Fake News

Digitally dissecting the deception behind the Coral Gables Gazette.

It’s a long one, people, so here’s your precious executive summary 😘:

• The Coral Gables Gazette is substandard propaganda dressed up as "news" and appears to have been deliberately misleading about its origins and true purpose.

• The publication launched conveniently after Gables Insider's collapse, filling KFC's propaganda void just before the election.

• Its website shares nearly identical technical infrastructure with Felix Pardo's campaign site, suggesting coordinated setup by the same entity.

• Both sites use sequential nameservers and appear to have been configured during the same setup session despite being registered weeks apart.

• Owner Justin Prisendorf donated $500 to Pardo's campaign while running a supposedly "objective" local news operation from 1,800 miles away in Minnesota.

• The technical evidence suggests either improper coordination between supposedly independent journalism and political campaigns, or outright violation of campaign finance laws by operating as an undisclosed campaign publication.

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"All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those to whom it intends to direct itself." —Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Despite being a drug-addled, genocidal megalomaniac, Hitler was nevertheless a devastatingly effective demagogue. His point in the quote above is that successful propaganda matches the psychological and emotional wavelength of its audience, their fears and hopes, their anxieties and aspirations. The highest common denominator thinks, while the lowest feels. And it's feelings, not thoughts, that move people.

Note how this idea is considerably more nuanced than assume your audience is stupid, which ironically is what many amateur propagandists intuit as the first step toward effective agitprop. In my experience, there's a strong correlation between desperately wanting to convince people of things and believing that all those who need convincing are morons.

Unfortunately, amateur propagandists are a dime a dozen these days, which is why much of the political “news” and “commentary” one encounters is so insultingly lowbrow and dripping with a certain contempt for its audience. A contempt that goes well beyond the cavalier dismissal of majority-held views and preferences. A meta-contempt. An inherent belief that most people are just too dumb to recognize political propaganda dressed up as objectively reported news, or notice subtle agendas that are about as subtle as Dr. Castro’s cosmetic enhancements.

The now-mothballed Gables Insider is a terrific example of this. But that poor horse has been beaten to death and then some, even if arguably more remains to be said about its mysterious disappearance. I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blog pull the ol’ Irish goodbye—no warning, no ceremonial farewell post, no "it's been a fun ride" tip of the hat to its readers. It just quietly slipped away like a thief in the night, right around the time Javi Baños got hit with that whopper of a lawsuit, which makes one wonder if perhaps Crazy Joe Carollo roped poor Javi into more trouble than initially thought.

Then there’s Elaine De Valle’s Political Cortadito. But Elaine’s been so thoroughly exposed as a pay-for-play grifter that I'm not sure she merits further attention either. Once the striking correlation between her coverage and sudden influxes of cash from certain political committees was revealed, any chance of Political Cortadito regaining what little credibility it once enjoyed plummeted to approximately zero.

One might even include the Miami Herald, whose local politics coverage suggests its business model has shifted from hard news to fan fiction. It clearly has a knack for feeding its left-leaning Coral Gables subscribers their preferred narrative, e.g., any story that casts Vince Lago as the villain. Hence the Herald's curious editorial formula, which somehow deemed Amos Rojas's ludicrous assault hoax against Lago newsworthy enough to publish within 24 hours, only to find the far more serious and well-substantiated Phishingate scandal unfit to print. This comes after the paper dutifully covered KFC-friendly stories about tacky Biltmore wallpaper, the city's lease dispute with a floundering sausage restaurant, and, inexplicably, published a hard-hitting think piece pondering whether Lago and Anderson were hypocrites for not providing receipts for their charitable donations of the raises their colleagues had forced upon them.

Of course, none of that holds a candle to the Herald's former Epstein-like obsession with Vince Lago and Rishi Kapoor, which may go down as one of the most spectacular letdowns in the paper’s history. Here’s actual footage of the Herald serving up its multi-year, multi-part Lago-Kapoor exposé to its hungry readers:

But, to be fair, the Herald is more a cautionary tale about audience capture than it is about audience contempt. And it isn’t necessarily lowbrow. No, in my view, the best example of the "assume your audience is stupid" principle in action is also the most recent to emerge (or reemerge) from the toxic swamp that passes itself off as the grassroots: the Coral Gables Gazette.

Artificial (insult to your) Intelligence

I’ve been reluctant to waste any proverbial ink on the Gazette, mostly because it’s so bad. Impressively bad. From its layout to its copy, everything about the Gazette is lazy, careless, and ugly. But especially the copy, which is often so uninspired as to seem totally lifeless. Utterly devoid of soul. Positively machine like.

