Candace
Ian Carroll Unleashed 2 | Urban Air Gets Darker And Trump Turns On Israel | Candace Ep 185
Wed, 14 May 2025
Afrikaner refugees arrive in America, Trump seems to distance himself from Israel, and the Urban Air story gets way darker. Follow Ian Carroll's official channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@UCCgpGpylCfrJIV-RwA_L7tg 00:00 - Start. 00:40 - Urban Air.36:22 - Afrikaner refugees. 44:07 - Trump & Israel. Smile Get 15% off + FREE shipping with promo code CANDACE at http://www.TWC.Health/Candace American Financing Act today! Call 800-795-1210 or visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/owens American Financing 800-795-1210, http://www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org, NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org Tax Network USA Call 1(800)-958-1000 for a private, free consultation, or visit http://www.TNUSA.com/Candace Candace Official Website: https://candaceowens.com Candace Merch: https://shop.candaceowens.com Candace on Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/Pp5VZiLXbq Candace on Spotify: https://t.co/16pMuADXuT Candace on Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/RealCandaceO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Urban Air scandal and how did private equity play a role?
Well, there's a new immigration scandal today, and this time it is white people trying to come to America, and everyone's got a hot take. All that while Trump is seemingly reversing the status quo policy on Israel and simultaneously making deals with Saudi Arabia for hundreds of billions of dollars.
And we'll get to that right after we drop a big bombshell on the story we started yesterday about Unleashed Brands, Michael Browning Jr., and The Little Jim. All that today on Candace. Today, we're going to start with a brief reminder of what happened to Toys R Us, famously bankrupted by the private equity firm KKR and Bain Capital.
Because it's important to highlight just how much private equity will do for profit and how little they care about who they hurt while they do it. Before private equity bought them out, Toys R Us had $1.8 billion of debt. After private equity was done with them, they were loaded with more than $5 billion of debt. By 2007, interest expenses consumed 97% of their profit.
Amazon was a juggernaut that spelled the demise of traditional retail stores, and in 2017, roughly 7,000 stores and 50,000 jobs evaporated. Between 2015 and 2017, of the 43 large retailers and supermarket companies that filed for bankruptcy, more than 40% were owned by private equity firms.
But what's worse, private equity has started to master the art of the leveraged buyout, where they don't actually put up the money to buy a business, but instead just take out a loan using the business they are about to buy, but don't yet own, and they use that as a collateral to secure that loan.
Quote, many private equity firms ship in only about 1% to 2% of the equity needed for a leveraged buyout and skim fees and interest throughout the deal. If things go well, the firms take a huge cut of the profit when they exit. If everything blows up, they usually still escape with nary a burn.
Another common tactic used to gut a company is once you control it, you sell off all the real estate to your real estate buddies and then force the company, Toys R Us, to lease back its own properties for monthly rent, further sinking the balance sheet. The private equity model, often called vulture capitalism, is to loot and flip, not to invest or run companies well.
And many people don't realize just how many beloved brands have been bought out through these types of leveraged buyouts. This is just a small smattering of recent leveraged buyouts, mostly by private equity, but sometimes by public megacorporations as well, as in the example of Kraft Heinz.
The big boys also realized during these years that forming cozy relationships with big consulting firms is a great way to simultaneously mismanage a company and take absorbent fees while you do it. The consulting industry is ruled by the big three. That would be McKinsey, BCG, and Bain & Company. Some of the big private equity firms even have associated consulting firms or vice versa.
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Chapter 2: Who is Garth Price and what is Leap of Faith Adventures?
And they did it by forming relationships with the people that invented these different rides and attractions and then creating bringing that technology and those attractions in and installing them for the business like Urban Air. Fast forward to the end of 2016. UATP's business model was now dramatically different.
