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00:01:21.660And I think it really helps new listeners to find the show.
00:01:25.460So now on to today's episode, which is going to be a great one.
00:01:29.940Adrian, what are we talking about today?
00:01:31.440This is the Grifter episode, and we're going to call it So You Want to Be a Right-Wing Grifter.
00:01:35.780So we're talking about the grift machine, this vast media and fundraising and political empire that's emerged on the right,
00:01:45.400Consisting of people who profess conservative beliefs or cater to right-wing audiences and they serve conservative talking points.1.00
00:01:54.300And they might even believe them or they might be full of shit.0.99
00:01:58.880It's always a little bit difficult to tell, right?1.00
00:02:01.780Because conservatism is the side on which their bread is buttered, right?
00:02:06.500They are making their living off of being right-wing.
00:02:09.940Yeah, and we should say right off the bat what everyone who discusses these guys says. You may not know them, and you should cherish that fact. Good for you, right? If we name-check Candace Owens or Haya Rychik or Ben Shapiro or Fargiato Blow or Riley Gaines, and you're like, who? Congrats. You're a better human being than we are and probably spend less time on the internet.
00:02:30.900You don't need to know these people, but it is worth saying that, you know, whether you know them or not, they are coming for you, right? They're interested in your life, right? We've got a total right-wing grifter, Chris Rufo, who is now actually making life hell for college teachers and students in Florida and potentially also in your state.
00:02:52.660We've got Vivek Ramaswamy, a sort of like venture capital grifter on the right wing, who's now apparently going to be the head of something called the DOGE or DOGE, which is the Department of Government Efficiency, a new government department dedicated to efficiency, which has two leads.
00:08:23.560Just to give our listeners maybe a sense of what this sounds like,
00:08:26.760today on your Insta story, you had a very funny example of this
00:08:29.840that is clearly a person who's hoping, who's an aspiring grifter.
00:08:33.760This is a young man who is apparently looking to launch
00:08:38.220exactly this kind of process that you're describing.
00:08:40.340Can I just say that it takes a lot for me to lash out on Instagram stories.
00:08:48.000I've gotten a lot better at just keeping every little thing to myself until I have, like, a fully formed thought for a podcast or something.0.97
00:08:55.140This morning, I saw this Daily Mail article that you're about to read, and I was just like, are you fucking kidding me?
00:09:00.620But it did prime me to be on this podcast today, so I guess it's a net good.
00:09:36.120So this is someone basically being like, the left was mean to me on dating apps, you know,
00:09:42.140sort of launching what could one day be a right-wing career.
00:09:46.020Politics can be a deeply personal matter, often something we keep to ourselves rather than making it a public spectacle of virtue signaling.
00:10:29.960Their story falls apart or they have other beliefs that sort of don't make them compatible with the conservative noise machine.
00:10:36.580But this guy is sort of he's trying, right?
00:10:38.660Yeah. And I think another kind of way that this happens to people at the beginning is sometimes people have like genuine questions or middling beliefs or are unsure about, you know, certain leftist positions.
00:10:52.280And one thing that I don't think the left is always great at is accepting and answering questions without passing judgment.
00:11:00.020And so I think the left is also involved in the creation of these people because I think that as a culture on the left, we do have to get better at like letting people be imperfect because another pipeline, right, is people have like legitimate questions or they'll feel like they're in the middle on something, you know.
00:11:19.320and then the right will see, you know, the left being mean on Twitter or whatever for having
00:11:24.620questions. Maybe genuinely, like, they don't know how HRT works, you know, on teenagers, right?
00:11:32.880And they have questions about that. Or they don't know what slogans like defund the police really
00:11:37.000refer to. And so they inquire about these things. And as a result of, again, maybe like Twitter
00:11:43.180backlash or whatever, they're like, well, if these people are being so mean to me, and the right is
00:11:48.400being so nice to me, then maybe the right is actually the party of inclusion. Maybe these
00:11:52.680are actually the same people who aren't infected by the woke mind virus. You know what I mean?
