Episode 44: So You Want to be a Right-Wing Grifter... with Matt Bernstein

I'm gonna hanna Montana it.

Like, I'm gonna put on a blonde wig and go onto TikTok tomorrow.

And being like, the gay community exiled me for asking a few questions.

And then I'm gonna start making so much money in my blonde wig, but then take it off and go back to being like leftist podcaster with my regular.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Maura Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

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So now on to today's episode, which is going to be a great one.

Adrian, what are we talking about today?

This is the Grifter episode, and we're going to call it, so you want to be a right-wing grifter.

So we're talking about the grift machine, this vast media and fundraising and political empire that's emerged on the right, consisting of people who profess conservative beliefs or cater to right-wing audiences, and they serve.

conservative talking points and they might even believe them

or they might be full of shit.

It's always a little bit difficult to tell, right?

Because conservatism is the side on which their bread is buttered, right?

They are making their living off of being right-wing.

Yeah, 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 Below 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.

You 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 Ruffo, who is now actually making life hell for college teachers and students in Florida and potentially also in your state.

We'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.

Nice.

Along with Elon Musk, who named it after his favorite meme.

And like, is this shit dumber than seems possible?

Yes.

And it's also influencing policy.

So this is the world we live in.

It's a grifter-run nation these days.

We're so excited to get to talk about this all with Matt Bernstein, host of the Amazing A Bit Fruity podcast, which for the 0.01% of our listeners who haven't heard of it, focuses on internet culture and especially the way it relates to gender and queerness and to often enough conservative politics.

You know, we sometimes touch on radicalized influencers and Twitter spirals of famous children's book authors or how being at the Capitol on January 6th apparently makes you an expert for the lives of LGBT people and how they're coming for your children.

But Matt's been doing this work for a long time and does these amazing deep dives on your favorite slash least favorite internet mess and how it's preparing to fuck up your life.

So welcome, Matt, to the pod and thank you so much for joining us.

Welcome, Matt.

We're really glad to have you.

Oh my goodness.

Thank you so much for having me.

You know what?

When you describe what I do on my podcast, it really does read like a self-harm ritual.

It's like,

why do I spend so much time doing it?

But because it's fascinating.

It really is fascinating.

There are so many incredibly dangerous people who are, you know, enriching themselves to an enormous degree and shaping our discourse at the same time and culture.

And, you know, to your point, Mario, whether you like them or not, they're here.

They're doing very, very well.

They're accumulating enormous audiences and wealth.

And I find their, you know, psychological, social, financial reasons for getting involved in all of this work really fascinating.

Yeah.

Just to start us off, right?

Like, what's a grift?

How do we know that we're dealing with a grifter?

What's the grift economy about?

I mean, you guys might have your own definitions for this.

I'll offer mine.

Sometimes people, you know, I'll call someone a grifter and people will be like, you know, you call everyone you disagree with a grifter.

And I want to be clear that it's not everyone I disagree with, right?

Like people arrive at all sorts of political opinions in all sorts of ways.

There are lots of people who I disagree with heavily who I don't think are grifters, lots of people on the right who I don't think are grifters.

But I usually put grifting in this context, especially when it comes to influencers and people working in public media.

There are people, I would argue, most people, who put forth their beliefs about politics or what have you online and attract an audience based on people who are agree with them, maybe don't agree with them, but find their beliefs interesting.

And then there are people who do it in reverse, which is they figure out what what most people want to hear and they espouse that back to them.

They may believe it, they may not, but it doesn't really matter in the end because the effect on the public is the same.

And I think that's grifting.

So what is the significance of these pipelines, right?

Like how do people get sucked into this grifter content and how do these grifters move through their career?

Well, I focus a lot on the conservative grift within like minority communities and specifically in the LGBTQ community.

And so what that looks like is, you know, a gay person gets canceled on Twitter right for an afternoon for having like a shitty hot take or something.

And it might not even be someone who's famous or has a public following.

And oftentimes they don't at the beginning.

But like this is one popular pipeline, right?

Which is that they start by getting a bunch of shit from leftists on Twitter.

Usually the Twitter dogpile goes overboard as they often do.

And then these people will like claim persecution.

Like, well, oh, free speech is dead.

You can't even say anything.

You, the woke left is like, it's the woke mind virus.

They're controlling what you can say and what you can't.

And sometimes if you make a big enough stink about this, you can sort of reach the claws of all sorts of, you know, what I call starter programs for these people, which are Prague or U, Turning Point USA, once you get really advanced, you know, Fox News, Newsmax.

But these people can often really capitalize off of the fact that they were dogged on by Democrats or by liberals or the left or what have you.

