Making Money by Making People Mad

More than one public voice has commented that the seemingly endless barrage of lawsuits filed, and Trump’s relentless tirades about election fraud along with them, actually have a different main goal: raising money. I think I may be able to add a little perspective to that discussion.

It does seem to support the money-grab thesis that the Trump campaign has raked in over $200 million on voter fraud claims since the election.

The exploitation of political outrage by both parties is a real, and huge, problem. It is a closer-to-home example of what those who study conspiracy theory know as the “Hegelian dialectic”: problem >> reaction >> solution. This is a manipulative pattern in which “elites” (or rulers, etc.) create some great social problem, watch everyone react in panic or fear to it, and then offer a “solution” to solve it. Eager for such a solution, the fearful herd follows happily along. It goes unstated that this “solution” was the pre-determined plan that the rulers originally desired all along.

A simpler version of this is that any time there is a predictable mass reaction, a skillful individual can and will exploit it. It makes no difference whether the triggering event was natural or fabricated, a skillful person of power will exploit it for an agenda or personal profit, or both.

Politicians and activists love such events. They dream about them. Don’t forget the line from Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Secretary of State, in 2008, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

For a more recent case in point, take a look at the latest Coronavirus relief bill: it is bloated with pork spending for every imaginable special interest, and many you cannot imagine, for astronomical amounts you cannot imagine. The purported goal is to get relief to average Americans and small businesses. The politicians, however, lined up like hogs at the trough, writing in billions for themselves and even foreign interests. This is all in the name of meeting a crisis.

If someone objects, they’ll quickly hide their own interest and pretend the objection is an attack on those who need relief. There is a crisis, there is a predictable reaction to the need, and there is an open spigot of funds. We’d be stupid not to seize the opportunity!

But the same type of activity goes on at every lower level down the line. Wherever there is a large and largely indefinitely designated source of funds, you will find some avaricious political operative doing everything he can, making every promise he can, assuring every outcome desired, in order to get his filthy hands on that cash.

Both parties, countless organizations, and thousands of individuals partake of this market. The Bible says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. I have watched the love of money drive people from being decent Christian folk with a focus on ministry into all manner of shame. The influx of cash brings power and exposes latent narcissism and greed.

I can tell you from experience, though I don’t think I have to tell you, that there is big money in political outrage. There is money in conspiracies and dragging out political battles in the media as long as possible. The more you can hype the fear, the more you create the “problem” in that dialectic. Then you can provide the “solution”—news commentary venting outrage, saying what they wanted to say all along, and selling all kinds of related swag.

I can further tell you there are some people who, behind a façade of deep concern for conservative values and saving America, see the conservative base as one big fat lucrative market. (Yes, liberals do it, too; but if you’re a conservative, I would hope you would want to clean your own house first. I do.) Here is why it works so easily:

The more loyal the base is, the more reliable of a market it is.

The more enthusiastic it is, the easier it is to get them angry.

The angrier you can get them, the more they will react in predictable ways.

The more you present alleged “solutions” to them, the more they will buy something, pay something, donate, click on website ads, etc.

There are plenty of specialists and opportunists working ceaselessly behind the scenes to fleece this constituency for every penny they can. These schemers may appear as earnest, energetic activists for the conservative cause, but they see the conservative cause as nothing but dollar signs for them, and the base as a market they can excite to their own gain.

There are folks in these groups who do nothing but use conservative causes and “for America” media for nothing but rousing attention and building mailing lists. They can build email lists of hundreds of thousands, even millions of names. They have little to no care who wins what political battle. All they care about is that they can broker that list to countless political groups and advertising agencies—and get paid.

A little from my experience

I have personally watched how money transforms people, and specifically large influxes of money from political markets.

I began working for a ministry in 2008. The ministry is very small and had a relatively small mailing list. A fortuitous series of circumstances, however, led to a huge influx of cash. The ministry rented an email list from NewsMax (Initially, I believe, among others) and a new publication at the time sold like crazy. It was a large, $40 book touting the definitive proof of America’s Christian history, and it sold well over 50,000 copies within a few years. The success specifically with email marketing would lead to a massive revolution at the ministry.

