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by orwin 121 days ago
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 :/

1 comments

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.