Scammers are always gonna scam. One of the reasons they get away with it is most of the media either ignores the hustle or is complicit.
How We Killed the Tea Party
Greedy super PACs drained the movement with endless pleas for money to support “conservative” candidates—while instead using the money to enrich themselves. I should know. I worked for one of them.
As we watch the Republican Party tear itself to shreds over Donald Trump, perhaps it’s time to take note of another conservative political phenomenon that the GOP nominee has utterly eclipsed: the Tea Party. The Tea Party movement is pretty much dead now, but it didn’t die a natural death. It was murdered—and it was an inside job. In a half decade, the spontaneous uprising that shook official Washington degenerated into a form of pyramid scheme that transferred tens of millions of dollars from rural, poorer Southerners and Midwesterners to bicoastal political operatives.
These sort of schemes depend on cranking up the outrage in order to raise money. The people who are good at that often make good guests on cable TV. They generate plenty of heat and provide cheap content for Fox, MSNBC, CNN, etc.
In the end we all end up dumber and more ignorant.
Related:
Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze
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