Leap of Faith's hard work, experience, and expertise made the Urban Air model scalable and reproducible, allowing Urban Air to open 13 new parks in a single year and expand its previously limited attraction selection. Remember, eight parks across the whole founding, then 13 parks in a single year,
So in short, Leap of Faith enabled Urban Air to grow and made its franchise a more attractive investment opportunity. Browning extended the following offer to Leap of Faith. Urban Air would send its franchisees business exclusively to Leap of Faith for the sales and installations of attractions. But in return, Leap of Faith would remit 70% of the net profits to Urban Air on top of profit sharing.
Urban Air also promised to provide Leap of Faith with back office services to assist with the influx of associated business in exchange for Leap of Faith's agreeing to pay $1,000 per park fee for those services. But Urban Air later increased that fee to $2,000 per park. And that service, back office services, will become very relevant later.
It included two main items, a semi-dedicated back office managerial and accounting employee, Abby Crowley, and the procurement setup and hosting of a private web domain for Leap of Faith. Browning insisted Leap of Faith needed a more professional email address, so Urban Air purchased for $11.86 and hosted the lofadv.com email domain for Leap of Faith.
Leap of Faith understood and expected, however, that the lofadv.com account would be maintained as Leap of Faith's private business account. That will become very relevant later in this case. And so just to clear this up and make it obvious, they agreed to this profit-sharing agreement because Leap of Faith was getting all kinds of business and Urban Air was getting everything.
Leap of Faith's work was predicated upon significant investment, including 375 hours of employee training on installations, building codes, ADA compliance, OSHA, and other on-the-job training to learn. Leap of Faith's investment, however, was recognized and lauded by the attraction manufacturers.
It built and installed more than 45 parks during its tenure from 2016 to 2018, compared to mere eight parks UATP had accomplished from its inception in 2013 to the end of 2015. And you start to see how relevant it is that Michael Browning would later start flying in Chinese labor to install his new parks when this is the type of costs associated with doing it correctly.
And Leap of Faith was very particular about doing it correctly. Browning, at this point, emailed his dad and said, quote, Garth just wired $75,000. That's a good way to end a Friday. In a month's time, Urban Air was earning as much or more in rebates as it had earned as an operator of eight parks the entire prior year, 2015.
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Chapter 3: How did Leap of Faith contribute to Urban Air's growth?
If you were junior, a nepo baby with an extremely successful father like Browning Sr., what would you do to protect your newfound success, your new private plane, your new access to the big boys club? Would you censor journalists and publications? Would you forge documents or commit perjury? Would you hire felons to do your dirty work or compel a woman to have an abortion?
Would you plant drugs or harm children or terrorize small business owners or bankrupt veterans? And I'm not saying that Michael Browning Jr. or anyone else did those things. I'm just posing you the question, if you had made your millions, how far would you go to keep them, okay? Michael Browning Jr. offered to move Leap of Faith's whole team from Ohio to Texas.
And Leap of Faith had all the relationships. Leap of Faith had all the connections to everyone that had invented these various rides and was selling them through Leap of Faith to Urban Air. They also had all the expertise that made this transformation possible. So it wasn't long before Jr. tried to alter their profit sharing agreements and take in more money from the partnership.
And now that Junior had an expanding business, he started to shop around among interested private equity investors. Quote, in response, Polozola drafted a letter informing Price that Urban Air and its prospective partners wanted to bring Leap of Faith in-house and make him Urban Air's vice president of attractions.
But if Price refused their offer, then Urban Air insisted Price had to sign the infamous rebate agreement that Price never signed, but that Browning now claims that Price did sign. We'll come back to forging of documents another time in another part of this story. Leave it to say for now that that was never quite resolved and Price was never able to prove that he did not sign that in court.
But when they offered to buy him out and he gave a resounding hell no, the next step got taken. Unable to acquire Leap of Faith for the price they wanted, the Urban Air defendants simply altered course and embarked on, quote, Project Leapfrog. This was their plan to steal Leap of Faith's business assets and eliminate any remaining viable enterprise so it could not then operate as a competitor.