And for good reason. Gazette articles are frequently riddled with telltale AI idiosyncrasies including, but not limited to, bizarre factual errors stemming from obsolete training data, like identifying Miriam Ramos, who left the city in January 2023, as the city attorney in 2025.

For what it’s worth, I take no issue with writers using AI as a tool any more than I have an issue with engineers using calculators or architects using AutoCAD, so long as neither is substituting the machine's talent and understanding for their own. If writers want to use AI for research or editing or ancillary material, have at it. I've finally come around to doing that myself. But don't surrender the actual writing to an algorithm. Try having a voice, and some goddamn pride while you’re at it. And if you really are too lazy and talentless to write something as vanilla as news copy, at least check that what the machine spits out is remotely accurate before dumping it on your readers.

Ontologically dishonest

Nonetheless, I doubt the AI thing truly resonates with many of you. So long as it delivers fair and balanced local news, who really cares if the Gazette is outsourcing its prose to algorithms? You’re looking for news, not art. I get it.

But synthetic or not, the Gazette's “news” content is anything but fair and balanced. I'd even go as far as to say that in terms of sheer bias, it rivals this very newsletter. The difference is I don't pretend otherwise. While I openly acknowledge my content as partisan commentary, the Gazette clings to the false pretense of objective journalism.

But don’t just take my word for it. In its inaugural February 27th post announcing its triumphant return, the Gazette declared its mission is to “inform, engage, and provide accurate, meaningful reporting that serves the people of Coral Gables,” and serve as “your trusted source for news in Coral Gables.”

So what does this "accurate, meaningful reporting" look like in practice? Since its February debut, the Gazette has published one unattributed hit piece after another under the ‘News’ banner, reliably amplifying KFC talking points while pretending it's objective journalism. In fact, in its very first ‘News’ piece, published alongside its return announcement, the Gazette describes Kirk as emphasizing "civility, stability, and selfless leadership" while framing Lago as the aggressor whose attacks on "fellow commissioners and their families" led to his unprecedented censure. Meanwhile, Anderson is dismissed for her "unwavering allegiance to Lago," with their supposedly "choreographed" initiatives, and Lara is mentioned alongside his opposition to "an ADA ramp for children"—presumably because, based on its coverage and the photos it chooses, they want you to think he'd rather eat children than help them.

What nice teeth you have, Mr. Lara. — All the better to eat you with, my dear.

All of which led one to immediately wonder: if that’s how they are kicking off the ‘News’ section, then what the hell are they going to put in the ‘Opinion’ section?

Unfortunately, fully cataloguing the Gazette's partisan coverage would consume an eternity. And besides, whether it's published ten hit pieces or a hundred misses the deeper point entirely. If we truly want to quantify the Gazette's duplicity, we must look beyond the sum of its propagandistic parts and examine it holistically, at which point it reveals itself to be what I'd call ontologically dishonest—dishonest by virtue of the very circumstances of its existence.

Consider the official story: Justin Prisendorf, who shuttered the original Gazette over a decade ago before moving to Minnesota, suddenly develops an irrepressible urge to resurrect his local newspaper and cover Coral Gables politics from 1,800 miles away. This journalistic awakening just so happens to strike less than two months before a municipal election he can’t even vote in, and mere weeks after Gables Insider's editor jumped ship, leaving KFC without their primary propaganda outlet. What are the odds?

Even more curious, this resurrected Gazette would inexplicably abandon the most basic journalistic norms—bylines, mastheads, any indication whatsoever of who's actually running the operation—replacing them with an air of secrecy so thick it makes me, an anonymous commentator, look like the model of transparency.

What’s more, it would conduct itself with all the partisan ferocity of its impossibly compromised predecessor, Gables Insider, pumping out plagiarized press content and AI-generated puff pieces that no one reads, all to establish credibility for its real purpose of generating propaganda and hit pieces against KFC's enemies. And all of this ostensibly orchestrated by a guy who hightailed it out of here over a decade ago but has somehow rekindled such a passion for Coral Gables politics that he felt compelled to resurrect his defunct newspaper from a town that’s less than a five-hour drive from the Canadian border. Oy vey.

Obviously, whatever the real story is, it isn't that. So what could it be? Well, since it proved so fruitful with regard to Ariel's Phishingate shenanigans, I decided to do a little digital digging, and lo and behold, what I unearthed makes Prisendorf's official story look even more ridiculous than it already seemed.

