perpetrators are hardly the first to try to fleece their own base. It was seven years ago when MSNBC's Chris Hayes wrote, "Much of movement conservatism is a con and the base are the marks."

The observation was true at the time, but it's even more important now.

As regular readers know, many prominent Republican voices --Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, et al. -- have created lucrative mailing lists used for highly dubious purposes. Similarly, the rise of the Tea Party in the Obama era led to the creation of "**scam PAC**s" that targeted conservative donors, but existed "mostly to pad the pockets" of the consultants who ran them.

Donald Trump, not surprisingly, was similarly eager to separate those he perceived as fools from their money, running a fraudulent charitable foundation and creating a fraudulent "university," which was designed to do little more than rip off its "students."

If the latest criminal indictments are accurate, groups like the NRA and We Build The Wall also saw conservatives as suckers.

The Washington Post's Paul Waldman added yesterday, "Conservative operatives such as Bannon have always viewed the right's rank-and-file with utter contempt, as little more than a collection of fools to be taken advantage of."

Similarly, Amanda Carpenter, a conservative who's worked with GOP leaders such as Jim DeMint and Ted Cruz, delivered an important message to the right yesterday: "Conservatives should be very angry. You got used.

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ref

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/conservative-circles-scams-abound

former Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) has used his mailing list as a lucrative tool for many years, and it’s a habit he’s apparently reluctant to break. Even after the Arkansas Republican gave up his Fox News program, apparently to pursue another White House campaign, Huckabee continued to send out emails with “really questionable ads.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) isn’t running for anything, but as discovered last week, he’s also using his list to send out spam-like messages that appear to be scams.

It’s against this backdrop that Kenneth P. Vogel had a great piece this week on the rise of “scam PACs” that target conservative donors.

Since the tea party burst onto the political landscape in 2009, the conservative movement has been plagued by an explosion of PACs that critics say exist mostly to pad the pockets of the consultants who run them. Combining sophisticated targeting techniques with fundraising appeals that resonate deeply among grass-roots activists, they collect large piles of small checks that, taken together, add up to enough money to potentially sway a Senate race. But the PACs plow most of their cash back into payments to consulting firms for additional fundraising efforts.

A POLITICO analysis of reports filed with the Federal Election Commission covering the 2014 cycle found that 33 PACs that court small donors with tea party-oriented email and direct-mail appeals raised $43 million – 74 percent of which came from small donors. The PACs spent only $3 million on ads and contributions to boost the long-shot candidates often touted in the appeals, compared to $39.5 million on operating expenses, including $6 million to firms owned or managed by the operatives who run the PACs.

I’m reminded of a line Chris Hayes used a couple of years ago, which continues to ring true: “[M]uch of movement conservatism is a con and the base are the marks.”

Eric Hananoki added soon after, “Media Matters has previously documented how conservatives have scammed their followers. [Erick Erickson], for example, was caught sending a plagiarized email (from Ann Coulter) endorsing a newsletter which purported to reveal a ‘secret’ system to become ‘instant millionaires.’”

And just yesterday, Ben Dimiero noted, “Erick Erickson’s email list subscribers have received a bizarre array of pitches from conspiracy theorists and dubious practitioners warning of the impending death of millions of Americans and promising ‘cures’ to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and aging.”

To be sure, there are some specific differences among these dubious appeals. The Politico piece, for example, highlighted the activities of suspicious political action committees, while the Huckabee, Gingrich, and Erickson examples focus on use of regular ol’ email lists, outside of PAC control.

But the bottom line remains the same: a dynamic now exists in which many conservatives are receiving dubious messages through lists operated by Republican leaders they trust.

The basic idea isn’t entirely new – for decades, groups and political figures sent out direct-mail letters, which regularly included unsavory appeals for cash – but the old model relied on slow and expensive distribution through the mail. It’s cheaper, faster, and easier for these unsavory schemes to be put in motion electronically.

Kevin Drum, meanwhile, asked the question that was on my mind:

So here’s my question: why is this so much more common on the right than on the left? It would be nice to chalk it up to the superior intelligence of liberal audiences and call it a day, but that won’t wash…. One possibility is that a lot of this stuff is aimed at the elderly, and conservatives tend to skew older than liberals. And while that’s probably part of the answer, it’s hardly satisfying. There are plenty of elderly liberals, after all – certainly enough to make them worth targeting with the same kind of fraudulent appeals that infest the right.

Another possibility is that it’s basically a supply-side phenomenon. Maybe liberal outlets simply tend to be less ruthless, less willing to set up scam fundraising organizations than conservative outlets. In fact, that actually does seem to be the case. But again: why?

I honestly have no idea, so let’s open it up to some discussion. Why do these scams seem so much more common on the right than the left?

