What Is a Grifter?
Online is an ideological minefield. How do we know who is acting in good faith?
As someone who spent way too much of my precious time following Gamergate, the front of the hobbyist culture war that was fought against video game developers exactly ten years ago, I was kind of amused to stumble onto this little interaction the other day.
It serves as a neat little epilogue to that whole thing. On the decade anniversary of the first shots fired, two of the most prominent generals, from opposite sides of the conflict, share a cute little tête-à-tête about the state of the grifter economy.
It’s not exactly allies sharing beer and laughter with captured German generals at Nuremberg, but it shows what kind of bizarre peace settled upon the people who were embroiled in that idiotic battle. No penance or apology ever occurred for or to anybody. By all accounts nobody ever grew up or changed.
Carl Benjamin, who led the right wing geekdom subculture under the name Sargon of Akkad, is still a hard right Men’s Rights Activist. Brianna Wu heads a PAC for the Democratic Party and runs for political office. Neither of them have anything in common except their shared participation in a notable cultural event, and one other thing that brings them together much more: Their shared accusation of Grift.
I see this accusation bandied around a hell of a lot and I’ve never been entirely sure what people mean when they accuse each other of grifting in this context. Certainly there is something dishonest being implied, but it’s not equivalent nor as harsh an accusation as “con artist.” It seems to imply something more casual. Something sneaky, deliberate, and slightly insidious. It’s not necessarily a medicine show, but it is a shell game.
The charge of grift as far as I can tell is a charge of bad faith or disingenuousness in combination with some degree of harm. Though all sorts of words are regularly misused, it is surely not a grift for a true believer to make money elucidating an ideological position, or else every opinion columnist is a grifter, and I am a grifter. Surely also it’s not a grift to know what your audience wants and pander to that, or else anyone who is offering any form of entertainment is a grifter.
Is it grifting for a pastor or cleric to continue to work despite suffering a personal crisis of faith? Does it matter if he believes his lies are doing genuine good, rather than simply enriching himself? These are questions that might divide people.
I think it’s helpful in trying to get to the bottom of this to think about why psychics are generally disliked by the secular public but stage magicians aren’t. I like to call psychics “Sith magicians” – they use the same powers, but for the dark side. The difference between a mentalist who reads your mind via phenomenal non-supernatural skill and a psychic who truly wants you to believe in the supernatural explanation is the harm of the lie, and of the manipulation. Psychics use the tricks they learned as mentalists, just like James Randi was able to expose Uri Geller’s use of standard techniques from the stage magician industry, and all of them are on the same mission to amaze and entertain, but the magicians are honest about what they’re selling you. The psychics are not.
It is surely a mistake to mark every ideologue as a grifter. So how can we tell the grifters apart?
The conservative talk show host Dave Rubin is often characterised as one of the all time most obvious grifters on the political pundit circuit, for his career trajectory alone. Rubin—openly gay, if it matters—began as a progressive host on the left of centre Young Turks network, but drifted ideologically over a relatively short period of time to eventually land himself, somehow, a coveted spot as the dumbest member of the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” a collection of ex-leftist free-thinkers who some might characterise as a who’s-who of the most prominent grifters of the podcast world, from Eric Weinstein to Jordan Peterson.
Ostensibly his transformation into a hardcore MAGA conservative occurred because he had some sort of revelation about the corruption of the left, but there’s very strong circumstantial evidence that he was simply wooed by a considerable amount of Dennis Prager money.
Brianna Wu is getting attention lately for much more than just this brief encounter with Sargon. On Wednesday she appeared on the Richard Hanania podcast, Clown Car, which has added plenty of grist to the mill of progressives who accuse her of grifting.
If Hanania doesn’t fit the definition of a grifter then the word might have no useful meaning at all. As has been well documented in the media, Richard Hanania used to write pseudonymously for a bunch of online far-right and explicitly fascist blogs. Upon his exposure by a Huffington Post investigative journalist, Hanania immediately dropped the type of apology that tend to be generated by these types of public embarrassments—you know, the “I’m not saying I’m sorry but I do regret that it happened” sort of thing. The youthful indiscretion defence. He’s older now, wiser, and won’t give specifics about which views he no longer holds but, just broadly, all the stuff you don’t like you can throw out and keep the stuff you do like. He’s a changed man.
