Robert Evans, Katie Stoll, and Cody Stoll investigate Brian Colfage's "We Build the Wall" GoFundMe, detailing how the disabled Iraq veteran raised nearly $74,000 after Facebook deleted his right-wing pages in October 2018. Despite accusations of fabricating news and disputing his combat injury status, Colfage pivoted to a 501c4 entity with advisors like Eric Prince to bypass disclosure laws. Ultimately, the hosts expose how this strategy transforms public donations into unlimited, anonymous political spending, fundamentally altering accountability in modern fundraising. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:31
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How did this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Deleted Right-Wing Memes00:06:18
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.
Wait.
We've been talking for two hours so far.
Cody Johnston and Katie Stole.
Thank you.
I am frazzled and have been reading paper for two and a half years.
You must be tired.
We've been talking for a long time.
I mean, we're tired.
You must be real tired.
Exhausted.
Yeah.
This is the right.
Yeah, you're still sick.
I still feel fine.
You guys are the patrons of the Some More News Network.
Yes.
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.
That $20 million.
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 refunded it 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 seem 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.
Absolute worst possible way.
Yeah, we promise we will do the right thing the wrong way eventually.
Doesn't an algorithm do it?
Can't a machine do this without thoughts?
Sure, there it is.
Yeah.
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 Guardian 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 Lynn, 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 believed 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 canceled.
A week later, his pages were gone.
I've 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, well, he's the guy behind the Build the Wall.
GoFundMe.
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.
Quote: 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 earned 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' pages, shared the most popular post from Right Wing News' batch of memes into the group President Donald Trump Official All Caps LLC with a 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' 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 group's 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 Colfaj, 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.
Like, you could get something an enormous amount of content.
And the main goal seems to have been driving ad revenue because they would have ads on these pages and they would make a shitload of money.
Now, when Facebook purged all these pages, it seemingly wiped out Brian Colfage's digital empire.
He responded in the way of all aggrieved parties in the 21st century, using GoFundMe to raise money for a court case.
Hell yeah, you did.
Free Speech Under Threat00:08:33
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 tenet, 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.
Everything was fucking so far.
Everybody's always had a voice.
Until now.
Oh, man.
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.
Not with a K. On 9-11, 2004, while serving in Iraq, I lost both my legs entirely and my right hand.
I'm the most severely wounded U.S. airman to survive.
You'll hear that line a lot with anything he points out, most severely wounded U.S. airmen.
Maybe it's true, but like it's hard.
You can't quantify most.
It's a guy that loses two hands and one leg less severely.
Right, right.
Yeah, that's.
Tammy Duckworth can't walk.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, it's a legitimately horrifying injury that he's suffered.
Sure.
Hard to imagine going through that.
But he's also really done a good job of making lemons out of lemonade.
I mean, he's the most severely injured, and the buck stop there was free speech.
Yeah.
He was the one who was the first guy.
The first one.
Yeah.
Free speech has been threatened.
Now, also when he notes he was severely wounded in combat, you can kind of debate that too, because in other videos, he was on an airbase when this happened.
A 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 the guy who lost three limbs.
Yeah.
Sure.
But again, you can kind of see what he's going for.
On his website, Brian Colfage, 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.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's his medal.
Now, it is hard to imagine someone getting injured worse than Brian Colfage and 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 shooted 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, Colfage 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.
So 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.
Quote, 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 U.S. 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, Landstuhl, and other official military hospitals.
His campaign raised $16,246.
BuzzFeed confirmed through GoFundMe that all of these funds went directly to Brian Colfaj.
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.
Wow.
Sure, sure.
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 Hawley, wrote for Colfage's main site, Freedom Daily.
Quote, 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.
Now, 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.
Quote, former employees told BuzzFeed News that Kolfaj 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.
Like, the people BuzzFeed are talking to, we're all fine writing for far-right shill pages.
So, like.
Oh, yeah, no.
I mean, and all of that questions that were like.
Yeah, we'd create these fake things.
Knowingly pushing the fake stuff is like really.
There's some stuff I left out about her like accusing him of going after her and her husband and stuff.
Because it's just like, I just don't know how credible you are, but it's not.
I can't believe it.
I'm not going to feel sorry for you.
Right.
You had a job lying, and now you're going to be able to do it.
You know the person that you were working with.
Yeah.
You know.
Your job is to breaking Obama-busted.
God.
Which I guess that was a line too far for them.
Right.
But, like, yeah, even like knowingly photoshopping it.