Explore:

The MaddowBlog, Elections, Erick Erickson, Fundraising, Mike Huckabee, Money in Politics and Newt Gingrich

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-says-he-didnt-approve-of-border-wall-project-but-these-key-players-bragged-of-his-approval

After Steve Bannon’s arrest on Thursday, Donald Trump tried to put a Grand Canyon-sized gap between himself and the “We Build The Wall” border scheme. Bannon, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato, and Timothy Shea were indicted on counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The federal indictment says the crew pilfered “hundreds of thousands of dollars” and a Bannon-controlled nonprofit received more than $1 million in funds.

The federal government is seeking to take possession of the fraudulently purchased items, like the flashy boat Kolfage purchased and used in recent “Trumptilla” boat parades. Incredibly enough, Bannon and Kolfage recorded a video promoting their scam fund and folks, you are not going to believe this—Bannon actually jokes they are filming in Saint-Tropez in southern France before adding: “We are on the million dollar yacht of Brian Kolfage. Brian Kolfage, he took all that money from Build The Wall.” Kolfage then lets out an awkward laugh. Watch them joke about the fraud below. You cannot make this up.

[twt mma] after you collect yourself, watch the video below this because it just keeps getting better. First up, let’s revisit Trump’s statement trying to put daylight between himself and the We Build The Wall project. He repeatedly says he “didn’t like it” and thought it was “showboating and maybe looking for funds.” In a stumbling response, he repeatedly said he never approved of the project and Bannon aside, that he didn’t know anyone involved. As you’ll see below, most of the folks involved in the project said otherwise.

Let’s listen to former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has been described as a “racist traveling con man” because of his history of helping cities enact racist laws and then billing them to represent them in court cases they inevitably lose.

[vid: t i feel bad about bannon charges]

kobach is legal counsel for We Build The Wall, because of course he is, and he recorded an “interview” with Jennifer Lawrence, who is also listed on the We Build The Wall website as the communications director for the organization. Listen to Kobach describe his conversation with Donald Trump and brag that Trump said: “I want the media to know this project has my blessing.”

It should be noted that just before Bannon’s arrest on Thursday morning byfederal postal inspectors on a yacht off the coast of Connecticut, federal investigators were also serving a warrant on Lawrence and another associate, Dustin Stockton. The pair told CNN that “heavily armed federal agents” served the warrant and confiscated their cell phones.

No doubt, Kobach must be sweating. Going after lower-level employees is a sure sign they’re angling for bigger fish. And while Kobach bragged about Trump’s full-throated approval, he wasn’t alone. Lexi Churchill of ProPublica found other examples claiming Trump’s full endorsement. Amanda Shea, wife of the recently indicted Timothy Shea, shared a photo of the crew with Donald Trump in August 2019, with a caption saying: “A summer of winning came to a high note in the Hamptons. I had the absolute pleasure and honor of spending time with President Trump who had a lot of questions about the wall We The People built through We Build The Wall. He was impressed, but more importantly, incredibly personable and easy to talk to. I forgot that I was speaking with one of the most powerful men in the world.”

Shea also touted the meeting on Twitter.

Churchill also found an interview Kolfage did with The Gateway Pundit in which Kolfage bragged of Trump’s support, saying: “President Trump loves what we are doing.”

And wherever a right-wing grift exists, you knowJunior isn’t far behind. Of course he promoted the wall and congratulated Kolfage on “[t]his is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.”

Trump’s Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, who a federal court ruled is illegally serving in the role, called the group’s work a “game changer” and said he “welcomed” their efforts.

So it would seem this is another in a long list of lies from Donald Trump. He welcomed this group’s efforts right up until ProPublica reported on the shoddy construction of the privately built wall, which was in danger of falling over. Nevertheless, the contractor, Fisher Industries, was awarded a massive government contract to build Trump’s wall and Trump reportedly “personally and repeatedly” intervened to make sure Fisher was awarded the project.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/feds-charge-ex-trump-official-steve-bannon-with-criminal-fraud-in-crowd-funded-border-wall-campaign/

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,former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon became the latest ally of President Donald Trump to face criminal charges when federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York indicted him for allegedly defrauding donors to the “We Build the Wall” project. Bannon and his associates raised over $25 million in a crowdfunding campaign, but Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss alleges that they didn’t use the money for the construction of a U.S./Mexico border wall like they promised. Never Trump conservative and CNN pundit Amanda Carpenter, in an article published by The Bulwark on August 20, stresses that Bannon’s arrest shouldn’t be viewed as an anomaly, but as a pattern of widespread corruption and criminality in Trumpworld.

“Oh, what a summer it’s been for those salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing, Second Amendment-protecting, border-defending members of President Trump’s circle of trusted advisers,” Carpenter says with biting sarcasm. “You know, the people who are working day and night to protect your rights from the evil, money-sucking swamp monsters of Washington, D.C.? Well, if you believe that, you’re probably the perfect mark for the next grifter campaign led by another one of Trump’s con men.”

