Behind the Bastards - The Whole Story Behind that 'We Build the Wall' GoFundMe

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

In episode 45, Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss the GoFundMe, 'We The People Will Build the Wall' campaign.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody! I'm Robert Evans. That was another classic, terrible introduction to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And my guests today are Katie Johnston. We've been talking for two hours so far. Katie Johnston and Katie stole. I am frazzled and have been reading paper for two and a half hours.

Yeah, you must be tired. I mean we're tired. You must be real tired. Everyone's exhausted. I'm sick. Yeah, you're still sick. I still feel fine. You guys are the patrons of the Some More News Network on Patreon. And today we're going to be talking about a subject that we should be exhausted and a little bit frazzled to talk about. You guys remember that GoFundMe to try to build that wall? I sure do.

We've got $20 million. Yeah. Now if you paid attention to sort of like the way that was presented on social media, it was dumb rubes paid, raised $20 million to build the wall, and then GoFundMe were funded at all. That's not what happened. Oh. What happened is terrible and frustrating. I'm excited for this. We're going to get into that.

But first, we're going to get into the guy behind that campaign, Brian Colfage. On Tuesday, October 11th, 2018, Facebook deleted 810 pages from their site for quote, inauthentic behavior. Some sites, like Newsweek, were quick to comment about the bias of this purge. Quote, Newsweek's title. Is Facebook biased against conservatives, right-wing news, other fake news sites taken down? American thinker, another conservative site, echoed this angle. Facebook's midterm purge of conservative pages well underway. Now, while most of the outrage came from the right, both left-wing and right-wing sites were deleted wholesale. And in true Facebook fashion, the purges seemed to have been a mix of legitimately toxic bullshit being axed

and also legitimate activist pages being deleted because they ran afoul of an algorithm. Because again, it's Facebook. They don't think about anything they do. Even if they're trying to do a good thing, they're going to do it in the dumbest way possible. Absolutely worst possible way. We promise we will do the right thing the wrong way eventually. Can't an algorithm do it? Can't a machine do this without thoughts? Here's the Guardian.

Quote, in a statement posted to its online newsroom, Facebook says it purged these pages because their owners were using fake accounts, sharing the same content between multiple pages and linking to ad supported websites it calls ad farms. But what the social network calls spam, the owners of these pages call standard procedures for operating on Facebook. Nearly all the page owners contacted by the Guardians say they use backup or fake accounts along with their real ones. They do it in part to protect themselves from being targeted by political opponents and having their real accounts end up in Facebook jail, says Edward Lin, the editor-in-chief of Reverb Press, a left-leaning news site whose Facebook page disappeared yesterday. Now, the Guardian talked to left-wing and right-wing content makers who believe they had been unfairly targeted. One of those people was Brian Colfage.

Quote, Brian Colfage, another disabled veteran who administered the right-wing news page as well as three other conservative pages that were removed, says his organization worked closely with Facebook. He shared copies of emails with a Facebook executive in which he tried to set up a meeting to talk about how his pages could adhere to the network's evolving policies regarding political content. The meeting was abruptly cancelled. A week later his pages were gone. He talked with Facebook maybe 50 times in the last months, he says. Not once did they ever say we broke any rules or did something wrong. If they had an issue, they could have brought it up.

We had a really close working relationship. That's why this whole thing is a complete shock. Now, Brian Colfage will again be our subject today. If you don't recognize his name immediately, he's the guy behind Build The Wall. Go fund me. Now, in 2018, the website Media Matters launched a study evaluating 463 prominent political Facebook pages from January to July of that year. They found that images posted on right-wing pages did better than any other kind of political content. A follow-up study on 26 right-wing meme-generating pages found that Facebook's algorithm changes tended to boost their traffic rather than reduce it. On August 31st, 2018, Media Matters published another study with the goal of tracking major narratives pushed by these meme pages and identifying the pages most responsible for spreading the sort of misinformation.

The study heavily implicated a network of sites focused around Brian Colfage's right-wing news. One Facebook network used pro-Trump groups run by fake news sites to push its content through right-wing circles. Five pages tied to the far-right-website right-wing news each posted the exact same engagement-bait meme, calling for the cancellation of the TV show The View in light of Roseanne's cancellation within about an hour of each other. The most popular post in this batch had over 700,000 interactions. Between the five-page posts, the meme earned almost 1.3 million interactions. Three pages in, the same network shared the most popular posts from the Trump Republic later that night and an additional 41,700 interactions. Right-wing news also pushed this meme through its Facebook group. In a now-deleted post, the personal account of Amanda Shea, who runs two of right-wing news's pages, shared the most popular post from right-wing news's batch of memes into the group President Donald Trump official All-Caps LLC, with the static text calling for a boycott of ABC. The post got over 8,400 interactions before it was deleted.