00:11:57.200And the right, like you said, the right has an infrastructure and a media ecosystem that will
00:12:02.100come in and exploit these people oftentimes at really emotionally vulnerable moments.
00:12:08.380It's not fun to get dogged on on Twitter. I've had it happen to me. And not that this always
00:12:13.740happens on Twitter, but it honestly does like half the time. And the right will see someone like
00:12:18.860genuinely struggling and be like, here's a life raft. How do you not take that?
00:12:24.260Another example of something that I saw really recently was Monica Lewinsky was campaigning
00:12:29.980online for Kamala Harris. And someone pointed out, and I thought this was really true. Someone said,
00:12:36.240after everything that happened to her, Monica Lewinsky could have been so susceptible to1.00
00:12:40.580becoming a right-wing grifter right yeah i mean talk about being literally traumatized by the
00:12:45.160democratic party and the fact that she didn't is kind of a miracle today yeah it's also getting
00:12:51.780back to the pipeline thing right like it's not just that the grifter is in a pipeline right that
00:12:56.300the grifter goes from like hawking particular kinds of brands on instagram or having a sort of
00:13:03.380socially liberal sort of twitter presence to suddenly the right-wing noise machine is that
00:13:08.200the people they're appealing to are kind of in the same pipeline. They often just don't realize
00:13:11.880it or, or they're in this on the same emotional journey, I suppose, as the grifter presents
00:13:16.500themselves as being. Yeah, totally. And again, I think sometimes we do have this culture on the
00:13:22.760left where people feel like they can't ask questions. Like, for example, I know that like
00:13:28.320sometimes my parents, you know, my parents who are like center liberals will be like, oh, I don't
00:13:34.820know, you know, and I'm more on the left than they are. And they'll be like, oh, I don't know if I
00:13:38.500can ask you about this thing. I don't know if what's appropriate to ask, what's not. And I think
00:13:42.520people in that position are unfortunately really susceptible to hearing from the right, you know,
00:13:48.520aren't all these leftists crazy and you can't even ask about anything that are. And again, I think we
00:13:53.640need to create a culture and so many people are, and I don't want to be like, you know, entirely
00:13:58.260scrutinizing of like leftists or the left in any way. But I think we can all probably agree that
00:14:02.720we need to create a culture of asking questions, of being open to people who are kind of sitting
00:14:09.360on the fence, deciding which way they're about to lean and providing a cushion for them the same
00:14:14.140way that the right does. So we've identified like one source of the grifter's like journey
00:14:21.240rightward, right? And one source of like their origin story that helps explain their conversion
00:14:27.440and their new set of avowed beliefs. And here's a question I have that maybe you're circling
00:14:32.140around a little bit, Matt, is why does this feel like it's more common, this grifter phenomenon
00:14:38.340on the right than on the left? Because on your podcast, frequent guest Taylor Lorenz, like really
00:14:43.520interesting thinker about the internet, she makes this very good point. The leftist misinformation,
00:14:49.740you know, it's not that it doesn't exist. It's that it doesn't go viral in the same way. Could
00:14:54.220you tell us a little bit about that asymmetry? Yeah, I think there's layers to the asymmetry.
00:15:00.980I think, first of all, and this is something that you're right, Taylor, and I talk about all the time, there is a right-wing media ecosystem that exists to, like, not only prop these people up, but, like, coddle them, media train them, give them various platforms of different sizes, build them up to having a primetime show.
00:15:22.140where there's no similar adjacent media ecosystem on the left
00:15:27.560because part of leftist beliefs are challenging power, right?
00:15:31.620One of the things about conservative grifters is that,
00:15:35.180among other things, they tell billionaires what they want to hear.
00:15:39.300The other thing is, again, with minority grifters,0.62
00:15:42.620the right has a problem with minorities.
00:15:45.560You can see that just in the exit polls of the most recent election, right?
