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Grift implies that people don't genuinely hold the views they're stating. I have no idea how people determine this. For those that call deBoer a grifter, what do they think his "true" views are?

Personally, I reserve the term "grifter" for anyone involved in NFTs and supplements.

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Thank you for pointing out the elite media angle of all this. Yes, heterdoxy is popular. But that's because many ordinary people really, REALLY hate mainstream media and its embrace of yelling, scoldy, Twitter-fueled social justice politics.

And since many of those people don't want to jump all the way over into reactionary Fox News land, they go looking for alternative options outside the binary. Count me in that category.

So to all these sneering writers, why not take a closer look at WHY heterodoxy is popular? It's not going away anytime soon.

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Long time free reader, first time subscriber to make this comment.

Freddie, I'm curious if you see any contradiction between what you lay out here (which I largely agree with) and what you wrote about Jordan Peterson a year and a half ago: "The man is a grifter; he is one of the most shameless and obvious con men in the conservative sphere today, and that's really saying something."

As a non-conservative whose life was improved Peterson's advice, this was strange to read. I watched a bunch of his videos on YouTube and bought his book and got a lot of useful life advice out of it; he got paid for this; and that somehow makes him one of the biggest conservative grifters?

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The very annoying thing about the current internet social scene is that it's a bunch of strangers who think they can look into each other's hearts and know their true selves, their true beliefs, their true north star, based on a couple of Tweets and a political affiliation. Talk about arrogance.

I've been with my wife for almost two decades, and I can't figure out what the hell is going on with her some of the time. You're not going to figure out the depths of a person from some small slice of what they do, you need to observe them for a very long time over a lot of interactions and with a lot of scrutiny before you're comfortable saying anything at all about them. I was one of those people who was like "Greenwald on Fox News? Huh? Is it about the money?" But after a couple of years of it and hearing his (quite honestly almost never-ending) justification for it and his internal consistency, I would have to say that the man seems to really believe that the medium is the message and he has to get his ideas out there, any way he can. So, I was able to tell one thing about the guy with some precision after years of observation. Now apply this to everyone you talk to online. You can't, of course. So it's all just made-up shit about people you like (or don't like) spinning through the digital cloud and bouncing off each other. I can't tell you how many times someone has told me "oh <famous person> is a bad person because of X" and I go try to source X and it's either: a) the most bad faith interpretation of an ambiguous situation or b) some anonymous accusation about them stated as fact or c) something inappropriate (rarely criminal) done decades ago, one time, investigated, apologized for, and it never happened again. What a maddening way to think about others!

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The strange part of this is that I don’t know anyone with orthodox views in real life. Everyone has a wide hodgepodge or disparate views.

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Apr 28, 2022·edited Apr 29, 2022

I suppose that the difference between "grift" and "taking money" is the extent to which the recipient believes in the cause and how much they take.

A direct mail fundraising artist who uses 95% of the take for further mailing campaigns and fat salaries for himself is a grifter.

An underpaid political staffer, probably not so much.

It's the difference between a doctor for The Tobacco Institute who is paid obscene sums to discredit a study showing that (gasp!) smoking cigarettes is strongly linked to cancer, when that doctor knows the truth full well, and a postgraduate biologist who is paid a meager salary to do experiments showing the carcinogenic effect of tar on lung tissue in lab rats.

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My guess is that the vast majority of the population is heterodox. How could that not be the case? Think about how political parties are devised.

The country is stunningly diverse and vast, a great multitude of religions, races and ethnicities, socioeconomic classes and so on. The US political system on the other hand is engineered to support two and only two major political parties. A party system that did justice to the diversity of the country would probably have dozens of parties that could at least attempt to cater to a more limited set of political priorities.

As it is both parties are big tents that inevitably shovel together people with widely disparate views. Blacks are typically much more socially conservative than the college educated whites that form the leadership class of the Democratic Party, for example. Or how many times have you heard the old "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" rubric?

So on one hand you have a public that has come by its political viewpoints organically, through lived experience, and embraces one party out of necessity rather than love.

But on the other hand you have individuals who curiously, by some strange coincidence, have an internal set of political beliefs that happen to match up neatly with one party's platform. I wonder why that is. Maybe it's because when you join a church you don't get to write your own bible?

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I'm with you pretty much. But I suppose their argument, which I'm not sure holds water, is that if you make a calculated decision to brand yourself "heterodox" because you know that it's more profitable than being "conventional", then that makes you relatively more "grifter-y" than them. Even if you both agree that all capitalism is "grift". Isn't it like "Well, you're pure grift. I'm just 'enough to pay the rent' grift. So we might agree that capitalism is evil but your MORE evil than me." Right?

