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RedHanded
RedHanded
The Church of Kardashian and Tax Strategy
From ShortHand: The Church of Kardashian — Jun 16, 2026
ShortHand: The Church of Kardashian — Jun 16, 2026 — starts at 0:00
I sold my car in Carbana last night. Well, that's cool. No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. realal offer, down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think. Wow, you need to relax. I need to knock on wood Do we have wood? is this table wood I think it's laminate. Okay, yeah, that's good, That's close enough. Car selling without a catch. seell your car today on carvana. Pick up these manfly Bring on the off road. Bring home a new hunter Snd a great deal on your favorite Honda vehicles, cononquer trails and back roads in cars built for explor. With the rugged Honda pilot, ridge lines, CRV, and passport road might stop You're not done. All from the twenty twenty five Kelly Llue book Best Value brand Based on twenty five consumer choice aws from Kelly Ggo, visitPp dot com for more information Hello and welcome they live. Okay, Hello. I welcome do that thing On the third of october twenty twenty two Kim Kardashian was fined one point two six million dollars for her part in an enormous cryptocurrency scattal And we're willing to bet that's the first time quite a lot of you have heard that. I'm certainly one of them ame And I know more about the coections than the average bear I certainly know more than you Now hardot No, and a fact you're very proud of. Not that you're like, I'm better than you you're just like, I do not engage. No, I just I know so much about unnecessary people who are unarried first time Whereas I C go? No, not it's not a moral judgment at all. Oh I just not interested in them. It would be fine if it were The Kardashian brand is a modern day juggernaut of PR and celebrity influence, the likes of which 've never been seen before The story goes that through reality TV, endorsements and paid promotions, the Kardashians managed to turn a savvy, staged sex tape scandal into an empire of wealth. One that's actually bigger than the GDP of quite a lot of small countries . Which Oh One of them. Uhhuh family I'll give you that, but it is impressive. And to be fair This is not sponsored Nobody thought that skims would topple spanks, but they fucking did. Oh, it is a far superior product. It's very good Is there more to the Kardashian's wealth than meets the eye All my Saturnday If you dig a little deeper, it does start to look like there's quite a lot more to their success than media strategy and Chris Jenner alone. Kim'sryptoka Fuffle was far from the first time that the Kardashian name has been linked to less than savory activity From financial fangling to lip filler fictions The Kardashian Kan set the blueprint for how to turn fame and influence into hard cash all bankrolled by their many, many followers And also the small question are their own personal family church an institution founded by Chris Jenner herself. which receives fifty monthly donations from every member of the Kadashian clan One whose financial records are more opaque in a bottle of Kardashian bronzer This is the shorthand. So let's get back to our crypto queen What exactly did Kim do to land herself in over a million dollars worth of hot water In june twenty twenty one in the middle of the pandemic, A lot of people had a lot of time to kill in front of their phones and computers And that meant Tooc currency boom was at its peak And Kim Kardashian posted an Instagram story to her many hundreds of millions of followers In the caption, she said that her friends had been telling her about a fantastic crypto opportunity I will have to say Do you know who really does know about crypto? A Paris Hilton. She is all over it. There's like a clip of her on like Fallon or something ages ago explaining what blockchain is Paris actually knows what she's talking about According to Kim, her friends. had let her know that the cryptocurrency Ethereum Max or Emacs was, quote, giving back to the entire Emacs community by reducing supply And what happens when you reduce supply and increase demand Price rises, I have been led to believe I have a diesel car because I' a piece of shit There is no unleted petro in Eastland and every Petrol station I went to you had no unleed signs Why do they bother saying unleeded because It's just People just got used to it because we're not like, oh, why don't just go get some lead? But within our lifetime it would have been So we also are one of the few countries that still say petrol or have ever said petrol. So we're already just hanging on to convention, you know So it's just one of those those dumb things So I do refuse to say gas. I refuse to say gas station Oh, I'm not an animal. Yeah use I'm writing script the moment it's Americase and's like's very heavily featured around a gas station. And I keep writing gas station and then I change it. I'm like, it's fucking pen A gallon of your fight is petroleum, please? We know, we know we're ridiculous nation In the aftermath of this Ethereum max incident, the head of the UK's financial conduct authority, Charles Randell said that the post may have been the financial promotion with the single biggest audience reach in history And the price of this huge