Carpenter goes on to say that Bannon, who served as White House communications director in the Trump Administration in 2017, is only the latest Trump ally to “get fitted with a free pair of steel bracelets.” The others, Carpenter notes, have ranged from veteran GOP operative Roger Stone to Paul Manafort (Trump’s 2016 campaign manager) to Rick Gates (his deputy campaign chairman in 2016) to Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen.

“Bannon is going to be spending a lot of time with his lawyers this fall because prosecutors at the Southern District of New York allege he participated in a scheme to bilk people who wanted to privately fund the border wall,” Carpenter explains. “Under the premise of an online crowdfunding group, We Build The Wall, he helped rack up more than $25 million in donations from donors who were told, according to the indictment, that the founders would ‘not take a penny in salary or compensation.’"

carpenter adds that Bannon’s We Build the Wall colleague Brain Kolfage, the indictment alleges, “used the money for home renovations, a boat, a luxury SUV, a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery, personal tax payments and credit card debt.”

“They’re grifters — and like magnets, they have a strange way of attracting other grifters,” Carpenter writes. “President Trump is like a galactic electromagnet that brings grifters together into a self-collapsing black hole of suckage.”

Carpenter wraps up her article with a sarcastic reference to Mike J. Lindell, the Trump ally and My Pillow founderwho has been touting oleandrin — which comes from the poisonous oleander plant — as a coronavirus miracle cure and was recently denounced as a “snake oil salesman” by CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“Oh, and while you have your wallet out, can I interest you in My Pillow Guy’s white oleander COVID cure?,” Carpenter writes. “There’s still time to get in on the ground level of the next big scheme.”

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The allegations underlying the charges against Abramoff, 62, of Silver Spring, Md., and Andrade, 42, of Missouri City, Texas, are contained in two separate documents: the information filed June 25, 2020, charging Abramoff, and the indictment filed June 22, 2020, charging Andrade.  According to the allegations in the charging documents, Andrade and Abramoff conspired to make false and misleading statements to potential purchasers of a proposed new cryptocurrency called AML Bitcoin.  According to the indictment, Andrade was the founder and chief executive officer of NAC Foundation, also referred to as the “National AtenCoin Foundation,” an organization that was intended to develop and manage the new cryptocurrency AML Bitcoin.  Andrade claimed to be the creator of AML Bitcoin and inventor of its technology that purportedly would prevent money laundering and anonymous use through “biometric technologies.” The charging documents allege Andrade claimed this technology would allow the AML Bitcoin cryptocurrency to comply with anti-money laundering and know-your-customer laws and regulations.  According to the charging documents, the defendants misled purchasers through various means when raising money to fund the venture.  In addition, the charging documents allege Andrade defrauded investors by misusing funds that were raised and laundered funds that were illegally obtained.

The indictment and information allege that beginning in July 2017 Andrade and his company NAC Foundation began raising money for the development of AML Bitcoin by selling AML Bitcoin to purchasers in the United States and elsewhere, and that sales continued through at least December 2018. According to the charging documents, NAC Foundation raised more than $5 million through the sale of AML Bitcoin.  The charging documents allege the defendants engaged in the following criminal condu

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superspreaders who beleive in small gov't take covis bailout $?!

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trumps-religious-right-backers-get-millions-in-covid%e2%80%8b-19-relief/

Conservative evangelical churches and advocacy groups led by vocal boosters of President Donald Trump have received millions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds, marking a new milestone in the religious​ right’s long campaign to take a wrecking ball to the wall separating church and state.

The Paycheck Protection Program included in coronavirus relief legislation was designed to help small businesses and other organizations stay afloat and keep people working during the pandemic. Religious-right leaders worked with​ ​their allies in Congress and the ​Trump administration to make sure that churches would be able to receive direct government funding to support clergy salaries and other operational expenses. The program is administered by the Small Business Administration, which waived normal requirements that participants in its loan program abide by nondiscrimination standards.

On June 22, the SBA hosted a “Recovery & Resilience for Faith Based Communities tele-townhall” for leaders of churches and religious nonprofits to urge them to participate in the program by applying before the June 30 deadline—and to lavish praise on Trump for supporting the program. The call was promoted by the White House and religious-right figures like Gary Bauer.

Paula White, who oversees the Trump administration’s faith-based outreach from her perch at the White House, began the call by praying for the president. “Put a hedge and wall of fire around him that no weapon formed against him would be able to prosper,” White prayed.

