Michael Fanone and Peter Rothpletz at The Michael Fanone Show:
Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are sitting in a federal detention center in Florida, fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, where they face 59 criminal charges between them. The Trump administration isn’t driving this, exactly. British prosecutors brought the charges and requested the brothers’ extradition; U.S. Marshals arrested the brothers in Miami on July 18, and last Thursday the White House said only that it would not intervene. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio put it, there was “no role for us to play at this moment or maybe ever.”
Even that much passivity is causing discord within MAGA, because they’ve loved these fucking freaks for years.
In May 2023, Donald Trump Jr. called the Romanian detention of Andrew Tate “absolute insanity,” and in June 2024 he joined a livestream with Tate, telling him: “you’ve got people attacking you as far as I’m concerned.”
Elon Musk endorsed Tate’s takes on British politics in a January 2025 post.
And Barron Trump cultivated a relationship with Andrew Tate, a connection the New York Times documented in December 2025.
Justin Waller, a Tate associate, says he arranged and sat in on a video call between the two men. Barron admired Tate, Waller claims, and spoke with him over Zoom once in 2024, while Barron was being fitted for a suit. The three discussed their shared belief that the Romanian criminal case was an effort to silence the Tates.
Tate, Waller claims, became a “big brother” to Barron.
Here was a self-described misogynist facing serious charges involving human trafficking, a man Romanian prosecutors accused of forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women. And the MAGA movement treated him as one of its own.
Then, at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February 2025, Romania’s foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, pulled Trump’s special envoy Richard Grenell aside in a hallway for a brief conversation that touched on the Tates, who’d been banned from traveling. The Financial Times reported that US officials had already raised the case on an earlier phone call, and that a request had been made to return the brothers’ passports and let them travel before their case concluded.
Grenell told the FT he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu, though he did not deny discussing the brothers, and added that he supports them “as evident by my publicly available tweets.” Hurezeanu, for his part, said the exchange was cordial, informal and brief, and that he didn’t feel pressured.
[...]
Now the White House says it will not intervene to stop the extradition. I refuse to hand out credit for that. For over two years, MAGA figures publicly praised and platformed the Tates. The retreat came on Thursday, July 23 — and only after British prosecutors unveiled the specifics. Now, they’ve calculated the cost of embracing the tates finally exceeded the benefits.
Congress has noticed. Representative Yassamin Ansari asked Oversight Chairman James Comer on July 23 to investigate “potential political interference and improper conduct by the federal government,” and requested that Barron Trump, now 20, testify. Before that, Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, pressed Secretary Rubio in April 2025 to explain the administration’s role in helping the Tate brothers leave Romania. Naturally, a subpoena probably isn’t in the cards from a committee the GOP controls.
MAGA, in any event, hasn’t found its principles. They’re just dropping a friend the instant he became a liability. Big fucking surprise.
The Trump Regime’s pandering to Andrew and Tristan Tate is blowing up in the faces.
McBride originally called for a special prosecutor after the three-hour video showed his client, Victoria C. White, was beaten by police in the West Terrace tunnel over a four-minute period on Jan. 6. The violence against White occurred just a few minutes before Boyland entered the tunnel.
Bodycam footage released in 2021 by the U.S. Department of Justice, and cell-phone videos posted to social media, show that Boyland was hit by a police officer numerous times with what appears to be a small tree branch or walking stick.
Shortly after, a group of men carries Boyland to a spot on the sidewalk directly in front of the police line at the center of the tunnel entrance.
Other videos show a bystander frantically performing CPR on Boyland, whose lips had turned purple. Another man, wearing body armor with a patch that read “Sheriff” on the front, takes over the CPR for a short time, but is then pulled away from Boyland. Police then grab the apparently deceased woman by the feet and drag her into the Capitol.
“She’s dying! She’s dying!” one man cries out to the line of police. “That’s on you, mother [expletive].”
The crowd outside the tunnel then erupts into a rage, charging at police and throwing objects, including flag poles, a riot shield and what appears to be a stereo speaker.
The new video confirms the limited bodycam footage and eyewitness accounts from Jan. 6 that Boyland was crushed and trampled when the crowd was pushed out of the tunnel, then repeatedly struck by police as she lay unconscious.
Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about Boyland’s death at an October hearing on Capitol Hill. “Was a determination ever made as to who repeatedly struck Rosanne Boyland in the head with a rod before she died?” Gohmert asked.