The only problem was that the unique product could not be duplicated. Nothing else sold like it did. Multiple attempts never came close. Leadership soon decided that ministry-minded material was not what was most desired. This audience wanted political red meat.

The leadership started a side media company owned not by the ministry but by the leadership. It was not a 501c3, so it could speak openly politically. The leadership then sold themselves the ministry’s mailing list. This was technically legal, though obviously shady.

The leadership then set up new websites targeting the same audience with purely political content. They used income from this start to rent other email lists from places like WND.com (WorldNet Daily at the time), NewsMax, and others. Any new reader who clicked through was asked to sign up for a new newsletter. These names were added to the original list. It grew.

Such a list is a gold mine. It is a list of individuals of a very concentrated special interest, which yields a predictable reaction to certain stimuli—i.e., stories, ads, triggers, etc. It could be used to drive traffic to your own websites and online stores, or it could be rented or sold to others who wished to use it for similar purposes. Both avenues were highly lucrative.

This was in the early days of Google Ads. Google had not yet refined its algorithms as much as today, and some ads paid shockingly well. The leadership created their website by aggregating news articles from other popular sites, truncating the content, and reposting with more provocative headlines. Then they loaded the pages with as many ads as possible.

Once the content was up every morning, they sent an email blast out to their list. The traffic rolled in, read articles, got angry at liberals, some clicked on ads, and the revenue began to flood in. I mean flood in. These sites at the time would generate tens of thousands in ad revenue alone every month. All of this was personal profit with hardly any overhead and no ministry value.

As soon as this occurred, the two or three leaders saw the revenue potential, so they duplicated it with a similarly-themed website, same model, but slightly different name. Then another. Then another. Eventually there were maybe a couple dozen websites—I lost count. For a few years, money kept pouring in every month.

When Google began cracking down on sites that aggregated news articles from other sites, the leaders were forced to create their own content. This was more labor intensive, and they began to recruit more writers.

While I do not knock ingenuity and profitability in general, I hated pretty much everything about these sites. To keep the audience base energized, coming in, and clicking, articles had to have the right slant, and this meant mainstream Republican angst and anger. It was like Rush Limbaugh on steroids and experiencing “’roid rage.” It was consistently negative against Democrats or liberals, with well-chosen bug-eyed pics of Hilarly, etc. Rarely was anything productive, constructive, or positive the message. The two main guys running all of this, who started out as biblical worldview ministry leaders, had all but abandoned anything to do with Christ or biblical ethics in their approach, except insofar as such language pandered to Republicans or blasted Democrats. In fact, they sometimes purposefully suppressed it, because in 2011-12, Romney’s Mormonism made them hold certain worldview issues at bay. It was a great and depressing loss for the Kingdom.

The more I lived through it and watched it happen every day, the more I grew to hate it for what it was: anger mongering for profit. It was stoking the fires of anger and anxiety in order drive internet clicks and make money. An acquaintance of mine nailed it when he described the whole enterprise as “rage porn” (my apologies to those who think “porn” is so serious a problem that even the word should not be used for anything except the real thing). That is what it was. It was selling angry Republicans an opportunity to get even angrier, to read something they didn’t like about Obama or Pelosi and get pissed off. The more pissed off, the better, for the more they reacted and clicked. The more they clicked, the more revenue poured in.

I’ll never forget one time when I accompanied one of these leaders while giving a visitor a tour of the facilities. A guy I knew because he attended my seminary (the year after I left) and who also followed me on Facebook had swung through my area and visited. The leader who was with us, who also was the president of the small ministry, too, actively tried to recruit the guy as one of his rage-writers there on the spot. He explained how he made money off these people, and explained what he expected from effective writing. It was one main ingredient. It was the only ingredient he gave, and all he needed to give:

“You gotta make ‘em angry. Gotta get ‘em really mad.”

he said this while pumping his fist and smiling. He went on to explain how they were making a killing doing this, and how the young man could make a few bucks on the side by helping them. (The young man later, to his credit, declined.)

Looking back on those times, my evaluation has not changed. The thousands of articles published on those sites over the years had absolutely zero effect in saving America. They got no one elected, changed not a single person’s mind, and made zero dent in the culture.