promotion is that prrice rose according me As a result of Kim K's post and similar posts by other celebrities all presumably with the same friend, like boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Emacs did indeed rise For a short while, it was worth one thousand three hundred percent of its original value before sharply dropping But predictably the people who profited from the spike were not the new investors Kim had brought to the table, sururprise, surprise They were, of course, the sellers That is, people who purchased emmacs before Kim Kase Post and before the subsequent rise in value This is what is called a pump and dump Atificially inflating the price of a stock, bond or cryptocurrency, and then selling at peak inflation for a huge profit And it is very much illegal Now. There was a sweet spot where they could get away with it So let's get to the ask covering portion of our episode today There is no public evidence we have found that Kim Kardashian or her team bought Ems before the spike and sold it. Kim did get into hot water over this Initially Kim and the other celebrities linked to their friend and the promotion had tried to avoid any legal fallout through savvy captioning What we mean? is the use of the hashtag hashtag ad My favorite is when people used to put hashtag ad and like put it in the picture and then change it to like a color that was in the picture so that you couldn't see that it was there. You'd be like, Well, it was there. You shouldn't see it the Marty have fallen. So The argument for the hashtag ad hidden in the image or not is that That' telling you that what they were saying wasn't Financial advice But this time that wasn't quite enough. And on the third of october twenty twenty two, Kim K was charged in the US And the United States of America, you have disclose if you have been paid to promote seecurity like a stock or a bond or a crypto or a general investment or your own butothole. I don't know And you have to say how much If Kim had made the same post but added a bit at the end where she said, this is an ad and I was paid a quarter of a million dollars to post it She'd be in the clear But it wouldn't really have had the same effect You would hope. Got an N or her advertising standards mistake Kim agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission one point two six million dollars as well as cooperating with their ongoing investigation The one point two six million included two hundred sixty thousand dollars of disgorged profit. What a disgusting word, I know. It's basically what she was paid to promote the coin plus any interest along with a one million dollars fine She was also banned from promoting any cryptocurrency for three years And it is really important to note that she was not prosecuted for her participation in the pump and dump She was only prosecuted for inadequately disclosing that she'd been paid to promote EMacs. There has never been any evidence that Kim or anyone of her team invested in EMax before the price rise. and therefore profiting from the pump and dump The truth is, we can't know, however, cryptocurrencies can very much be purchased and sold anonymously. That's kind of a big part of the point Hm, but they are traceable, no matter what anyone will tell you Bring on the off road. Bring home a new hunkter great deal on your favorite Honda vehicles, cononquer trails and back roads in cars built for exploring. With the rugged Honda pilot, ridge line, CRV and passport, the road might stop, but you're not done. All from the twenty twenty five Kelly Bluebook Best Value brand ed on twenty five C consumer Choice Wedbs from Kelly Bg v isitPp. com for more information Klan Kardashian has perfected the art of walking the blurry line between aggressive marketing and misleading their fan base Another example is the groundbreaking lip kits Kylie made Kylie Jenner's Lipkits launched to the kind of buzz that most companies could only dream of had quite a lot to do with herer noticeably fuller lips which had developed mysteriously previous year. Yeah. my favorite thing about the Kardashians is the pictures that people post of like their faces and then their faces when they were younger and they're just like, you're not ugly, you're just poor. Yeah And according to Kylie, all of her Spontaneous lip development was to do with her new product, The Kylie lip kit Repeatedly just like all the rest of them publicly denied having any cosmetic help In the marketing spel, Kylie said that she had been inspired to create her lip kits by a lifelong insecurity about her lips The product claimed to achieve a perfect match between lip liner and lipstick, allowing users to overline creating the illusion of bigger, fuller lips. Stop it. We're meant to believe Kylie's lips are just overlined. That's hilarious. Stop it The P productduct flew off the shelves But anyone with eyes knew that there was slightly more going on than just a bit of pencil. But this is, I thing, I think This is what people miss the point of They know Christ Jenner knows that you know. It doesn't matter. you're buying it anyway. L and that's what the genius of it is. And that's why it works so well is because you know, the let's say fifteen percent of people who buy that it actually works part of the equation. L the vast majority of people who buy it