“Again, I think this was a matter that was investigated by the U.S. Attorney’s office,” Garland said.
[Boyland’s sister Lonna Cave] said she wants to know why the police officer who beat her sister isn’t under investigation. “Why in this case is this policewoman not being held accountable? Why is nobody investigating her?” Cave said. “Why isn’t anybody talking about it? It’s mind boggling.”
The Epoch Times asked both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Metropolitan Police Department for comments on the circumstances of Boyland’s death, but did not receive a reply by press time.
Cave said she noticed on the videos that it wasn’t the police who came to her sister’s aid.
“It doesn’t show the police officers helping my sister whatsoever. The only people who are helping her are the guys who are sitting in jail right now.”
After the collapse of his Hollywood directing career and his escape to Europe when the blacklist began in 1947, Welles made films mostly with the money he earned from his work as an actor, so he enjoyed the independence that meant so much to him as a director. As he said later, “I chose freedom.” That causes the resentment of wage-slaves in Hollywood who don’t have the courage to go that route. He paid a price by having difficulty getting his films seen in this country and being unable to finish many of his projects, leading to gloating by smug professional filmmakers and commercially minded reviewers even today.
Mank and the Ghost of Christmas Future, Joseph McBride (here)
On December 10, The New York Times released a report laying out how “Andrew Tate courted powerful figures on the American right, from Tucker Carlson to Barron Trump” ahead of his and his brother's release from Romania in February, where they are facing charges. The report was based on “interviews with dozens of people in Romania, the United States and Britain, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of court documents and private messages.”
Tate is one of the most well-known influencers in the manosphere, a collection of conservative online personalities known for promoting abuse and extreme violence against women. Andrew and his brother Tristan Tate are facing charges that include rape and human trafficking in Romania, and they are under investigation for similar charges in the UK.
The brothers had long been prohibited from leaving Romania, while prosecutors in the country worked to build their case. According to The New York Times, Romanian prosecutors “received their marching orders and handed the Tates the freedom to travel” within days of the second of two conversations between Trump's diplomatic envoy, Richard Grenell, and Romanian officials.
In their report, The New York Times’ Megan Twohey and Isabella Kwai delved into how the Tates and their lawyer Joseph D. McBride leveraged right-wing media, specifically Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Andrew Tate in Romania in 2023, to their advantage. They also looked at how he “nurtured relationships with Donald Trump Jr. and his younger brother Barron, who recognized the role that young male voters could play in their father’s return to power.”
As they described, Tate “shrewdly courted Tucker Carlson and other media stars of the right, who in turn tapped into the brothers’ loyal following to expand their own reach.” (Following the interview with Carlson, Media Matters found that videos of the interview widely circulated on YouTube and Facebook, despite Tate’s bans from the platforms.)
As Media Matters previously reported, MAGA and manosphere podcasts, and the Tate brothers, leveraged their mutually beneficial relationship during the Tates’ return to the United States, garnering tens of millions of views across social media on content with them.
During that tour, Tate appeared on 5 different right-leaning podcasts — the Hodgetwins’ Twins Pod, the Nelk Boys’ Full Send, Sean Kelly’s Digital Social Hour, Patrick Bet-David’s PBD Podcast, and Candace Owens’ Candace — and arrived with the Nelk Boys at a UFC Power Slap event, where UFC President and Trump ally Dana White welcomed them, hugging Andrew and saying, “Welcome to the States, boys.”
Certain sectors of the right-wing media, along with Trump Admin folk, helped pave the way to allow Andrew Tate to travel to the USA.
“If I’m wrong, so be it, bro," Carlson's guest said after he'd told Fox News viewers that the St. Louis baseball booster was "clearly a law enforcement officer."
Ryan J. Reilly at HuffPost:
Viewers of Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show were presented this week with a very explosive charge: that a man in red face paint and a “Keep America Great” hat at the front lines of the U.S. Capitol attack is “clearly a law enforcement officer” and an “agent provocateur” who infiltrated the Jan. 6 mob to make Donald Trump’s supporters look bad.
“Let’s put his picture back on the screen,” Carlson said Monday on his show as an image appeared beside him. “Who is this person? Why hasn’t he been charged? That’s a very simple ask.”