White praised Trump and his administration’s extensively, saying​, “it has always been his heart to make sure that houses of worship and people of faith have been protected.” She continued:

You heard that from way back, he was saying, ‘We’re going to put Merry back in Christmas,’ or talking about the Johnson Amendment. But he’s done so much to accomplish that. Things with religious freedom, like removing restrictions on grants. The PPP is one way that we begin to see this. There are so many others, but there are departments everywhere that have grants, and for years and decades, they’ve had restrictions that people of faith have had very, very difficult time. Well, our president made sure to remove those restrictions on grants, ensuring faith-based has equal access to capital, equal access to grant money.

White’s own City of Destiny church got between $150,000 and $350,000 in PPP funds, according to SBA records​.

To overcome the skepticism some conservative Christian leaders might have about getting directly involved with the federal government, officials invited several prominent religious-right leaders to praise the program. While PPP funds could be a lifeline to smaller congregations and nonprofits, it turns out that staying afloat has not been a problem for some megachurches that had online worship and fundraising abilities​. Instead, some of those megachurches have used money freed up by paycheck protection to expand their influence in their local communities.​

Jentezen Franklin, a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, is pastor of the multi-campus Free Chapel megachurch, based in Gainesville, Georgia. Franklin was effusive on the SBA call​, marveling that his church received a “tremendous amount of money” within three weeks of applying for it. Data released by the SBA Monday make it clearer how “tremendous” that amount was—in the $1​ million to $2 million range. With payroll covered by government funds and the ability to “catch up online,” Franklin said his church distributed $340,000 to small churches in his community.

Franklin has urged evangelicals to help reelect Trump or​ be prepared to face tragic consequences. Trump publicly announced that he was watching Franklin’s worship service on March 15, which Trump had declared a national day of prayer.

Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor who prayed at Trump’s inauguration and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said PPP money​ was “like manna in the desert of this pandemic.” Rodiguez said the church was “made for this hour,” adding that “for this administration to recognize the church and the faith community as essential is a game​ changer.”

Rodriguez’s New Season ​Church in Sacramento​, California, received between $150,000 and $350,000. He said the money has helped his own church not just survive but help other churches and expand community outreach. Rodriguez, who recently denounced the Democratic Party as “hostile to our Christian worldview,” ​called the program a “powerful resource” and a “blessing.”

“This is Uncle Sam helping us do the will of our heavenly father,” Rodriguez said. “So the PPP enabled us to cover payroll for our staff that is right now praying for interceding for the needs of our community, not just physical, spiritual, but in mental and emotional needs, literally saving lives.”

Also on the SBA call was another member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and longtime opponent of reproductive choice and LGBTQ equality. Dobson said that his organization, the James Dobson Family Institute, “has literally been kept solvent this spring and summer by the Paycheck Protection Plan.” Dobson said that thanks to the money his organization had received, ​adding, “We have not asked for a cent from anybody in six months.”

Other Trump-supporting leaders and organizations have done quite well. Here’s a sampling, drawn from our own research and other reporting on the SBA records:

Initially, the idea of tax dollars directly supporting clergy and church operations was defended as an extraordinary response to the unique situation caused by the pandemic. But on a phone call organized by Paul​a White’s One Voice Prayer Movement in May,former Rep. Randy Forbes ​of Virginia, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, celebrated ​that​ “precedents for religious freedom” that ​are​ being set during the pandemic—specifically the unprecedented use of federal tax dollars to directly fund clergy and churches—“are going to endure long after this coronavirus has gone.”

Marcus Harris, director of faith and community initiatives in the office of Entrepreneurial Development at the SBA, told people in the call, “One thing I’m able to say in my role as the faith-based leader here at SBA is that I know for many of you this is your first interaction with SBA, but we do not want this to be your last,” a sentiment that was repeated by SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza.

Tags: Donald TrumpJames DobsonJentezen FranklinJim BakkerPaula WhiteRick JoynerRobert JeffressSamuel RodriguezChurch-StateCoronavirusElection 2020Trump AdministrationAmerican Center for Law and JusticeFirst Baptist Church DallasLiberty CounselTrump Administration

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Brothers Behind an Extreme Gun-Rights Network That Republicans Call a Big Scam

Before they instigated some of the earliest protests against COVID-19 shutdowns, the Dorr brothers honed a brand of fiery Second Amendment activism that doesn’t sway lawmakers, but keeps the donations flowing.

the trace 720?

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520 mma

A new study from British medical journal The Lancet shows that the drug Fox News and President Donald Trump had relentlessly promoted may not be the miracle cure for COVID-19 that the network had made it out to be.

“A study of 96,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients on six continents found that those who received an antimalarial drug promoted by President Trump as a ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus had a significantly higher risk of death compared with those who did not,” The Washington Post reported. “People treated with hydroxychloroquine... were also more likely to develop a type of irregular heart rhythm, or arrhythmia, that can lead to sudden cardiac death, it concluded.”

