Pluralistic: Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (22 Jul 2025)


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A carny barker at a podium, gesticulating with a MAGA cap. He wears a Klan hood, and his podium features products from Nu-skin, Amway and Herbalife. Behind him is an oil-painted scene of a steamship with a Trump Tower logo, at a pier in flames.

Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes (permalink)

Ever notice how many right wing influencers are on the grift? Like Alex Jones – that guy is basically Gwyneth Paltrow for conservative bros, selling the same "wellness" crap to a male audience (and not for nothing, Paltrow's victims are reliable boosters for RFK Jr's MAHA movement):

https://theweek.com/speedreads/709232/how-goop-infowars-are-selling-exact-same-wellness-products

I think that ideologically, conservatism contains elements that groom its followers to get rooked by scammers like Paltrow and Jones. First, of course, is the hierarchical nature of conservatism. Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind seeks to find a common thread running through the many different strands of "conservative" thought. "Conservatives" include libertarians; monarchists; Christian Dominionists; white nationalists; Hindu nationalists; Zionist genocidiers; eugenicists; Men's Rights Activists; etc:

https://coreyrobin.com/books/the-reactionary-mind/

Robin says the thing that all these groups share is a belief that there is a natural hierarchy in the world, and that the world is best when the born leaders are on top, and that social movements that seek to elevate inferior people over their social betters commit civilizational suicide (think of the reflex to blame everything from tanker ships colliding with bridges to Boeing jets falling out of the sky on "DEI"). Different conservative factions disagree about who should be in charge, but they all agree that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/29/jubilance/#tolerable-racism

The belief that some people are simply better than others makes conservatives easy marks for arguments from authority (think of Trump's insistence that "I alone can fix America"). It also presents an irresistible temptation to the people at the top: if you know your followers believe you are better (smarter, more righteous) than they are, then you can be pretty sure that they'll buy the things you sell them, from a "prayer cloth" to "miracle water":

https://dustoffthebible.com/Blog-archive/2012/07/25/the-worst-tbn-product-scams-of-all-time/

The conservative's mantra is "incentives matter." When you're surrounded by marks, there's a hell of a temptation to rook 'em.

But this is just the background condition for conservative vulnerability to hucksters. A key aspect of conservative ideology is hyper-individualism, and the rejection of systemic explanations for one's problems:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/19/systemic/#criminality-pure-and-simple

Poverty, unwanted pregnancy, abusive workplace situations and worse can all be blamed on "bad choices" – not systemic factors. Likewise, the MAHA movement blames chronic illnesses and contagious diseases on personal failings, such as the failure to "eat clean" and exercise regularly. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, there's a short, greased slide from this belief to a eugenic, let 'er rip response to pandemics ("Why should I shut down my yoga studio just because you didn't take care of your immune system?"):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

People who are steeped in this belief are easy marks for supplements, fad diets and quack exercise gadgets like the Thighmaster and the Abflex, which promise to "spot reduce" fat (what better expression of the rejection of systemic explanations than the belief that you can reduce the fat in one part of your body?).

It's a double whammy. If you reject the very idea that problems are systemic, then you have no use for institutions, and institutions are the only effective response to systemic problems. That primes you to reject the unsatisfying answers of science ("If you don't want to get cancer, regulate corporations and cars that dump carcinogens into the environment") in favor of individual solutions, which are, inevitably, products that someone can sell you, from alkaline water to electrosmog-shielding hats.

Rejecting systemic explanations also primes you to believe in conspiracy theories. This is why antisemitism is called "the socialism of fools": rather than fighting against the system of primacy of extractive finance capital over the productive economy, you spend all your time locked in a one-sided battle with an imaginary cabal of evil Jewish bankers.

Conspiratorial beliefs make you especially vulnerable to a grifter's sales pitch that goes like this: "Of course they don't want you to drink raw milk, otherwise you'd be as powerful as they are." Variations on this theme include "buy the miracle anti-aging cure that only billionaires are privy to" and "buy a bump stock before the conspiracy to take away your right to self-defense makes them illegal."

And indeed, when you look into right-wing movements, you inevitably find someone on the grift, from Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson hawking ripoff "cash for gold" schemes (and ripoff "gold for cash" schemes); to Donald Trump with his fake watches, fake phones, and Made in China MAGA stuff:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/687574/trump-mobile-plan-bad-deal

This isn't new. The far right has always relied on the direct mail industry, which used the heavily federally subsidized US Post Office to send anti-government spending sales pitches to gullible, easily frightened people:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2n4w5r7

These direct mail houses primarily serve two types of customers: people hawking scams, and right wing fundraisers. The Venn diagram of these two groups is an almost perfect circle.