also know. So you've got both sides of the coin and that's why they're so successful And Sadally The people most likely to believe that this would work when it's definitely not going to are teenagers and children A as teens all over the world tried Kylie's new Wonder productro with Mixed results, shall we say Eventually, the eighteen year old Kylie finally admitted that she had indeed had lip fillers As for the claim that the kits were sold out everywhere, well, it's kind of just part of the campaign And this is before we even get to the lip kit branding The artwork features liquid makeup rolling off a set of very plump lips very, very closely resembled the artwork by a makeup artist called Vladder Hagatty I have seen these pictures and very, very, very closely. resembles In fact In a post which has since been deleted, the official lipkit Instagram account credited her as hashtag Inspo for the image which featured on all of the original lip kits Once again all a bit of a dodgy move, but it didn't really matter. The twenty fourteen lip kit release was a huge success, and Kylie Jenna had perfectly monetized her online influence Turning likes and followers into hundreds of millions of dollars And yeah, I think the like faux par there was then that creator was like, you've stolen my work and put it everywhere. And they've like, Hash shag insspo. and then delete it because they're like, yeah, fuck, we didn't like pay this person for any of this artwork. And you would just think that Bike be people there who know what they were doing But what are you going do? S the Kardashians into the ground. You can't touch them. likeike it's the same Miley Cyrus did the same thing with a cosmetage range Or it was an album cover art or something. Just like so blatantly stole. It's like how even though the legislation exists, to not be treated incredibly poorly in the workplace. In order for any of that to matter, you have to be willing to take your former employee to a tribunal, which is expensive and tiring and will take over your whole life. That's what you have to be willing to do for any of that to matter So they're like for it to matter, for them to be penalized for stealing artwork A person has to have unlimited funds to go after them and just nobody in the world does In twenty nineteen, Kylie Jenner sold a fifty one percent stake in Kylie Cosmetics to beauty giant Cody for six hundred million dollars. Which implies that the whole company was worth about one point two billion dollars redues Forbes magazine then took a bit of a leap and declared Kylie Jenner to be the world's Youngest self made billiona Festival Self made. Oh Supremely generous, stop it, stop it. I like n't believe when that got itle got given. I remember it so clearly A actually a few months later following an investigation Forbes redacted their claim For whps don't like I don't know Teen Ms USA Balker Self made billionaire. Yeah, I mean, there was once a version of me that thought there was a difference between those two things and now I justQite Quite right. I agree Kylie's company had been ay overvalued And Jenna herself had actually taken home a comparatively wee three hundred forty million for the deal. much like fillers that came before and Kim's crypto controversy that came after Truth doesn't really matter Asas Kylie Jenner being a billionaire Already headline newews It's the only bit anybody remembers And that's what the Kardashians are the best at pushing the narratives they want and creating such an endless tidal wave of headlines For the negative ones, don't make a splash unless they want them to And when they do, it still only adds to their net worth. They're the best There has ever been at this Now just to be clear, we don't actually care that Kylie Jenner isn't really a billionaire. We also don't particularly care about her having lip fillers I think my only issue with that is because you're right, everyverybody has work done and then they all deny it. I think it's hurt pretending should have work on and then selling a product that made it seem like that was going to give you the effect that she had I agree with you, however She was a child So I'm not convinced all of the blame lies. No, definitely not all of the blame lies with but that's what Yes, I agree. And it's also like Kim Karashin selling waste trainers and pretending that that's going to give you like the waste that she has, which presumably is coming from a guess aggressive cosmetic surgery rather than just squishing all your organs around, which is probably just going not help you at all and probably be again quite dangerous for your he The issue we're talking about with all this stuff is that as an influencer, Kylie was selling a dream In twenty fourteen, that dream was bigger Fuller lips which she promised to her hundreds of millions of teenage followers profiting her hundreds of millions of dollars in the process In twenty nineteen, the dream was The American dream She was positioning herself as a self made billionaire, a success story. to be envied, emulated, and influenced by. But just like those lips. It had all been exaggerated and inflated benefit her bra Over the years, the Kardashians have promoted, as Ru said, waste trainers, diet tees, etcet claiming They were essential parts of how they achieved their famous hourglass