Fox News is the source of the president's belief that hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for the coronavirus. The network’s hosts and contributors promoted the drug literally hundreds of times, running with the flawed conclusions of :{grifters and charlatans}:. Trump responded by publicly promoting the drug and even saying that he was taking it personally, as his public health experts stressed that evidence supporting its use as a treatment was sparse.

Trump even changed federal policy based on Fox’s hydroxychloroquine coverage. Administration officials diverted time and resources from other potential efforts to fight the coronavirus toward the drug because of Fox’s influence. The network continued to tout the drug even as evidence mounted that it was ineffectual.

The drug Fox promoted, according to this Lancet study, actually makes things worse. Instead of listening to public health experts, the network sent the president -- and the federal government -- down a rabbit hole.

Also: Sean Hannity claimed that the worst side effect of hydroxychloroquine is “an allergic rash or upset stomach”; Fox host Jesse Wattersmocked people concerned over FDA warnings on hydroxychloroquine.

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Judge rejects Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli’s ‘delusional’ request to be released from prison to work on coronavirus treatment

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/court-filings-show-the-nra-is-in-shambles-and-wayne-lapierre-hopes-his-lawyer-can-keep-him-out-of-jail/

igor d

a year after being re-elected as the executive vice president and CEO of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre has seen his group go from an electoral kingmaker to the edge of financial ruin. He and other NRA executives have urged laid-off employees to seek public assistance benefits. The nation’s most prominent pro-gun lobby has lost tens of millions of dollars amid numerous legal woes and investigations that have exposed its questionable financial dealings. Now, the longtime NRA leader hopes his lawyers can “keep him out of jail,” according to previously unreported allegations in court documents in the group’s legal battle against its longtime public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen.

The documents, which were published in full on NRA Watch, a new database launched by the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, allege that LaPierre has grown “preoccupied with going to jail.” Ackerman’s allegations paint a picture of an executive who “didn’t trust his own accounting department” and instructed associates not to disclose important information to the group’s auditors.

The documents also include allegations about the NRA’s search for a personal mansion for LaPierre, whose alleged obsession with “purchasing a lavish home for himself” led Ackerman to pull out of the deal. They also allege that LaPierre may have violated his own group’s bylaws by improperly using Ackerman to pay off the group’s former president, Lt. Col. Oliver North, who left the organization after what it described as a “failed coup attempt.”

Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, the grassroots arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, told Salon that NRA Watch aimed to show that LaPierre “used member dues for what looks like personal reasons” while “only 10% of NRA funds in 2018 were even spent on gun safety.”

“NRA is losing at the ballot box, in courts, on the balance sheet,” Watts said. “We always talk about shining a light under the refrigerators and forcing the cockroaches to run out, and that’s really what this website does.

“It’s important to point out why the NRA is underwater reputationally and financially,” Watts continued. The NRA’s policy priorities are killing us, so stopping the NRA is our top priority. But when it comes to legal issues, the secret to our success is that we let the NRA beat itself.”

The NRA worked with Ackerman McQueen, creators of the now-defunct online video channel NRATV, since the 1980s, paying them as much as $42 million a year. But the NRA sued the firm in Virginia in 2019, accusing Ackerman of overbilling for its services. More recently, the NRA filed a lawsuit in Texas alleging that Ackerman continues to improperly use the NRA’s brand and properties. The NRA later filed an amended complaint in October alleging that Ackerman had breached its fiduciary duties, engaged in fraudulent billing and failed to maintain adequate records. The NRA has also accused Ackerman of a pattern of corruption, including its “failed” NRATV venture, for the purpose of collecting millions in fees.

Some of the new allegations were made in Ackerman’s bid to have the law firm of Bill Brewer, a longtime friend of LaPierre, disqualified as the NRA’s legal team.

Brewer’s firm responded to Salon’s questions with a statement from Linda S. Eads, professor emerita at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

“After my review, it is my initial opinion that this request for disqualification provides no legal basis for the relief sought,” Eads said. “Factually, it appears to be supported only by assumptions and innuendo. Also, it is based on allegations that have not been factually established. It is too early in the litigation process to use such unsupported claims as a basis for disqualification, which is one of the most serious actions a court can take against a litigation party — to cause the party to lose its lawyer.”

Brewer’s firm is expected to issue a formal response to the new allegations next week. The response comes after Ackerman successfully asked the court in Virginia to stay the litigation pending a resolution of the Texas case, against the objections of the NRA, according to a previously unreported court order.

LaPierre was elected to a second term as the NRA’s CEO at the group’s annual convention in 2019, one year ago this week. It was not the party that the longtime gun activist had expected. What was supposed to be a coronation quickly devolved into a civil war that has since led to the ouster of multiple top NRA officials.

Before that meeting, North — then the NRA president — began to raise concerns about the large legal fees the NRA was paying to Brewer. By the first day of the meeting, LaPierre wrote a letter to the NRA board claiming that North had attempted to force him to resign by threatening that Ackerman would release a “devastating account” of the NRA’s financial dealings.

