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Trump Fans Have Spent Millions on a GoFundMe Page to Build the Wall — But It Looks Like They’re Getting Duped

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Last month, a GoFundMe campaign was launched titled “We The People Will Fund The Wall,” purporting to collect money for President Donald Trump’s border wall so that Congress would not need to. The page has raised over $20 million.

But who is behind this?

The person who created the campaign is Brian Kolfage, a decorated Iraq War veteran and ultraconservative activist in Florida. He has also launched past GoFundMe campaigns ostensibly to mentor veterans at military hospitals, although no medical center has reported receiving any money or volunteer work from him, according to a report from BuzzFeed News.

He also reportedly ran a deliberate fake news operation for his own financial gain. The report explained:

Lindsay Lowery, who goes by the alias Prissy Holly, worked for Kolfage’s main conservative news website, Freedom Daily, for about a year in 2017 as Trump’s presidency began to take shape and the world of fake news on Facebook remained largely unabated.

“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,” she told BuzzFeed News. “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.”

BuzzFeed News reviewed a cache of internal emails and text messages from several of Kolfage’s former employees and acquaintances that show how he pushed to sensationalize and fabricate right-wing content on Facebook to amass clicks, manipulate users, and in the process, make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in advertising revenue. In one text, he claimed to run a “multi-million business.”

In addition to Lowery, three sources corroborated the documents and their experience with Kolfage, but were afraid to go on the record, citing his past behavior of lashing out and threatening legal action against those who have spoken against him.

Kolfage reportedly ordered his content team to use manipulated images on Facebook to make it look like former President Barack Obama was having an affair or Hillary Clinton was being arrested, captioned “BREAKING!! OBAMA BUSTED!!! VIDEO LEAKED!!” and “BREAKING!!! TRUMP’S DOJ JUST DID IT!!! It’s FINALLY Happening!” He paid employees based on the number of clicks they got, the report said, and dismissed their complaints that the content was fake.

“He was very smart in how he would do it. He never wanted the truth,” one employee told BuzzFeed News. “It was all just for clicks, and the more inflammatory, the better. I felt dirty writing the stuff.”

Fittingly, Kolfage’s latest GoFundMe project is just as dubious. There is no legal way to give that money to Trump to build a wall, and the goal of $1 billion is far short of the $6 billion Trump is asking for from Congress, let alone the $25 billion that experts say he would actually need.

But hardcore Trump supporters are falling for it all over again.

Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license

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MTG Claims Biden Is ‘Starting a Nuclear War’ Over Debunked Claim of Giving Nukes Back to Ukraine

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Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) accused President Joe Biden of leading Ukraine into a nuclear war by giving weapons to Ukraine following a brief reference in a New York Times article. The nukes in question, however, are not in the United States.

Greene shared a post by independent journalist Kyle Becker on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday morning. Becker’s original post claimed that Biden’s government is “considering the return of Nuclear Weapons to Ukraine.” The weapons in question were taken from Ukraine following the fall of the Soviet Union.

“Outgoing administration officials (the admin that massively lost the popular vote and electoral college) should be arrested if they give nuclear weapons to Ukraine. Starting a nuclear war on your way out is treason. The American people do NOT want anything to do with this!!!” Greene tweeted.

The claim originates from a New York Times article published Thursday, called “Trump’s Vow to End the War Could Leave Ukraine With Few Options.” That article read, in part:

“Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.”

READ MORE: Top Military Advisor Secretly Had Defense Officials Take an Oath Blocking Trump From Launching Nuclear War Without His OK

The Kyiv Post points out that though many nuclear weapons were indeed surrendered by Ukraine following the collapse of the USSR, the nuclear weapons did not go to the United States. They were returned to Russia during the 1990s. In return, Russia gave Ukraine 100 tons of reactor fuels and Ukraine received safety guarantees from Russia, the U.S. and the U.K.

