There's one really pressing empirical question at the bottom of all of this. Documenting the scale of the grift both in terms of the money to be made and the shamelessness of the deception in many cases is depressingly easy. Depressing because it shows that most of the people involved have very little fear of getting caught either by law enforcement or by their marks (which traditionally is the thing a con man really has to be afraid of).
What's harder to say is who the marks actually are and what this tells us about them, particularly in terms of telling us about their material circumstances.
We know that there's a long-running strategy among grifters on the right of sometimes spending a ton of their own money (or money they control through PACs, etc.) to buy their own grift products in order to make themselves look bigger and more popular than they are, with the hope that this will then translate into actual support. Say, spending PAC money to buy thousands of copies of a memoir or book in order to bump it up the best-seller charts, or buying poor-selling schlock promotional products and distributing them for free to cover a failed initiative. That money is mostly coming from the deep-heeled pockets of major corporate and private donors who don't really care what the money gets spent on after they donate it.
But there's enough of this stuff sloshing around, as you note, that some of it is definitely being bought by real people who really want it for some reason. What I really wonder there is whether it's like the market for guns. Fewer and fewer people are buying guns, but more guns than ever are being sold, because the remaining gun buyers buy LOTS of guns in a way that really raises questions about their household incomes--at least some of those gun buyers are in much more impoverished areas of the US and at least some of them who come into public focus don't appear to have a huge amount of disposable income. Are these guys going into credit card debt to get guns? Do they have some under-the-table income that they're diverting to that purpose? Are they skimping on everything else to keep acquiring more guns? An AR-15 costs as much as a new computer, more or less--even upper-middle class households have to think somewhat carefully about durable commodities in that price range.
So it makes a big difference whether we have a bunch of lower middle-class white conservative households buying one or two pieces of Trump schlock out of devotion versus a smaller number of conservative middle to upper-middle-class households buying a lot of it, maybe because they see it as an entry point to getting their share of the grift at some point. The Jan. 6 rioters offer examples of people in both of those categories--folks who were spending a relatively significant sum in terms of their budgets to participate in the insurrection and folks who were trying to spin their devotion to Trump and Trumpism into some advantage in their own business endeavors.
Thanks for your faithful reporting, also the wise cracks.
There's one really pressing empirical question at the bottom of all of this. Documenting the scale of the grift both in terms of the money to be made and the shamelessness of the deception in many cases is depressingly easy. Depressing because it shows that most of the people involved have very little fear of getting caught either by law enforcement or by their marks (which traditionally is the thing a con man really has to be afraid of).
What's harder to say is who the marks actually are and what this tells us about them, particularly in terms of telling us about their material circumstances.
We know that there's a long-running strategy among grifters on the right of sometimes spending a ton of their own money (or money they control through PACs, etc.) to buy their own grift products in order to make themselves look bigger and more popular than they are, with the hope that this will then translate into actual support. Say, spending PAC money to buy thousands of copies of a memoir or book in order to bump it up the best-seller charts, or buying poor-selling schlock promotional products and distributing them for free to cover a failed initiative. That money is mostly coming from the deep-heeled pockets of major corporate and private donors who don't really care what the money gets spent on after they donate it.
But there's enough of this stuff sloshing around, as you note, that some of it is definitely being bought by real people who really want it for some reason. What I really wonder there is whether it's like the market for guns. Fewer and fewer people are buying guns, but more guns than ever are being sold, because the remaining gun buyers buy LOTS of guns in a way that really raises questions about their household incomes--at least some of those gun buyers are in much more impoverished areas of the US and at least some of them who come into public focus don't appear to have a huge amount of disposable income. Are these guys going into credit card debt to get guns? Do they have some under-the-table income that they're diverting to that purpose? Are they skimping on everything else to keep acquiring more guns? An AR-15 costs as much as a new computer, more or less--even upper-middle class households have to think somewhat carefully about durable commodities in that price range.
So it makes a big difference whether we have a bunch of lower middle-class white conservative households buying one or two pieces of Trump schlock out of devotion versus a smaller number of conservative middle to upper-middle-class households buying a lot of it, maybe because they see it as an entry point to getting their share of the grift at some point. The Jan. 6 rioters offer examples of people in both of those categories--folks who were spending a relatively significant sum in terms of their budgets to participate in the insurrection and folks who were trying to spin their devotion to Trump and Trumpism into some advantage in their own business endeavors.