Shortly thereafter, Urban Air personnel began sending emails to franchises with whom Leap of Faith had active sales and installation contracts in progress that contained the following message. Quote, And it's important to note really quickly that these new wiring instructions no longer linked to Leap of Faith's bank accounts, but instead linked to Urban Air's bank accounts.
And we will come back to that shortly. But now that he had private equity backers, he needed to get in line and run the private equity playbook the way they wanted to play it. After successfully diverting leap of faith business funds using this ploy, Urban Air began using the following warning on its own email communications.
Warning, we're actively working to reduce the possibility of email hacking and phishing. If you receive an email letter or package containing wire transfer instructions, call us using previously known contact information to verify the information prior to sending funds. Never use the information provided in the email.
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Chapter 4: What legal battles arose between Leap of Faith and Urban Air?
Urban Air would later take steps to clean out a Leap of Faith checking account. Such theft would never have been possible except for the fact that Leap of Faith accepted Urban Air's offer to provide Leap of Faith with the necessary back-office accounting and invoicing on franchisee products. for a per-park fee. That was that thing we mentioned earlier that was gonna come back around?
Allegedly, it came back around. In addition to diverting funds, Urban Air also began an active campaign to solicit Leap of Faith's trained and experienced employees to come to work for Urban Air, and in that process, learned Leap of Faith's installation trade secrets.
They also allegedly put up cameras that right there it says, quote, it's obvious to me that you are trying to learn how to install a park with the line of questions you've asked of my team and the cameras you have placed facing the attractions build at the Bedford job site.
In his arrogance, Browning readily admits their intentions was to learn and steal leap of faith experience and proprietary know-how so that urban air defendants could use it without leap of faith. Quote, "'It is correct that we have placed cameras at the Bedford location to record the build. It is correct that we are learning how to perform the installs.
Myself, John, and Doug have told you numerous times in person that our investors and board of directors will not allow us to have all of our eggs in the LOFA basket.'" They want us to have a contingency plan. Notably, no such videos have been produced in the litigation.
On July 24th, 2018, the Urban Air defendants successfully poached 26 of Leap of Faith's 40 full-time trained and experienced employees or three of its five active crews. So, Michael had cameras installed in urban airs that were being built so they could record Leap of Faith installing those attractions and use that footage to make training videos.
Because a lot of the attractions arrived without installation instructions, but Leap of Faith's teams were aces and they knew exactly what they were doing because they'd had all that training that he had paid for, which Michael Browning was not as hot on paying for, it didn't seem, but...
Then Michael went through a long series of manipulations to acquire everything he needed and file patents on attractions brought to him by Leap of Faith Adventures. And I don't know how much intellectual property he might have stolen this way. There's an immense amount of legal documentation to go through, but I'll show you one or two as an example.
So when Leap of Faith finally took Michael Browning to court, a man named David Evans was deposed and testified about theft of his intellectual property. He owned Rascal Face, which is one of the companies that Leap of Faith had worked with over many years because he had invented one of the attractions that Leap of Faith installed in parks, the Skyrider.
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Chapter 5: What allegations of intellectual property theft were made against Michael Browning Jr.?
I wonder what they could possibly have needed those drawings for. Who knows? I wonder why they only copied two of Michael's lawyers onto the forwarding. And I don't know what they meant when they said, Jeff, will this work? But shortly after that, patents and trademarks were filed.
So as soon as David Evans became aware of this, many months later, he sent a cease and desist letter to Junior, clearly stating, if you refuse to comply with our suggested course of action in paragraph two of this email, we will have no option but to instruct our lawyers to commence action to revoke and oppose all your applications for the trademark Skyrider.
