May 3, 2025
MAGA is a grift all the way down. At the top, you have crypto scams, stock manipulation and influence peddling. It’s not a moment, it’s a movement which is all about looting the country before it all comes to a crashing end.
For the suckers at the bottom, there’s not a lot of ways to earn wealth. Being shut out of the higher-level conspiracies, they have to generate cash by taking advantage of the people beneath them. A classic pyramid scheme.
One of the few opportunities to make money is to be a YouTube Livestreamer.
It seems so easy. Anyone with an iPhone can do it, right? Trigger the libs for fun and profit, as you livestream events on YouTube. Garner enough subscribers and YouTube will share revenue with you or, even better, solicit donations directly from your audience through Superchats and other online tools.
Howard Lutnick thinks that Americans want to screw in tiny screws, like Chinese factory workers. But we don’t want those jobs. Everyone wants to be Media, as predicted in Super Sad True Love Story, a novel that I think about often because it captures our decline better than any dry article in the Economist.
The problem is that the MAGA livestreamer market is saturated with chuds who also think this is an easy way to riches. It’s one of those markets, like much of American capitalism, where all the benefits accrue to a tiny portion at the top while 99% make little or nothing.
I’ve watched it happen in DC, as livestreamers infested my town in the wake of the trucker convoy, the 1776 Restoration Movement and the jail side vigil known as Freedom Corner. These were tiny MAGA groups where nearly every participant was also a livestreamer, providing coverage of what little happened as donations rolled in from elderly shut-ins watching at home.
It was a good grift, with a constant sense of outrage that fueled the granny squad to open their purses and send those Social Security dollars to the chuds of Freedom Corner.
Trump pardoning the J6 rioters was the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to them.
With the scam over, most went home. Some remained in the area and have sought to recapture the golden age of the grift by triggering the libs for fun and profit. It’s the MAGA Livestreamer Business Model.
One of them, whom we’ll call Big Dummy, showed up late (chuds are never on time) to the May Day demonstration at Freedom Plaza. As people packed up and started to leave, Dummy tried to provoke them with questions like, “Why don’t you love yer President Donald Trump?”
The idea was to get people mad. Or, even better, to attack him.
A month earlier, at another protest, he got under the skin of folks to the point that one of them sprayed him with blue spray paint.
The guy who assaulted him was arrested. Dummy caught it all on camera, leading to appearances on several right-wing podcasts and a few moments of viral fame. More views and more exposure, which meant donations from an audience desperate to show that the left was violent, too.
Conflict is content. If you want views and donations, you want to provoke a situation where you’re the victim.
Most of the people at the May Day protest wisely ignored this limping man with a long beard and MAGA hat asking dumb questions.
A few tried to block his camera by holding up signs. But that is giving him content; don’t do that.
One man sang Woody Guthrie to him, edging ever closer to Dummy. It really freaked him out. The young man sang:
I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose
This turned the tables on Dummy, by using his platform for an antifascist message that drove his right-wing audience nuts.
But it’s best to just ignore them. Any engagement is content, which means more views for them.
So, if you’re at a protest, and you’re approached by a character with an iPhone on a gimbal with some provocative questions, just ignore them. Don’t take the bait. Don’t give them what they want, which is conflict, viral moments that they can clip and share to drive donations.
Focus on your message. What you’re there for. As Winston Churchill said, “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”
Starve the beast. Wreck the MAGA Livestreamer Business Model.
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