Rebel Without a Dime

I haven’t blogged in over a month. Mostly, I’ve been busy keyboarding like crazy on a Comeuppance sequel, it’s heading into Holiday Season, and there have been a few personal issues taking up our time and attention. The poor blog has languished.

I struggled to find something to write about. The universe saw those struggles, took pity on me, and delivered a cornucopia of material in the form of a news story about an alt-right personality’s attempt to get a movie made of his comic-book, Confederacy-loving superhero character, and how he was allegedly scammed out of nearly $1 million dollars.

There is so much that makes this story a delight as a story. The surname of the alleged financial grifter is Wolfgramm. I couldn’t make that up. I couldn’t, but I very nearly did—one thing that does irritate me about this tale is that Wolfgramm (an assumed name) is very close to the villain in the Comeuppance sequel. It’s close, and it’s better. Damn it!

I’ll leave the link here and let you read it. (For some of us, it’s behind a paywall.) Here’s another link with more data.) But the fun, for us speculative fiction types, is just beginning.

Some of the fun is right on the surface. “Rebel,” is, I guess, a superhero who cribbed her costume from Wonder Woman but substituted used the confederate flag for the bodice. She goes around the world fighting a left-wing global police organization that imprisons free-thinking people. Her creator was envisioning a feature film to rival, well, The Avengers. I mean, I could stop right there.

Or I could start with the alleged scammer, James Wolfgramm, who has been charged with seven counts of fraud. He worked out of Utah, a state that wants to give the Dakotas a run for their money (that’s a pun) as the new USA “offshoring” hotspots. He named his financial business Ohana, (anyone who knows Hawaiian, savor that for a moment) and one of his comments was that he offered “banking services to the unbankable.” Ohana, that kindly family bank, is incorporated in the Kingdom of Tonga.

I could stop right there, too.

But those aren’t really the best parts. There is an element of just desserts in this story, at least for some of us—or, if you give the kaleidoscope of this tale one more twist, perhaps a very different story indeed. That’s because of who our alleged victim is. It’s Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day, architect of the attempted coup at the Hugo awards in 2015. That’s right. On the surface, it seems like the Rabidest of the Rabid Puppies (their name for themselves, honest) fell for a scam anyone who watched one season of Leverage might have clocked to.

Or did he? Because as anyone who watched Leverage also knows, one of the best ways to dodge suspicion in a scam is to be scammed yourself, one of the indignant victims. You might even toss out suggestions that the scam was motivated by people on the left who want to attack and destroy your alt-right “community,” by stealing the money you crowd-funded for your film.

It’s easy to believe that gadfly Beale was so arrogant and desperate to bring “Rebel’s Run” to cinematic life that he got taken in by this scam. The little bit of reading I’ve done of Beale’s fiction, his market copy for his personal micro-press, and his blog posts, shows a person whose confidence in his own vision, intelligence, creativity and power of will vastly exceeds his actual vision, intelligence, and so on. Some might say, a perfect mark.

Beale is also the complete opportunist. He seized on the sense of entitlement of some disgruntled writers in 2015 and hijacked their movement, putting together a concerted group who controlled the nominations for the Hugo awards that year. Amazingly, many of the works they got onto the finalist list were edited by Beale. What a startling coincidence! In 2016, he tried the same thing again with even less success, and many of the titles they foisted onto the voters were published by his press. In retrospect, it became clear that both these shenanigans meant free publicity for Beale and his press. Is it so much of a stretch to think that there are two scammers, not one, at the heart of this?

Beale’s father, once a celebrated, Christian millionaire from Minnesota, served a ten-year sentence for income tax evasion. You can read more here, but please understand that it wasn’t just “Ooops, I knew I forgot to do something! It was pay my taxes!” No, Robert Beale set up a detailed an elaborate plan to not report income and not pay taxes, and he pulled others in with him. He was also a federal fugitive for 14 months, during which time he hid out in Florida and went on a cruise. Parents don’t define us; but it’s possible Theodore Beale learned a few tips and techniques growing up at his father’s elbow.

Whatever happened here, it is intriguing, and filled with unintentional irony. I doubt we’ll hear more, but I really wish we would.