America The Sucker
The Harry and Meghan Con and What it says about Americans Plus, the kids can’t read or do math (which some teachers claim is racist).
“A sucker born every minute and two to take ’em.”
Paula Froelich has an article in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press today worth paying attention to. I rather enjoy The Free Press and Paula’s writings, but this one post speaks volumes about where we are as a country and a culture.
To summarize, Paula writes a mea culpa. Because, by her own admission, she was one of the folks smitten with Meghan and Harry and their fairy tale marriage six years ago, she is one of the many Americans who fell for the whole Pretty Woman “she’s a real princess!” narrative pushed by the mainstream media, in magazines and on talk shows. The clips from that fawning coverage were then diced up and shared through our social media platforms until it was Meghan and Harry all the time (or ad nauseam, as I prefer to think of it). I couldn’t get a haircut without hearing about those two pretend royals pretending to be victims.
That anyone ever fell for this grift at any point shows just how gullible and weak-minded Americans have become.
Sorry Paula, but that you were ever taken in by these two grifters, that you ever have them an ounce of your attention or spent a second thinking about them and possibly defending them against others who, from the start, called out their con game.
Harry is a second-rate second brother with no discernible skills and little polish or charm. Basically, he’s an ungrateful, lazy buffoon. Meghan came along and polished up that dumb rock, which perhaps led to people failing to see in the first place that she is a gold-digging liar who was always only in it for the fame and the payday.
Now that those suckers taken in by the fake duke and duchess’s royal grift are offering mea culpa. Or, as Paula writes, her mea maxima culpa. As my father likes to say, that’s about a day late and a dollar short. Why does anyone care? Why write about this? Because it reveals truths about our country and ourselves, we might want to start waking up to and hopefully straightening out.
To begin with, this is a big grift, a long con in the spirit of The Sting; Netflix gave them $100 million dollars for some of the worst, most poorly produced, drek on tv —and I started my career PA’ing at a daytime talk show, so I know serious drew when I see it. By the way, this is the same Netflix refusing to pay real writers with real talent what they are owed, much less what they deserve. These two issues are not mutually exclusive. Because when the con is on, everyone starts to steal to get rich. Steal from writers to pay a couple royal grifters. Piss away money on piss-poor programs and movies that no one wants to see. Then ignore the audience when we tell you what we like versus what we don’t like. We don’t like being condescended to. We don’t like to be told it’s our fault your movie bombed (Star Wars; Captain Marvel; Bros). And we don’t like woke-ism or being lectured to by the companies we pay our hard-earned dollars to; for a service or a product. Not for your fake virtue signals.
The problem is, so many Americans — not all — but let’s say between a quarter and half the country, fall for these grifters time and again. We live in the Age of Information, and somehow, we are more susceptible than ever.
It begs the question, what other lies and scams are we falling for? To know the answer, one only has to look at the headlines of every major newspaper, or listen to the talking-head shills behind the anchor desks on the cable news channels selling the same con, only now it’s produced, and it’s beamed into your tv or phone or computer. And don’t even get me started on the comment sections and Twitter chains. I’m all for the back and forth, but I can also see the abject stupidity of so many people online. I mean seriously.
Because there is a cost. The dollars and cents are not limited to what ends up in the pocket of grifters like Harry and Meghan.
Sure, I know; you’ll say no one watched, and no one listened on Spotify. That’s kinda like pointing out that the con men known as Travellers who do home repair scams didn’t actually fix the roof. Right. But they got paid. And in the case of Meghan and Harry, they didn’t just get paid. They got PAID.
They were served up as a fairy tale power mixed-race couple who would speak truth to power — or whatever other nonsensical derivation of that obvious marketing ploy people fell for is a problem. Plus, you have to wonder about the folks running these studios, streamers and digital music companies…what other cons are they falling for? How much are these suckers losing to scam artists? And when you’re talking about publicly traded companies, now you’re getting into financial improprieties and possibly fraud.
The canary in the coal mine should be obvious grifters like Meghan and Harry. And yet…
“The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”
That’s a quote from The Wire. And it’s true.
Not just about a bullshit princess but about a lot of things we’re served up and expected to swallow without even knowing what the ingredients are going into the meal. Or, for that matter, who’s in the kitchen cooking it up. Which can lead to some very bad outcomes.
When you have a good head on your shoulder, and you’re smart with even a modicum of common sense, along with a decent sense of decent morals, you can spot these cons coming.
Or, they don’t register for you because, as at what used to be called in this country, an intelligent, productive, hard-working member of society, you’re not someone who needs to cut corners or look for the angle. You’re too busy rising up and succeeding on your own merit.
That’s why, as the number of that type of upstanding, accomplished person diminishes, and the suckers increase in this country, you see a push to do away with merit in schools and jobs. AP classes are called racist and canceled. If you don’t see that or the scam it is, then you’re….well, let me put it this way: If you can’t spot the sucker at the table, you are the sucker.
