The Why.
He is a grifter and so many seem not to know it, or seem to be confused as to the extent of the grift. He has normalized the grift, and the hucksters have come out of the woodwork, taking outsized influence on the political discourse and values of our great, but knotty nation. The grift is destroying truth, and the grifters are many.
Firstly, to all you off- and on-line troglodytes who think you’re independent thinkers, but are really simply legion of the “I’m just asking” conspiratorial hive-mind with no honest empirical or epistemological bone in your bodies, THIS SITE IS NOT A MANIFESTATION OF TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME(I’m looking at you, Marjorie…no, the government doesn’t control the weather, and Jewish space lasers…let’s just say if any of that shit was even quasi-plausible, a narrow beam of light inside a tiny hurricane would have assuredly found your doorstep).
This is something quite different altogether. Point of fact, this site isn’t even really about Trump, it’s about an ancient and malevolent human design that Trump just so happens to be the current embodiment of, The Art Of The Grift, a design once easily identified and maligned to the ideological waste heap with other human anathema, like phrenology, eugenics, or white nationalism, which, non-coincidentally, are making a comeback.
You may scoff at this next bit, but this site isn’t even partisan, the grifters are on all sides, it just so happens that the phenomenon has found a comforting nest in the right wing at present. This site is a concept borne out of a vacuum amongst legacy media(woke or otherwise), amongst activists, and amongst the information landscape at large, a simple one, one that I’ve been mesmerized hasn’t been created prior, and one that I’ve felt I, and the general public, would benefit from. So, I just decided to try and make it myself. You’re welcome.
The concept is this:
1)It’s obvious that a group of intelligent, I guess let’s call them, whilst gritting teeth violently, political manipulators and profiteers(see Breitbart, Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, and most recently dudes like Elon Musk and RFK, etc., excellent grifters in their own right, magnificent salesmen of snake oil in the form of MRE’s and iodine tablets and “Patriot” brand non-perishable foods and silver and ivermectin and FEAR, and a colony on Mars, and their own books, and their brands, and…well, we’ll just let them each have their own private little section) plagiarized a Russian propagandist philosophy and bestowed it upon a useful idiot, adroit in grift, with a decades long track record proving he was committed to the huckster movement, whom we’ll lovingly refer to as Uncle Donnie.
This philosophy is summed up in the phrase Bannon has repeatedly used: “flood the zone with shit”. These wannabe, politico-philosopher, baby-king, ego-twats weren’t and aren’t the least bit opaque or clandestine about their “strategy”, they just flat out talk about it, as if it were tantamount to “HOPE”, or “Get Out The Vote”, or “Yes, America Can”, or “For People, For a Change”. It, along with militant punishment, mortal “accidents”, poisoning, labor camps, eradication of free speech, capture of the media apparatus by the state, and outright execution, has done quite well for a famous Strongman of our times, you may know of him, if only from hearing our own beloved Uncle Donnie speak of him as a statesman comparable to Wiston Churchill: the one, the only, the Strongman Uncle Donnie dreams of emulating, Vladimir V. Putin.
This philosophy has found itself to be quite successful and virulent when leveled against our Red, White, and Blue homeland, and Trump has harnessed it for nearly a fucking decade at this point, it’s tentacles are deep around our soul, and have now made it to the souls of famous alternative media figures once seeming to have a missive somewhat akin to truth-seeking, like, oh…..I don’t know, Joseph Rogan, et al.
This has all been a little breathy, apologies. I hope I haven’t lost anyone who takes red pills every morning, gulping them down with water they’ve been de-fluoridating on their own. I’ll strive for brevity going forward. I’m kidding, of course, I won’t, I just felt the need to acknowledge it.
2)Uncle Donnie has run a daily marathon of political grift nine years and counting. He’s run a daily marathon of real estate and financial grift(with the help of lawyers none of his devoted “populist” following could dream of affording) for a lifetime. There’s no evidence he was hip to the “flood the zone with shit” ideology when his father started his real estate career for him, but he certainly understood its tenets intrinsically. Maybe that’s some sort of genetic nepotism, a gift passed down to all offspring of robber barons(coincidence that’s his son’s name?).
From the first golden escalator ride our uncle took down into the figurative hell of “there is no political truth”, he has flooded the zone with shit. It was of this escalator ride that the aforementioned Bannon(who was Donnie’s first chief strategist, a position newly minted just for him) likened Donnie to Hitler(favorably, in both of their defenses) and the whole scene to something out of the Nazi propaganda film by Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will. The media was, understandably so, in a fuhrer, uhh, I mean, furor over Donnie’s candidacy, and reported ad nauseam on most every moral, political, human decency, and social transgression that he made, and this continued through his presidency, his attempted coup, his national security violations, his felony convictions, and everything in between up until the present day, where we’ve found him elected again.