00:15:48.940because they are surrounded by correct narratives of racism, homophobia, transphobia,
00:15:55.420you know, xenophobia, all of this stuff.
00:15:57.380So there is a space for tokenizing individuals who belong to different minority groups
00:17:10.580at the University of Kentucky who,0.60
00:17:12.600you know, you might've heard of her.1.00
00:17:13.980you've probably heard of Leah Thomas, but she raced against a bunch of other cis women and Leah
00:17:20.220Thomas, who is a trans swimmer in one of these national meets. And she and Leah tied for fifth
00:17:27.280place behind four cis women, which is very funny because in the cultural memory, like Riley Gaines
00:17:34.980got second place and Leah got first. And like, she had the gold taken away from her by a trans0.86
00:17:39.820woman, which is just not what happened. She got the prize of a participation trophy, basically.
00:17:43.980Exactly. Like, neither of them were on the podium. But she turned this moment of, like, I had to share fifth place with a trans woman into a full-blown career. And, you know, you were saying that it sometimes doesn't happen very quickly, but it sometimes does.
00:18:02.800Within a month of this NCAA meet, she was a Fox News regular.
00:18:36.260That's also, it's put on by Outkick, which is a Fox conservative sports news company.
00:18:42.440And she gets all of these publishing deals.
00:18:44.420She withdraws her deposit from dental school.
00:18:46.920And she, you know, is now a superstar.
00:18:49.200She spoke at CPAC and was on stage with Trump.
00:18:52.080So I think she is such an ideal grifter because, first of all, she has this pipeline that we were talking about where she was really exploited at a vulnerable moment by this media ecosystem.
00:19:05.760But also, and this speaks to your question, Moira, of, oh, do you like how I just never shut up about this stuff?
00:19:13.300You know, what is one reason that these people can go so far on the right where they can't on the left?
00:19:17.800because the right is full to the brim of misinformation
00:19:20.820and there's virtually no fact-checking on any of it.
00:19:23.740There's no accountability process.1.00
00:19:25.300And so one thing that Riley Gaines does a lot in her work1.00
00:20:13.900Yeah, I was going to say sometimes to a fault.
00:20:15.880Yes, often to a fault. But it also does mean that it's much harder for something patently false and transparently opportunistic and just sort of like wrong to gain the same kind of steam on the left because other leftists will tear it down. Right. And that's not really happening on the right where there's not really the same kind of culture of internal dissent or contention.
00:20:40.840Right. There's actually I think a lot of it like intellectual and political variance on the right. The right is quite large. They don't all agree with each other. But when they disagree, they're not tearing each other down like this. Right. Somebody who's like, well, I don't really think the trans swimmer thing is that big a deal, but I am part of this broader ideological project. So I'm just kind of kind of ignore it. Right.
00:20:59.540So the people who are really in to, you know, buying whatever she's selling, if you're if you're Riley Gaines, you can make that grift work for you without facing right wing backlash.
00:22:48.440Adrian, you, like, just put out a brilliant, hilarious new book called The Cancel Culture Panic, out now from Stanford University Press, available wherever you get your books.
00:22:58.500And it talks about this, like, victim archetype a lot, right?
00:23:01.180You use the concept of moral entrepreneurs.
00:23:04.080Could you explain to our audience what that is?
00:23:06.060So, yeah, I'm taking that from Stanley Cohen's really good book on folk devils and moral panics from the 70s.
00:23:11.300And the moral entrepreneur, according to him, is basically someone who picks up the kind of anecdotes that usually fuel a moral panic and helps them sort of win public support.
00:23:23.580So it's the mechanism by which someone presents themselves as a neutral arbiter or as a disinterested arbiter who explains to you that, no, this thing that just seems scary or annoying or just not productive or whatever is actually a sign of this huge problem.
00:23:41.300Right. And it's a way for them to like make a name for themselves. Right. It's very public facing. That's how I think of the moral entrepreneur. And then there's this other kind of right wing grifter who has a different angle. And that's like the victimizer or the provocateur or like the aggressor. Right. And these are guys mostly, although there are a growing number of women in this space, too, who go to the liberals and confront them and try and provoke them into outrage. Right.