The group President Donald Trump official LLC was originally started by right-wing news's official Facebook page. Six of the group's 12 administrators are pages that are part of the right-wing news networks. Amanda Shea's personal account, along with the personal accounts of administrators and moderators of the group, regularly pushes posts from right-wing news's network of pages to the President Donald Trump official LLC groups 183,000-plus members. So, we're building to something here. There were several large networks of right-wing meme and fake news-generating pages. Right-wing news, run by Colfosh, was the center of one of these networks. They all reinforced each other, creating a never-ending font of viral content. So, the one Roseanne-related meme that right-wing news posted earned nearly 1.6 million interactions solely from circulating through these networks. You could get something in an enormous amount of content. And the main goal seems to have been driving ad revenue, because they would have ads on these pages that would make a shitload of money. Now, when Facebook purged all these pages, it seemingly wiped out Brian Colfosh's digital empire. He responded in the way of all the grieved parties in the 21st century, using GoFundMe to raise money for a court case. Hell yeah, you did.

I'm not a conservative. I'm not a liberal. I'm an American, with deep beliefs in what our country stands for. I proved this by vowing to protect and fighting for America's greatest tenant, free speech. Many Americans have fought for these political freedoms, freedom of speech, and every American has enjoyed those freedoms until today. On October 11th, 2018, Facebook shut down thousands of Facebook accounts for their political opinions, saying in effect that they don't have a legitimate political argument. Stop social media censorship now! Until today. Until today. Everything was fine until now. Everybody's always had a voice. Until now. Now, over the last two months, this campaign has gained almost $74,000 of its $100,000 goal. In the campaign, Brian talks up his military credentials, and his story is pretty incredible. Quote from Brian,

I'm a veteran of the United States Air Force. I was severely wounded in combat. Combat is capitalized on 9-11-2004 while serving in Iraq. I lost both my legs entirely in my right hand. I'm the most severely wounded U.S. airman to survive. You'll hear that line a lot when anything points out most severely wounded U.S. airman. Maybe it's true, but you can't quantify most. That's a man. It's a guy that loses two hands and one leg less severely. Tammy Duckworth can't walk. Yeah, exactly. It's a legitimately horrifying injury that he suffered. Hard to imagine going through that. But he's also really done a good job of... Painting himself. Making lemons out of lemonade. I mean, he's the most severely injured and the buck stopped there was free speech. He was the end of it.

The first one, his free speech has been threatened. Now, also when he notes he was severely wounded in combat, you kind of debate that too, because in other videos he said he was on an air base when this happened. 107 millimeter rocket landed a couple of feet away from him and blew him up. He was heading to the gym. That's not combat. I mean, you could argue, I guess, and I think for the purpose of getting an award for something like this, you get shot at by the enemy. I'm not going to split hairs with a guy who lost three limbs, but again, you can kind of see what he's going for. On his website, Brian Kofage, motivational veteran speaker, there is a picture of him severely wounded in the hospital with a guy laying a purple heart on his chest. It is the main picture of the website. This is like the front page of his site is him severely wounded in a gurney.

Okay, so that's him and then that's his medal. Now, it is hard to imagine someone getting injured worse than Brian Kofage in surviving. He said about his injury, quote, I was fully conscious after my friends rolled me over my back. I remember every detail like it was yesterday. I wasn't in any pain at first. I remember being pissed because I knew what had happened and how it happened. I looked at my hand and it was hanging by skin like it had been shoot off. My hand was folded backwards and hanging. I tried looking at my legs, but my friend, senior airman Cortez put his hand over my eyes so I wouldn't see.