And of course, the entire multi-level marketing (MLM) industry is grounded in far-right movements and cults. The Heritage Foundation was founded with money from the DeVoses and van Andels, who made their riches off of Amway. MLMs are a conspiracy: virtually no one ever buys any MLM products, except for the "distributors" who are told they are entrepreneurs and are convinced that they are the only ones secretly making quota by buying up merch on their own credit cards and filling their garages and sewing-rooms with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

The guys at the top know this, which is why they alone among all product manufacturers report on their industry's "sales" by adding up how much merchandise their distributors have ordered, not how much of all that merch has been sold to people who actually use it. The secret fact that there is no market for MLM junk allows MLM bosses to victimize their marks for a second time. Each victim believes that they alone are failing to sell the MLM's crap, which means that they can be duped into paying for expensive, useless "courses" on how to be better at selling.

This one-two punch (rip someone off, then rip them off again) is a familiar pattern among con-artists. Every successful con ends with a "blow-off," that is supposed to leave the mark uncertain about whether they were really scammed (a three-card monte gang might use a fake cop who breaks up the game, who sends everyone running). Sometimes, con artists seek out the same mark after the fact and hit them again (sometimes through a confederate). After all, a mark who falls for a scam has already demonstrated that they are the type of mark that falls for scams.

Digital con artists do this, too: you've probably gotten an email from a scammer pretending to be a cop of some kind, claiming that they are investigating a scammer gang. These people indiscriminately spam the internet with these "I can help you recover your money/jail your victimizer" messages as a way of attracting people who have already been scammed and thus demonstrated their vulnerability to scammers like them.

This is another place where direct mail, MLM and conservative con artists overlap. Right-wing scammers sell each other mailing lists of frightened, easily victimized people who can be pitched with gold bars, supplements, and fundraisers to help imaginary Christians being targeted for extermination in Africa. MLMs pitch themselves to MLM victims: "Did you get scammed by Amway? Come sell Nu-Skin, we're the Amway that's not a scam!"

These scammers know their audience and they have an unerring instict for an opportunity to fleece them again. Take the Dorrs, a multigenerational clan of far-right grifters who've been rooking easily frightened conservatives since the Goldwater campaign. The Dorrs run a bunch of "charities" whose IRS filings reveal that they are pocketing 90%+ of the money they raise. Five years ago, the Dorrs hit on a great scam: fundraising for anti-mask-mandate and "re-open" anti-lockdown groups (and keeping the money):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/20/no-mask-no-service/#dorr-brothers

They were succeeded by waves of covid grifters, like the con artists peddling ivermectin and chloriquine. Incentives matter.

At the time, I called the Dorrs the Flu Klux Klan, but what I didn't know then was that the Klan is also a MLM scam.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/hatred_and_profits_under_the_hood_of_the_ku_klux_klan.pdf

The Klan's second incarnation, in the 1920s, was designed the Southern Publicity Association, a PR firm that had sold both the Salvation Army and Prohibition. They conceived of an MLM-like structure that was wildly successful: Klansmen who brought in new members got to keep $4 of their $10 membership fee (more than $50 in today's money); the remaining funds were shared between top Klan boss William Simmons and various regional bosses, who served as uplines to the recruiters.

Over time, this system developed into a true pyramid scheme, with a bewildering series of tiers: Kleagles, King Kleagles and Imperial Kleagles, as well as Great Goblins, Grand Dragons, and Imperial Wizards, each of whom got a piece of the action from their complex downlines. Klansmen didn't just pay the membership fee, either: they had to buy robes, life-insurance, special Bibles, helmets, candles, swords, and even special robe dry-cleaning services (they also paid annual membership dues). All of this money filtered up through the pyramid's levels, a vast sum of money funneled from frightened, angry working class rubes to the grifters who made millions off of them.

Many people have observed that one of the reasons conservatives govern so badly is that they campaign on the idea that "governments are wasteful and inefficient," which means that if they run the government in a wasteful and inefficient fashion, they only prove their point. In the same fashion: right-wing grifters who pitch you on the idea an evil cabal has rigged the game, and then take your money and rip you off, are demonstrating the correctness of their pitch.

