Theodore Beale AKA Vox Day is in the news again. A few years ago, sick of all those comic book movies full of good guys and liberal ideals (I’ve got news for him: most of them are violent libertarian fantasies), he decided to promote and raise money for his idea of a good comic book story: Rebel’s Run, a Confederacy-themed anti-woke superhero pissed off at a world that has made hate crimes a, well, crime. How dare they?
Then, of course, it was an idea from rabid Vox Day and his legion of frothing mad, walking talking hate crimes. There was a chance he could pull it off.
There was reason to think Beale and his fans could realize their dream of going from comic books to cinema, if only through sheer fanaticism. His devoted followers call him the “Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil,” and describe themselves as his “minions.” Beale’s supporters, who frequently complain about supposed progressive “social justice warrior” influence creeping into fields like video games and science fiction, had already funded a handful of comic book issues and stirred up a controversy at science fiction’s premiere awards.
Beale’s history of racism could have made it difficult for Rebel’s Run, which stars a character sometimes depicted in a Confederate flag bustier, to find traditional financing. He has claimed that certain races are more likely to commit violence and called one of his foes in the science-fiction dispute, a Black author, a “half-savage.” Beale has affiliated himself with the Gamergate movement, opposes women’s suffrage, and once described homosexuality as a “birth defect.”
He even made a teaser trailer. They didn’t actually have any movie footage — it hadn’t been made or cast or anything — so basically it’s a clip of a woman in a convertible firing a pistol at some stock footage of cops. It’s not at all impressive but it got the conservative donors fired up.
Rebel's Run Teaser Trailer from Galatia Films on Vimeo.
He raised a million dollars from his minions, which is small potatoes in the big screen superhero world, but hey, it was seed money. He just needed to invest it somewhere safe, build on his now-demonstrated ability to raise funding, persuade some investors to grow it, and…uh, ooops.
Given that track record, he instead turned to Utah-based Ohana Capital Financial, a business aimed at customers that would struggle to get money elsewhere.
As Ohana’s promotional materials put it, according to prosecutors, the firm offered “banking [to] the unbankable.” On Nov. 5, 2020, Beale transferred the $1 million to Ohana to be held in escrow in advance of future film funding.
Ohana was the creation of James Wolfgramm, a self-described cryptocurrency billionaire who posted pictures of sports cars that supposedly belonged to him on social media. But in fact, according to a federal indictment filed last month, Wolfgramm’s wealth was a sham. The sports car pictures, for example, were pulled from other websites. Wolfgramm’s business also sold what were billed as high-tech cryptocurrency mining rigs — but those too were a hoax, according to prosecutors, with their screens just running on a loop to create the illusion of mine.
Unbeknownst to Beale and his supporters, the indictment alleges, Wolfgramm was deeply in debt to one of his business’s other clients. That client had paid Ohana more than $4 million in September 2020, several months into the Covid-19 pandemic, as part of what was meant to be a payment to a Chinese manufacturer of personal protective equipment. Instead of carrying out the transaction, prosecutors allege, Wolfgramm spent the millions on his own unrelated business issues.
Oh. He trusted a cryptocurrency grifter with his seed money. It’s gone. All of it, vanished into the pockets of con artists and conservatives…but I repeat myself. The movie is not going to be made.
But don’t you worry about Vox Day. He’s already blaming the libs. It was a conspiracy, don’t you know, to destroy his dreams.
Beale claims, without evidence, that the alleged con was carried out to disrupt his right-wing fanbase.
I strongly suspect that this whole thing was a targeted operation intended to break our community,Beale said in the video he published last week.
And he’s bouncing back with another fantastic anti-woke plan.
Beale isn’t done with movies yet, though. In a video to his fans, he told them he’s working on a script starring his friend, antisemitic former comedian Owen Benjamin. In this new movie, Beale plans to cast Benjamin—who believes the moon landing was faked—as the head of NASA.
Somewhere out there, another cryptobro is rubbing his hands in glee, anticipating another windfall of a million or more from the gullible minions of the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil.
It’s always good to blame the dirt when your Three Magic Beans don’t work.
It’s always good to blame the dirt when your Three Magic Beans don’t work.
Wait… Beale’s anti-woke super-hero is a WOMAN!?!?!? How very contradictory.
His devoted followers call him the “Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil,” and describe themselves as his “minions.”
Sounds like a wad of cucks.
I’m sure Beale is thinking up his next scam right now.
What else can he do but sell right wingers their hate back for money and run scams on his two dozen or so fanboys?
He almost got it right.
There are certain groups prone to criminal behaviors.
It has nothing to do with race though.
The entire right wingnut segment of our population is basically one big collection of cons and scams.
The biggest and most successful conperson who is at this very moment running multiple multi-million dollar scams is their leader and idol…Donald Trump.
Wow, catchy.
But I guess “Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight” was already taken.
