Simple Grifts

 

Here's Lin Wood telling Georgia Republicans NOT to vote for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue next month.

"They have not earned your vote. Don't you give it to them. Why would you go back and vote in another rigged election for god's sake! Fix it! You gotta fix it!" pic.twitter.com/Uvj1QIpqFL

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) December 2, 2020

It wasn't until I saw Lin Wood's mic skills that what he was doing fully made sense to me. I mean, sure, you can't go wrong flattering pathetic vain elderly people who are already obviously vulnerable to conspiracy theories by telling them they are good enough, they are smart enough, and god damnit, they probably won California. But that's only good for what? For Trump's PAC grift it's good for a few hundred million, and for folks in Giuliani's (former) circle it might help with potential legal liability to squeeze out some pardons along the way--this guy right here wants something more. He's taking high-value hostages. 

That it's a grift is clear--the lawyering here is designed to get things thrown out early and create pointlessly stupid delays while the grift keeps rolling on--it's a lot of superficial business without a lot of solid work. They don't want to bring actual cases in front of a judge because it's weaksauce. But then you see that mic-handling: Soros! China! Vote stealing! The Deep State! 

Hugo f'g Chavez. There's like, well over a decade or so of Pavlovian/operant conditioning to work with in that.

And all they want the folks they are terrorizing (Raffensperger, Kemp, Sterling, the employees of Dominion, the Republican Party) to do is, you know, what he said. "FIX it." Like, the words are right there. Leaving aside that I and about 80 million other people think that Wood and Powell leaning on their salivating hounds to fail to vote for two entire GOP US Senate candidates is super hilarious, you don't need to assume the Wood is a Democrat plant (as the folks at Breitbart are alleging) to get what they're looking for:

Stop the steal means "Start the Stealing". 

It's art. It's just a hand-full of grifters on the outside, begging a handful of potential grifters on the inside, via a ginormous PA system, to pull off an inside-job. Because patriotism, the Bible, the purity of our precious bodily fluids, defense against Communism and jazz cigarettes, mom's blessed stain-free knickers and pecan pie.

It's a lot more subtle in its tent-revival flavor than than virtually the same thing being put on in mock hearings in hotel ballrooms and apparently, the Michigan state legislature by Giuliani and Ellis, except that the Wood/Powell version uplifts its participants in a righteous rage instead of subjecting them to being a number in a slackjaw parade of folks who believe votes came in on (or went out on--it's a bit unclear) food trucks, that they were intimidated by BLM activists wearing rhinestones, that all Chinese people look alike, etc. (Trumpism has given a lot of attention to the wild slackjaw population, but it has lost something of its dignity.)  

It's stupid-dangerous and threatens to lead to actual violence. But as grift-as-performance, it has a certain robustness in its aesthetic. Very much "fascism holding a cross and wrapped in the flag", if you will.