Carlson has repeatedly and falsely suggested that the Capitol riot was actually a false flag event, meaning it was staged by shadowy government authorities in order to persecute Trump fans.
Joseph McBride, an attorney for several Jan. 6 defendants who was a key figure in Carlson’s “Patriot Purge” series on the Fox Nation streaming service, told Fox News viewers that the painted man’s face was “MAGA red,” but he was only in disguise as a Trump supporter.
“He is clearly a law enforcement officer,” McBride told Carlson’s viewers, saying the man was part of a government entrapment scheme in which Trump supporters were handed weapons by government agents “for reasons that we cannot comprehend.”
But the man is no fed. He is mainly known to St. Louis Cardinals fans as “Rally Runner,” HuffPost has learned, and he sprints around the outside of Busch Stadium during home games. Based on the man’s Facebook posts, he appears to have a fairly difficult life and has a tenuous relationship with reality. And he’s a huge Tucker Carlson fan.
“Rally Runner” is somewhat of a local celebrity in St. Louis. A photo of him was featured in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in October 2013, when the Cardinals reached the World Series. The man, who did not provide a name, told the paper his running “strengthens the spirit for the Cardinals to get the energy to win.” (They lost to the Red Sox in six games that year.) He also told St. Louis magazine in 2016 that running around the stadium was “spiritual,” that his “memory is horrible” and that he’d like to publish his journal as a book.
“Rally Runner” has built up a decent Facebook following, and, like millions of his fellow Facebook users who supported the former president, he also got swept up in lies that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from Trump. He documented it all online, including his trip to Washington for the Jan. 6 rally that became a riot. He appears in many pictures taken that day — standing out in his signature red face paint, with a red “Keep America Great” hat standing in for his usual Cardinals cap. Online sleuths investigating the U.S. Capitol attack have nicknamed him #RedFace45 and tipped HuffPost off about his identity after Carlson’s show Monday.
McBride, contacted by HuffPost and informed about the man’s actual identity, at first stuck with his claim.
“I don’t believe that at all,” he said at first. “Amateur mascot or not, we maintain our position.”
HuffPost asked how firm McBride was in his suggestion that Rally Runner was an undercover member of law enforcement.
“I’m just as firm as the government is in suggesting that my clients are domestic terrorists,” he said. “If they’re going to throw out terms like that, we have no problem throwing out the counter term. None whatsoever.”
But as HuffPost went into more detail explaining why the idea that Rally Runner was some sort of undercover law enforcement agent was absurd, McBride shifted a bit. He said his job was to defend his client, and he didn’t “need to be right” in everything he claimed.
“If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care,” McBride said. “I don’t give a shit about being wrong.”
McBride said he was simply “theorizing things” and “not publishing conclusive findings,” and he said his appearances on Carlson’s show were a part of his effort to combat the narrative being given about his Jan. 6 clients.
“If this guy turns out to be some, some guy who runs around the Cardinals’ stadium with his face painted, then that’s great,” he said. “If that’s the truth, then so be it, and God bless America.”
“Rally Runner” did not respond to a request for comment. Ironically, he has posted several items praising the man now accusing him of being a double agent. He reposted a Donald Trump Jr. video captioned “Tucker Drops Nuke on Fauci Worshippers” in October, a screenshot from a Tucker Carlson show in August, a clip of Candace Owens on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that was posted in April and a clip of Carlson posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in June. “This is so true what he says,” he posted along with one Carlson clip last year. “Tucker nails it again! So true!” he wrote in another. “Look at my post from Tucker Carlson on my timeline recently, if Dems get Senate and President we are screwed. Everyone is screwed,” he wrote in November.
One of McBride’s clients is Ryan Nichols, who the feds say stormed the U.S. Capitol, went inside through a broken window and then bragged about it all over Facebook. In a filing last week, McBride sought a court order to remove designations that restrict the dissemination of eight videos in connection with the Nichols case and said he intended “to raise the issue of agent provocateurs materially participating in the events that took place in and around the Tunnel and Western Terrace” on Jan. 6.
“It is a historical fact that law enforcement frequently infiltrates political movements using agent provocateurs who urge others to engage in violence,” he wrote in the filing. “At first glance [RedFace45] looks like a Trump supporter. Closer review, however, suggests that he is likely an undercover agent.”