For me, a nobody consumer of this stuff, the only way I delineate what to read/watch/consume isn't on the grifter axis, the elite axis or the partisan axis. I do it on the honesty axis. Which is a subjective judgement call, but it's all I have. I don't even care if I agree or disagree with them. I care about wether or not I think they're truly telling me what they think. No matter how much money they make or who subsidizes them. I ask myself, "Is this honest? Or is this bullshit?" My take often changes but here's my current score card:

HONEST LIST:

You

Sam Harris

Fifth Column (I know you have issues with them but I'd love to hear you there)

Jesse Singal

Matt Yglesias

Nate Silver

Joe Rogan (often a knucklehead, but honest)

Andrew Sullivan

Lex Friedman

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Angel Eduardo

Dr. Sheena Mason (Great but little known professor of the Theory Of Racelessness)

John McWhorter

Glen Loury

Steven Pinker

Michael Shermer

Richard Dawkins

(Most real science people of course)

Nikole Hannah-Jones (Even though I disagree with her a lot)

Helen Pluckrose

Sarah Haider (Great new substack! Super smart).

DISHONEST:

Taylor Lorenz

Ben Shapiro

Dave Rubin

Candice Owens

Ibram X Kendi

Robin Diangelo (she might just be really dumb)

Cenk Uygur

James Lindsey

NOT SURE:

Jordan Peterson

Bari Weiss

Weinstein Brothers (Bret & Eric)

Glenn Greenwald

Matt Taibbi

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I think you nailed it in the last paragraph, and this relates to the freakout over Musk and Twitter too. Just who do people think owned Twitter before him? Are we to believe Vanguard and JP Morgan were somehow different? Their outrage is completely incoherent. Elite capitalists have always controlled the media here, does anyone remember William Randolph Hearst?

Their outrage, as usual is extremely selective and incoherent. I get hating Musk, I personally find him obnoxious beyond measure, but that won't turn an irrational stance into a rational one.

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founding

When I think of a grift I think of knowingly lying or withholding a piece of information.

Scott Gottlieb was rightfully always pointing out his relationship with Pfizer when talking about vaccines.

Conversely, as many have pointed out, many of the ex-National Security and military folks talking about the war on TV fail to point out their ties to defense companies.

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I think you meant to write "heterodox" here instead of "orthodox"? --> "Most self-styled *orthodox* thinkers will tell you flat out that they’re not defying the will of the people but rather the will of the tastemakers who set the agenda against the will of the people. That’s key to the brand! So reference to polling just isn’t relevant."

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Grift is when the primary activity is separating people from their money but sold under the guise of providing a positive good. Facebook is a grift. So are most political action committees (by design) as are most people in the business of DEI.

Figuring out who is/isn’t a grifter is nearly as complicated as you make it out to be. When there is a choice to be made between servicing the stated good and reaping wealth what action does the person or organization take?

If they not only go against their stated goals and reply to criticism with a torrent of bullshit that’s the grift revealed.

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Apr 28, 2022·edited Apr 28, 2022

The wheel is necessary because of human duplicity: we are all grifters and all the time. All systems are undermined by those who are empowered to intermediate our commercial activities. The gate keepers will take care of themselves first, they will distort the system which in turn will always prioritize self preservation. The violence of capitalism is a proper and good antidote to the violence of human duplicity: creative destruction is our best hope. With competitive capitalism we harness what comes natural to us, yes it’s ugly but so are we. For me, simple things like high minimum-wage are the solution, all the social programs that you lefties iput in place are always distorted by duplicity and rendered at best 50% effective. Ask people what they want they will say money, they don’t want you helping them because they think you are a self serving douche bag, which you are, we are all grifters, that’s the human condition, it’s gravity, stop moralizing it.

Freddie writes so very well, his argumentation is delicious too read.

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Apropos of almost nothing, I want to again thank Elizabeth Bruenig for getting me on the Freddie substack train early on.

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Apr 28, 2022·edited Apr 28, 2022

Yes, you're all running on the same wheel... though I don’t think we should toss the wheel out. What is the proposed socialist alternative to a market-based media ecosystem? I assume Freddie shares his critics' belief that this market system should change, but I'm curious about how and why. It seems like the current system protects diverse/heterodox perspectives better than a state-based alternative. If there’s one industry where you want to preserve a free market, it’s media.

Or maybe he has a different kind of socialist model in mind, not based on government... at any rate, I'd be interested to see a piece about this in the future.

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Good point. Beijer's failure to acknowledge the context of the media climate you describe makes whatever point thought he was making complete worthless. I note he allows no comments on his Substack. Wouldn't want any heterodoxy intruding on his brand I suppose.

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