Hours after LaPierre, North and President Trump appeared on stage together at the meeting, news of North’s attempted coup had leaked. On the third day of the meeting, North issued a statement announcing that he would not seek another term. The statement was read by another board member as LaPierre, who had reportedly orchestrated North’s ouster, looked on next to an empty chair reserved for the group’s president.

Though LaPierre was successful in beating back the alleged coup attempt, the NRA’s legal entanglements in the year since have laid bare its devolving financial situation and threatened its tax-exempt status. Along with multiple lawsuits involving Ackerman, the attorneys general in New York state and Washington, D.C., have launched investigations questioning the group’s tax status. New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating whether the group violated the state’s charities law, which some legal experts and NRA insiders believe could result in a criminal referral related to LaPierre’s “use of nonprofit funds for personal expenses,” according to the New York Times.

A previously unreported court filing by Ackerman alleged that “[s]ometime in early 2018, LaPierre became preoccupied with going to jail.”

LaPierre later allegedly told Angus McQueen, Ackerman’s longtime chief executive, that he believed “Brewer was going to keep him out of jail,” according to another previously unreported court filing in March.

The NRA roundly rejected Ackerman’s claims.

“This is the same stale, desperate and contrived narrative Ackerman has been peddling for a year,” Andrew Arulanandam, managing director of public affairs at the NRA, told Salon. “In any event, it does nothing to diminish the confidence the NRA has in Bill or his law firm — or our commitment to hold this former vendor accountable.”​

“The simple truth is, Ackerman is desperate to distract from the agency’s woes and alleged improper actions,” Arulanandam added. “It seems the agency has resorted to unhinged rants, based on non-existent communications and allegations from terminated employees.”​

The group’s finances have taken a huge hit as a result of its legal woes.

According to a secret recording obtained by NPR, LaPierre recently told members that the NRA took a “$100 million hit” over the past two years and had to cut “about $80 million” from the budget and “took it down to the studs.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” he warned in the recording. “We still gotta wrestle with this financial situation.”

Internal documents obtained by The Trace show that the group’s finances soured as it spent millions in member donations on salaries for executives, legal bills and lavish travel, while spending less than 10% of its funds on its supposed core mission: gun safety, education and training.

The NRA’s members have begun to raise questions about the group’s spending after it was reported that LaPierre spent hundreds of thousands on Italian suits and luxury vacations. Brewer has argued that the “vast majority of travel involved donor outreach, fundraising and stakeholder engagement.”

NRA board member Allen West, a former Republican congressman from Florida, slammed LaPierre after NRA officials defended their CO. West argued the defense was filled with “outright lies” and said he was removed from key committees for daring to “challenge the cabal of cronyism.”

More than 10% of the organization’s board has resigned in the past year.

“If you’re surprised by this you don’t know Wayne LaPierre,” Watts said, “because he has a long history of overseeing sweetheart deals and self-dealing to himself, friends and family and others.”

Many of the more lurid allegations of impropriety came from Ackerman in response to the NRA’s lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed weeks ahead of the 2019 annual meeting, in what appeared to be an attempt to get ahead of the allegations raised by North.

North warned officials that the legal fees paid to Brewer were “draining NRA cash at mind-boggling speed” and “pose[d] an existential threat to the financial stability of the NRA.” North claimed that LaPierre had rejected multiple attempts to request a full audit of the legal fees.

After North’s ouster, several NRA members spoke out against LaPierre and NRA leaders and initiated motions for a no-confidence vote in LaPierre, though that effort was defeated.

Since then, mounting allegations of wrongdoing have consumed the group. But executive compensation has continued to rise. In 2018, LaPierre’s salary increased by 57% to $2.15 million per year. Other “senior staff cashed in, too,” the New York Times reported,” while oversight “has been complicated by paydays to the 76-member board.”

Court filings suggest that shortly after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the NRA considered buying LaPierre and his wife a $6.5 million mansion through Ackerman. The NRA sent a $70,000 check to a newly formed LLC to facilitate the transaction.

In a previously unreported declaration, Ackerman’s chief financial officer, William Winkler, said that he refused to move ahead with the acquisition when “it became apparent … that Mr. LaPierre was more interested in purchasing a lavish home for himself” than in addressing “alleged safety concerns.”

The NRA has dismissed the allegations.

“The agency introduced Mr. LaPierre to its preferred local real estate agent, directed a tour of multiple homes, and established a company to manage the investment,” Arulanandam said in a statement to the Washington Post last year. “No matter, Mr. LaPierre ultimately rejected the opportunity and not one dime of the NRA’s money was spent on this venture.”