Quillette reprinted his damage control piece with a headline and editor’s note both so detached from its actual content that I’m sincerely curious about whether they read it. “My Journey Out of Extremism,” they hilariously titled it, accompanied by a wistful lead image depicting a lonesome group of travellers wandering out of a dark wood, their heads down and heavy with regret, toward the light of redemption.
The reason behind publishing Hanania's essay below lies in the scarcity of narratives portraying young men's journey away from extremist ideologies through the processes of maturity and moderation, reads the soulful lead note by Quillette Editor-in-Chief Claire Lehmann, We need more stories like the one Richard offers to serve as guidance for those who may be falling into radicalism.
But Hanania does not, in fact, offer any such guidance. He spends most of the piece simply attacking the journalist who exposed him and investigative journalism in general, before flippantly offering the suggestion that he just grew out of his attitude. He doesn’t even offer that he was wrong about much of anything—his opponents were still the wrong ones, he contends—just that he’s not as abrasive about it anymore. Even in this very piece he admits proudly that he still has racial supremacist views, just that he’s not as strict of a genetic behavioural determinist as he once was.
Given that his opinions include such gems as the idea that Fred Phelps, the decrepit and thankfully now dead leader of the “God Hates Fags” Westboro Baptist Church sect, was “an alpha at an almost supernatural level,” it’s a bold past for him to stand by even in part. Presumably that’s one of the views he’d like you to distance him from now.
This carefully constructed not-quite-apology piece came out within a day of the Huffington Post exposure, which makes me suspicious about how much of it was pre-prepared, loaded in the chamber and ready to go. It’s a valid suspicion considering Hanania wrote an academic article in 2019 for Behavioral Public Policy journal examining the efficacy of public figures composing fake apologies in response to scandals. He knew this was coming, he’d been waiting for it for years and studying how best to respond in a way that makes him look good without having to walk back any of the views he still holds in a more muted and palatable form.
He wanted to keep his mainstream HarperCollins book deal and his academic placements without also abandoning and risking losing his other less couth fanbase. That’s pretty grifty. It seems to have worked.
But Hanania cannot hide the fact that he is obsessed with his own success. He’s pinned a tweet to his Twitter profile about what percentage of his Substack audience comes from places like Yale and Harvard based on their email domains. He gloats incessantly about how many views his newsletter gets, how many retweets he gets, how well his book is selling, how well his career is doing, insane metrics for a guy who once opined about the bangability of Fred Phelps.
I watched the episode of Hanania’s interview with Brianna Wu on his Clown Car podcast with really no idea what to expect. I hadn’t paid any attention to Wu since Gamergate faded away upon the election of Trump. In recent weeks, though, she has been under fire from progressives for labelling herself a progressive while, at the same time, seeming to harbour political views on many topics that appear more centre-liberal or even right of centre.
Turns out she just wanted the Bernie Sanders healthcare and to take Amazon down a peg, but now progressives want this wacky insane shit like police reform. On the Israel/Palestine conflict she is staunchly anti-Palestine.
Her position seems to mirror something similar to Bill Maher liberalism and the split between liberals and progressives that happened after 9/11 and the progressives had the gall to call themselves feminist and pro-LGBT while at the same time opposing the Iraq war. Taking the side of the Muslims? The right wing theocrats?
As such she’s finding herself more at home with folks like Ben Shapiro, and social media progressives have taken to following her for the outrage sport, taking potshots, noting that there’s a token slot open on the Daily Wire panel now that Candace Owens is out and wondering whether Wu will take the gig. Comparisons are often made between Wu and Dave Rubin, particularly as her ideological trajectory seems triggered by the same sorts of things, such as a frustrating lack of priority given to western values by the progressives.
So what, I wondered, could a discussion between Brianna Wu and Richard Hanania possibly look like? Would she be as amicable and olive-branch-bearing to him as she is to Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, who once directed armies of geeks against her and, during his own bid for political office, once unapologetically commented on the rapeability of a female MP?