It's kind of exactly what Candace Owens did at the beginning of her career, which is the left was mean to me.

Right.

And so I fall gently into the arms of the right who embraces me.

And especially when you're a minority, you can say, and look, I'm a gay person, I'm a trans person, Caitlin Jenner, I'm a black person.

And look how nice they're being to me.

This is my new home.

That's kind of like the most, I would say, popular pipeline.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's interesting, right?

So it's a form of opportunism that requires a certain kind of infrastructure to help it, right?

Like on the one hand, there's a person that something happens to who kind of uses that trauma or whatever to launch themselves.

And then, as you say, there are these cradling arms of right-wing media ecosystems that are sort of ready to accept you and uplift your story in some way.

Just to give our listeners maybe a sense of what this sounds like, today on your Insta story, you had a very funny example of this that is clearly a person who's hoping, who's an aspiring grifter.

This is a young man who is apparently looking to launch exactly this kind of process that you're describing.

Can I just say that

I it takes a lot for me to like lash out on Instagram stories.

I'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.

This morning, I saw this Daily Mail article that you're about to read and I was just like, are you fucking kidding me?

But it did prime me to be on this podcast today.

So I guess it's a net good.

Yeah, I was very pleased to see it.

I was like, yep, this is exactly it.

And I see what you mean.

Like, in some way, we're kind of making fun of this person who probably doesn't yet have that reach.

Yeah.

But this is the moment, right?

This is the moment when you have a choice to either...

react or not react.

Like there's a kind of attention being sought.

So what is this?

This is from the Daily Mail, noted source of definitely true news.

Quote, gay, lifelong Democrat who voted Trump opens up what's happened to him since coming out as pro-MAGA.

So this is someone basically being like, the left was mean to me on dating apps.

You know, sort of launching what could one day be a right-wing career.

Politics can be a deeply personal matter, often something we keep to ourselves rather than making it a public spectacle of virtue signaling.

I can't stand that.

Today, I've decided to speak up about this because I have a gut feeling that if I don't, I will live to regret it.

In the past week, the lack of moral clarity, especially on the American political left, has horrified me.

Maybe we're going to see this guy on Fox News in three years.

Maybe we're not, right?

Like, some of these people, like you mentioned, Candace Owens, really ascend to the lofty heights of conservative media stardom.

And a lot of these things fizzle out, right?

Like, you can see someone making a real genuine play for it, and it just doesn't connect.

They're not interesting on camera.

Their story falls apart or they have other beliefs that sort of don't make them compatible with the conservative noise machine.

But this guy is sort of, he's trying, right?

Yeah.

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.

And one thing that I don't think the left is always great at is accepting and answering questions without passing judgment.

And 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 will have like legitimate questions or they'll feel like they're in the middle on something.

And then the right will see, you know, the left being mean on Twitter or whatever for having questions.

Maybe, maybe genuinely, like they don't know how HRT works, you know, on teenagers, right?

And they have questions about that.

Or they don't know what slogans like defund the police really refer to.

And so they inquire about these things.

And as a result of, again, maybe like Twitter backlash or whatever, they're like, well, if these people are being so mean to me and the right is being so nice to me, then maybe the right is actually the party of inclusion.

Maybe these are actually the sane people who aren't infected by the woke mind virus.

You know what I mean?

So, and the right, like you said, the right has an infrastructure and a media ecosystem that will come in and exploit these people oftentimes at really emotionally vulnerable moments.

Like, it's not fun to get dogged on on Twitter.

I've had it happen to me.

And not that this always happens on Twitter, but it honestly does like half the time.

And the right will see someone like genuinely struggling and be like, here's a life raft.

How do you not take that?

Another example, something that I saw really recently was Monica Lewinsky was campaigning online for Kamala Harris.

And someone pointed out, and I thought this was really true, someone said, after everything that happened to her, Monica Lewinsky could have been so susceptible to becoming a right-wing grifter, right?

Yeah.

I mean, talk about being literally traumatized by the Democratic Party.

And the fact that she didn't is kind of a miracle today.

Yeah.

It's also getting back to the pipeline thing, right?

Like it's not just that the grifter is in a pipeline, right?

That the grifter goes from like hawking particular kinds of brands on Instagram or having a sort of socially liberal sort of Twitter presence to suddenly the right-wing noise machine is that the people they're appealing to are kind of in the same pipeline.

They often just don't realize it or they're on the same emotional journey, I suppose, as the grifter presents themselves as being.

Yeah, totally.

And again, I think sometimes we do have this culture on the left where people feel like they can't ask questions.