For grifters who prey on angry, bitter rubes, stealing from the rubes only makes them angrier and more bitter – and thus easier to fleece. That's why the postmortems on the right's greatest everyday heroes turn out to be a litany of instances in which they were scammed. That's the story of Ashli Babbitt, the January 6 insurrectionist who was killed while trying to penetrate the Speaker's lobby:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-simple-thing-biden-can-do-to-reset

Babbitt was first rooked by an Army recruiter, who got her sent to Iraq – a war cooked up by right-wing scammers – eight times. After her deployments, she tried to run a small pool supply company, which was driven out of business by a monopoly called Pool Supply, which routinely breaks the law to drive competitors out of business, bragging about its lawbreaking even after getting fined by the FTC:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/b2icontent.irpass.cc/603/181440.pdf

Then Babbitt went to a loan shark, a "merchant cash advance" company called EBF Partners, who bailed her out with a loan at 169%, but didn't call it a loan, in order to avoid lending regulations, which is why she wasn't able to sue them when they drove her to default:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/story/2021-01-07/san-diego-woman-killed-in-capitol-siege-was-iraq-war-veteran

That's when she ended up in Qanon, a cult full of easy marks getting suckered for everything they had, who are told that their problems are the result of evil individuals, not a rigged system. Then, she got shot dead while trying to overthrow the US government.

Babbitt was a serial victim of con artists. These are exactly the kind of ripoff creeps that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the FTC and the DOJ spent the Biden years fighting with a vigor not seen in generations. Trump has shut them all down and wiped out nearly all of their good work, including the most basic, common-sense shit imaginable, like bans on junk fees, and the "click to cancel" rule (which says that services need to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for it):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

In the 2016 presidential debates, Hillary Clinton accused Trump of cheating in his business dealings. Trump didn't deny it. He replied, "That makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Trump was elected by the people who rip off the frightened and angry: cryptocurrency hustlers ("the dollar is gonna collapse!"), sports gambling moguls, and anti-DEI peddlers ("lesser people have been elevated to power by social justice warriors and they'll kill us all"). No wonder he's shut down every agency and rule aimed at preventing ripoff artists from preying on everyday Americans:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-incredible

It's a movement powered and funded by scammers who've discovered the ultimate can't-lose proposition: perfect a pitch that preys on the angry and scared; rip them off (making them more angry and scared); and repeat.

I've lost a dear friend to MAGA. When I reflect on her life, I see the same pattern. Both she and her mother were abused by her mother's boyfriends when she was growing up. She married a terrible guy who cheated on her, who then used threats to take away her kids to keep her from demanding child support or half the house. She was pressured into an affair with her married boss, who then fired her.

Today, she believes in conspiracies, and disbelieves in medicine. She supports Trump, concentration camps and immigration crackdowns (despite being the child of a refugee and a former undocumented immigrant).

This person is deeply unhappy, and faces severe financial strain with no end in sight. What's more, the things she supports – not getting vaccinated, voting for Trump, terrorizing migrants – will not solve any of her problems. Supporting these things can only make things worse, which will make her more frightened, more angry, and more precarious, and thus an easier mark for the next right-wing grifter.

Trump is the head of a cult that has figured out how to turn fear, precarity and pain into the top of a sales funnel that destroys anyone who gets caught in it.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago History of the ingredients in a banana split https://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0405/p18s02-hfks.html

#15yrsago Similarities between gold farming networks and drug dealing networks https://web.archive.org/web/20100722104318/http://www.aurumahmad.com/vwe/gold-farming/

#15yrsago Where the global rifts are in the secret copyright treaty https://web.archive.org/web/20100724061132/http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5222/125/

#15yrsago How Heinlein plotted https://memex.craphound.com/2010/07/21/how-heinlein-plotted/

#10yrsago Paul Erdős’s FBI file https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/jul/21/nothing-indicate-nothing-indicate-subject-had-any-/

#10yrsago Hackers can pwn a Jeep Cherokee from the brakes and steering to the AC and radio https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

#5yrsago Trump's spent a billion on re-election https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#moneyball

#5yrsago As We May Think https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#story-not-article

#5yrsago Luxury homes to be washed away https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#schadenflooding

#5yrsago The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#tomine

#5yrsago Christopher Brown's Failed State https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/21/the-thief-of-joy/#failed-state

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • Canny Valley: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Matt Stoller (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/).

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1011 words yesterday, 7152 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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