Michael Browning responded saying, oh, no worries, bud. We just filed these patents to protect you and our investment. More or less. You can read the text here if you want to know. In a more formal legal notice, they clarified, "...when investigating the market for Zip Coasters, Urban Air noticed that Rascal Face had no U.S.
presence or sales, had taken no steps to obtain patent protection or trademark protection in either the U.K. or its home country or here in the U.S., Urban Air was and is, remains the sole customer here in the US and is working hard to grow the market. While looking into your recent email, Further Investigation found an article from this past October interviewing Mr. Rupert Oliver.
That article, published by Global Amusements and Play, confirmed Urban Air's investigation. Mr. Oliver admitted that despite being invented 22 years ago, the Zip Coaster had been a bit of a slow burner. So it all amounts to, in other words, we just noticed that you didn't have the trademarks on it, so we thought we would file it to... Protect it. For you.
Today, Urban Air continues to install and use SkyRiders, and kids are falling off of them and suffering life-altering injuries, as we watched on video the other day. And Rascal Face, the original owner, no longer produces them. Weird how that works. He then made sure to brag all about it to his buddies. FYI, we protect our attractions, baby. Thank you, Michael Browning, Urban Air Adventure Parks.
Right on. Now, during this time, Michael Browning Jr. had moved Leap of Faith Adventures down to Texas. So they were in an Urban Air owned building. Michael Browning had built them a new website and new emails because he wanted them to appear more competent. At least that's what he said. But this gave him control over almost all of Leap of Faith's infrastructure.
And then one day, Leap of Faith alleges that they showed up to work and they claimed they were locked out of their building and locked out of their emails. And this is when Michael Browning Jr. sent emails to all the franchises that owed LOFA money for installations with instructions to pay, but the payment link seemed to secretly link to the Unleashed brand's bank accounts, not Leap of Faith.
So we went over this a little bit earlier. So it was kind of like all happening all at once. And when that happened, Jen Siraki was a member of the Franchisee Association at Urban Air, and she had been in it for a while. And she noticed that the banking information was not the same as it used to be. So she went to Garth, the founder of Leap of Faith, and asked what was going on.
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Chapter 6: How did Urban Air allegedly divert funds and employees from Leap of Faith?
If anyone thinks one of our crew chiefs can afford to hire a large law firm to sue us and that Stephen and Michael aren't paying for it, I've got a big bridge I'd like to sell them. I think our lawyers will be able to prove that this is just another step by them to try and destroy Leap of Faith. So from Garth's perspective,
It didn't feel like Michael Browning was there to be a partner in much of anything. And he filed this whole big injunction, the one we've been reading a bunch from, because he thought that Michael was trying to steal his company. So Garth files for this injunction to stop Browning from doing whatever he was doing, and Michael received it.
Much of what we read today was from that motion for injunction, which has never been seen by anyone outside of the case before now. And Michael Browning Jr. went to massive lengths to ensure that no one would ever see it. Whoopsies! Because Michael Browning Jr. and his team of lawyers just kept dragging the case on and on, Garth was unfortunately bled into bankruptcy.
Several of Garth's lawyers took this case on contingency, which means they're so sure you're going to win that they take the case without pay because they're going to get paid when you win. They fought for over two years and still hadn't even made it to discovery.
The section where they go over all the ways that Browning and his lawyers extended, disobeyed, and drew out the courts is way too long to cover. It's pages and pages and pages long. And that's because Junior just kept throwing money at the case, filing appeals over and over to every level of court that they could in Texas. That's likely three different levels right up to the Texas Supreme Court.
And we're talking sometimes like $50,000 to $70,000 per instance. This stuff costs a lot of money for Michael Browning, but also for Garth Price. And the balance of power is clearly not even in that relationship. And eventually, they bled Garth dry, and he had to settle, and Unleashed Brands paid Garth $5 million.
But most of it, if not all of it, probably went to the lawyers that he'd been using for over two years to defend himself against this lawfare. And so the actual case never even made it to conclusion. It never even made it into discovery whatsoever. And Garth never had a chance to prove any of these claims that he made in this document. And to be clear, they are all just claims.