Like, for example, I know that like sometimes my parents, you you know, my parents who are like center liberals will

be like, oh, I don't know, you know, and I'm more on the left than they are.

And they'll be like, oh, I don't know if I can ask you about this thing.

I don't know if what's appropriate to ask, what's not.

And I think people in that position are unfortunately really susceptible to hearing from the right, you know, aren't all these leftists crazy and you can't even ask about anything?

And again, I think we need to create a culture.

And so many people are.

And I don't want to be like, you know, entirely scrutinizing of like leftists or the left in any way.

But I think we can all probably agree that we need to create a culture of asking questions, of being open to people who are kind of sitting on the fence, deciding which way they're about to lean and providing a cushion for them the same way that the right does.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So we've identified like one source of the Grifters' like journey rightward, right?

And one source of like their origin story that helps explain their conversion and their new set of avowed beliefs.

And here's a question I have that maybe you're circling around a little bit, Matt, is why does this feel like it's more common, this grifter phenomenon on the right than on the left?

Because on your podcast, frequent guest Taylor Lorenz, like really interesting thinker about the internet, she makes this very good point that leftist misinformation, you know, it's not that it doesn't exist, it's that it doesn't go viral in the same way.

Could you tell us a little bit about that asymmetry?

Yeah, I think

there's layers to the asymmetry.

I 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 prime time show.

where there's no similar adjacent media ecosystem on the left because part of leftist beliefs are challenging power, right?

One of the things about conservative grifters is that, among other things, they tell billionaires what they want to hear.

The other thing is, again, with minority grifters, the right has a problem with minorities.

You can see that just in the exit polls of the most recent election, right?

Because they are surrounded by correct narratives of racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, all of this stuff.

So there is a space for tokenizing individuals who belong to different minority groups that doesn't exist on the left.

Like, if anything, maybe we need like a token cishet or a white man.

Oh, shit, we got to get one on the podcast now.

Oh, God.

We have Jon Stewart.

We have.

What's his face?

John Oliver.

We have all the Johns.

At least one of the pods save America, guys.

At least.

One of them.

At least one of them is.

I know.

You know, we've been talking about the grifter,

and I think it might be helpful for us to like zoom in and give our listeners an example.

So, like, who do you guys is like the platonic ideal of a right-wing grifter?

Well, I mean, I just did an episode on my podcast, A Bit Fruity, about Riley Gaines,

who is

princess of Grift Nation.

She's really interesting to me because she is this former college swimmer.

She would race in like the Division I NCAA national meets.

I don't have the most expertise on talking about collegiate sports, so I apologize if I'm like getting the NCAA thing wrong.

But she was a college swimmer at the University of Kentucky who, you know, you might have heard of her.

You've probably heard of Leah Thomas, but

she raced against a bunch of other cis women and Leah Thomas, who is a trans swimmer in one of these national meets.

And she and Leah tied for fifth place behind four cis women, which is very funny because in the cultural memory, like Riley Gaines got second place and Leah got first and like she had the gold taken away from her by a trans woman, which is just not what happened.

Like she got deprived of a participation trophy, basically.

Exactly.

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.

Within a month of this NCAA meet, she was our Fox News regular.

And she was 22 years old at the time.

And so I think this speaks to all of the things, right?

How quickly the right-wing news media can come in and find a story that fits their narrative or doesn't, right?

Like it would have been a lot more useful for them probably if she did come in second to Leah, but they tied in fifth and that was as good as it was going to get for, you know, Rupert Murdoch.

So they swoop in, they say, here, here's a microphone, air your grievances about having to tie fifth.

And then she gets a podcast that's also, it's put on by Outkick, which is a Fox conservative sports news company.

And she gets all of these publishing deals.

She withdraws her deposit from dental school.

And she, you know, is now a superstar.

She spoke at CPAC and was on stage with Trump.

So 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.

But also, and this speaks to your question, Moira, of, oh, do you like how I just never shut up about this stuff?

You know, what is one reason that these people can go so far on the right where they can't on the left?

Because the right is full to the brim of misinformation, and there's virtually no fact-checking on any of it.

There's no accountability process.

And so, one thing that Riley Gaines does a lot in her work is just lie.

She's lied about a number of school shooters being transgender and like very occasionally she'll delete something if it's like really, really wrong, but usually she won't.

And that's a pattern that is true of Haya Reich, who's another one, and of Elon Musk, right?

And Elon Musk owns the platform.

He's not fact-checking if you say a shooter was trans and they weren't, because he, those lies exist to prop up a worldview that conservatives want to perpetuate.

I think this is a really good point, Matt.

