The Grift Awakening
The first “Great Awakening”—that early 18th-century wave of religious fervor within the American colonies that spurred conversions among atheists and apostates and deepened the faith of those who already believed—was typical of a pattern some historians claim occurs roughly every 80 years. In America, these mass religious revivals come in waves, often tied to momentous political change at their end, such as the Revolutionary War.
As the last Great Awakening wave may have ended in 1965, we are not due for a much-needed increase in religious belief until approximately 2045. Yet, as with so much else, the communications revolution may well hasten one. Unfortunately, these technological changes could also hurl humanity to rock bottom, so we would be seeking divine intervention and assistance just to survive and rise.
This is not the apocalyptic chirping of a Cassandra. It is merely recognition that the communication revolution has ushered in “The Grift Awakening.”
A grift is a “small-scale swindle;” a person engaging in one is, ergo, a “grifter.” Of course, grifters and grifts are nothing new in America. Nonetheless, such crimes were kept at bay because they were limited to a small group of criminals who were cunning enough (or vain enough to think they were cunning enough) to get away with defrauding victims in this way.
It should come as no surprise, then, that politics has always been, rife with grifting and grifters. But as is often the case in politics, there has to be a special twist to the word when applied to politicians—perhaps to appeal to their sense of vanity: Crooked public servants—elected and otherwise—engage in graft. Or perhaps this is because the grifter must put in a lot of elbow grease to rip off his victim, while the politician need only t sit back and stick out his palm to be greased.
This may also explain why the term’s usage derives from the other sense of “graft,” as in affixing one object to another. In this case, it is a matter of affixing illicit remuneration to a public position.
Consider the Gilded Age’s New York state Senator George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, who infamously said, “There’s an honest graft, and I’m an example of how it works. I might sum up the whole thing by sayin’: I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” As Eric C. Sands further elucidates at the site Teaching American History:
[Plunkitt] became independently wealthy by manipulating the political system and trading political favors for insider information. These practices, which Plunkitt candidly (if ironically) defended as ‘honest graft,’ provide a close-up look at the functioning and practices of the big city machines. Plunkitt was only too happy to defend these practices against accusations of corruption and inefficiency.
Whether it’s grifting or grafting, the fundamental problem remained: the practitioner was engaged in illegal and, moreover, illicit (“forbidden by law, rules, or custom”) conduct.
In our social media-fueled, postmodern age, the possibilities for grifting and grafting—for fun and for profit—have been expanded, democratized, and institutionalized; even as the liabilities for engaging in it have been reduced through decriminalization and cultural ambivalence that amounts to acceptance in many cases.
Social media has democratized the opportunities for grift and graft. Targeted algorithms, for example, intensify individualized insularity, which is then compounded by their appeal to confirmation bias, often through ad populum arguments.
Even though the First Amendment does not protect all speech, such as illegally obtained and/or disseminated information or slander and libel, these exceptions are only a bar against lying about individuals, not about issues. So political speech, as the most highly protected form of speech, necessarily makes room for grift and graft. Indeed, even legally proscribed leaks of governmental information have long been accepted by the public as something in the interest of transparency and the public’s right to know.
Thus, to the annoyance of presidential administrations, the illegal nature of leaks has been diminished by the public’s acceptance of them as a beneficial political and journalistic practice. In short, in the public’s mind, acceptance of this once-problematic practice transforms the ostensibly illicit act into a licit one. When it comes to social media, where anonymity is allowed and is often embraced by bad actors, the public’s resistance to the dissemination of illicit information, regardless of its veracity, as well as misinformation and disinformation, is daily eroded and, worse, embraced.
Exacerbating this problem, social media operates in a postmodern age where truth is considered passé. Compounding the problem is the rise of AI, which makes the creation of misinformation and disinformation both easier to do and more easily believed. Social media facilitates the inundation of the public square with fallacious ad populum arguments, algorithmically targeted to persuade identifiable individuals and reinforce their confirmation bias.
As explained by Kassiani Nikolopoulou at Scribbr.com, an argumentum ad populum fallacy (“argument to the people”) is:
A claim that something is true simply because that’s what a large number of people believe. In other words, if many people believe something to be true, then it must be true… This type of argument is often used when there is no real evidence to back up a certain claim… We make an appeal to what most people think, like, or believe, instead of justifying our position with evidence.
Importantly, Nikolopoulou notes that relevance is crucial to determining whether such an argument is fallacious. There are instances where the majority’s opinion is relevant to the issue at hand, notably in democratic elections. However, one should also consider the use of fallacious ad populum arguments to mold voters’ opinions before the election.
Consider this recent appeal to authority from our own history:
Biden partisans with intelligence and national security credentials falsely claimed in a publicly released letter that Hunter Biden’s laptop bore all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” This letter constituted an example of an ostensibly illicit act becoming licit in the eyes of those who agreed with its aim. It was legal, but it transgressed rules and customs that such individuals who had been entrusted with the security of the country would not deliberately endeavor to deceive the public in support of a partisan cause or candidate (though this, of course, is honored more often in the breach than in the strictest sense of things). Further, social media sites censored the initial revelation by a respected news outlet, and traditional media either ignored the story or promoted the “finding” of the letter’s signatories.
Indeed, the entire “Russia-gate” lie that was perpetrated by the administrative state’s elitists to subvert the duly elected president constituted a grift for his political opponents in government, the media, and even academia. Small fortunes were made; awards were given; brands were established and burnished; pundits’ clicks soared; leftist organizations’ fundraising escalated; and, yes, the end goal was attained: the 2020 ouster of President Trump.
Also think of the DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) cult, which was foisted on American institutions, including government, corporations, and academia. Billions of dollars have streamed into this leftist reeducation boondoggle. At least in this instance, efforts have been made to make illegal its compulsory cultural-Marxism indoctrination and patently inequitable practices, and to stanch the flow of funds that enable its spread and reward its commissars. Even so, because it is the right that initiates challenges to the DEI industry, courts often prevent them from advancing on First Amendment grounds.
The practical reality precipitated by these facts is that people generally conclude that it is impossible and, therefore, inadvisable to try to do anything about such lies due to First Amendment considerations. In consequence, during this era of “The Grift Awakening,” deceiving people and being rewarded for it without fear of punishment is easier than ever, due not only to technological changes but also to the public’s acceptance of such practices when they accord with and reinforce an individual’s confirmation bias. After all, how many people have been prosecuted—or even socially ostracized—for their role in manufacturing and promoting the Russia-gate lie? The Hunter Biden laptop letter? The DEI academic-corporatist-governmental scam?
Absent a return to critical thinking and a healthy dose of civic education, this postmodern age, infused as it is with AI and algorithmically guided ad populum appeals, portends a recrudescence of a most destructive fallacy: “might makes right.” The dangers of the Grift Awakening to our republic are patent: Can a nation founded upon self-evident truths survive postmodernism’s denial of all truth?