figures, but they just didn't Diet te is just It's just Don't, don't do it, don't do it It just like gives you aggressive diarrhea and makes you lose a load of water weeight so everyone thinks they've lost weight. and I'm like Oh That's not how they're losing weight. They're getting it lipos sucked out of them. Oh yeah, there's a A lot more expensive solutions that they are employing And that's before we even mention the infamous twenty ten. Kardashian card about this. Oh my the card with a c. Yep The card is a prepaid debit card designed and marketed by the Kardashians for teenagers to live the celebrity lifestyle go out spending money with their friends Prepaid cards themselves aren't actually a big issue. Plenty of parents put money onto them for their kids to spend as an allowance, but the issue was? the card with the case fees The card reportedly charged an upfront activation fee of almost one hundred dollars. And then a monthly fee of ten dollars ten And a three dollar charge every time the card was used at an ATM. This was pretty steep compared to the literal pocket money that children would normally get onto those kind of prepaid cards If you were a child in twenty ten, getting an allowance of let' say twenty dollars a month per ccent of that money would have gone to service the fees for your card with a K and the rest would quite quickly be swallowed up by ATM charges. On top of this, the adverts actively encourage kids to go out and spend as if they were Kardashians So not exactly teaching physical responsibility to children Unsurprisingly, the card was cancellled within a month. But not before everyone involved had made a tasty bit of money And all of this dirty money leads us to h's the grubbest Kardashian cash grab of all Chris Jennner, California Community Church alsoso known as the Church of Kardashian. Christ Jenna herself launched it in two thousand nine originally calling it the Life change Church and she hand picked its pasta Brad Johns Johnson had actually been kicked out of his previous position as a pastor thanks to an adultery scandal By the time that Chris offered to pay for him to start a new ministry, He was working in Starbucks twentyenty years on, doctor Brad Johnson is still preaching at the non denominational church, doing sermons in his trademark Jeans and Cverse Among the sort of cool Vicar modern faith branding, is a much less holy endeavor which serves one purpose and one purpose only making the Kardashians even richer So first and foremost, donations to religious organizations in the US are, of course, tax deductible. Ding ding ding Kim has spoken openly about how she tithes ten per ccent of her income the church which effectively reduces her taxable income And obviously the benefit of the Kardashians investing in this specific church is that their mum is its founder Combine this with the US's opaque standards on financial reporting when it comes to religious organisations and while You're onto a winner What do we think is going on here E if we're being nice Tithing to a church run by your own family means lowering your taxable income while making sure that money goes towards things that serve your own interests like setting up celebrity networking events, or investing in projects that you yourself run Or if your scientology Buying out the LAPD. Oh that Easy solution to all of those problems. That church Tack them all and world hunger, I'll wit you don't want The Kodashians have never been formally accused of anything, so I'm being careful. but If one had come into a large amount of money through shhady means Running a tax exempt institution with opaque financial records, come in very handy indeed And now we've got that potentially libeless implication out away The truth is whether by design or not There is actually very little hard evidence point to the Kardashians knowingly scamming their audience nor is there any good evidence of them using their church to cannily inflate their wealth could just be good Christian shepherds supporting their church b by them I know this is a particular specialist subject of mine that everyone is really tired of me talking about Being a Citalist is the least Christian thing you can be Like this in Ti and I know like the super chch is every blah blah It just isn't Christian, It just isn't a Christian thing to do. So by uniting This very pure capitalism is very light rapid and aggressive and exploitative All of those things and being like, but I'm a good Christian is a contradiction in terms Anyway Kim Kardashian has a very large team checking every post she makes. Every from controural insensitivities to legal issues. It says here she herself is studying law, she's given up, she failed too many times But that hasn't stopped getting into theval Office every five minutes Are we really supposed to believe that she didn't know the rules around the highly lucrative and highly contentious crypto post she was making I could buy that she didn't know I don't think she's that smart. I think Chris Jenner is incredibly smart Would she risk her reputation and fortune for a paid post? Yes, because they've done it so many times and they know it doesn't matter. like it nothing happens Nothing happens, exactly
This excerpt was generated by Smart Features
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