You're circling around this idea that the left has a

robust tradition of internal dissent and critique, right?

We are a ragtag group of movements and people that are fighting with each other all the time and we're critiquing each other.

Yes, I was going to say, sometimes to a fault.

Yes, 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 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, right?

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 going to kind of ignore it, right?

So 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.

You know, you're kind of troubling.

You're kind of ruining my plans for the podcast, Matt.

No!

Because I came in being like, okay.

You're kicking me off.

Well, I came in being like, I have a taxonomy of two kinds of right-wing grifters, right?

So I think of them as victims and like victimizers or like victims and provocateurs, right?

So there are people who make their living claiming to have been victimized by a liberal excess, right?

Like Riley Gaines.

And then there are people who are like going out to the liberals and trying to provoke them, right?

So on the one hand, you have a lot of people who are like, I

was a liberal.

I was on the left.

I voted Democratic.

In like your work, Matt, a lot of them are like people of color or they're gay men or whatever the case may be.

And they've got these like quote-unquote liberal bona fides or like identity markers that are supposed to mark them as like belonging to this one tribe.

And that increases their authenticity when they can then turn around and be like, it's too much even for me.

Right.

And they can go and activate their audience with this like moral authority of their own suffering and persecution and like invite their listeners or their readers to join them in like righteous outrage.

Yeah, it's a very like I was a lifelong leftist

until non-binary people came along.

But then someone yelled at me on Twitter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the Candace Owens archetype.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Adrienne, 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.

And it talks about this like victim archetype a lot, right?

You use the concept of moral entrepreneurs.

Could you explain to our audience what that is?

So yeah, I'm taking that from Stanley Cohen's really good book on folk devils and moral panics from the 70s.

And 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.

So 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.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

And it's a way for them to like make a name for themselves, right?

It's very public-facing, is 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?

And these grifters are like selling their audiences

the pleasure of like sadistic domination, right?

The pleasure of making their enemies feel pain.

And I'm thinking here of people like Nick Fuentes, the like little neo-Nazi shit.

Milo Ioonopoulos, I think was a big one.

He was always like going to campus and being like, I'm going to say something that the Lib students don't want to hear.

And then like Caitlin Bennett, the Kent State gun girl who's like, I'm parading around my campus with an AR.

Remember her?

Yeah, what happened to her?

She now works for like Turning Points USA.

Oh, she does?

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Like, she's kicking around.

Yeah.

She's around.

You know, they're all out here.

Like, there was some incident with like a diaper.

Like, one of her friends was like wearing a diaper to like protest safe spaces.

He's like, liberals are babies, right?

But I think what I'm hearing from you, Matt, is that like

these are not like

actually mutually exclusive categories, right?

Somebody who might start off as being like, I was victimized might go on to start like aggressively

like trying to provoke people, right?

Yeah.

And then somebody who's like trying to start shit might be like, look, I was canceled.

I was canceled even after I, you know, went trying to get canceled.

It's like a cycle.

Yeah.

And in the cases that I've observed, I think it really often flows from the, I was persecuted by the liberals to these, you know, really like honestly careers built on cruelty that I think even the people conducting them would be really shocked had the younger version of themselves seen what they what they had become.

You know, Riley Gaines, in the early, early interviews she did after her race tying with Leah Thomas, she was, you know, clearly upset about losing, which is a thing that anybody who has ever competed understands and feels.

Totally understandable.

And while I think that she always had a bone to pick with Leah being a trans woman, she still spoke relatively respectfully about Leah's trans identity.

She, in an early interview, wished her well in her transition.

Fast forward a couple years, first of all, she's still talking about Leah Thomas, who I would say disappeared from the public view, but really just never entered the public view because she was never a public figure herself.

She just immediately became, you know, a scapegoat for conservative cruelty.

And Riley Gaines is on Joe Rogan talking about Leah's genitals.

And 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.

I just have questions, da-da-da-da.

And then they get absorbed into this media ecosystem that really encourages you to be more and more and more extreme.

And that also doesn't really exist

in like liberal media, right?

The way that it does on like Fox News.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And you see some people sort of resisting it in the moment, right?

I was thinking the Riley Gaines example brings to mind Angela Karini, who fought Iman Khalif at the Olympics, and who clearly was getting drafted into the kind of Riley Gaines role, even though Iman Khalif is not trans, but it was becoming kind of a trans in sports controversy.

And then she, 48 hours later, is like, oh, God, what am I helping make happen?

And says, no, like,

I wish I hadn't said that, right?

So 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, 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?

Yeah, that's a great point about Angela Karini.