The truth is, they were never designed to. They were designed to pretend to be doing those things while actually eyeing their thousands of conservative readers as nothing but a market to be fleeced. It was one great big façade of making people mad in order to make money. You could put it only slightly more nicely and say it was telling people what they wanted to hear in order to take their money; and in the realm of political rage, there is a sucker born every minute. However you construe it, it was insincere and avaricious from beginning to end.

As far as renting those email lists out to others, it was done with wild abandon. A political operative who brokered such lists for a living started working with these guys. They wasted no time hammering the lists with all comers: I saw ads for every alternative health product or cancer cure you can imagine, as well as other conservative newsletters, candidates, etc.

I was told at this time that renting one of those lists cost $8,000 a pop. These guys were tapping it every day, sometimes multiple times a day, for months. They raked in millions. The ads were almost all trash.

I also remember about this time, as I stayed behind as almost the lone holdout working only for the small ministry, receiving phone calls from angry readers. Remember, the core mailing list on which all those others were based was the ministry’s mailing list. It had been duplicated without the individuals’ permission time and time after time. These poor people, within months, were suddenly on multiple political email lists and were getting spammed all day long from several websites plus all that crap coming from the third-party renters.

Since they were the ministry’s followers originally, however, they would call in to us and complain. With no one else there (the other guys were off in their other offices or in meetings), I would have to field these phone calls from people angry and upset about all the spam. I had to tell them that our ministry had nothing officially to do with all those other for-profit companies. I would also apologize and tell them I did not approve of these uses of their email. They were so upset and confused. “How did I get on all these mailing lists? I never signed up for these?”

They were rightly upset. What had been done to them at the time was technically legal, but utterly selfish and abominable.

I will add that I have told only a tiny portion of what fell out from all of this. The full story of what resulted when the money transformed certain individuals involved, and what has resulted (even today) from it all, is truly revolting and shameful. The point here is that I watched first hand as a purportedly Christian-based, “America”-loving group of people were mostly about nothing more than money, and they used political outrage-mongering to get it. Under the guise of God, family, and freedom, they were really just provoking and perpetuating anger and grievances for profit. They were doing nothing but making people mad for money.

Conclusion

Does all of this mean that this is what’s going on with the multiple lawsuits and Trump’s extended refusal to concede? I am not in those circles directly, so I cannot say with certainty. But I can say that this goes on to the nth degree. An article by Morton Blackwell a couple elections ago discussed how the problem of political operatives out for nothing but money is absolutely ruining conservative politics in general. All I can say is that I have seen it with my own eyes, and among those people who would have been regarded as the most conservative, most Christian of them all. It is sick and very discouraging.

When I hear the rumors that Giuliani is getting $20,000 per day for defending Trump, though he has denied it, it doesn’t surprise me a bit. You see Sidney Powell everywhere in alt right media and beyond; but the very first thing you see if you go to her website is “donate” and “buy the book.” I know people have to get paid, but it’s also not hard to see when getting paid seems to take center stage.

When I read the lawsuits, I do not see any merit. I agree with AG Barr that there was not fraud significant enough to have swung the election. In every single instance I see, the actual provable facts do not amount to the claims of fraud, etc., and could have been addressed a long time ago.

Worse yet, the same claims are merely repeated in multiple suits. It is somewhat understandable when new claims show up, though they all seem to fail just as miserably when tested and explained. But I read cases and articles where the same things are argued over and over, even though they were refuted already. The sheer repetitiveness and redundancy of much of this may suggest these people simply think they have not yet gotten the hearing they deserve; with my experience, however, it strongly suggests someone is milking this for all it’s worth.

Again, I am not making that claim. All I can say is that it goes on. And when I consider what it will take to save America actually, whatever all of that truly entails (I have increasing doubts that we really know), these hearings and lawsuits and claims and “Trumpism” and throwback attempts, etc., strike me as a terrible joke. It is nowhere close to what is needed, either in scope or in nature. What is does all smack of, however, strongly, is that yet another master marketer once again has seen the conservative base as one big profitable market that is gullible enough to keep sending money if the right salesman keeps it angry and keeps making it the right promises. That is what it looks like to me. It looks like making money by making people mad.