One thing I’ve learned from being on social media is that it’s extremely easy to become successful by pretending to be something you’re not. Within the political sphere, all you need to do is play into a particular demographic, and you’ll earn a rabid following in no time. This often leads to people playing fast and loose with their supposed belief systems in the aims of chasing success.
This ties into grifter culture, which I outlined a little in this post: http://meatgoblet.com/pour-your-40oz-out-for-the-grifters/. This is when people intentionally develop an online persona that appeals to a particular demographic for the purposes of growing a brand and making money. It’s far easier to become “famous” by playing into the base of one of the two political groups in the U.S. (or leftism, Libertarianism, etc. to a lesser degree), than it is to take a candid, non-partisan approach to politics.
The overwhelming majority of the #Resist and #Maga crowds on Twitter™ are composed of people who have never said anything even remotely intelligent or insightful, yet managed to end up with thousands of followers. This calculated grifting allows relatively mediocre individuals to attain some degree of success they would never have attained otherwise.
A lot of these unexceptional people managed to hit these high follower accounts by engaging in mass following events, or MFEs. I just made that term up because I have no idea what they’re actually called, or if they even have a name. Regardless, they look like this:
They tweet out lists of others within the same cult, who usually identify themselves via a hashtag in their bios (#Resist for example), then follow each other to increase their follower counts.
I guess a lot of them do this to feel like they’re actually important or valid because of their artificially inflated follower counts, but this count rarely ever leads to actually engagement, i.e. people interacting with their tweets, which is sad and funny at the same time.
Congrats on those 2 likes. A 20k follower to 2 like ratio is abysmal. As a comparison, I’ve never broken 100 followers on Twitter™, yet I’ve had numerous tweets make it into the hundred of likes, and even had one almost reach 3000 likes (aren’t I cool?). These goofballs are lucky to hit 50 likes on a post while sitting at tens of thousands of followers. This is probably because most of their followers only followed them to receive a follow back and inflate their own following. This, combined with them never saying anything of substance leads to a glut of over-valued, under-performing accounts on Twitter™.
Then we have the heavy-hitter grifter accounts. I’ve highlighted a few of these before, like Rex Chapman and the Lincoln Project, but you also have accounts like George Takei and BrooklynDad_Defiant.
George Takei is primarily known for playing Commander Sulu in the original Start Trek, but eventually developed an online following through social media like Twitter™. He started out posting relatively innocuous content, but at some point, decided to go full-bore morally-bereft grifter mode. Now he posts stuff like this:
Here he is fluffing up Andrew Cuomo, during a time when Cuomo was both making horrible Covid decisions that led to a lot of deaths in New York (Takei lives in San Francisco), and fighting off the early accusations of sexual impropriety. He had no problem doing this, because he has no moral qualms with backing whomever is important within the Democrat circle at any given time for online likes and validation. Here is his only tweet in response to Cuomo eventually resigning as governor:
Luckily, none of his followers held him to task for propping this guy up for a year, only to throw out a half-hearted disavowment in a weak attempt to sweep his constant endorsements under the rug. He can just repeat this cycle because he appeals to a very under-informed, lowest-common denominator portion of Democrat voters, the same type who non-ironically get their information from Occupy Democrats™.
He acts as a liberal version of a Candice Owens or Charlie Kirk type. He only has to play into a specific base, and doesn’t need to worry about any of those annoying things like moral consistency, or actual facts.
As bad as George Takei is, he’s not nearly as bad as Brooklyn Dad Defiant. This guy will claim that water is wet, then claim it’s dry the very next day as long as he gets a paycheck for doing so. Here he is calling out “cultish idiots”, while appealing to cultish idiots:
Here he is calling out Apple’s terrible business practices, then pulling a little flippity-doo and simping for Apple now that it’s politically convenient to do so in the wake of the completely idiotic Joe Rogan controversy:
There’s actually a twitter account that was started to highlight every hypocritical post this grifty goofball makes. He is seriously that bad. He’s got at very least dozens of these flip flop tweets. He’s also getting paid by the Democrats:
It seems it pays fairly well to be a political grifter on Twitter™. It wouldn’t surprise me if guys like George Takei and Rex Chapman are also having their pockets padded for the idiotic stuff they continually post.
