Lee Stranahan: ‘Been Caught Stealin’!
*Editor’s Note: This piece is intended to establish that a Breitbart writer has a well-documented penchant for asking for money for various “projects” he’s allegedly working on, and never seeming to deliver. The case study we offer here is the Breitbart writer’s interaction with the group known as Diary of Daedalus, and how $559 of the DoD team’s money seemed to disappear into thin air. Once pressed on this issue, the Breitbart writer deflected and refused to return the money, as archived elsewhere on The Trenches sites.*
A little primer to the reference:
This is exactly what Lee’s done as of today to the former members of Little Green Footballs, which has become the Diary of Daedalus. Yup, those guys really got ripped off by the Jack Ass of all Tirades, Lee “Pornohan” Stranahan. As Perry says, Lee just “walked right through the door” and stole a beer outta their fridge.
What’s the anatomy of a scam, you ask me? Well, here’s how we at the Trenches call this foul play.
1.) Get a semi-prominent news pundit (in this case, Andrew Breitbart, to vouch for you), and toss his salad hard enough for him to be convinced to vouch for your sorry, worthless ass.
2.) You gotta cut ties with all of your former “heartfelt” beliefs. So, that means you gotta cut ties with all the idiots that used to believe a word you said. (we’re not going to hot link to a scammer, so it’s a text link). http://leestranahan.com/sell-out-how-i-started-working-with-breitbart/
3.) Now that you’re in, you use the reputation of your employer, and the reputation of his organization to run your scams.
4.) You use other people to pressure others into not speaking up when they realize they’ve been robbed.
5.) Rinse, repeat. (Help, I’m under attack from an older man in a wheel chair! Please send teeth and money!)
See, Lee has a history of these scams. The Texas Panhandler, the polyamorous, unjobbing windbag has spent the better part of two decades running around the west coast embarrassing himself with scams. Now he’s 47 (he says) and he’s all grown up. All you Breitbarent’s just need to deal with the fact that he shot porn, lost his teeth, and now he’s all better. Like Ali Snackbar, it was just an oopsie! Nothing the internet can’t delete, right?
Well, we here at the Trenches are going to do the duty for other conservatives that some will not. Starting with the Chronicles of how some of us were ripped of at Diary of Daedalus by Lee Stranahan, and remain ripped off (yes, not dollar one returned, to this day).
In 2011, the DoD was in good spirits with Andrew Breitbart. Andrew was in the midst of the Weinergate story, exposing asses for later butthurt. Many of our members were anxious to get in and ouster crooks, expose liars, and more importantly keep an eye on Charles Johnson (@lizardoid) of Little Green Footballs. Many of the members came to the DoD after Johnson did a dramatic backflip on his conservative political thought and became not just a liberal, but a code pink commie.
All of that’s fine I suppose, because there is a place in life for the angle of “I changed my mind”. Having been in political debates for almost twenty years, that’s almost refreshing to hear from people. However, Johnson didn’t just do that to his readership, he also conspired to purge an entire community of friendship that had been forged over a decade between his readers. So they (we), slowly migrated over, one by one (including Barrett Brown), to the DoD in search of conservative kinship.
Like a shining beacon from a lighthouse, there was Andrew. Taking on the left, and exposing Weiner’s weiner. Then, like an ass pimple on a perfect ten, Johnson emerged on it. We all rushed to aid Andrew with support from our blog, our readers, and most of all…Twitter.
Andrew went on the DoD radio show, and as rumor has it, asked Lee Stranahan to make a video about Chuckles the Assclown. Many of us were excited, nay enamored, with the idea that a big shot in the media paid our loyalty back with support from his organization. I mean, think about it, the DoD was a small one-trick-pony blog that got tapped from the minors!
So we were all introduced to Lee Stranahan.
Lee, pulling on a decade of scamming relatives, churches, and anyone else he could find (including the late Andrew, it now appears) knew exactly what to do. He quickly put up a site on Quickstarter and started to ask for donations for this task! Stripping isn’t a charity, and Lee doesn’t expose for peanuts (he can’t chew them!).
To the rational eye, some would think “Why wouldn’t you vet someone you were about to give money to?” and you’d be right. However, in the defense of those poor souls that didn’t know any better, many were going off the word of the late Andrew, and trusted that his people, his brand, stood for conservative values. That would include……Thou shalt not scam.
Lee had other plans, though:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968679247/the-decline-and-fall-of-little-green-footballs
A short documentary about how the Little Green Footballs blog went from a newsmaking star in the blogosphere to a discredited wreck.
That’s all he needed to say to those scorned by Johnson, those who had supported his blog and built a community of friends, only to have been backstabbed by one of Ander’s Breivik’s manifesto references as justification for his unforgivable crimes. We were eager to expose Johnson as a dangerous blogger for either the left or right, a monetizer of hysteria (as we’re finding out now, out of the frying pan into the fire).
Between that small group of conservative (and liberal, the DoD embraced diversity) friends, we donated to Lee over $559 dollars for what we saw as our duty to expose Charles Johnson as a fraud. In the comments section you could see people like Slinky Bewmont, dolphin catcher, Gus_807, etc. eager to lend Lee support in this task. Many offered quick references, images, interviews, anything to make this video a winner.
Well, that was 2011, and that was Weinergate. Now we’re in 2012, and it’s Whinergate, Occupy Courtrooms etc. and there is no movie. Against the will of the donors, Lee decided (when pressed about not having the movie, mind you) to alter the plot of the movie to his personal vendetta with his former employer Brooks Bayne. Many asked him to simply return the money.
That’s simple, right? Lee bears no malice and has no history of doxing anyone, right? He simply asks for your paypal account, and he will promptly return the funds. No harm, no foul.
That would be a negative on two fronts. First of all Lee has exposed himself as a vindictive hothead, eager to use the internet to destroy reputations:
Lee has a penchant for taking his frustrations out on people over the internet. In fact he’s quite fond of using it as a weapon, it appears. So for some poor soul with an actual job, and a desire to get a return on funds, simply sending Lee your personal information isn’t really a winning proposition. In addition, Lee’s rallied the Breitbaren’t troops to will others to simply forget about this loss of money in the interest of “seeing the big picture.”
That big picture, it now appears, is donating money for Lee to sue people. I guess we can’t blame Lee and the crew for this adventure; the Westboro Baptist Church started their organization by suing people under the auspice of civil rights. So, horses for courses I suppose.
I sometimes wonder if Lee is still good on his word to return that money, given his current circumstance. He’s now begging people to donate so he can move to yet another location (one that will be as public as the last, mind you, if you weren’t already convinced that this is yet the latest of many scams). As Kickstarter said recently, Kickstarter is an investment, and if you’re a capitalist (and the Trenches is) investments carry risk. Lee might just be a risk lost.
However, in the interest of being magnanimous, perhaps Lee can still find it in his heart to not sour relations between conservatives, and do the right thing for the reputation of his late friend. I doubt it, but the offer is still open to Lee.
In closing, I’d like to add that the DoD neither endorsed this opinion or solicited this post. So any Breitbaren’t who may read this, fear not. Some of the DoD have severed ties over the Breitbarts and the ones here from the DoD who are writing this. Our interest is in doing what is right, and exposing fraudsters and bad players, of which we believe Lee is one.
Lee Stranahan, shame on you, and may god forgive you for destroying trust in honest, hard working conservatives that I call friends. If you read this, I want you to look closely and scrutinize the havoc that you, and only you, have caused.
Return the money to those people and apologize.
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