CON'EM-19

The Big Con and the Little Grifters part ways

Many of you remember the old “Hardcore” feature in this newsletter, where once in a while I’d round up stories I got from wingnut emails that came unbidden to my inbox, as I suppose must come to the inboxes of lots of old guys who visit rightwing sites. It was good fun until I got sick of it. As I said at the time:

I’ve unsubscribed from a lot of the rightwing hate mail services that I had been mining for it, mainly because I just couldn’t stand looking at them in my inbox anymore. I mean, even a proctologist gets sick of assholes after a while.

It might be different if the content of these emails changed appreciable from month to month or year to year. But while sometimes they do at least acknowledge major changes in the temporal world, their basic pitches — fear, hate, tribal loyalty, vengeance etc. — remain the same.

As I also said at the time, I wasn’t sure how different these creeps are from the high-priced pundit versions in major publications. That was part of the fascination: Here was conservatism served without the fancy dressings that would make it look like something other than poisonous boob-bait.

It’s a tidy theory, but not applicable in every situation.

Like everyone else I’ve been talking about the virus thing for a couple of weeks now. (Don’t worry, I’m working on alternatives.) The conservative pitch in this time has been more or less in keeping with the President’s — and, as a recent viral video shows, it means flipping from “this is no big deal” to “this has always been a big deal.” (And of course Trump more recently reversed field again, pledging to “open the country” by Easter Sunday.)

At the same time I’ve been getting a new wave of emails from the rightwing crap farms — emails offering coronavirus defenses and cures. And in this regard, the low-end vendors have definitely taken a different course from Trump and his MSM ass-kissers.

Because now the Trumpkins are, of course, all about supporting Trump, and since Trump has obviously decided broken-field running is the way to go, so, too, do they run with him. (Here’s the Washington Times reporting, in keeping with Trump’s latest switchback, “White House dismisses doomsday COVID-19 death toll,” contrasting the “Imperial College’s drastic predictions” and “dark vision” with the Trump team’s sunny optimism.)

I understand Trump’s logic: he wants to rack up statements that support both POVs — a surfeit of concern, and a lack of concern — so that when it’s over he can pick whichever one of the two stories works best and say he believed that one all along. (That’s why he’s trying to get an ad pulled that shows him talking out of both sides of his mouth on this issue.) And his toadies have no motive other than to support this.

But the low-end guys have a separate motivation. Most of the time heretofore they have been united with the big boys in grift, since Trump is a hustler and they’re hustlers; he sold MAGA bullshit, they sold MAGA bullshit. Everybody gotta eat, as the mobsters say.

But now that Trump’s devoted to laying down markers for a future con, from which the low-end guys cannot yet profit (unlike conservative pundits, they’re not salaried — they only eat what they kill), they’re sending out grift emails promising cures and defenses that you can get for a price.

Here’s a tweet I did comparing one such conjob to the Kung-Fu ads that used to appear in the backs of comic books.

Roy Edroso @edroso

LOL the Coronavirus con artists have started using spiels from the Kung Fu "his masters would punish him severely" ads in the back of old comic books.

And here’s the text of another:

Gwenith Paltrow and Kate Hudson have both taken selfies wearing the mask N95.

(That misspelling is very MAGA.)

They did that upon the announcement of the CDC that corona will spread at a “community level” (far faster) and only the N95 will protect you.

But what if a sneeze droplet hits your eyes?

That goes right to the bloodstream.

Moral of the story.

You can’t rely on masks or Hollywood actresses for your health and safety.

How dare Gwyneth (or Gwenith) Paltrow try to deceive you? The author of this spam email, on the other hand, has only your best interests at heart.

Only this

Don't be scared. Be smart.

Pradeep

P.S. You can be “coronavirus proof” in just a day.

Do this for your family, if not for yourself.

And there are separate links on separate lines in the text (to see which one hooked you — it’s an ad and a copy test!) steering readers to their con. It clearly didn’t cost much, and if even just a few of their readers — aged Fox News viewers, perhaps, terrified by the prospect of an unattended quarantine funeral — pull the trigger, it’s all gravy.

This should give you some idea of how colonized conservatism and the Republican Party are by Trump, that they can sustain little scams like this quite independent of their own fortunes — until the day when those fortunes collapse entirely, with the leader on the lam or hanging upside-down outside a gas station. Which is yet another reason to work for that collapse.