The only thing standing between her and like, you know, a house in the Hamptons is having a moral backbone.

Yeah.

And I'm glad she does because she could have been a star.

This is my tragedy, too.

I'm ready to sell out.

I want that house.

Oh, my God.

We could all be so rich, you guys, the three of us.

We could be on the beach right now if we turned right wing tomorrow.

We used to be feminist podcasters.

Now we are blowing the whistle.

Again, call me Barry.

When I was posting that stuff on my Instagram story this morning about the gay guy who voted for Trump, who has then written up in the Daily Mail about it, I was reading some of my DMs and someone was like,

someone messaged me and they were like, I'm a Native American bisexual trans man.

I could be fucking loaded.

And it's like, you know.

It's like, kid, go, go get it, girl.

This This is great.

Times are tough.

We're going to see more grifters.

Yeah.

I mean, I love that.

We're all hawking our Patreons like right at the beginning of this.

So, like, yeah.

But, but I will say about that, like, yes.

And there's a reason that every leftist podcaster is on Patreon and why the right-wing ones, for the most part, don't have to be because they get contracts with these media conglomerates.

Yeah.

There's no leftist media conglomerate, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, we would obviously do a big left-wing sugar daddy.

It's way easier than signing up, like than having to create Patreon-only content.

But the problem is like that money's not flowing.

So I'm still waiting for my Soros checks, right?

Like we're easy.

I keep being told that I'm a paid agent.

And I'm like, well, then why aren't I getting the money?

Yeah.

I know.

If you just listened to Elon Musk, you'd think that I had a house in the Hamptons and it was paid for by Soros.

But

I did just do this episode that's airing on my podcast tomorrow where at the end, I'm like, okay, who's a billionaire who's like liberal at least and Mark Cuban comes to mind yeah and I'm like I'm like Mark

fund us

yeah

no like do it

so I think we're getting there we promised our listeners in our title you know news they can use right as we say times are tough So you've decided to sell your soul and become a conservative grifter.

How do we do it?

Like, let's give them a step-by-step on how to really really sell out.

And I think we've named a couple of these things already, but let's really drill down on them.

So, I would say, like, right, the stage one is the err scene, right?

You have something bad happen to you, some kind of trauma, and you decide in that moment, fuck it.

I'm going to make this my entire identity, right?

How do our listeners have to do this?

What's important in order to have a proper er scene for a career in right-wing grifting?

I think if you're any kind of minority, also, frankly, even if you're just a white woman, 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.

I voted Democrat my entire life, and I'm done.

I'm seeking truth, and I'm leaving the left.

That's a really key part.

You have to mention leaving the left if you want your daily mail article.

Yeah, so this is already,

I'm taking it.

I'm taking notes, yeah?

Am I?

Again, my followers on Instagram this morning were being like, we feel like you could do this.

And just like,

but that's the thing.

Anyone could do this.

All you have to say is like, I was a lifelong liberal, but then insert like single random thing that went too far.

I was a lifelong liberal and then I saw someone on TikTok using neo neo-pronouns.

And that's why I voted for a fascist.

Yeah.

I was asked whether I identified as queer.

Boom.

Yeah.

There it is.

Yeah.

Yes.

I was asked to state my pronouns at the beginning of a board meeting.

And I can't believe how far the woke mind virus has gone.

D-E-I, like sprinkle in a little D-E-I.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a good one now.

That's a good garnish to use.

And just start making TikToks.

Just start tweeting.

Just, oh, say that you're red-pilled, that your eyes have been open.

You are leaving the Matrix.

They don't want you to know this.

Totally.

Oh, they don't want you to know this.

You did your own research.

Oh, yeah.

For sure.

Finally, I'm brave enough to say the truth.

That's a big one.

Yeah.

Totally.

I know I'm going to get canceled for this.

Oh, my God.

Oh, beautiful.

I can hear a cash register opening whenever I hear that phrase.

I'm calling Hermes as I type on Twitter.

But I mean, like, in some way, right, like it is kind of time-dependent, right?

Like, you have to, as you say, like, DEI wouldn't have flown like four years ago, and now you got to do it.

But probably there's also a moment when DEI will be over.

Like, you kind of have to have the right moment.

Like, it's not that the Grift machine is always open to all comers who say anything.

I mean, woke mind virus is sort of like a constant.

You can probably always do woke mind virus.

But, like,

the whole Riley Gaines thing, they needed someone to slot into

that spot of like cis athlete deprived of, well, in this case, a participation trophy.

Fourth place.

Deprived of something by a trans athlete, right?

Like in some way, like if that had happened, if that meet had happened five years prior, my guess is Riley Gaines could not have ridden the train as far as she did, right?

