The scam

We're hearing the same thing from several sources these days.

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice in A penny for your outrage.

Allan at The Angry Black Lady Chronicles in Handcuffing ourselves to the Whitehouse email server: A guide to online petitions.

Deaniac at The People's View in Move-On joins media and professional left circus on social security.

Keith Owens at Jack and Jill Politics in MoveOn.org needs to move the hell out of the way.

What they're all talking about is the grifters (as Dennis calls them) who are either stoking or using the current poutrage of the left to line their pockets while simultaneously hurting the Democrats. As Dennis says, we've seen it all before.

We know how this will end and that the pattern will be repeated. The issue really doesn’t matter at all. It also doesn’t matter if the con is sold with a Conservative or Progressive frame. The pattern is always the same and it is all so predictable.

A trigger is published in the media from a speculative source. It will outrage the single issue grifters. Anything that happens or doesn’t happen will will be used to pimp the urgency of their rage. Any thin reed of speculation will be sensationalized with text crafted to maximize search engine optimization, buzz and clicks. The gullible will believe the lies and give the grifters their emails and their money. Almost everything said to promote the outrage will be wrong, but that will not matter if the grifter can control the narrative. Fools will parrot their outrage talking points, give them money and some small measure of political power.

Eventually, reality will settle in and only the extremely stupid will still buy the con hook, line and sinker. But by then, the grifters will have move on to another manufactured outrage and mo money for them from the fools among us.

Allan points out that there's almost always a singular focus.

But the more pernicious message that these emails drive is that all feedback must be aimed directly at the president, that it is somehow up to the president alone to respond to the will of the petitionees, regardless of the issue and the degree to which other parties, especially Congress, have a say in the ultimate outcome.

That's just good marketing, isn't it? How much more difficult it would be to get eyeballs and contributions if you went into the nuance of issues, policies and process. Its much better to have a single target who is at fault for the problem at hand.

Ideologues are vulnerable to this kind of scam because, as I talked about yesterday, they don't know the difference between activism and organizing. As Giordano said about activism:

Activism seeks media attention through protests and other means, errantly thinking it will draw others to its cause by doing so. This dominant tendency in "activism" becomes a circular, self-reinforcing, self-marginalizing, chest-thumping, bureaucratic and anally-retentive activity and a big waste of time with little impact on the issues or policies it seeks to change or defend.

But it brings in money for the grifters. And that's the point.