I told him to just get me home. Once he got home, Kofage had to relearn virtually everything about day-to-day life from how to tie his shoes to how to do everything else we do that's not shoe tying. Brian's story is undoubtedly harrowing and the rather spectacular nature of his survival and recovery ensured that he would get work as a sort of inspirational figure. He's been on Anderson Cooper. He's met George W. Bush. He's done photo ops with Mike Huckabee. He's won awards and he's pretty plugged in to a certain corner of the conservative media ecosystem, but he's also never been quite mainstream. Brian's still in progress GoFundMe to fight Facebook made vague promises about his access to the Trump Inner Circle in an update he posted. We are talking with a major law firm who worked with the Trump transition team and they are now assisting us in moving ahead on our legal case

and also getting Zuckerberg hauled back into a Senate Congress hearing so Americans can hold him accountable. Your donations will be used to jumpstart the legal proceedings against Facebook. Now, I want to note right now that this is not Brian's first GoFundMe. His first GoFundMe was made in 2015 and its goal was to support what he called a veteran mentorship program. In the original Facebook post for that, he claims, quote, my wounded warrior mentor engagement program was created after Obama slashed military spending. Up to that point, the US military would fund my trips to visit wounded warriors who needed a little motivation. When doctors saw a patient struggling, they reach out to me and I donate my time to put these vets back on track.

So, he claimed to have deals in place with Walter Reed, Lange Stuhl and other official military hospitals. His campaign raised $16,246. BuzzFeed confirmed through GoFundMe that all of these funds went directly to Brian Colfage. I have not found any information on his mentorship program since. Although, just based on what he promised, going out and hanging with wounded vets who are buddies of his on occasion would technically qualify. BuzzFeed reached out to all of the medical centers Colfage named. None of them had any agreements in place with him or had ever heard of his mentorship program. BuzzFeed actually published the best article I found on this guy.

It's titled, I felt dirty, former employees of veteran crowdfunding Trump's Wall say he pushed fake news to get rich. The article does not paint a positive picture of Brian Colfage. Lindsay Lowery, who wrote under the alias, Prissy Holly, wrote for Colfage's main site, Freedom Daily. After I started challenging some of his business decisions that I felt were reckless for the company and for my career, the real Brian emerged. Everything is only about his war hero persona and money. If there's a perceived slight on his part, he viciously attacks people and, in my case, tries to destroy their life and livelihood. In their conversations, he claimed to run a multi-million dollar business which may well have been true. He also advised her on how to gin up fake stories for outrage clicks.

Former employees told BuzzFeed News that Colfage instructed his crew to produce Facebook content to more flagrantly convey a false narrative. In one instance, photoshopping former President Obama's head onto another body to make it appear as though he was having an affair. With the caption, breaking Obama busted, video leaked. You'll love this one. He texted employees during a conversation about manipulating images. Yeah, your free speech is being silenced, bro. I mean, that makes me so angry. It's really gross, and it's one of these things that people at BuzzFeed are talking to. We're all fine writing for far-right shill pages, so like...

Oh yeah, no, I mean... Yeah, that's part of what we did. Yeah, we'd create these fake things. The knowingly pushing the fake stuff is like really... It makes me insane. And there's some stuff I left out about her accusing him of going after her and her husband and stuff, because she's like, I just don't know how credible you are, but I can't believe it. Also, I'm not going to feel sorry for you. Right, you had a job lying, and now you're telling me this stuff.

You know the person that you were working with. Yeah. You know. You know your job is to breaking Obama busted. God. I guess that was a line too far for them. Right, but knowingly photoshopping it. It's not even like we're misrepresenting it accidentally, or we heard it from somebody else.

No, we're just going to make up something real quick. We're just going to lie and put it out there. We need Russian trolls doing this shit. No. They're one of the biggest... They're such a big problem, and so it bothers me so much. Yeah, how do you get people to stop focusing on that and stop believing it? Anyway.

Yeah, Orwell was right that people just want to spend some time every day hating something. Yeah. With other people. And Facebook has made that easier than ever. Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Thank you, Mark. You're really...

Hey, remember when Mark Zuckerberg was touring the country because he thought he was going to run for president? I'm glad we've shut that one down. Oh, man. Nice try, Mark. I feel like the whole country got unified for a second to be like, we all hate each other, but no. No, no, no. This is absolutely not.

Under no circumstances. We can't agree on whether or not we should be one country, but we're all agreed. No, Mark. No. That's not okay. Oh, God, what if we could just turn him into like the kind of alien invasion that we need to unify humanity? Right.

What if we all eat Mark Zuckerberg? Eat? Eat. Yeah. Right. We can't like... It's like the existential crisis of climate change or something like that could do it, but I think eating Mark Zuckerberg...

