The Political Grift That’s Making Everyone Stupider

Many people in our public life grift for clicks and cash. You can tell who they are because they kaleidoscopically shift their views and their personas on a routine basis.

You’re constantly asking yourself, “Hey, what happened to that guy? What happened to her? They didn’t use to be that way.”

These people are shaping our political life in all the dumbest ways, because people love car wrecks. They like to watch car wrecks.

A lot of these people get pretty good numbers, use those numbers to proclaim that they are on the cutting edge of populist politics, and then actual political figures follow them.

Here is a solution. Do not donate your attention to them. There are only so many breaths you have in this life, and you’re not going to get these breaths back.

I understand that by talking about these terrible people, I’m giving many of them more attention than they deserve. But here’s the thing: They get a lot of attention. The idea is to point out and warn you that they don’t deserve that attention. If you don’t know what they’re doing, and if you don’t know how they are rigging the game, then you’re not going to be able to avoid it.

There’s a verse from Deuteronomy that, when slightly altered, truly rings home: Each evening I go to sleep thinking it certainly cannot be more stupid than it was this morning. And then I wake up in the morning, and I think, “Oh, God, I just wish it were as stupid as it was last night.”

There is a person named Milo Yiannopoulos who was pretty popular for a short period of time back in 2015-16 as a flamboyantly gay man making transgressively edgelord statements. He was a brainchild of Steve Bannon, another political grifter.

It turned out that Milo Yiannopoulos was very much in favor of priests raping underage boys as a sort of maturation process. He said that on tape, and things imploded on him.

But no one ever really goes away. He stuck around. He interned for Marjorie Taylor Greene — another great intellect of our time — because the Retarded Grifter Employment Network is alive and well. He appeared as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s and Candace Owens’s shows; he ran a campaign with Kanye West, and he became a supposedly ex-gay man who was militantly Christian.

And then he overstayed his visa and was deported because he was here illegally. And now he’s showing up on Piers Morgan’s show because Morgan is the Bonnie Blue of politics, a total clickwhore.

Which brings us to last night’s hilarious, entertaining multiple clown car crash/carnage on Piers Morgan’s show.

I don’t revel in the suffering of people who are deported. But when you spend your entire political career being the worst human being possible, you get deported in pretty quick fashion. And then you go on Piers Morgan’s Click Bordello in order to lament your own tragic mistreatment.

In February 2025, Milo tweeted, “I f*cking love tyranny.” He was a person who was very much in favor of the brutal treatment of pretty much everybody. He’s also the kind of person who — after Dennis Prager had his tragic accident in which he broke his spine and ended up paralyzed — tweeted, “God’s wrath has found Dennis Prager and his many and terrible sins. I gather he recently fell out of the shower and severed his spinal column. Paralyzed. Quivering. Drooling. Silenced. Such a freakish accident, worthy of Final Destination. What to call it but an act of God.”

It’s important to recognize who he is before you fall for his drama queen trick. Now he gets to be the drama queen of England. He described his horrific treatment this way:

Sure, it was humiliating and it was disorientating (?) all the rest of it. It was physically degrading. It was frightening. I don’t think I’ve ever been frightened like that before. … I’ve never been like this before. I tripped and kind of tumbled down the stairs an hour or two ago. I’m a clumsy person, so it’s not the rarest thing in the world, but it sets something off from when I’d been kind of shoved down a couple of steps and I was weeping like an old woman for an hour, and I was like, “Oh, I really have to go to get this out of my system.” 

I think maybe in the past I’ve been a little bit blasé when people talked about the trauma, a little bit kind of cavalier when people talked about it kind of lingering with them. But I get it now, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

He literally wished it on everyone. Literally.

Playing the sympathy card?

Going to be a no on that.

He also says that 15 agents swarmed him and he didn’t eat for 24 hours.

He does look as though he could stand to miss a meal or two.

He said two of the agents were so offended that they walked off the job, which I don’t believe for one solid, single, solitary second.

We don’t need this person in our country. We never needed this person in our country.

He put out a piece titled, “I am a Persecuted Human Rights Icon.” That’s because, of course, he’s a victim. He’s really enjoying the attention.

We should all collectively decide not to pay attention. But the reality is this: The political incentive structure in this country has been skewed by the attention economy. There’s a book called “Collective Illusions,” where psychology professor Todd Rose talks about how people tend to follow others based on how many people they think are following that person, what he calls a “collective illusion.” He writes:

If people can see one another’s choices and if they’re merely copying each other, wisdom becomes stupidity in a hurry. In doubting our own judgment and defaulting to conformity, we transform ourselves from individuals into members of the herd. And before we know it, the seat of error can become a copying cascade that devours all other knowledge and leaves a collective illusion in its wake. It’s terrifyingly easy to start a copying cascade.

The copying cascade online is extraordinarily easy to start. This is the reason why Piers Morgan’s defense to every charge of immorality is that he gets lots of clicks. His idea is that if he gets lots of clicks, that means other people agree with him.

The attention economy should not dictate politics. If people fall for that intellectual trap, we have a problem. When the public starts to substitute clicks for judgment, then people end up following some of the most idiotic and immoral people in America and abroad.

The American Founders feared the mob for this reason. This is why the Founders were fans of checks and balances in government — and not fans of pure democracy. They favored enshrined rights that were not subject to the whims of the majority, because human beings are gullible and follow the crowd.

They were correct.