00:24:08.320And these grifters are like selling their audiences the pleasure of like sadistic domination, right?
00:24:17.420The pleasure of making their enemies feel pain.1.00
00:24:20.420And I'm thinking here of people like Nick Fuentes, the like little neo-Nazi shit.0.99
00:24:25.500Milo Ianopoulos, I think, was a big one.0.99
00:24:27.800He was always like going to campus and being like, I'm going to say something that the Libs students don't want to hear.
00:24:32.720and then like caitlin bennett the kent state gun girl who's like i'm parading around my campus with
00:24:38.540an ar remember her yeah what what happened to her she now works for like turning points usa
00:24:45.340oh she does yeah oh wait she's talking around yeah she's around you know they're all out here
00:24:53.060like there was some incident with like a diaper like one of her friends was like wearing a diaper
00:24:57.840to like protest safe spaces he's like liberals are babies right but i think what i'm hearing from
00:25:02.360you matt is that like these are not like actually mutually exclusive categories right somebody who
00:25:10.960might start off as being like i was victimized might go on to start like aggressively uh like
00:25:19.320trying to provoke people right yeah and then somebody who's like trying to start shit might0.83
00:25:24.300be like look i was canceled i was canceled even after i you know went trying to get canceled it's0.90
00:25:29.300like a cycle. Yeah. And in the cases that I've observed, I think it really often flows from
00:25:35.260the, I was persecuted by the liberals to these, you know, really like honestly careers built on
00:25:42.940cruelty that I think even the people conducting them would be really shocked had the younger
00:25:49.720version of themselves seen what they, what they had become. You know, Riley Gaines in the early,
00:25:55.420early interviews she did after her race tying with Leah Thomas, she was, you know, clearly upset
00:26:01.240about losing, which is a thing that anybody who has ever competed understands and feels totally
00:26:06.760understandable. And while I think that she always had a bone to pick with Leah being a trans woman,
00:26:14.880she still spoke relatively respectfully about Leah's trans identity. She, in an early interview,
00:26:21.440wished her well in her transition fast forward a couple years first of all she's still talking
00:26:26.840about leah thomas who i would say disappeared from the public view but really just never entered the
00:26:33.420public view because she was never a public figure herself she just immediately became you know a0.72
00:26:39.080scapegoat for conservative cruelty and riley gains is on joe rogan talking about leah's genitals
00:26:44.620And that's the kind of thing that you see a lot in these spaces where people start and they're like, you know, I don't want to rub anyone the wrong way.0.91
00:26:58.540And then they get absorbed into this media ecosystem that really encourages you to be more and more and more extreme.
00:27:05.380And that also doesn't really exist in, like, liberal media, right, the way that it does on, like, Fox News.
00:27:13.020And you see some people sort of resisting it in the moment, right?
00:27:16.080I was thinking the Riley Gaines example brings to mind Angela Carini, who fought Iman Khalif at the Olympics, and who clearly was getting drafted into the kind of Riley Gaines role, even though, you know, Iman Khalif is not trans, but it was becoming kind of a trans in sports controversy.
00:27:32.580And then she, 48 hours later, is like, oh, God, what am I helping make happen?
00:27:36.740And says, no, like, I wish I hadn't said that, right?
00:27:40.280So you can tell that these folks have a choice and you can see folks making sort of the moral one, but you're right that there is a kind of automatism. There's this kind of, you can let sort of the radicalization logic take over and you say the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And yeah, the next thing you know, you're talking to Joe Rogan about someone else's genitals, right? You're like, well, here I am. How did I get here?
00:28:06.300Yeah, that's a great point about Angela Carini.0.61
00:28:08.540The only thing standing between her and, like, you know, a house in the Hamptons is having a moral backbone.