Eating Mark Zuckerberg... ...might be an easier sell. We can all get on board that. It's vegetarian, but maybe. Yeah. I mean, I feel like that's ethical consumption under capitalism. Eating Mark Zuckerberg... It's not like he's going to taste like meat.

No. No. We're not doing it for the flavor. No, no. He has... Eat my human meat. Eat my human meat. No.

Yeah. That's exactly how he'd say it. Oh, Mark. Okay. So we're going to get back to the rest of Brian Colfage's story and how it gets way more sinister than I had guessed when I started this research. But first, produce and services, maybe. Let's see.

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In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. He's in a good and bad ass way, and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

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Now Brian ran a constellation of sites. The Guardian was definitely off when they said he only had three, at least 10, probably more like dozens or more. These pages had names like Patriot Nation and Right Wing News. Every page was boosting and sharing what went up on every other page. Colfage claimed you have purchased one page with a reach of 1 million people per week for $100,000. He seems to have started hiring people in 2016, paying $2 per thousand clicks on Facebook,

which was seen as a good rate by the employee's interview. It's hard to say just how many pages he operated or how much money he made. It was enough to drive 28 million page views to his website Freedom Daily in one month in 2017, at least according to BuzzFeed, which was about $300,000 in monthly ad revenue on just that website. And he's making money off of the revenue of this stuff on Facebook. He has other websites. He's potentially making millions of dollars a year doing this, at least he was until his

revenue stream from Freedom Daily was cut off in March of 2018. Yeah, he was silenced. Yeah. Well, that was later. That was when Facebook was silenced. His website Freedom Daily was cut off in March of 2018. Here's NBC News explaining why. Quote, the shattering of Colfage's sites came a month after Michigan man Joel Van Vangelhue

sued Freedom Daily and other Right Wing sites for misidentifying him as the driver of the car that plowed into a group of peaceful protesters at a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Freedom Daily article relied on the image board for Chan as its major source, according to a letter provided by the court by the contributor named in the suit. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

So he lost his websites before he lost his Facebooks. Um, good. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Dumb. NBC. Quote, the site often trafficked in false inflammatory and racist content, including

headlines like obnoxious black people lose their minds when Victoria's secret model says this one word on live video and Trump just released embarrassing vids of Obama's Muslim friends that he never wanted seen. I hate it so much. Really gross. Burned. Really gross. Yeah.

So the website is currently defunct and it does seem that Facebook's sweep succeeded in, if not wiping out, severely damaging Brian Colfage's empire of bullshit. Colfage himself is permanently banned from Facebook due to both his manipulation of their system and a number of harassment complaints filed against him. Now that all went down in the middle of October on December 16th. That same year, Brian Colfage created the fundraiser for Donald Trump's long promised wall. It quickly went viral and then viral-er.

The goal this time was to raise $1 billion Colfage claimed to have, didn't realize how much money that was. Did you, Brian? Colfage claimed to have some vague connection to the Trump administration who had assured him that there was a way the government could take the money. So his promise at the beginning was, I'm not getting a dime of this, a hundred percent of it is going to the government. On January 11th, 2019, after raising well over $20 million from 346,237 donors, Brian

Colfage posted an update. Re-consulted with our nation is leading experts on border security and construction. There's hundreds of miles of private land along the border. To continue this mission, we need you to opt in so that your donation counts. The one thing I learned from being a triple amputee is that anything is possible. We the people can build the wall, but I need your help. If you're sick and tired of Democrats holding national security over our heads, opt in now. We build the wall and we can start now.

Below the video in the text on the GoFundMe update, he admits offhandedly that the federal government won't be able to take donations any time soon. Colfage brags, quote, our highly experienced team is highly confident that we can complete significant segments of the wall in less time for less money than the federal government. So he opened a new site, WeBuild the Wall, where he solicits donations for WeBuild the Wall Inc. The idea he very much puts across on the GoFundMe page is that they're just raising the funds in a different area because they can't donate directly to the government anymore, and that

was part of the original promise. The way this became framed in news reports was that GoFundMe was refunding all of the donations. That's not what's happening. They are giving people until April to opt in and transfer their donations to WeBuild the Wall Inc. So you do have to opt in in order to transfer the donations, but it is not a straight refund. So here's how WeBuild the Wall Inc. describes their mission, quote, our mission is to unite