We can see now that a lot of this political grifting that takes place on Twitter is quite beneficial, both to grow a platform and further one’s career opportunities, and also as a means of making money. George Takei peddles all of his goods for sale via a linktree in his Twitter™ bio for example.
Given that this grifting can be a great job opportunity, why wouldn’t non-famous people decide to hop in on the action too? Well, they do. I covered Eugene Gu in a previous post. He’s the guy who went to Doctor School™, but never actually became a practicing doctor. He then garnered fame by a taking a picture of himself kneeling in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. After the ensuing wave of new followers, he started LARPing as a practicing doctor and giving out medical information on different subjects. There were also some issues with him potentially engaging in stalking and online harassment as well, but that’s beside the point.
Eventually, he either deleted his Twitter™ account, or got banned, but he’s no longer with us on the bird app. 😢RIP, bro.
Have no fear though. Once other people realized you could literally just pretend to be a doctor on Twitter™ and sucker impressionable people into following you, many a person did just that. (You can pretend to be a lawyer too, to great effect.)
We’re gonna look at one of the more blatantly fake doctor (or nurse) accounts that is currently doing well in the grift-o-sphere. I present to you, “Emily Winston”.
First off, notice that they follow 26.6k accounts. This is a good sign that they engaged in the above mentioned “MFE” follow-for-follow tactic to initially build their account up. This is an effective technique, because gullible people see your large following, and assume that you gained this following legitimately, and therefore must be a good account to follow.
Also, right off the bat, the account almost seems like a satirical liberal account. They have the Trump-is-bad header, the obligatory #BidenHarris hashtag, and… what’s that? Computer… enhance. It appears to be some sort of link to a t-shirt shop. Computer… scan link for viruses, then engage. Beep beep boop!
It’s just as I feared. It appears to be a shitty teespring-style t-shirt site. My guess is that the entire Twitter™ account was created and manufactured for the prime purpose of selling t-shirts to liberal wine aunts. Hence the almost satirical profile and generic posts like the following:
These are the types of posts an artificial intelligence designed to produce the most generic 2020’s era liberal tweets imaginable would output. Beep beep boop. “Guns are bad, please like.” Beep boop “Everything I don’t like is white supremacy. Retweet please.” Beep beeeeep. “The next President should be an indigenous woman in a wheelchair with Asperger’s. Buy my t-shirts.” BoooooooOoOoOp.
They don’t just link to the t-shirts in their profile though. They literally try to sell this crap under each meticulously coifed tweet they post:
Their entire timeline on Twitter™ is also just 95% posts trying to sell these goofy-ass shirts. I’m thoroughly convinced the person running this account is probably a Republican voter who saw a business opportunity to fleece goofy Occupy-Democrats types and took it. They even retweet Occupy Democrats™ tweets:
This is evidently where they learned to beg for retweets under every single post they shit out. Very clever actually. I’m legitimately kind of impressed. It makes me want to create fake generic liberal and conservative accounts and fleece goofy people out of their money via shitty merch as well. Great business strategy.
This is the funniest thing they’re posted so far:
“She” is really being sincere here guys. The person who is definitely not a guy pretending to be a liberal nurse lady on Twitter™ to sell t-shirt to people is begging you to get a dose of the Corona juice. Look how tired and sincere “she” looks in that picture. Wait a minute… computer… search the google database for stock photo “TiredNurse.jpg”. BEEP BOOPITY BEEP.
Initiating image scan. Match found. Boop. Bottom right. 100% match. Beeeep.
Gotcha, scumbag. Using a stock tired nurse photo on your “sincere” Twitter™ post. Unbelievable. How could a t-shirt peddling salesman stoop this low? I actually thought you were a tired nurse who definitely worked at a completely slammed hospital, yet has the time to sell t-shirts off Twitter™ all day long. Jokes on me, huh? Boy was I gullible.
But seriously. There are people so smooth brained that they see accounts like this and think that they’re legit. How? How is anybody this gullible? I wonder what kind of money this dude is pulling in a year off this grift. I want him to mentor me in the ways. Teach me the ways of bamboozling doofuses out of their money, Sensei. If you stumble across this post, hit me up dude.