They are not proven out in a court of law today. In all of this, Stephen Polizola was the lawyer leading the charge for Urban Air and Michael Browning Jr. Prior to this, he was a private lawyer at Decker Jones, not a huge law firm that specialized in contractor law. And he was a small fish that mostly just worked in getting people to pay money in contractor law.
When he came on with Browning, he didn't take pay, but instead took ownership share. And he's been instrumental to everything Michael Browning Jr. and Unleashed Brands has done. And now his considerable fortune is inextricably tied to the success of Michael Browning Jr. and Unleashed Brands.
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Chapter 7: What role did patents and trademarks play in the dispute?
Roe wrote, Accordingly, we have determined that by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.
Roe stressed that while Episcopal Migration Ministries will seek to wind down all federally funded services by the end of the federal fiscal year in September, the denomination will continue to support immigrants and refugees in other ways, such as offering aid to refugees who have already been resettled. Here is Reverend Sean W. Roe discussing it on ABC News on Monday.
Of course, this was a four decades old relationship across many administrations that was ended abruptly today. Why did the classification of these immigrants as refugees cross a moral line?
Well, the reality is we can't be ourselves in the Episcopal Church and take the step of resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa. Our church has a long commitment to racial justice and reconciliation. And we have historic ties with the Anglican Church of South Africa. Desmond Tutu has been a partner in this work for us. So we're just not able to take this step.
It's not in line with anything that we're about. And it also saddens us to see that other refugees who are being denied entrance to the United States are people, brave people, who've worked alongside of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan, now face danger, have been in camps for a long time, and aren't being allowed in.
And so this is just, the program no longer aligns with where we are as a church and what we're about.
Racial justice, but only for certain races. Despite how funny his voice in that clip is, I think it's important for us all to remember there's some middle ground in these issues. And there's a lot of these issues like this around the world right now. People fighting over land and fighting over whose land it is and people dying, innocent people dying.
And whether it's South Africa or whether it's Israel, wherever it is, I think that every side could use a little more understanding of the other side's humanity. And yeah, South Africa has a long history of brutal violence from white people towards black people. But that does not give us reason to recycle that violence into violence from black people towards white people.
That only extends these cycles. And the same is true in Israel and Palestine. The same is true everywhere that it happens. I would love to remind us all to have a little humanity and just advocate for not killing innocent people. Please.
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Chapter 8: How did David Evans and Rascal Face respond to Urban Air's actions?
government's left them and they're still there. Anyways, that announcement came just as flights with Afrikaners were scheduled to arrive at Washington Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., and the first batch of entries after Trump declared via a February executive order that the U.S. would take in Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.
The South African government has stridently denied allegations of systemic racial animus, Rowe noted his announcement comes as the Trump administration has otherwise all but frozen the refugee program with Afrikaners among the few and possibly the only people granted entry as refugees since January.
Shortly after he was sworn in, Trump signed an executive order that essentially halted the refugee program and stopped payments to organizations that assist with refugee resettlement.
Ashley Allison, the former deputy director and senior policy advisor for the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement, was on CNN discussing how the white Afrikaners should go back to their native land in Europe.
Thirty five, 30 plus years ago, they went through a revolution. The apartheid system ended. And they reformed their constitution under the great leader of Nelson Mandela. And that allowed for a racial reconciliation, one that this country has yet to do. But South Africa did it and they reformed their constitution.
And part of that is that the people who are native to that land deserve their rightful land back. That is not what the Afrikaners actually want to have happen, which are the white Africans. And so who are not originally from Africa, who colonize South Africa also. And so that is what they are saying is discrimination.
Now, if the Constitution in South Africa is discriminatory, they have their checks and balances in that land, just like we do. And that is for them to. So if the Afrikaners don't actually like the land, they can leave that country.
They are. They're leaving to come. No, no.
They can actually leave and go to where their native land is, which is probably Germany. Are you against them coming here? Holland. Holland.
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