private citizens that share a common belief in providing national security for our southern border through the construction, administration, and maintenance of physical barriers inhibiting illegal entry into the United States. In interpreting the purpose of the corporation, the board of directors and members of the advisory board will consider the impact of a post structure on a selected site's environment and construct effective barriers primarily designed to prevent illegal access to the United States. We will focus on building portions of a U.S. southern border wall and manage support

operations required for and the process is associated with the design, engineering, construction, and maintenance of the wall. Now this is officially a 501C4. You guys know anything about 501C4s? I came across something interesting about the monolegal blog I found because I didn't know much about this either. So I'm going to quote from this legal blog which is run by a non-profit legal aid group and this article was from July 16th of 2018, quote, the Treasury Department announced a

change in the regulations making it no longer necessary for 501C4 and 501C6 organizations to disclose the identities of their donors on their annual information returns to the IRS. The concern with the elimination of the disclosure requirement, however, is that more dark money will flow through 501C4 social welfare organizations like the NRA. Yeah, so this same blog, which is part of a non-profit called the Neolog Group, published another fun article in January of 2018. They called it, A Prediction for Non-profits in 2018, Rise of the 501C4, I'm going to

quote another excerpt from that. We'll see an increase in the number of 501C4 social welfare organizations being formed and receiving contributions. While contributions to 501C4 organizations are not deductible as charitable contributions, this won't matter to many donors for two major reasons. With the increase in the standard deduction, there will be a substantial reduction in the number of taxpayers who itemize their deductions. This means that the vast majority, possibly 95% of taxpayers, will get no tax benefits

for making a charitable contribution to a 501C3 charitable organization. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act did not eliminate the charitable contribution deduction, but the act made the deduction useless for all but a small number of taxpayers. The Nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that charitable contributions will decline by about $12.3 billion to $19.7 billion per year as a result of the change. Because 501C4 organizations can engage in unlimited lobbying and furtherance of their social welfare purposes, and because they can use their resources to support or oppose political candidates, they have greater flexibility and potential power to affect social change

than 501C3 organizations. So that is the kind of organization Brian Colfage has found it. GoFundMe has confirmed that so far, 42% of the Wall's original donors have responded and 94% of those have opted in. Rolling their money into this new venture, we build the Wall Inc. It seems like Brian went from GoFundMe, a platform that's very open about how the money that gets raised on it gets spent, and a platform that would have held him accountable to a platform to where he is completely unaccountable for how the money is spent.

And both in the mission statement and in the legal operation of a 501C4, he could use that money to build the Wall, or he could justify, well, I'm going to spend it putting in donations to political candidates who will help the Wall get made, and that's how we'll further the Wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Sneak. As long as it has to do with the Wall.

As long as it has to do with the Wall. Wow. It's going to pay for my life as I try to get the Wall built. Yeah, and of course. That counts. That counts. That is something else. That is something else.

Pony up, guys. Yeah. Now. They should report on it better. Yeah, they really should. It feels like some, I mean, here's, this is a start. Yeah. Now, Brian still uses that $20 million raised number on its site.

Here's one of his tweets by Amanda Shea, who you may recognize from that Media Matters report, was also a big part of his fake news Facebook network. In its first month, We Build the Wall link has raised over 20.5 million from 345,000 opt-in today. Badly photoshopped picture of Donald Trump giving a thumbs up at the Wall. Great tweet. I love that they were like 20, almost 25 million. That's a fourth of a billion dollars.

I saw a lot of people say that. We're on our way there. They only needed $980 million more. Now, We Build the Wall in Kaz Joy of Joy's released the names of their team members. You can guess some of the names on this list. Tom Tan Credo, former congressman and failed presidential candidate. Sheriff David Clark. Yes.

Former Kansas Secretary of State Chris Kobach, some guy named Dustin, and Eric Prince. This is a real who's who, a fuck. Eric Prince? Eric Prince? Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? I am not kidding you. That is, that should not be a lie.

Like, how do you stop? Like, don't allow that. That's, ooh. Ooh. Yeah. It's so weird that we talked about Betsy DeVos at the end of the last episode. It's so weird. What were you saying?

Don't allow that to. Before recording this. He's class. The world? Yeah. Wow. Who's Dustin? He's just some guy named Dustin.

He's the guy? He's like right in between Chris Kobach and Eric Prince, I think he's the guy named Dustin. The MLS. Yes. He's kind of, he just isn't anyone famous. He's just a dude named Dustin. He's on the team. The guy named Dustin, he has a last name, doesn't matter.

