All Falls Down: Kanye West and the American Scam Economy

Who you gon call now?

The most revealing moment of our current Kanyocolypse hasn’t been the flashiest but once you see it everything clicks into place. After antisemitisming his way off of Instagram and Twitter, occasional rapper and current full time content farm for Twitter accounts that end their posts with “‼️ 😳,” Kanye West has entered into an agreement to purchase Parler, the moderation free version of Twitter for right wing chumps. Kanye has been spotted palling around with conservative shell-person Candice Owens. She was the one wearing “White Lives Matters” tee-shirts with him at Paris Fashion Week. Parler is, in almost any sense of the word, a flop. It commands around 40,000 daily users and just over a million monthly visitors (Twitter averages 450 million). It isn’t even the “free speech” social media platform that Trump is on, which is also a flop. But now that Kanye has been banned from his two favorite social networks he’s looking to just up and buy his own, so that’s where Parler comes in. But here’s the fun part. Parler is owned by Parlement Technologies. Their CEO, George Farmer, is married to… Candice Owens. Now, am I saying that Candice Owens Wormtongue’d her way into Kanye West’s inner circle in hopes of one day offloading her husband’s failed social media platform onto him? No. But it sure did work out in her favor.

Kanye’s recent troubles are usually framed as mental health crisis and while that’s a totally valid approach I also fear it’s missing the point. Kanye is an extremely troubled individual. He’s also a billionaire and like all billionaires Kanye West is a scam artist, surrounded by other scam artists, propped up by an economy of scam artists, who are all trying to scam as much of ours and each other’s money into their own pockets before everything falls apart. The problem with running scams on Kanye right now is he really has suffered a mental break. I won’t speculate on specifics but I’m familiar with a lot of what he’s going through. It’s the intersection between religious fervor and mania, when your brain is short circuiting and you become very vulnerable to people telling you what you need to hear to keep that mania going, to confirm you’re not crazy, the spirit really is moving within you. So while he may have once been, Kanye is no longer in on the scheme. He’s simply being ripped off. It’s why Tucker Carlson had to edit out portions of his big interview with him. Kanye’s diatribes on the KKK creating Planned Parenthood to control the Jewish population so clearly gives the game away. He isn’t actually saying anything or is some victim being unfairly cancelled by the woke left, Kanye is just a sick man worth 1.8 billion dollars being passed around and given a firm shake to see what comes loose from his branches. Except what’s coming loose isn’t just money and clout it’s “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” and fake children being placed in his house to sexualize his kids.

This isn’t to say grifting doesn’t go on in left leaning circles, it does, but it’s impossible to overstate how much this grift is simply the entire point on the right. Nothing on the left is perfect, politics never are, but there’s still an overall thrust to it; acknowledging that the future is coming and it’s up to us to fix things now before it’s too late is a concept universal enough to be at least grasped by the entirety of the left flank. Meanwhile, the whole right side of the equation is propped up by “The Big Lie,” cameo accounts, price gouging, Cyber Ninjas, fundraising emails, fake voter fraud accusations, defamation, wine, fraudulent coffee companies, crowdfunding scams, and pillows. My god, so much pillow grifting. My own run in with a member of the right wing grift machine came when one of their twitter personalities/outrage vomit bags retweeted a post of mine, sending various members of his audience my way. I attempted to extradite them by asking them all to fuck off but forgot to block their leader so he sent more of them to attack me. It sucked. But what I could never get over was that his pinned tweet for the duration was a MyPillow promo code in his name. Come on. Be serious now. Your alpha dog, with the million followers, is fighting for the soul of the nation but also really wants you to make sure to use his promo code when purchasing a bad pillow?

Pillows, NFTs, $1,000 pit tickets, AI generated art, self driving cars, a tunnel to nowhere, all access series, Fyre Festivals, an endless monsoon of “Likely Spam” calls and texts. The level of off-the-charts grifting now feels extra absurd because there’s such a rush to get the money up the chain of command that those with the money and the power are only barely dressing up their schemes with a veneer of legitimacy. Build everything cheap, and flip it quick because once the sea levels rise enough there’s only going to be people who can afford apocalypse bunkers and people who can’t. Nothing is being built with the future in mind because they don’t think there is a future. At all. For anyone. When noted right wing grifter JD Vance lets Donald Trump remark straight to his face what an ass kisser he is, on stage at his own rally mind you, he shrugs it off because to him there’s not going to be anyone around to even remember that soon. All that matters is this very urgent moment where he can hopefully accrue enough influence to maintain his comfy lifestyle while the world falls apart and he’ll kiss as much ass as it takes to make that happen.

Don’t you feel like you’re being taken for a ride? Can you even go outside anymore without accidentally spending $25? What’s your current student loan balance? Any unpaid overtime lately? When do you think you’ll be able to afford your first home? Has your rent gone up recently? How many invoices do you need to follow up on right now? Hey, how about this newsletter, do you feel like you’re being scammed just reading this? Does the funny nu-metal guy using his Substack to write about Kanye West and remind you of your student loan balance feel like a rip-off? There’s almost no ways to engage with the United States anymore without feeling like someone is getting played. Everytime I put down a paywall on an article or remind my Twitch audience to subscribe or work on my Patreon I feel like I’m apart of the problem. Nobody thinks they’re going to be millionaires, movie gods, or rockstars anymore. Hell, vanishingly few people I know think they’ll ever afford a house or kids or a vacation. It’s not as if there isn’t enough money to go around, there is, it just isn’t going around, it’s going up. The people responsible for creating life changing art are making pennies on the dime while the people who have dedicated their lives to simply moving money into their own pockets are rich beyond reason.

I truly hate to say it but it’s going to get worse before it gets better. California’s fake woke billionaire class are going to disappear into the bushes and reemerge fascist the second wealth redistribution becomes an even somewhat serious policy concern, the mere sight of poor people has already put them halfway there. There’s also an entire generation about to expire infuriated that the future does not belong to them anymore and losing the culture war has pushed our nation’s Facebook fried boomers to the courts, where they will enshrine their misery into law.

So what is to be done? Despite the ease of doomer sentiments that tend to proliferate on Twitter and seep down into Substack newsletters (oh, shit) I personally remain optimistic. I don’t know why exactly. Maybe I’ve been surprised at the productivity of our current democratic administration but as I’m watching the opposition party easily turn the populace away from progress through gas prices and rainbow fentanyl mongering I suspect that all their meager gains are about to be washed away by the tide of reactionary sentiment. But the future does still belong to us. We have more time than we think to improve things and there will always be beauty in this world worth sticking around for and the bottle just has to break at some point. Things can’t always trend downward, the people currently pulling us backward won’t be there forever (I think?) and we have time to correct this course. Kanye isn’t going to show us the way though. Nor are any of his billionaire friends. They’re all going to pile into a helicopter and pull the ladder up behind them as soon as these waves get choppy and they’re going to do with with pockets full of our money. I don’t know how happy they’ll be with each other once those doors slide closed though. Once us peasants are out of the picture they’ll have to contend with the fact that for all their money and power they’ve only made dicks and swallowers out of each other and will keep on doing so until all the lights are out.