How to Spot a Political Grifter Online
Five types of online political grifter setting our discourse on fire.
A few years ago, the internet discovered that performative conviction pays better than intellectual honesty. Much better. So much better, in fact, that it’s now a multibillion-dollar industry (probably), and it’s steering our political discourse off a cliff.
There are some brilliant voices out there, of course – genuinely challenging power and asking difficult questions. But they’re drowned out by sleek and cynical operators who’ve learned that outrage generates revenue and tribal certainty beats nuanced thinking. They’ve discovered that you can build an entire career by throwing a chair through the Overton window and being professionally wrong about everything as long as you’re wrong with confidence.
Some of us have become adept at spotting the manipulation. Others have been swept up in it, radicalising themselves via a perfectly tuned algorithmic experiment in confirmation bias. None of us is entirely immune. We’re all being manipulated to varying degrees, with the result that we occasionally stray into moral posturing or bad-faith arguments.
Our political moment has produced five distinct archetypes that currently dominate online discourse, distorting reality through the sheer gravitational force of their popularity.
1. The “I’m just asking questions” guy
Asking questions is usually good. Asking good questions is better. Asking questions that feign innocence while carefully manipulating the narrative is wildly profitable. The “I’m just asking questions” guy is the archetype who has perfected the art of influence while denying they’re influencing anyone. They’ve built massive platforms by claiming to “just have conversations” – no agenda, just wide-eyed curiosity.
Please. Listen closely to those questions. Notice how they only point in one direction, mysteriously failing to interrogate the other side of the argument. Observe how the mainstream expert gets the full treatment – credentials questioned, motives doubted. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists, fringe figures, and the lunatic who thinks chemtrails are making the frogs gay gets the chin stroke and head nod, followed by another softball.
Sometimes this is a genuine service – experts should face tough questions the mainstream media won’t ask. The problems come when the rigour is selective, when one side gets forensic interrogation and the other gets friendly chatter.
When challenged about amplifying misinformation, there’s always the retreat: “I’m just a comedian” or “I’m just asking questions”. But when their endorsement shifts political races, suddenly they’re an “important voice”. The mantle of authority gets picked up and discarded as needed.
It works brilliantly because the audience gets permission to believe what they’ve already decided is true. This is a subtle form of confirmation bias because it comes packaged in the language of “no agenda” and “just asking questions”. What makes it dangerous is that genuine inquiry gets tainted by association. When someone actually asks difficult questions in good faith, they’re now viewed with suspicion. Rigorous questioning of the climate-change denier is now associated with “the regime” rather than a search for the truth. Truly intellectually honest interrogators will cross-examine both the climate sceptic and the climate zealot equally.
2. The heterodox academic
Academics are strange creatures. Some are brilliant, have vast intellectual curiosity and a generous spirit. Others are bitter, envious and stupid about everything except one tiny area of human knowledge, about which they have god-like mastery. The heterodox academic sits uneasily between these extremes, and we often first hear about them following a controversy or public disagreement with institutional orthodoxy. This becomes the origin story for a new career outside traditional institutions.
Thrust into the limelight, their expertise tends to broaden suddenly. The biologist becomes an expert on vaccine policy. The psychologist becomes an authority on climate science. Having established the brand of “credentialled person willing to challenge consensus”, the heterodox academic will attract audiences who will accept their authority on virtually any subject. This is dangerous because humans are quick to deceive themselves in the face of flattery and the heterodox academic is the most human in his class.
Real intellectual heterodoxy requires rigorous argument and a willingness to be proven wrong. Performative heterodoxy requires only the appearance of courage and an audience hungry to distrust expertise. The grifting academic, fresh from controversy and shunned from the academy, will excel in the latter – often making claims with an unearned authority that can cause harm.
The worst of them never admit error. Every setback becomes proof of conspiracy. Every criticism is evidence of suppression. They’ve discovered you can be wrong about everything as long as you’re wrong in ways that validate your audience’s suspicions about institutions. This is how we end up with resurgent diseases that vaccines had made virtually extinct half a century ago.
“You can build an entire career by throwing a chair through the Overton window and being professionally wrong about everything”.
3. The revolutionary brand manager
There’s something comic about the self-described communist busily planning the economy via the notes app on their iPhone. Actually, not planning the economy – that would at least make some concession to their professed ideology. What they’re really doing is building careers on anticapitalism with a gift for capitalism that would make Milton Friedman blush. The best operators in this field make revolutionary zeal into a designer aesthetic while managing their social media presence with the sophistication of a Fortune 500 marketing agency.
The routine is fairly consistent. First, rail against corporations from a hipster cafe in Kensington using a MacBook Air. That’s breakfast. Later, appear on Sky News to rail against corporate media. Evening times are for serious writing, perhaps polishing the first draft of their manifesto for audiences who’ll never experience anything more revolutionary than buying a keffiyeh.
What’s striking isn’t the hypocrisy – everyone’s a hypocrite about something. It’s the complete absence of cognitive dissonance. Genuine radicals at least struggle with the compromises required to survive under capitalism. The revolutionary brand manager has no such qualms because the “revolution” is really just a brand differentiation strategy that gets them onto media panels and speaking circuits.