(from somewhere deep in a hollowed-out volcano lair)
Number #1: Well, fellow liberals, we dodged yet another bullet by making Beale’s money, and his movie, disappear. Number #2, please tell us how you did it.
Number #2: Actually, it was quite easy, for, you see, the trick is to make them believe something is their own idea, not realizing that we control it. Once we have their money, they’re too embarrassed to admit they were taken, they blame liberals. They’re right, of course, but nobody believes it so now they look both gullible and stupid.
Number #1: Excellent, Number #2. Now, Number #5, please tells how you are going to fix the upcoming elections…
@ 6
YEAH BABY! YEAH!!!
So, he grifted money from his “minions” only to lose it to another grift? He should make that into a movie.
Can we be sure that Beale didn’t spend the money on himself and pretend to be a victim? Just askin’. 8-)
The status of the fake “trailer” linked-to in the OP seems to have changed. At first it apparently did exist and could be watched (I didn’t), then became “private”, and now seems to have been removed entirely.
There is what is claimed to a Rebel’s Run Trailer Transcript at the SEC (Exhibit F of something, I haven’t bothered to track down the details). Having not seen the video, I do not know if that transcript in any way reflects the videoed fake trailer.
BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!!! It couldn’t have happened to a nicer scumbag.
The SEC filing mentioned in @11 turns out to interesting — or at least comedy — it’s an “Offering Statement” for 750,000 $1 shares. In Exhibit B: Business and Business Plan (PDF), there are such gems as (all emphasis & emboldening in the original):
There is a colour image of Beale on page 11 which may be more-or-less up-to-date (from memory, unless I’ve confused him with someone else, he “always” uses rather old photos of himself when younger).
I haven’t gone through all the Exhibits — or their other SEC filings — other than a very brief skim of their Annual Report dated earlier this year, which concludes (my transcription).
Looks like Teddy has taken down the video.
@6
An object at rest cannot be stopped!
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/the-tick-animated/images/5/5b/Evilmidnightbomber.png/revision/latest?cb=20170710004105
How in the name of the seven levels of purple pluperfect hell can ‘libs’ be this powerful and still let the conservatives pack the supreme court, gerrymander most states, gut gun laws, find ways to restrict the rights of 51% of the US population, and, generally, move fascist ideas into the mainstream? Or is all of this also a triple-double-secret long-term scam against conservatives?
VD has always had poor understanding of that majority of humans who don’t think exactly the same way he does. Consider his computer input device, the Warmouse; this puppy had eighteen buttons. Plus a scrollwheel. The Warmouse came and went more than a decade ago, apparently without VD ever considering what percentage of potential buyers have the mental bandwidth required to keep track of All The Buttons And Double-Clicks…
a fool and his money are soon parted
@13:
This is the drunk-fanboys-at-0245 fanfic sequel to The Picture of Dorian Gray:
“Hey, what if the picture always stayed the same but the Career of Evil™ showed up immediately in every line on his face?”
“You mean like it sometimes does in real life?”
“Oh. Never mind. Ted, you wanna do this one? Maybe throw some libs and orcs in for lolz?”
Ha Ha
Small-time grifter suckered by bigger grifter. News at 11.
Galatia Films? As in a misspelling/alt-spelling of Galatea? The Greek myth of a sculptor who sculpted a statue of the most beautiful woman in the world, fell in love with her (so apparently he was an incel–of course he fell in love with a pretty image that doesn’t talk) and then brought her to life by the power of prayer.
Vomit.
No wonder Vox Day works there. Or doesn’t, since there’s no money, as he seems to have pissed away all the money on magic beans and tulip economic bubbles.
So this is what he’s been doing with his time since he got kicked out of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
He was crap as a sci-fi author & editor (at the apparently now-defunct Castalia House) and apparently he’s an even crappier wannabe movie mogul.
https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2019/08/21/castalia-house-has-stopped-publishing-new-science-fiction/
But he’s still better at either of those things than he is as an investor, apparently.
NK Jemisin had it right.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/nk-jemisin-hugo-award-conversation/498497/
“Jemisin: They may be, but I’m not hearing them as much. I seem to have passed some kind of threshold, and maybe it’s something as simple as I now have so many positive messages coming at me that the negatives are sort of drowned out. As a side note, the so-called boogeyman of science-fiction, the white supremacist asshat who started the Rabid Puppies, Vox Day, apparently posted something about me a few days ago and I just didn’t care. There was a whole to-do between me and him a few years back where he ended up getting booted out of SWFA [Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America] because of some stuff he said about me, and I just didn’t care. It was a watershed moment at that point but now it’s just sort of, “Oh, it’s him again. He must be needing to get some new readers or trying to raise his profile again. Or something.” I didn’t look at it. No one bothered to read it and dissect it and send me anything about it. No one cared.”
and this is a pretty good summation of Vox Day efforts. He really does suck at everything.
https://universesofthemind.com/2018/08/20/three-years-later/