Alex Berenson,
COVID denialist
For a quick and easy grift, take a public health disaster or other tragedy and declare it the true grift, a conspiracy, a grand lie pulled over the eyes of the unsuspecting public. What’s REALLY going on? What is the government up to? What should the wised-up reader do, if they want to be truly informed? Why, they must read your books, available now on Amazon.com, able to be downloaded or shipped in a blink by exhausted wage slaves. While these same Amazon workers go on strike to protest the superspreader conditions of their work environments, the public may rest assured, based on the deliberately misleading writing of Alex Berenson and others like him, that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu. The millions of recorded deaths are inflated, or maybe people would have died anyway, or maybe they died because of the lockdown, or whatever other excuse is suitable for the moment. That these assertions are false and heinous doesn’t matter; what matters is that Berenson moves those book units and gets engagement on those concern-troll tweets, gaining more and more followers every day. Line goes up.
The Lincoln Project
The bloated corporate version of the mom-and-pop apple pie grift, the folks at the Lincoln Project—a coalition of “Never Trump” Republicans and other professional dorks—have managed to separate quite a number of #Resistance fools from their money. While ostensibly funding Democratic campaigns, the Lincoln Project has funneled a large chunk of the donations into ensuring its cadre of “consultants” gets paid very, very well. This could be viewed as some kind of sinister Republican plot to target innocent Democratic voters but it’s simultaneously more banal and more depraved. This is “non-ideological” centrism at work in its purest state: Washington business-as-usual, where the purpose of any action is to make sure more milquetoast centrists get elected, who will proceed only to ensure more milquetoast centrists get elected, as they are the only “electable” candidates. In the process, everyone gets rich as Croesus, spending it all on bland suits and American flag pins and prim DC mansions full of beige, interchangeable corridors through which their own empty minds echo in the middle of the night.
Neal Katyal,
#Resistance hero and child slavery apologist
Author of Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump, Katyal has successfully parlayed himself into a lucrative career as a guy you may see on MSNBC while you accidentally walk by the television at your parents’ place. As a lawyer and an impassioned anti-Trumper, Katyal is against child separation at the border. He’s also for child slavery. Arguing in court on behalf of Nestle and Cargill—American companies which rely on the trafficked and unpaid labor of African children—Katyal said that corporations should not be held liable for just a lil’ bit of slavery that happens under their watch. With a remarkable lack of irony, he cited the fact that the Nuremberg prosecutors did not hold the makers of Zyklon B liable for the fact that their product was used as a weapon of mass murder. Later, Katyal took to the airwaves to complain that it was unfair that he should be held accountable simply for doing his job. If I were reliant on the Nuremberg trials for precedent, I might not make that particular argument.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/12/ ... tie-awards