00:30:54.800I think if you're any kind of minority also, frankly, even if you're just a white woman, like you don't even need trauma. You can just say, I'm a woman. I'm a gay man. I'm a trans person. And the excesses of identity politics on the left have gone too far. The Democrats have always wrongfully assumed that they were entitled to my vote, but no more.
00:34:49.160Also, I believe her husband is a person of color and then, or maybe it's that she's Jewish.
00:34:55.560Either way, the white supremacists that she was courting ultimately were like, you're not white enough for them, which is pretty remarkable.0.92
00:35:04.160Screaming the N-word doesn't make you white enough even, you know?0.97
00:43:09.360But some people have already succeeded under capitalism, like Lizzie Sovetsky with her like rich plastic surgeon husband or like Caitlyn Jenner. But, you know, the other thing you get is connections. You get welcomed into this like echelon of conservative political society. You also oftentimes like get fame.
00:43:27.600You know, Ali London is famous because of this. A lot of it is anti-fame, but you still have your supporters. And oftentimes, the anti-fame that comes with being like a minority identified grifter can serve as like a self-reinforcing thing for like, what I'm doing is correct. They hate me because I'm speaking truth.
00:43:49.140Right. Right. You know? Yeah. I think you're onto something with this idea that it doesn't have to be about money. Right. Like we've talked about these kind of like lesser figures who are clearly kind of like grubbing for the sort of monetizable attention that could change their lifestyle.
00:44:03.300But I think you're right to point out that a lot of these people are already really accomplished, right?
00:44:08.840So, like, J.K. Rowling, like, more money than God, you know, and has still devoted her life and really torched her legacy with her generational devotees of readers for the sake of this, like, transphobic project she's embarked on over the past couple years, right?
00:44:25.520And this morning I was listening to a New York Times podcast on my drive to work about Elon Musk and these like, frankly, kind of credulous sounding New York Times reporters were talking about how Elon Musk really turned right wing in like 2022.0.95
00:44:43.200And I'm like, where the fuck had you guys been?0.95
00:44:45.620Like he was right wing for a long time.0.99
00:44:47.960And I think part of this is that these grifters on the right are able to pretend that they've undergone this big conversion in part because a lot of people, if you're not like too online, if you're not a right-wing watcher, you might not understand these shibboleths, right?
00:45:05.440You might not be able to identify this vocabulary of radicalization, right?0.69
00:45:10.140Yeah, you're just like asking questions or like what's so wrong with that?
00:45:14.520But really everyone who's in the know knows where you got it, yeah.
00:45:17.700Right. As Esmet mentioned earlier, there are legitimately people who are just asking questions. Right. And then there are some people who say in bad faith, I'm just asking questions because what they're actually doing is promoting an agenda and trying to get their audience to reach a preordained answer. Right. Yeah. I'm looking at you, Pamela Paul. Yeah. Oh, my God. She's a classic. How many questions?
00:45:41.080I'm just asking the same question again for the 20th time this year.
00:45:46.500Nobody will let me say this, which is why I'm saying it in the New York Times, you know?
00:49:12.700Like, it can be a media environment, right?
00:49:14.520Like, by the time Megyn Kelly calls you brave on her show, you've definitely made it.
00:49:18.640But it can also be a judicial environment, right?0.94
00:49:20.460Like being picked out as like the nut du jour that like some right-wing outfit uses to sort of push some bullshit case to the Supreme Court, right?0.55
00:49:29.440Like whoever Ames is in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, right?1.00
00:49:33.980The lady who was discriminated against for being straight, she had the right claim at the right time for a conservative legal war machine that wanted to use someone like her.1.00
00:49:44.180You can link up with politicians like Ted Cruz's podcast, or you can link up with, you know, the reactionary centrists, right?
00:49:51.840Like, especially if you work, I guess, in academia, like I do, or in legacy media, like Moira does.0.99
00:49:57.220Like, were you mildly inconvenienced by wokesters?1.00
00:50:00.220Well, The Atlantic would love to hear from you, you know?1.00