How did we end up as the sucker?
One explanation might be that if you don’t have basic reading comprehension and know basic math, you’re more likely to get taken in by scam artists. Turns out that in America, half the kids in school can’t read or write. Seriously, here are the stats.
It’s depressing and scary as hell to read.
And before any of us, graduates start feeling all high and mighty about ourselves because we’re the adults, it’s not like our proficiency was off the chart when we were in school. This pattern of failing of students failing in math and English has been going on for 11 years straight.
“American, on average, are stupid people.”
That’s another quote from “The Wire.” Same episode. Maybe there’s a correlation. Be dumb and get conned.
More proof of the correlation between our country being populated by morons and by so many of us being taken in by a con is all the while, the cost of college and higher education have skyrocketed. Meanwhile, the higher education received and the return on the investment for those degrees don’t balance out in the end. So you end college deep in debt.
Which, in the parlance of a confidence game, means, “You owe.” “You’re on the hook.” “You’re in deep to the sharks.”
This leads people to make more bad decisions. It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t end well for the suckers.
This wouldn’t be so terrible if it were limited to woke princesses playing the victim card and her callow husband, who sells out his family for a buck at every turn, but already I’ve pointed out a few correlations with more significant implications in society and to our country.
To wit:
Bernie Madoff
Elizabeth Holmes
CDOs and the housing crash
Sam Bankman-Fried and woke bank collapses
Brought to you by the folks at Pfizer.
These people are all crooks. But they got away with their crimes for so long because they wrapped their pitch up in the virtue signaling of our era of suckers. Of course, they do. Because like all good confidence artists — they make you feel good about giving them your money. You only figure out you’ve been had — suckered — when it’s too late.
It’s not limited only to the royals or crashing crypto banks backed by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, or profligate spending streamers in Hollywood paying all the wrong people while refusing to pay the right ones actually doing the good work. It’s also the collapsing of narratives that were so obviously bullshit lies from the jump, and yet, so many people fell for them for so long, which is how some of these scams managed to be long cons with big payoffs worthy of Newman and Redford in The Sting.
Starting a couple of summers ago, we were introduced to social justice not-for-profit BLM organization. I don’t like to say Black Lives Matter because associating a decent enough phrase with a very indecent organization doesn’t sit right with me. That group was started and partially run by a woman named Patrice Cullors. Cullors was later forced to resign from BLM, but not until she’d managed to buy herself a 3.1 million dollar house in Los Angeles’s tony neighborhood of Encino. The organization itself, which received roughly $90 million in donations and paydays, now can’t account for where that money went.
To paraphrase Wesley Snipes as “Nino Brown” in New Jack City, “You gotta rob to get rich in the Biden era.”
Makes you wonder what other bs narratives we’ve been sold:
Social distancing and six feet safe.
Masks work.
Project Warp Speed.
The vaccine works.
Mostly peaceful protests.
My truth versus the truth.
Equity over equality
There’s no such thing as Antifa.
There’s no such thing as cancel culture.
ESG and DEI quotas.
Climate change will kill us.
Epstein killed himself.
Math is racist.
The flag is racist.
Americans are racists
White supremacy is the biggest threat we face.
We’re not coming for your kids.
Hands up, don’t shoot.
The world is overpopulated.
Gender-affirming care is health care.
It was Russian disinformation
The one thing we have in common is government
You know the scariest thing you can be told by someone who shows up at your door is — “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
I’m sure I missed a few, but I’ve triggered more than a few of you by now. And I don’t want anyone’s head exploding like some scene from the David Cronenberg movie, Scanners (great movie).
Then, as soon as the grift is played, the mea culpa begins. How could we not have known Harry and Meghan weren’t the real deal fairy tale we were led to believe?
“Because you’re stupid, Virgil.”
That’s a quote from The Usual Suspects.
Or, to put it another way cinematically speaking, Too many of us have turned into Fredo Corleone screaming, “I’m not dumb! I’m smart!” while trying to convince the rest of us that a man can be a woman and 2+2=5 if only you believe in objective truth.
Oh, and of course, that Harry and Meghan were speaking truth to power while sitting on their last grifter’s asses in Montecito cashing their Netflix and Spotify checks.
So from me and the rest of the country not taken in by these two grifters, who refuse to fall for shiny, sparkly baubles that the media dangles in their faces like cult leaders hypnotizing the rubes in their flock, our response is, save your mea culpa, maxima or otherwise. Instead, sit down and be quiet for a while. If we could, we’d send you suckers to your collective rooms to study and learn something for a change. But since we can’t, maybe do the rest of us a favor and self-quarantine. You remember how to do that, right? Think of your mea culpa as the latest covid variant. The sucker strain. And mask it.
Better still, in the future, let’s all of us get smarter.