It's not even like we're misrepresenting it accidentally or like we heard it from somebody else.
It's like, no, we're just going to make up something.
Who's going to lie?
Who's going to lie?
Put it out there.
Don't get me Russian trolls doing this.
Like, no.
They're one of the biggest.
There's such a big problem.
It's so it bothers me so much.
Yeah, how do you get people to stop focusing on that and stop believing it?
You can't.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Orwell was right that people just want to spend some time every day hating something with other people.
And Facebook has made that easier than ever.
Yeah.
Thanks, Mark.
Thank you, Mark.
You're really, you're going to do well.
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 off.
Nice try, Mark.
I feel like the whole country got unified for a second to be like, we all hate each other, but 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.
Yeah, no, Mark.
No.
That's not okay.
Oh, God.
What if we could just turn him into like the kind of like alien invasion that we need to unify humanity?
What if we all eat Mark Zuckerberg?
Eat?
Eat.
Yeah.
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 might be an easier situation.
We can all get on board that.
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.
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.
Eating Mark Zuckerberg00:03:51
Okay, so we're going to get back to the rest of Brian Colfaj's story and how it gets way more sinister than I had guessed when I started this research.
But first, produce and services.
Maybe.
See?
Here's some ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
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Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
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Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
Next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
The Unaccountable 501c400:15:37
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're talking about Brian Colfaj.
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.
Kolfaj claimed to 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 employees interviewed.
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.
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.
Yeah, he was silenced.
Yes.
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 shuttering of Kolfage's sites came a month after Michigan man Joel Van Van Galhu 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.
The Freedom Daily article relied on an image board of 4chan as its major source, according to a letter provided by the court by the contributor named in the suit.
Huh.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yup.
Yeah.
So he lost his websites before he lost his Facebooks.
Good.
Good.
Yeah, you dumb.
NBC, quote, the site often trafficked in false inflammatory and racist content, including headlines like, obnoxious black people lose their minds when victorious secret models says this one word on live video, and Trump just released embarrassing vids of Obama's Muslim friends that he never wanted seen.
Oh, my God.
I hate it so much.
Really, really gross.
Really gross.
Yeah.
So the website is currently defunct, and it does seem that Facebook sweeps succeeded in, if not wiping out, severely damaging Brian Kolfaj's empire of bullshit.
Kolfage 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 Kolfaj created the fundraiser for Donald Trump's long-promised wall.
It quickly went viral and then viraler.
The goal this time was to raise $1 billion.
Kolfage claimed to have...
Didn't realize how much money that was, did you, Brian?
Kolfaj 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.
100% of it is going to the government.
On January 11th, 2019, after raising well over $20 million from 346,237 donors, Brian Kolfage posted an update.
And I created the viral campaign that raised over $20 million for the southern border wall.
And it's only possible because of your donation.
So thank you.
But do you really think the Democrats in Congress will take the money you donated and put it towards the southern border wall?
I doubt it.
That's why we are changing our mission from we fund the wall to we build the wall.
And we the people can build the wall.
We consulted with our nation's 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.
We'll be getting to opt in in a second.
Wait a minute.
Privately build the wall?
Yeah.
Yeah, you're going to have to.
That's people's land.
Like, you took so much money to get the land, man.
I have to say, what I'm about to explain is actually a kind of genius con.
He's not a dumb man.
Give him credit for that.
So below the video, in the text on the GoFundMe update, he admits offhandedly that the federal government won't be able to take donations, quote, anytime soon.
Notice in the video, he says the Democrats just wouldn't spend on their...
Yeah.
Kofaj 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, We Build the Wall, where he solicits donations for We Build 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.
Now, the way this became framed in news reports was that GoFundMe was refunding all of the donations.
That's not what's happening.
Oh, no.
They are giving people until April to opt in and transfer their donations to We Build the Wall Inc.
Okay.
So you do have to opt in in order to transfer the donations, but it is not a straight refund.
Wow.
So here's how We Build 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 proposed 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 processes associated with the design, engineering, construction, and maintenance of the wall.
Now, this is officially a 501c4.
Do you guys know anything about 501c4s?
I came across something interesting about them on a legal 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 NEO Law Group, published another fun article in January of 2018.
They called it a prediction for nonprofits 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 in 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 Colfaj has founded.
That's some bullshit.
That is some bullshit.
Smart guy.
Smart guy.
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.
But is he going to keep running?
So that's not the way it's been presented.
That's not the way it's been presented.