Ukraine’s official website says prior to surrendering the nuclear weapons, they had over 4,000 nuclear warheads, plus 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 103 strategic bombers. Since the return of these weapons to Russia in 1996, Ukraine does not have any nuclear weapons, according to the country’s official website and The Independent.

Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov condemned the suggestion that the U.S. could return these nuclear weapons to Ukraine, according to Turkish newspaper Anadolu Ajansi.

“This is absolutely irresponsible reasoning from people who probably have a poor understanding and imagination of reality,” Peskov said.

The spectre of nuclear war has come up again since November 19, when Russian President Vladimir Putin made changes to rules regarding when Russia could launch a nuclear attack, according to Reuters. Two days earlier, Biden allowed Ukraine to use U.S.-made non-nuclear weapons to conduct long-range attacks into Russia, Reuters reported.

Image via Shutterstock

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Trump Media Stock Price Hits Lowest Point Since Last November Following Debate

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The stock price for former President Donald Trump’s company Trump Media has fallen to its lowest point in nearly a year the day following his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris.

As of Wednesday morning at 11:00 eastern time, shares of Trump Media were trading at $15.96, according to CNBC. The last time the stock was that low was on November 14, when shares traded at $15.925 at close of business. The stock price has been declining since July 17’s high of $37.38.

That high is not quite half of the stock’s peak price this year on March 26, when the stock hit a high of $66.22 per share. That day had the highest stock price since less than a month after the launch of the company, when shares hit an all-time high of $97.54 at close on March 6, 2022. Trump Media & Technology Group was founded on February 8 of that year.

READ MORE: Parallels Between Trump Media Loans and Infamous Trump Tower Meeting Drawn by Reporter

Trump Media’s biggest asset is the social media platform Truth Social. Since the beginning of the company, it has promised to have a television streaming service, TMTG+, however it’s yet to materialize. Promises of some form of Trump TV network have circled since 2016, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expected to win the presidential election, according to NBC News.

Given the company’s small portfolio, many have seen the stock like buying stock in Trump personally, according to CNN. The NASDAQ ticker symbol is even DJT after his initials, rather than TMTG, the initials of the company’s full name. And some stock experts have pinned its success on Trump’s own success in November’s election.

“I think if he loses, he has to sell and DJT goes to $1. If he wins, he doesn’t sell and DJT can make a run for it,” Tuttle Capital Management CEO Matthew Tuttle told CNN.

Trump has $2.3 billion in Trump Media stock, however, he’s been unable to sell it, due to a lock-up period. But that period will expire in two weeks, according to CNN. But if he sells off his shares, it could cause the stock to fall even further.

“It would be all but impossible for Trump to liquidate his whole stake or even a third of it without completely tanking the stock price,” Michael Ohlrogge, associate professor of law at the New York University School of Law, told CNN.

This year has been particularly tough for Trump Media. This April, the stock’s woes led to Trump falling off Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index of the richest 500 people in the world, according to Fortune. The company has also faced lawsuits from the company’s co-founders, Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, according to the Washington Post, who were in turn sued by Trump, NBC News reported.

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‘We Are Not a Cult!’: GOP Senator Begs Chuck Todd Not to Call Donald Trump the Republican ‘Leader’

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Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) insisted that his party is “not a cult” despite a cult-like following for former President Donald Trump.

NBC host Chuck Todd pointed out in a Sunday interview that Republicans largely maintained “the same leadership” despite underperforming in the midterm elections.

“And of course, Donald Trump is sort of the leader out there,” he said. “If there’s no change there, do you think that’s a problem for Republicans going forward?”

“First, we’re not a cult,” Cassidy offered without prompting. “We’re not like, OK, there’s one person who leads our party. If we have a sitting president, she or he will be the leader of our party.”

RELATED: ‘He wasn’t on the ballot!’ GOP lawmaker struggles to defend Trump’s midterm humiliation

Cassidy argued that the Republican Party has been missing a “fulsome discussion” of policies.

“Again, we are not going to have one person anointed unless she or he happens to be a sitting president,” he remarked.

Watch the video below from NBC or at the link.

 

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