Totally.

And also, I do want to say, we talk about, I talk about how easy this stuff is.

But the truth is, if you look at the grifter space, there are people who are trying and not succeeding.

And kind of a recurring joke on left Twitter is like, oh, you know, insert grifter here just doesn't have the juice.

Yeah.

There are some grifters who really

treat it like an art form and those are the ones who succeed.

And then there are some who are half-heartedly like,

okay, there's that white girl.

I forget her name, but she made a TikTok where she just said the N-word.

This was, I think, last summer, maybe early last summer.

And immediately she was trying to cancel herself into getting that Fox News spot.

Right.

And it was so transparent and it was such an unsophisticated grift, right?

Yeah.

And she did not end up succeeding.

I think her name was Lily something.

Also, I believe her husband is a person of color.

And then, or maybe it's that she's Jewish.

Either way, the white supremacists that she was courting ultimately were like, you're not white enough

for them.

Which is pretty remarkable.

Screaming me N-word doesn't make you white enough, even, you know?

Like, exactly.

Exactly.

But the ones who are really good at it, they know how to maneuver their grift from thing to thing.

Another grifter that I made a podcast episode about is Ollie London.

Oh, my God.

The K-pop community is super traumatized by my mention of this name.

Moira, are you Googling Ollie London?

Yes.

Sorry.

Oh, no.

Matt, please explain this to Maura.

Maura, do not look up anything.

Let's have Moira react to this in real time.

This is rough.

Okay, okay, okay.

This is rough.

This is this is kind of though, like

you were talking about like the platonic ideal of a grifter.

I think it's kind of Ollie London.

So Ollie London is a British man who

became like had, are you, are you reading about him?

No spiders.

No spiders.

Oh, this is, this is really morbid.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Matt, go on, go on.

This is really extreme.

So he developed this K-pop fixation in the mid-2010s and started getting tons and tons and tons of plastic surgery, you know, allegedly hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plastic surgery to look Korean.

This is a white British man.

And starts identifying as trans racial.

And for so many different reasons, this drives Twitter crazy.

This drives the K-pop community on Twitter crazy, which is a huge niche on Twitter.

And it drives the trans community crazy because from the beginning, you could feel that he was like

maybe

seeding these little like sprouts of I'm going to be like an anti-trans grifter in some way by identifying as transracial.

This is kind of also in the wake of like Rachel Dolezal,

where everyone was like, well, if you can be transracial, then what's next?

Are we just trans everything?

You know what I mean?

And eventually he says, okay, not only am I I a trans-Korean person, but then he starts actually apparently for a few months transitioning to female, like starts wearing a wig or maybe grow out his hair.

I don't know.

That would be impressive, I guess.

But after like, after like a very, very short time of being a trans-Korean woman,

which I'm saying all this in air quotes.

I know this is not a video podcast, but I need you to know that.

I can confirm so many air quotes.

Yes.

After a few months of being a trans-Korean woman, Ollie London says, I am a born-again Christian.

I am detransitioning.

And at this point, he has like a really, really botched face, as is what happens when you spend so much money getting like 20 cosmetic surgeries trying to look like a different race.

And he starts going on Fox News all the time to be like, this is what gender ideology did to me.

Mind you,

he was an adult the entire time.

And he, you know, he made all of these decisions himself.

But he, he basically was like, this, yes, this amorphous gender ideology like coerced me into thinking that I wanted to be trans-Korean and da-da-da-da-da.

So ridiculous.

So he rode that way for a while.

He published a book immediately, which was wild.

It's called Gender Madness.

I've read it.

I know, actually.

Yeah.

Wait, seriously, Adrian?

This is what I do for a living.

It sucks.

I mean, you should fire as ghostwriter is what I'm saying.

I hate myself, but I don't hate myself that much.

Adrian is the only person on earth who has read this book.

Yeah, that's right.

There's one copy here and like 90,000 at the Heritage Foundation just like gathering beasts.

Well, I mean, Moira, I hope you're right, but honestly, I don't think you are because

this book has good reviews on Goodreads.

You know,

Ollie London has, I think, close to a million followers on Twitter.

And the thing is, I mean, not that the focus has really moved away from the anti-trans grift on on the right, but to the extent that he could, he's maneuvered around different things.

So he became like really balls to the wall for Israel.

And now Ollie London, or at least at the time that I made that podcast episode a few months ago, Ollie London's profile picture on Twitter was like him wearing like an IDF vest.

I guess he took a PR trip to Israel.

That's so dark.

It's so dark.

It's so dark.

But he's a very, very, very good professional grifter.