It seems like Brian went from GoFundMe, a platform that's very, tries to be pretty open about how the money that gets raised on it gets spent in 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.
That's how we'll further the wall.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
What a little 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, of course.
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.
I mean, here's this is a start.
Yeah.
Now, Brian still uses that $20 million raise 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 Inc. 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.
Great tweet.
I love that they were like, we've like 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, man.
Now, We Build the Wall Inc. has Joy of Joys released the names of their team members.
You can guess some of the names on this list.
Tom Tancredo, 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 of fuck.
Eric Prince.
Are you kidding me?
I am not kidding you.
That is.
That's not a lot.
That's.
Ooh.
Ooh.
Ooh, it's so weird that we talked about Bessie DeVos at the end of last episode.
That's a good idea.
Yeah, we just did a KKK episode before recording this.
The world.
Yeah.
Wow.
Who's Dustin?
He's just some guy named Dustin.
He's like right in between Chris Kobach and Eric Prince.
I think he's the guy named Dustin.
Does he have a last name?
Yes.
He just isn't anyone famous.
He's just a dude named Dustin who's on the team.
He's a guy named Dustin.
He has a last name.
Doesn't matter.
They call me the old man.
Dustin.
They call me the old man.
Wow, wow, wow.
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 multi-million dollar 501c4 in the very near future and probably during the 2020s.
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.
Talk about it.
Yeah.
That is.
Well, we'll talk about it and we'll say that this is.
We talk about it in depth.
But like, you need to know.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The news really fell down on the job of reporting what the fuck went on.
Yeah.
Really dropped the ball, but David Clark Prince and David Clark with an extra at least around $8 to $10 million.
Yeah, that's like.
I mean, that's spit 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 someone would make that up to say like, oh, by 2020, this is our situation.
No, It's just reality.
This is just reality.
Oh, that's...
Ooh.
Dang.
Fun on the bone.
I have been waiting for you to be like, by the way, he was never even like in the military.
No, no, 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 to.
It's not debatable that it was a horrific, horrific injury novel.
But again.
Well, he was going to battle with his abs Yeah.
At the gym.
Yeah, there you go.
Battle with his abs at the gym.
Just the theme, it seemed like you were.
I'm not trying to.
I'm not also.
No, he's a legitimate guy who went to war and was horribly injured.
Nothing about that I've ever read seems exaggerated.
It's debated.
He's probably an asshole before the war, too.
I mean, maybe not.
Traumatic brain injuries change personalities, 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 take.
Push a bunch of lies.
On a fun note, I read a neat article recently about a guy named Dr. Rapp, who was 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.
It was like met with like professional rap artists and stuff and was like, everybody loved him.
He was just, he was Dr. Rapp with two P's.
Is that 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.
He should have called himself Dr. Stroke.
Well, Dr. Rap's pretty good, too.
Yeah.
I mean, Dr. Stroke's definitely cooler sounding.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It just lets you know.
Just let you know.
But then again, Dr. Rap lets you know what he does.
I mean, he's 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.
I know.
I know.
Oh, get you.
Get a little rage spike every time that motherfucker comes into something.
Adrenaline rush.
Yeah.
Well, 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 pluggables.
You could check us out at patreon.com/slash some more news.
That's where we are.
And on other places, like the Twitter.
Twitter, same name.
YouTube, same name.
I'm Katie Stoll with a K-A-A-T-Y.
My Twitter is Dr. Mr. Cody.
Yes.
It's on Twitter.com.
I'm Robert Evans.
Where to Find Us00:03:41
Sophie's not in the room right now.
She had to leave.
So I'm probably going to just wild dog the rest of these plugs.
All right.
Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
If you want to support two social media sites that are terrible, I'm on there a lot because I'm a gigantic hypocrite.
Causing real problems for the nation 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 tpublic.com.
We also have cups, stickers.
We sell, I always throw a joke in, but my peace of mind is fried right now.
We don't sell peace of mind that is unattainable at any price in 2019, my friends.
Valuable.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Pretend I said something funny about that.
I don't have anything funny.
Go to TeePublic and buy a thing.
Behind the bastards, TeePublic.
We have a website behindthebastards.com where you can read all the sources for this super fun episode.
You can find me on Twitter at IRID.
Oh, yeah, I already plugged it.
Fuck it.
Fuck Twitter.
Podcast.
That was the end of the episode.
Wild dog that.
Yeah, things really go off the rails and sophistry.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
If you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Stad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.