He's called me the old man. Just the guy named Dustin. They call me the old man. Wow. Wow. So I don't know what's going to happen, but I am certain we are all going to be hearing about this fun scam slash multimillion dollar 501C4 in the very near future and probably during the 2020.

This is shocking. Yeah. I'm definitely going to tell people on our podcast, come listen to all of your episodes, but like this is. I don't give a shit if you guys want to report the same thing. I'll send you my notes. It's fucked up. And people should know about 501C4.

Yeah. We were talking about it. Yeah. That is. We were talking about it and we'll say that this we talk about it in depth, but like. This is something people need to know. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah. The news really fell down on the job of reporting what the fuck went wrong. Yeah. Really dropped the ball boys. David Clark. Join me together. Rick Prince and David Clark with an extra at least around eight to ten million dollars. Yeah.

That's like. I mean that's spitting money for Eric Prince, but I still don't want him to have it. But like it sounds made up. Like what you're describing is like, but that's like some someone would make that up to say like, oh, by 2020, this is our situation. Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's just reality.

This is just reality. Oh, that's. Dang. Fun on the bone. I have been waiting for you to be like, by the way, he was never in even like in the military. He was in the military. He got horribly injured in Iraq.

I do think he's kind of fudging a little bit when he says it's a capital C combat injury, but that's debatable. I mean, I don't want it. It's not debatable that it was a horrific, horrific. Yeah. But again, well, he was going to battle with his abs. Yeah. At the gym.

Yeah. Battle with his abs at the gym. It's the theme. It seemed like you were. I'm not trying to hide away. I'm not also. No, he's a legitimate like guy who went to war and was horribly injured. Nothing about that I've ever read seems exaggerated.

He was probably an asshole before the war, too, just maybe not traumatic brain injuries. Yeah. That's true. And it's hard to imagine getting hit by a rocket at that range and not having a traumatic brain injury. And it can change people's personalities dramatically. Yeah. All right.

Well, that's a slightly kinder. Yeah. I'll take push a bunch of lies. On a fun note, I read a neat article recently about a guy named Dr. Rapp, who was a an elderly white neuro doctor, like brain doctor who had a series of minor strokes and started rhyming things and then started hanging out in like a chunk of Los Angeles where there was like nightly rap battles and just became like a fixture of the rap scene in LA for years. This is incredible.

It was like professional rap artists and stuff and was like, everybody loved him. He was just he was Dr. Rapp with two P's. Is there a movie being made? No, but there's like a documentary that talks about it and stuff. That's amazing. Yeah. It was really cool story. You should have called himself Dr. Stroke.

Dr. Rapp's pretty good, too. Yeah. I mean, Dr. Stroke's definitely cooler sounding. Yeah. He just lets you know. But then again, Dr. Rapp lets you know if what he does is a doctor and he's very descriptive. Yeah. Good times.

Wow. This has been fascinating. I'm very upset that you said Eric Prince's name in the context of this whole conversation. Get you a little little rage spike every time that motherfucker comes into something. Adrenaline rush. Yeah. Welp. Well, I've doodled this entire page.

There's not an inch left. Then I think it's time for y'all to plug your plugables. You can check us out at patreon.com slash some more news. That's where we are and on other places like the Twitter. Other places. Twitter, same name. YouTube, same name. I'm Katie Stahl with the KAATY.

My Twitter is Dr. Mr. Cody. Yes. It's on twitter.com. I'm Robert Evans. Sophie's not in the room right now. No. She had to leave. So I'm probably going to, this is just wild dog, the rest of these plugs.

Oh, yeah. Twitter and Instagram at atbastardspot if you want to support two social media sites that are terrible. I'm on there a lot because I'm a gigantic hypocrite. It's causing real problems for the nation and the world. If you want to buy a t-shirt, which does not cause massive problems in the nation and the world. You can go to teapublic.com.

We also have cups, stickers, we sell, what's a, I always throw a joke in about my brain. She's fried right now. We don't sell peace of mind. That is unattainable at any price in 2019, my friend. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Pretend I said something funny about that.

I don't know anything funny. Go to teapublic and buy a thing behind the bastards teapublic. We have a website behind the bastards.com where you can read all the sources for this super fun episode. You can find me on Twitter at, I write, oh yeah, I already plugged the fuck it. Fuck Twitter. Podcast. Woo.

Woo. Woo. That was the end of the episode. Yes. Wild dog that. Yeah. I just really go off the rails and stuff. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Head to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.