And, you know, that's the only compliment I'll give him.

Moment of silence.

Yeah.

No, I'm just, I'm just absorbing all this information.

It's a lot.

It's a lot to, you're giving us a lot to chew on here, Matt.

I'm sorry.

So I'm kind of wondering, like...

Ali London maybe is a little bit different, but like it almost seems to me like there's actually a stage zero.

Like you have the stage one, which is like some kind of constructed offense or whatever.

But there's this other thing.

You have to have this pre-existing identity or like you're the least likely person to ever turn conservative, right?

I think about this a lot because like the political correctness panic, which I've written about, has a lot of this where like I was a lifelong Democrat and then when you talk to these people again and again, which given how long people worried about political correctness, people did, you realize that their conversion kind of kept just having happened, right?

They're like, oh, I've voted for Democrats all my life, but this election, and it's like, didn't you say that four years ago, right?

So there is this kind of moment where you have to be like the last guy you'd expect to go MAGA, right?

Like, but in fact, of course, many of these people have been wallowing in various right-wing fever swamps for a long time.

That's, right, after all, what gives you probably the sense of what kind of anecdote and framing will catch on.

It's not an accident, right?

People have to have a little bit of an instinct, meaning they are already plugged into the very machine that they claim only to discover when liberals started being mean to them, right?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah, that's right.

And

you're right.

A lot of them do say, like, oh, I was just, I mean, how many takes of this I've read in the last week since the election?

I never thought I'd be out here saying I proudly voted for Trump.

And yet.

And the reason that's the refrain you hear over and over again is because, you know, the right does not necessarily need to develop a ton of new voices that are, you know, white men who grew up with a picture of Ronald Reagan on their wall.

Right.

Those are indeed the first people that you'd believe would be, you know, campaigning for Trump.

No tie wearers, yes.

Yeah.

Young men who look like old men, yes.

As a white man named Jonathan from Connecticut, I never thought I would vote for Trump.

Like I did.

But, you know, it's so much more of a compelling refrain.

I was, you know, I was just seeing this with like...

Jewish women did overwhelmingly vote for Kamala more than almost any other cohort besides black women.

But there were a few who have gone really, really extreme.

One who I'm thinking of is a former real housewife of New York named Lizzie Savetsky, who's like a kind of just.

Do you know her?

Well, I know real housewives of New York, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Lizzie Savetsky, like in this election cycle, like really came out really hard for Trump because she kind of like...

it seems, deluded herself into thinking that Kamala was not also extremely pro-Israel.

And so she's like, well, if we want Israel, then we have to have Trump.

And she like had a whole like MA-themed election viewing party.

And it was like Trump popcorn, Trump cupcakes.

It was like really zero to 100 on the cult leader kind of stuff.

But yeah, she posted this long statement and she was like, I never thought I'd be posting a statement like this.

And it's like,

you and everyone else.

Yeah.

I also want to add to that end, like, this is already an extraordinarily wealthy woman.

And sometimes you do see wealthy people doing the grift, right?

Caitlin Jenner being one.

There is more to gain from conservative grifting than just money.

I think the average person wants money because that is the average person's concern under like American capitalism.

But some people have already succeeded under capitalism, like Lizzie Savetsky with her like rich plastic surgeon husband, or like Caitlin 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.

Yeah.

You know, Ollie 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.

Right, 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.

But I think you're right to point out that a lot of these people are already really accomplished, right?

So 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?

And this morning, I was listening to a New York Times podcast on my drive 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.

And I'm like, where the fuck have you guys been?

Like he was right wing for a long time, right?

And 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 the shibboleth, right?

You might not be able to identify this vocabulary of radicalization, right?

Because

yeah, you're just like asking questions or like, what's so wrong with that?

But really, everyone who's in the know knows where you got it.

Yeah.

Right.

As Asmet 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.

Right.

Because what they're actually doing is promoting an agenda and trying trying to get their audience to reach a preordained answer, right?

Yeah, I'm looking at you, Pamela Paul.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh.

She's a classic.

How many questions do we like?

I'm just asking the same question again

for the 20th time this year.

Yeah.

Nobody will let me say this, which is why I'm saying it in the New York Times, you know?

Yes, yes.

It's very Joe Rogan, too.

It's like, I can't believe how silenced you are for the Joe Rogan podcast.

I didn't realize those were like three-hour episodes.

They're just like massive and long.

He goes on and on and on.

I just did this episode with Taylor about, Taylor's basically my co-host at this point, but I just did this episode with her about the Manosphere.

And for the first time, I really sat down and watched a bunch of Joe Rogan.