The Pardo Post?

Something you have to remember about the KFC coalition is that it's incredibly incestuous. Most of their schemes are conceived and executed in-house, mainly because they have no other choice. Practically everyone outside their relatively tiny clique thinks they're toxic and is loath to work with them, which is why, for example, David Winker, who serves as Ariel's attorney, is also Dr. Castro's attorney, and the recall committee's attorney, and so on. This incestuousness helps with digging, because it shrinks the search grid to the core members of KFC, their lieutenants, and their small handful of willing accomplices. Hence why it didn’t take long to uncover the first clue:

Interesting. Is that the Justin Prisendorf? The owner of the Coral Gables Gazette? Well, if you look closely at the address, you’ll see he resides in that little enclave in the north-north-north section of Coral Gables called Long Lake, Minnesota. So yup that’s him!

Already, we have enough to throw cold water on the notion of the Gazette as an objective news source. Seems to me like Mr. Prisendorf may have had a slight favorite in the election he parachuted in just in time to cover. What's intriguing, though, is that unless I'm mistaken, you won't find any contributions from Prisendorf to the other KFC candidates. Kirk raised over $42K but didn't receive a dime from Prisendorf, which tells me the $500 he donated to Felix Pardo mere weeks before the Gazette relaunched was perhaps more about the individual than the coalition.

Naturally, this narrowed the search grid even further. It made sense to focus on that connection to Pardo, with the understanding that if there were a deeper relationship at play—something beyond a simple campaign contribution—this element would elevate from merely intriguing to genuinely concerning. And then I found this, a connection so direct it is nothing short of damning:

The information you see above is called a WHOIS record. It's the internet's equivalent of a property deed, revealing who owns a website, where it's hosted, and the technical details of how it was set up. The first record is for the Gazette, the second for Felix Pardo's recent campaign website. What you see here is actually pretty stunning.

Both sites are set up through Cloudflare London, a subdivision of Cloudflare. While interesting, this could be mere coincidence. But then there are the IP addresses and nameservers, both of which connect in ways that are extraordinarily unlikely to occur by chance.

Let's look at the IP addresses first. Both sites are hosted on the same subnet, which means they're allocated from the same block of server addresses. It’s like getting consecutive apartment numbers in the same building. For two supposedly unrelated websites registered weeks apart, this would be highly unusual. But the strongest evidence is found in the nameservers.

Think of nameservers as the postal system for the internet. They tell browsers where to find your website. Both felixpardo.com and gables-gazette.com use sequential GoDaddy nameservers: ns19, ns20, ns21, and ns22. To understand how unlikely this is, imagine GoDaddy as a massive post office with hundreds of different sorting stations. When you set up a website, you get assigned to whichever station has capacity at that moment. For two "unrelated" websites to get consecutive station numbers, especially when they were set up weeks apart, is like buying lottery tickets on different days and getting consecutive numbers. The odds are truly astronomical.

But it gets worse. The technical evidence shows these domains were likely configured during the same setup session, despite being registered weeks apart. This suggests someone registered felixpardo.com in January but didn't actually configure the hosting until they were setting up gables-gazette.com in February. In other words, it’s almost as if they were managing both sites as part of the same project.

To demonstrate how AI should be used, I asked an AI agent to analyze the probability that two supposedly independent websites would randomly share the technical signatures shown above. Here's the assessment:

Probability analysis of observed technical correlations: IP allocation within same /24 subnet (160.153.0.x): highly improbable for random assignment across hosting infrastructure. Sequential nameserver pair allocation (NS19/20 vs NS21/22): approximately 1 in 200+ available pairs. Identical ASN, registrar, and hosting infrastructure: uncommon for independent registrations. Combined probability for independent registrations: approximately 1 in 500 million to 1.2 billion. Additional correlation factor: both domains targeting identical micro-political market (Coral Gables). Forensic assessment: Technical signatures strongly indicate common administrative control. Digital forensics standard: Correlations of this magnitude are considered compelling evidence of coordinated setup in professional investigations.

So how do you explain a supposedly independent news website, your so-called “trusted source of news,” and a political campaign website being set up by the same party, and, as it would appear, at the same time? The way I see it, there are two potential explanations. One bad, the other even worse.