I had a realization during his first campaign that has grown exponentially stronger since, that the reason people can’t see the full scope of his grift, his scam, is because we’ve received each bit of information detailing it in piecemeal fashion. There’s been a flood of it, it’s shit, the water is extremely muddy, and we’ve been desensitized to it, numb, paralyzed. Each new story or quote or video or policy just finds its way to being catalogued at the bottom of a long list in our minds, or in our collective blurred mythos of Donnie. Each instance that would be the ruination of any decent politician or even business person is instead burdened with some sort of distorted diminishing return in our idea of how repulsive this man, this brand is.
This is what the pseudo-politico-philosopher baby king ego-twats like Bannon wanted. And, they’ve been aided and abetted by a rotating host of grifters in different, tangential orbits around Donnie, cementing his ultimate grift. We’ve been told early and often that real, sourced, vetted stories are “fake news”, so many times that the meaning of the phrase no longer exists. We’ve been played on by a concept Donnie and his orbiters must know and worship, the “illusory truth effect”, a real phenomenon(if you can bring yourself to still trust sociologists using the scientific method rigorously) showing that we exhibit the tendency to believe something is true after being exposed to it multiple times, even if it's false or contradicts what one already knows.
For example, if Donnie or his clingers-on just say that illegal immigrants are felons and murderers and rapists and monsters repetitively(even though the chief utterer of these accusations actually is a felon and a sexual predator), people will believe it, even though the data, which is available to all if they’re actually interested, shows that illegal immigrants commit felony crimes at a lower rate than US citizens.
If I may stop you before you start, this isn’t a woke polemic on immigration, illegal immigration is a massive national concern, however, we have real data with which to have real conversations on the matter. You won’t hear that from the grifters, you’ll just be handed a sign that says “mass deportation” to wave fervently at a rally that has all the trappings of Pentecostal tent revival. But, there’s gotta be fear to sell the grift, there’s gotta be a narrative to sell to the people, there’s gotta be fodder for the podcast and the news report and the X posts and the Reddit forums and the youtube videos. How is it not patently obvious that these folks are just selling something, peddling ideology?
These phenomena have been well described, they’ve been documented at length, but it’s been done so by a media apparatus that the grifters have undermined using the same phenomena that the media is reporting on, which has created a self-fulfilling, Cartesian circle of shit, that has unmoored truth and fact checking from our collective understanding of reality. Maybe we can even give some of the new grifters the benefit of the doubt, maybe the Rogans and Musks of the world have been so duped, so disarmed by the tsunami of shit, the effect of illusory truth, that they’ve also been unable to see the forest of grift from a thousand foot view, and they’re not so appalled by each individual tree. Or maybe they also just know the power of a good narrative, true or not, the muddy information landscape providing fertile ground for their ad revenues and economic enterprises.
3)So, finally, the point of this site. It seems essential that there be a thousand foot view of the grift…the presidential one, the one with international/nuclear/survival of democracy(or republic for my right-wingers)/general human decency/let’s not engender rapists(per civil court)/let’s not engender felons/economy/women’s rights/checks and balances of power/avoidance of a technocrat-bro oligarchy/survival of the middle class implications, and of the smaller grifts being doled out by the orbiters and socio-economic-political Trumpian dingleberries, as well as the Trump-unaffiliated opportunists, all grifters really.
The goal is for this site to be a sort of encyclopedia, a reference point, that gathers and captures the individual data points, the flood, the totality of the scam being perpetrated against our collective society. A one-stop shop where you can come, you can direct your friends and your family, to see the staggering size of the grift all at once. We want this site to be a place that gathers up all the shit so you don’t have to, so you can prove it’s real. So you can estimate it’s real world consequences.
The secondary goal would be that some that visit might change their mind about the grifters, large and small, when they see how enormous it is viewed all at once, and treat the swindlers of thought, money, mental-health, relationships, energy, time and most importantly of all, truth, with the abhorrence they deserve. That maybe, you’ll be reconvinced that truth does exist, it does matter, it has real world consequences, it probably isn’t on Truth Social, ironically, and we should treasure and preserve its importance.
Caveat: the elephant in the room, what will be leveled against us are that many of our sources of information are from “liberal” media outlets. The media has definitely been reactionary, some of the coverage has been a stretch, woke click-bait, illegitimate, even, finding problems in need of angry solutions….. but that doesn’t mean that the earnest, appropriately vetted stories by human beings that have made it their life’s work to be accurate and fair journalists aren’t legitimate. The repetitive, pernicious alt-right railing about fake news and liberal agendas doesn’t erode the foundations of journalism and the over 400 codes of ethics regarding integrity in news and reporting. If anything, the persistence and dogged tenacity of these outlets, in the face of the alt-right adhering to absolutely no rules (here’s more…….and more still) regarding what they’ll report or disseminate to continue to monetize fear and loathing, should be lauded.
Glad You’re Here,
He Is A Grifter.