While it’s true that revolutionaries have often come from privileged backgrounds — Lenin was upper middle class, for example – what they did not enjoy was the same insulation from consequences. The modern revolutionary brand manager — book deal secured, regular slot on mainstream news media and a growing property portfolio — is revolting, certainly, but not in the way they think.
4. The identity-politics entrepreneur
Perhaps no political grifter is as instantly recognisable as the one who discovered that demographic credentials can be monetised if you tell the right audience what it wants to hear.
The formula is simple and repeatable: “As a [minority identity], I can tell you that [issue] isn’t actually the problem they claim it is”. Identity provides the authority. Contrarianism provides the income. It’s a perfect marriage.
On the right, there’s a lucrative market for minority voices willing to tell conservative audiences that racism or sexism isn’t really a problem – that the real victims are actually the people being accused of discrimination. On the left, there’s a demand for people who’ll weaponise their identity to police ideological boundaries and excommunicate heretics. Then there’s the white liberal who makes a career castigating whiteness, monetising the guilt and moral vanity of other white people desperate to prove they’re “one of the good ones”.
The pattern is consistent across demographics: they never meaningfully challenge the audiences that platform them. They save their harshest criticism for the communities they claim to represent. The traditional grift was exploiting your community for personal gain. This is more efficient in that it exploits your identity to gain access to audiences that will pay you to criticise your community.
What makes this particularly corrosive is how it poisons genuine discussions about discrimination. When someone raises legitimate concerns about racism or sexism, they’re now competing with a marketplace of identity entrepreneurs who’ve already told everyone what they want to hear. The grifters don’t just profit from division – they ensure the problems they claim to address never get solved, because solving them would end the revenue stream.
5. The far-right edgelord
Who would have thought that at the dawn of the internet, saying unsayable things would one day be a viable business model? Yet here we are, a few decades later, watching young men born in this century turning the horrors of the last into clicks. These are the edgelords – essentially right-wing engagement farmers who discovered that Holocaust jokes and “ironic” fascism play well with an audience that equates provocation with profundity.
Ironically, they often present themselves as serious thinkers, brave and fearless. But they’re not speaking truth to power or taking on a cruel authoritarian state. They’re just saying vile things designed to provoke outrage, knowing that this feeds the algorithm, which in turn generates revenue.
The defining feature is escalation. Each statement must outdo the last because the audience develops tolerance. What starts as “just asking questions” about historical events ends with openly praising “misunderstood” dictators.
The business model works by cultivating an audience of alienated young men (it’s nearly always men), telling them their grievances are legitimate, pointing at an enemy and then selling them the identity of “fearless truth-teller”. What the followers are actually buying is the feeling of being in on a secret that the “normies” are too scared to hear.
We can’t just dismiss this as the sad and pathetic hobby of naive kids following a cynical manipulator. Yes, the average antisemitic ghoul might look like he was grown in a lab from the least impressive part of Hitler’s anatomy. But mockery only works so far, because bubbling away under the grift is a growing army of demoralised young men looking for someone to blame. And that someone, increasingly, is Jewish. (Read: Why Antisemitism Is Still the Barometer of Civilisation).
Grifting the attention economy
The political grifter emerges in a system that rewards performance over principle, and confidence over intellectual honesty. The attention economy isn’t interested in what’s “right”, only in what triggers an emotional response – especially outrage and moral righteousness. Playing on identity and dialling up the contrarianism are marketing strategies to sell you a product.
The problem is that the public keeps buying it. Too many of us are willing and eager customers paying in clicks and shares and chasing dopamine as we raise our digital pitchforks to pile on the enemy.
The very best political grifters understand all this better than we do – that in our craving for conviction, we become addicted to people who sound certain when we no longer are.
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Underlying all of this is the collapse of professional ethics in legacy media. When the NYT and NPR became blatant propagandists, they inadvertently bolstered the appeal and supposed credibility of all of the types that you mention.
You forget the Centrist Dads, who simultaneous believe it's possible to bring back the Fukuyama era, there was nothing wrong with neoliberalism for the West, and Trump/Brexit was caused by new media ecosystems/Russian disinformation.
Trump was a symptom of a neoclassical economic system which fundamentally failed to understand labour dynamics and the importance of tight labour markets to social stability and the economy.
In simple terms, for every 10% added through immigration, wages for the blue collar class drop 5-10%, and the effect is twice is big on the living costs side of the equation, because lower wage migration causes demand for housing without the corresponding credit/mortgage capacity to increase supply. Overview data doesn't even really detect the problem. One has to look at blue collar in high-to-medium cost employment hubs.
Plus, they're trapped. Regardless of the method employed, retraining and education only works in 8% of cases when the demographic in question is blue collar.
Finally, they never really realised that the knowledge economy hit peak saturation back in the 2000s. Once one excludes health/education and focus only on high value $100K+ in America/£60+ in the UK, then one quickly sees that growth has been pretty incremental since the 2000s.
The neoliberals never really admitted that 'blank slate' thinking was wrong. Education can only do so much. Talent and ability, especially in relation to value add, are pretty inelastic as far as the knowledge economy goes. Besides both the US and the UK are likely to experience high levels of job losses in the high value knowledge sector. Finance and insurance will be the hardest hit. Some estimates are too conservative. In this specific area between 20-30% are likely to lose their jobs by 2030.