Dave Troy

John was involved in a couple of unremarkable tech companies with college friend Jared Thomson. After a short stint working at Amazon in Seattle, and being unhappy there, he and Alina return to Vegas and decide to marry. They traveled to Russia in November 2017.

John and Alina were married December 2, 2017 in Kazan, Tatarstan, Russia. They were married in a government facility overseen by Alina’s mother, Gulnara Mukhutdinova, a longtime government functionary. Gulnara’s mother was an “Honored Builder of Russia” in Soviet times.

John and Alina traveled in Russia and in Europe extensively between December and July 2018. They returned to Vegas and launched Parler with Jared Thomson in August 2018. Almost no one joined between August and December 2018; it was in early alpha stages.

In December 2018, the site received a massive influx of new users (tens of thousands) thanks to publicity from “far right” LARPers Candace Owens and Cassandra Fairbanks. Many operatives reserved accounts that month as a result of this push, including Owens’ pal Kanye West.

As the company grew in 2019, they turned to Jesse Benton, a political operative who had worked with Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell. Benton was indicted and found guilty of election finance violations. Benton is married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter Valori Pyeatt.

Benton became the company’s PR consultant and primary press contact. To help with marketing, they enlisted the hospitality coordinator of the BLT Prime steakhouse at the Trump hotel in DC, Elise Rhodes. She had no prior marketing experience, it seems.

As the company expanded in 2019, it has been squarely focused on creating conditions that would challenge section 230 of the communications decency act. The company’s purpose seems to be expressly political and aimed at eroding US social media firms.

Now let’s talk money. Parler LLC is owned by two member entities: John Matze and NDMASCENDANT LLC. There is no public record of who comprises NDMASCENDANT LLC. It is a Delaware corporation. The company has not raised any traditional VC rounds that we can see.

Parler has claimed that Dan Bongino (notorious Republican media personality) has made strategic investments in the company. However it is unlikely he would have sufficient capital to fuel such a firm. Likewise “cryptocurrency investor” Jeffrey Wernick has said he is an investor.

However none of this passes the sniff test: any company aiming to challenge firms at Twitter scale needs a massive supply of funds to hire employees competitively and pay for rapidly scalable computing infrastructure.

Also, the kinds of employees the company needs cost over $100k per year each, even in Las Vegas. $120k-150k is a more competitive salary. These folks do not come easily and are in short, inelastic supply. They also have to compete on ideological grounds...

Limiting their employee pool to people ideologically committed to Parler’s bizarre anti-social mission is going to be a tough sell, and difficult to scale. The firm is likely to need technical and infrastructure help from outside to survive, as its weird revenue model is nascent.

Additionally, flooding the zone with shit noise about the company’s ownership would seem to be a way of deflecting attention away from valid questions about that exact question. Who does own it? Where is the money, tech talent and infrastructure coming from? Follow the money.

I believe that @TechCrunch, @theinformation @theverge and other outlets that cover this realm need to dig in and get to the bottom of this. Parler is the #1 app in the App Store and has been off and on for months. It sucks, but it’s growing.

The company seems to like to promote the Epoch Times. Epoch Times is owned by Falun Gong, and aligned with Steve Bannon’s buddy Guo Wengui. They may also have an interest in Parler’s trajectory and finances. We don’t know. Again, what’s NDMASCENDANT LLC?

I’ve been sitting on this information for six months and hoping media outlets would cover it and get up to speed on this. It hasn’t happened; our press corps is spread to thin. There is no “smoking gun” here. Everybody is behaving within their legal rights, it seems.

But it doesn’t add up. Non-descript tech bro randomly meets ostensible Russian honeypot, travels to Russia, marries her, then returns to US to start a whacko social network with explicit political aims, in partnership with Russia aligned ops? Uh, ok.

This is not some kind of free-speech tech dudebros just tryna let people do their thing. This is a calculated political and economic attack on US interests and we should treat it accordingly. The fact that it sucks makes that easier. But it may get better.

Oh, and one more thing. It seems NDMASCENDANT LLC was filed by Greenberg Traurig, LLP. If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s Rudy Giuliani’s former firm. He was traveling in Russia and the region at the time Parler was founded in late 2018.