Would Wu push back on any of the still pretty extreme male supremacist and bizarre quasi-phrenological Steve Sailer race hierarchy beliefs that Hanania pushes to this day, regardless of his recent apparent repentance?
The interview disappointed me in some ways and fascinated me in others—she didn’t push back on these things because it seems apparently she was unaware of them.
The moment I can tell that Wu hasn’t done a scratch of basic research on Hanania comes just a minute into the podcast when he asks her about Gamergate, saying that he basically has no idea what any of that was about and barely paid any attention to it. Wu, knowing that this is essentially her claim to fame, should have known this would come up and so would have done well to look up what Hanania knows about it, which is far from nothing. According to what he’s said in the past, he seems very confident in knowing what that was and what its main issues were.
Why would Hanania lie about hardly having heard of Gamergate? It seems like he knew his mark, and he wasn’t wrong. Brianna Wu takes him at face value and explains to him that Gamergate was the origin of the alt-right. Not only is that not true—which betrays Wu’s own ignorance of the topic here—but it’s kind of insane for her to try to explain the alt-right to someone who was instrumental in creating and even naming the alt-right during his time as an understudy to Richard Spencer. She doesn’t seem to know this.
Later in the same discussion she namedrops journalist Michael Tracey through the course of describing prominent figures on the left. She’s not expecting Hanania to have ever heard of Tracey, clearly having no idea that Hanania once co-hosted a podcast with Michael Tracey. Even Hanania, who seems to be playing along swimmingly with Wu’s ignorance as to who she’s even talking to, reacts with amusement at this point.
Bizarrely, Wu thinks that Hanania’s “origin story” as a public figure is a tweet he made a few weeks ago about the actress Sydney Sweeney’s cleavage. Not only does Wu think that his tweet about Sweeney’s tits is what made him famous, she thinks it’s what made Sweeney famous.
The most fascinating thing to me about the Hanania/Wu interview as a whole is how Hanania actually manages to position himself politically to the left of her on most topics. She doesn’t ever bring up any of his race theories and he doesn’t volunteer them. She comes into the discussion angry about the left, and he just lets her rant. He only ever objects to her on occasions when he can find an opportunity to position himself to her left—he gleefully places himself to her left on animal rights, disagrees with her assessment that the left is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic and generally meaner, and even seems softer than her on some transgender issues, which is the primary topic that he’s interviewing her for. As a transgender woman, he compares Wu to the staunch conservative and Trump-supporting Caitlyn Jenner, a comparison that she doesn’t entirely take issue with.
I feel a little more clarity after this week in defining Grift, and I don’t think Brianna Wu fits the description. If Brianna Wu is a grifter, then she is being out-grifted. Richard Hanania is grifting fucking circles around her here. And, as expected, he’s got what he needed out of it—spending the next week using this discussion as an advertisement for himself. At least one out of three of the famous Gamergate Literally Whos agrees: Richard Hanania is an astonishingly effective intellectual on the right, and—might I add—much sexier than Andrew Tate!
To circle all the way back to Carl Banjamin and his incredulousness about the idea of a right-wing grifter:
To answer his question as if he’s being earnest about it, the right wing Soros is Peter Thiel. Or Dennis Prager, or David Koch, Elon Musk, Jeremy Boreing, shit why am I still running down this list? The point is that Benjamin’s failure as a grifter is that he was just fucking bad at it. It takes effort to be worse at grifting than Dave Rubin, but life, uh, finds a way.
But Carl of Swindon is kind of right about one thing—the grifter needs a griftee. Brianna Wu clearly isn’t doing Richard Hanania’s show to come out as some kind of alt-right influencer. There is no market for Brianna Wu meeting Richard Hanania in the middle about trans rights or vegetarianism, but there is a market for people like Hanania grifting leftists into free advertising. Shit, maybe it’s just grift all the way down.
Yep. Just a bottomless grift. Trump mastered it and his fans have learned well🤷♀️
This is a long way from the meaning of grifter, which is a specific insult or career path, unrelated to ideology or politics.
Trump is a grifter, for example, it's his life purpose.