In a separate transaction that even the NRA’s own accountants described as “vague and deceptive,” the NRA paid $1.8 million to rent a house in Southern California from a production company that worked on a show featuring LaPierre, according to The New Yorker.

The NRA also “used unorthodox means to arrange [LaPierre’s] travel, including his use of private jets for almost every trip,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The group’s accountants were “instructed to pay” for certain trips “without the usual detailed supporting documentation, which was held in a private file in the NRA treasurer’s office,” including private flights that “totaled about $2 million in one recent year.”

The big spending extended to other officials as well. A previously unreported February court filing by Ackerman alleged that LaPierre convinced North to “leave his paid position at Fox and become the next President and an employee of [Ackerman] by hosting a television show on NRATV.”

“The NRA agreed to compensate [Ackerman] for Col. North reimbursing [Ackerman] for his work,” the filing claimed.

The contract may have violated the group’s bylaws, Everytown for Gun Safety said.

“The pass-through nature of the contract raises serious questions about whether the NRA was attempting to conceal its payments to its board president, especially since the NRA’s organizational bylaws do not provide for compensation of the board president,” according to a report from NRA Watch. “One concerned NRA employee wrote a memo shortly afterward, warning that ‘using a vendor to provide compensation to’ North ‘does not work to hide disclosure of the compensation.’ Months later, the NRA audit committee retroactively approved North’s contract.”

The NRA’s relationship with vendors like Ackerman sparked concern within the group’s audit committee, which held an emergency meeting in 2018 to discuss the spending. Documents obtained by The New Yorker show that the group’s accountants were concerned that the “NRA pays overbilled, deceptive, vague invoices to ‘preferred’ vendors and contractors” and “decisions are made in the best interests of vendors,” not the organization.

A previously unreported filing by Ackerman alleged that “[t]hroughout his tenure with the NRA, LaPierre has routinely used third-party vendors like [Ackerman] to conceal his penchant for personal spending, seemingly with the NRA’s blessing.”

The filing goes on to allege that LaPierre “on many occasions, told [Ackerman] that he didn’t trust his own accounting department within the NRA” and that “on several occasions, LaPierre would specifically instruct [Ackerman] not to disclose certain information to certain auditors” in the NRA’s accounting department.

The relationship with Brewer also drew scrutiny after the NRA paid the firm more than $24 million in legal fees, according to North. Ackerman has alleged that Brewer’s firm is a “PR firm masquerading as a law firm to try cases in the ‘court of public opinion,’ not the courtroom.” The filings also raise questions about the firm’s methods. Revan McQueen, the son of former Ackerman CEO Angus McQueen (who died in July of 2019), alleged in a previously unreported declaration that attorney Bill Brewer “had detailed knowledge about Angus’s cancer treatment and used that information to time his litigation and media attacks.”

Another filing by Ackerman alleged that Brewer “engaged in deeply personal and calculated attacks on the McQueen family … at times strategically coordinated with Angus [McQueen’s] medical treatment, his final family events, his declining health, and ultimately the period of grief following his death.”

The past year has also seen several congressional investigations aimed at the NRA. Rep. Brad Schneider, D-Ill., called for the IRS to investigate the organization’s nonprofit status after a yearlong probe into allegations of self-dealing and corruption. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., separately urged the IRS to investigate financial fraud by the NRA. Reps. Don Beyer, D-Va., Dwight Evans, D-Pa., and Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., followed with their own call for an IRS probe.

In the Senate, Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, led an investigation that found that “NRA leaders may have violated tax laws that prohibit use of organization resources for personal benefit.” Wyden and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer have called on the IRS to investigate the group’s tax-exempt status.

Raskin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., have separately called for an investigation into whether the NRA violated campaign finance laws by coordinating communications with the Trump campaign and other Republicans.

As the investigations mounted, LaPierre issued statements warning gun owners that their rights were under attack by lawmakers who want to make “Americans less safe and less able to defend themselves.”

“The NRA is mired in crisis and they’re strapped for cash and their leaders keep going back to the old playbook to bail them out: fear-mongering about the collapse of society to raise money [and] to sell guns,” Watts told Salon. “And it’s so dangerous right now given that there are increased risks of domestic violence, unintentional gun violence [and] gun suicides because of the coronavirus crisis.”

The past year also saw NRATV shutter after three years after the NRA spent upwards of $20 million annually to sustain the network. The NRA later said in court filings that some NRA leaders found the network’s content to be “distasteful and racist” and described the overall effort as an “abject failure.”

The past year has also seen a purge of NRA board members who had spoken out about the alleged financial misconduct. Eight of the group’s board members have resigned and multiple high-ranking officials have left the group, including former top lobbyist Chris Cox, who was executive director of the NRA Institute of Legislative Action.