And

goodness gracious, there is a whole world out there that I don't even know about.

Like people who listen to this.

But that might bring us to like step two, right?

Or stage two, which is that like becoming a right-wing grifter

allows these people to like really find a mic, you know, and get access and plugged into these massive environments where they have a ton, ton more influence, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

And I also think that

I don't know if you were going to ask me for a cure because I don't

like.

We live in a

very grift-heavy time.

Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's a particularly fruitful time if this is a, if this is a career path you're considering going down.

Congratulations.

Though not without competition, there's a lot of people scrapping to be the next

gay Fox news host.

So good luck out there.

But

the root of all of this, of course, is capitalism.

And you are rewarded at these microphones for saying more and more extreme things, as we've discussed, right, with people like Riley Gaines, with Ollie London.

And there's very little accountability if what you're saying is not true or if it's like skewed to the point of being virtually not true.

But even look at like libs of TikTok, right?

Haya Raichik.

I don't know if you guys wanted to talk about her.

Yes.

You know, she is someone who

even if you believed that her stated goal was like protecting children, which I really, really don't think it is, protecting children from the woke mind virus or whatever.

In practice, all she's doing is driving, you know, millions of people to dox and harass, you know, gay teachers wherever in the United States and have them fired from their jobs or have a bomb threat called on their school.

And she is making so much money doing this.

And she's also profoundly affecting the way we think about LGBTQ people

and the temperature of the culture on this issue.

And so I guess this is what I'm trying to say.

So much extremism, so much like far-right, really bigoted extremism that drives, you know, an environment that becomes unsafe for minorities is the direct result of capitalism and the fact that Haya Reich wants a second house.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, and the fact that there are these networks, as Maura was mentioning, that kind of, that'll link you up to the broader conservative media ecosystem, right?

Where I mean, Haya Reich, right, like wouldn't have probably become quite the phenomenon she did were it not for Tucker Carlson, right?

Totally.

You know, it's easy to sort of be like, like, oh, all these online influencers, but like, actually, it's often the online world as it interlocks with really legacy media, with people who have no trouble getting an invitation to the White House correspondence dinner, right?

And it's not just media, right?

Like, it can be a media environment, right?

Like, by the time Megan Kelly calls you brave on her show, you've definitely made it.

But it can also be a judicial environment, right?

Like being picked out as the nut du jour that like some right-wing outfit uses to sort of push some bullshit case to the Supreme Court, right?

Like whoever Ames is in Ames v.

Ohio Department of Youth Services, right?

The 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.

You can link up with politicians like Ted Cruz's podcast, or you can link up with you know, the reactionary centrists, right?

Like, especially if you work, I guess, in academia like I do or in legacy media like Maura does, like, were you mildly inconvenienced by Wooksters?

Well, The Atlantic would love to hear from you, you know?

Or

Bari

has a whole installment of the newsletter set aside for you.

This brings me to maybe like a nice place to close, which is the grift that I keep telling Adrian we have to embark on, which is to fund In Bed with the Right by setting up our own fake right-wing grifter with a Twitter account and like, you know, me in one of those like fake mustaches doing front-facing videos on Instagram about how I've been canceled.

And then I will be rich and we can keep doing this forever.

Oh my God.

Wait, that's so good

to like basically to plant a right-wing grifter and nurture them so that you can fuel the profits back to the left, so that you can discuss the cures to the harm that you're causing.

Ugh, galaxy brain.

Yeah.

It's not a grift.

It's redistribution.

All right.

What if we hired someone to portray this person and then they went like rogue and actually started believing?

They were like, I just listened to Joe Rogan and he makes some good points.

We're like, he's gone rogue.

He's gone rogue.

Terminate with an extreme prejudice.

Yeah.

I'm going to Hannah Montana it.

Like, I'm going to put on a blonde wig and go on to TikTok tomorrow.

And being like, the gay community exiled me for asking a few questions.

And then I'm going to start making so much money in my blonde wig, but then take it off and go back to being like leftist podcaster with my regular.

This has been so fun.

Thank you so much for coming.

I'm really glad we got to talk to you.

We should have you back again because you're such a delight.

Oh, thanks for having me.

I think we learned a lot.

I would be so proud if there are a bunch of fake right-wing grifters popping up in the next six months.

I'm like, those are our children in so many ways.

Yeah, those are Embed with the Right ideas.

Yeah.

The first of you to make it onto like a Fox News show and then be like, oh, I was making it up.

Shout out, Embed with the Right.

Like, you're getting a tote bag.

You're getting a tote bag from us.

A sorrows-funded tote bag.

George, call us.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.