The first, only slightly less damning explanation, is that Pardo and the Gazette merely hired the same person to set up their respective websites, but that there was no further coordination. But then why would someone set up the hosting infrastructure at the same time for two independent domains that were registered weeks apart? Remember, the fact that both sites share sequential nameservers suggests batch processing via a single transaction. Even legitimate web developers typically configure hosting separately for different clients, especially when the domains were registered separately. Now, I'm somewhat familiar with GoDaddy and hosting setup myself, and I don't know of any way to use two separate payment methods for one transaction. In my experience, one session means one payment.

So who paid in this hypothetical? Did the Gazette pay for Pardo's campaign website, or was it the other way around? And if we assume, again, just hypothetically, that it was the latter (because who doesn't use campaign funds to pay for a campaign website) then isn't the Gazette technically an extension of the Felix Pardo campaign? Wouldn't the Gazette have been violating campaign communication laws this whole time? Wouldn't every article have to, by law, include a disclaimer stating "Paid for by Felix Pardo for City Commission" or something similar?

And what about the "advertise with us" plastered all over the site? Has it generated revenue? If not, then who is paying for the Gazette and the "reporters" it sends to hound certain elected officials? If it is making money, is it being reported to the elections department as campaign contributions? All perfectly legitimate questions to ponder.

Another legitimate question to ponder is whether Sue Kawalerski, Pardo’s partner in crime on the PZB, is the person who set up both sites. “CGNA Sue” is known to do this kind of work, and she did receive over $700 from Pardo’s campaign for marketing related expenses and reimbursements. In fact, and I bet you didn’t know this, but Sue is the registrant for Gables Insider. I wasn’t kidding when I said they were incestuous:

The other, more damning explanation incorporates everything in the first but adds coordination to the equation. The use of the same individual to set up both sites wasn’t a happy accident but rather the natural product of both sites being part of a broader, unified strategy.

In this scenario, which again is purely hypothetical, we can imagine political candidate Felix Pardo waking up one morning and realizing he's getting absolutely crushed heading into the election. We can imagine him longing for the days when Gables Insider monopolized the political narrative and propelled intrinsically weak candidates like Ariel and Dr. Castro to victory. We can imagine his despair at knowing Gables Insider couldn't be revived, as it was a dead brand.

But then we can imagine him recalling the glory days of the Coral Gables Gazette, a brand that doesn't resonate with carpetbaggers like Ariel and Dr. Castro, but was beloved and trusted by old-timers like Pardo. We can imagine him realizing that Prisendorf wasn't doing anything with the brand and might be interested in lending it to an old friend, perhaps in exchange for some passive income. We can imagine the desire to keep that little enterprise running well past the election to help shape the narrative.

And we can imagine everyone involved thinking the rest of us are too stupid to catch on.

On another note, for months I've been wracking my brain trying to figure out whether it's astral projection or a really awesome set of tarot cards that allows the Gazette superfan, Lynn Guarch-Pardo, Felix’s wife, to predict when the Gazette is about to drop an article and be among the first to comment, often within minutes of publication (below is just a sample). But do we potentially have a simpler explanation now? Might Lynn Guarch-Pardo be an actual Gables insider:

Running out of lives

No matter how you slice it, no matter how charitably you interpret the findings above, it is clear that the Coral Gables Gazette is one massive compounded lie. Its claim to independence is a lie. Its claim that it publishes actual “news” rather than agitprop is a lie. Its very origin story is a lie.

At best, it's inextricably linked to the same band of agitators that produce all the other bargain-bin propaganda that has been cluttering your inbox for years, from old Gables Insider posts to the senility-fueled screeds posing as CGNA emails.

At worst, it's an appendage of Felix Pardo's now-defunct political campaign that has been operating for months in potential violation of campaign finance laws, pumping out hit pieces while pretending to be journalism. Even if we generously assume they merely hired the same person to set up both sites, the payment question remains: who paid for what, and why wasn't this coordination disclosed?

In any event, the Gazette is a bad actor, one that assumes you're too stupid to notice propaganda dressed up as legitimate news, too gullible to spot the KFC coalition’s heavy hand on the editorial rudder, and too unsophisticated to spot the obvious clues it leaves in its wake.

The good news is that most of you could already sense that. The even better news is that now you know it for sure.

Having begun with a quote from such a vile man, it seems only appropriate to end with one from his antithesis, Churchill: “In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.” How very true, for every time one of these bungling KFC-sanctioned media operations succumbs to its own humiliation, another even less credible one invariably rises to take its place. But Churchill said many times, not infinite times, and something tells me KFC's propaganda machine is running out of lives.