I agree with this entire article, except that it's not just a right-wing phenomenon. Both sides distort the truth for financial gain and from a quantitative POV it's not a false equivalence.
At least in the U.S., from my observations, it's mainly a right-wing phenomenon and borne from the same culture that brought us the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Hal Turner. As a teenager, my friends and I would laugh at this stuff and assume by the time we were having kids, Fox News and similar right-wing, vaguely racist, puritanical media would be diminished to a point where it was hardly noticeable. We were clearly very wrong.
To quote you from an earlier comment of yours: "This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against."
The left has been traditionally anti-capitalist and in favor of improving rights and living conditions. Who on the left is gaining financially from distorting the truth to the level of someone like Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Koch Brothers, or Jeff Bezos?
In the favor of improving living conditions? If and only if it is through their ideology. If it is through something which goes against their ideology the goalposts move at the speed of light and out comes some rationalization like "it wasn't really important, what we need is community".
When communism had claims to being more productive growth was the most important thing in the world and why we should adopt their ideology. Now look at the 'degrowth' people what a coincidence and they are literally arguing for worsening living conditions....
That's because Marx was a productivist, and communism was strictly productivist until a decade ago (and still is mainly productivist nowadays).
In a lot of country political ecology used to be liberal/capitalist (save a few radical feminist like D'Eaubonne who linked environment with feminism, but it's less than a minority). Basically Blair's 'third way' but with less nuclear (for some reason, although I think this position is loosing ground in ecologist), and more electric cars.
The degrowth movement is an offshot of that ideology. Degrowth is to political ecologism what anarchism is to communism, based a very Idealist and hopeful view of humanity.
Communists and ecologists are broadly on the 'left', but rarely allied until maybe a decade ago, and again, on minor things (Communists love nuclear,as it is typically something you don't want a capitalist with 'limited liability' to take care of), and while degrowth might be close to anarchists in some way, it is very, very dishonest to put them in the same basket.
True, but rarely you see someone grifting to the left. Each time someone get caught putting his hands, or worse, where he shouldn't, he tends to go rightward, and fast. Same thing when they are caught doing MLMs, always to the right. Even with shitcoiners, the right-wing pivot is fast once your 'racism is bad, but this antiracist coin' is done. I honestly don't know why.
Probably you have either more money, or more forgiving/powerful people on the right? Some grift to the center, but it's very rare, when libs are as powerful and rich as conservative, so I've no idea.
Sorry, i wasn't clear, my bad. You have grifters everywhere, especially in the fringe as when your audience is small, grifting is the best way to make any real amount of money. But when a grifter is caught doing something the public consider bad (SA, but sometime just being caught red-handed stealing money), he either disappear, or grift to the right. No grifter go further left is my point.
I think the internationally known examples are the Tate brothers or the Paul brothers, but among the scammers who got pardonned by trump you will mostly find people who grifted to the right. In my country it is also quite clear. Doctors caught doing weird chamanism and not helping patient? Suddenly it's "cancel culture!!1!". Your "quantum energy" bullshit is caught and proved to be a weird MLM? Cancel culture! Every fucking time.
It happened with people who used to grift for kombaya/hippies with weird chamanism and yoga. Suddenly, 911 was an inside job and Donald Trump is our savior, Q is his prophete. I shit you not, my mother Yoga ayurvedic group went from hippies that use to get scammed into buying essential oils to "open the Chakra" to weird antisemites who purchased trumpm/melania coin in less than 3 years. And we're not even in the US :/
Ah I think i understand. To paraphrase, you're saying that people that are caught tend to take refuge by more rightward grifting.
I cannot speak to your specific experience and i don't necessarily disagree. However, I do think there a potential selection bias here because by our media environment. Agree or not, the media believes that Trump is the most horrible person in the world at the moment. So there is a propensity to attack anyone that is considered allied to the right, so rightward grifters will get more aggressively exposed.
Yes, exactly, I'm not a native speaker and I have trouble explaining nuances on stuff I've thought about in my mother tongue first.
Agree with the selection bias, that one explanation. A second is that a lot of grifters who were caught now want to get pardoned, so maybe it influence their politics. And the third one is that the society as a whole shifted right, so grifters shifted right. When the pendulum will swing back, maybe grifters will also be shifting back (it doesn't match with Russell Brand/Andrew Tate timing though, but it match quite well with the podcast bro crowd and the Paul brothers).
I also think the age and money factor is also a thing (conservative have more disposable income on average, are older on average, so easier and richer targets). When you get caught grifting your audience will decrease. Concentrating on the richest/oldest is just good business.