The NRA suspended Cox in June of 2019 after accusing him of participating in North’s attempted coup. Cox, once considered the “heir apparent” to LaPierre, resigned days later as NRA-ILA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker insisted that “any notion that Chris participated in a coup is absurd.” Baker was subsequently fired as well.

But the purge has not stopped the leaks about questionable spending at the group. Internal documents obtained by the Washington Post show that the organization spent $9.3 million on office supplies in 2018, roughly $12,000 per employee. To make up for the big spending, the NRA cut funding for gun training, a key component of its purported core mission.

According to the NRA’s financial report, the group ended 2018 with a $10.8 million deficit, marking the third straight year it spent more than it brought in, even as it continued to increase executive pay.

This year, the NRA announced across-the-board 20% pay cuts and layoffs, urging affected employees in a leaked memo to “contact any germane state or federal agency to determine eligibility for any additional aid.”

LaPierre in the memo blamed “extraordinary challenges resulting from COVID-19” for the cuts despite years of deficits and increased legal spending.

But the revelations in the court documents and news reports make it clear, Watts said, “that the pandemic is not what’s bankrupting the NRA. “That’s its own corrupt leadership. It’s really showing that even though Wayne LaPierre is scapegoating, he and the rest of the NRA leaders have used the organization as their personal piggybank for years.”

The NRA has also seen its political influence wane as its election spending has dropped precipitously. In the group’s home state of Virginia, voters elected a Democratic legislative majority in 2019 that quickly passed a package opposed by the NRA that implemented expanded background checks, a “red flag” law and other gun-control measures. The previous Republican majority had refused to take up the issue even after the mass shooting that killed 12 people at a municipal building in Virginia Beach.

“We outspent the NRA eight-to-one in Virginia, we outworked them on the ground, making hundreds of thousands of calls and knocking on tens of thousands of doors,” Watts told Salon. “And as a result we flipped both chambers” of the state legislature.

Watts said the Virginia elections were only one example of the NRA’s waning influence: “The NRA is weaker than it’s ever been and we are stronger than we’ve ever been. We outspent and outworked them in 2018. We were able to flip the U.S. House of Representatives and change the makeup of seven state legislatures and elect over 1,000 ‘gun sense’ candidates across the country.”

Going into the 2020 elections, Watts said, her group has “already committed to spending $60 million, which is twice what the NRA spent in 2016. And the NRA is so deep underwater that even the president they worked so hard to elect no longer wants to work with them.”

President Trump received more than $30 million in backing from the NRA during his 2016 run, but has recently complained to aides that the group is “going bankrupt,” according to the New York Times, and tweeted that the NRA “must get its act together quickly, stop the internal fighting, & get back to GREATNESS – FAST!”

“Donald Trump talks about the Second Amendment, but he doesn’t so much talk about the NRA anymore,” Watts said. “Some of the NRA’s own board members have distanced themselves from the NRA and major donors have begun to distance themselves from the NRA, so it’s really not surprising that Donald Trump would as well if he sees them as possibly an albatross around his neck.

“If you look at the way this country has been going since the 2016 election, background checks continue to pass, red-flag laws, laws that disarm domestic abusers. We have a 90% track record in the last five years of stopping the NRA’s agenda in state houses. So politically, they have not been as successful.”

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420

**Bakker Begs Viewers: ‘Don’t Let Me Have to File for Bankruptcy’**

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/cnn-host-grills-louisiana-pastor-for-asking-poor-parishioners-to-hand-over-their-stimulus-money-in-fiery-interview/

spell blackwell tony

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LA NO hard hit early covis, many poor POC

louisiana pastor who held packed services during pandemic arrested for allegedly threatening protester with church bus

Marissa Higgins / Daily Kos

Pastor Tony Spell has previously been arrested on misdemeanor charges for holding crowded church services in spite of Louisiana’s stay-at-home orders.

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as COVID-19 has spread throughout the United States, several right-wing media figures have profited off of scams, including supposed coronavirus treatments. Government agencies have sent warning letters to companies and individuals who have been promoting purported coronavirus cures.

Here are a few personalities and media-related companies profiteering off the pandemic:

  • Alex Jones has been selling bulk food at inflated prices and also hawking a variety of supplements as coronavirus cures and preventatives, including a colloidal silver toothpaste and zinc supplements. (Jones even did so this past week, hours before news broke that the FDA had warned him.)
  • Jim Bakker has heavily promoted products related to his doomsday prophecies and recently, as Right Wing Watch documented, attempted to sell a “silver solution” as a coronavirus cure.
  • Wayne Allyn Root has endorsed an “alkaline structured silver” product from the company My Doctor Suggests, which advertises on his program, and he used his now-defunct Newsmax TV program to tout it for people who are concerned about COVID-19.
  • Newsmax’s health divisionhas been trying to get subscriber money by selling a book claiming to offer “3 powerful secrets to never getting sick again,” including ways to ward off the coronavirus.