McBride wrote that #RedFace45 “is seen passing weapons through the crowd on multiple occasions, and is seen communicating with other suspicious persons through use of military hand signals. All this suggests that he is indeed an undercover agent.”
The man known as #RedFace45 and Rally Runner is in fact known to the FBI: Rally Runner posted about being visited by the FBI very shortly after the attack.
That’s not a surprise. Rally Runner is a bit of a Facebook addict. You might describe him as an over-sharer, often posting multiple times a day. He extensively documented his trip to D.C. and his presence at the Capitol. He posted photos of his drive, he posted videos from the Capitol and he posted a lengthy recap of his experience on Jan. 6, which even noted how much he spent on parking in D.C. ($13). His social media also explains how he was radicalized and illustrates how, aside from providing the videos he filmed on Jan. 6, he’d be a pretty useless asset to the FBI.
Long before Jan. 6, Rally Runner made his support for Trump clear. He posted computer-generated videos of himself dancing with Trump in front of an American flag and riding behind Trump on a bald eagle’s back. When the then-president said the election was stolen, Rally Runner echoed Trump’s talking points amid his posts on the latest Cardinals developments.
[...]
Amid posts about his struggling business driving Cardinals fans around downtown St. Louis in a golf cart, Rally Runner has occasionally posted about Jan. 6 and his continued belief in lies about a stolen election.
“Like I go to do The Rally Run for America and I end up in what is called an insurrection where I almost got hurt or killed and I saved someone’s life. I had no clue any of that was going to happen,” he wrote in November. “They could have arrested me. They made the right call by not arresting me and so I have a lot of respect for them getting that right. But it’s like wow God, what’s next? It’s always something.”
He wrote this week on Facebook that he has no money in his account, no income, he doesn’t own a house, his car and truck needed new engines, he was probably $100,000 in debt and his credit score was dropping.
At the same time, one of his favorite Fox News hosts was asking why he hadn’t been charged with a crime, and Rally Runner was explaining to other people who saw his Fox News appearance why he shouldn’t be charged.
“A shield is not a weapon. Everyone was passing shields,” he wrote this week. “[I]t can be used as a weapon but it’s still not a weapon.”
In the 11 months since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, the FBI has made nearly 700 arrests. But that’s still only about a fourth of the number of potential defendants who committed chargeable offenses that day. There are hundreds of more cases in the pipeline, and there are several factors that affect when arrests take place. Rally Runner isn’t alone in the category of Jan. 6 rioters who were quickly identified after the attack but not charged for months: One veteran who was interviewed by the FBI in January was able to reenlist in the Army before the FBI realized that he had been captured pepper-spraying officers. There are a variety of reasons that help explain why Rally Runner hasn’t yet been charged.
As is standard practice, the FBI declined to comment on an ongoing investigation. Neither Rally Runner nor Carlson responded to a request for comment sent through a Fox News spokesperson.
Tucker Carlson's "agent provocateur" is a man known as "Rally Runner", who sprints around the outside of Busch Stadium during games and is a fervent right-wing conspiracist who loves Tucker Carlson.
[EXPRESSO] The Other Side Of The Wind (2018) | Mrs. Phells Fishsticks Forever
[EXPRESSO] The Other Side Of The Wind (2018) | Mrs. Phells Fishsticks Forever
Prima di tutto, devo far notare come questo film sia stato filmato tra il 1970 ed il 1976, ma infine distribuito solo quest’anno via Netflix, 40 anni e passa dopo, ancor più di The Man Who Killed Don Quixote…. o Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, film che altrimenti non hanno nulla in comune.
Un caso particolare comunque, visto che fu girato da Welles assieme a vari amici registi ed attori (tra i…
Who was Ernst Lubitsch? To the converted, Lubitsch is a cinema god. He's the genius behind such comic masterpieces as "Trouble in Paradise" (1932), "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940) and "To Be or Not to Be" (1942). Those of us who admire him spend a good chunk of time puzzling breathlessly over how he did what he did, how he made such sexy, smart and fluid films. Alfred Hitchcock called him "a man of pure cinema." To François Truffaut, Lubitsch was a prince; to Orson Welles, a giant. Greta Garbo thought him "the only great director out there." Sadly, today, the name "Lubitsch" has fallen somewhat by the wayside.
How Did Lubitsch Do It? by Joseph McBride https://amzn.to/2ze6UN3
