Sorry, breaking out the clown picture for this one. I do feel bad about it, though.
I'm actually having a bit of a hard time with this, because if you're on any hard-right mailing lists at all (don't all raise your hands at once, please) it becomes clear that a very large percentage of
all conservative advertising
is peddling various forms of scams.
Stansberry & Associates, an investment research firm catering to right-wing audiences' fears of President Barack Obama, has been fined $1.5 million for engaging in "deliberate fraud" and profiting from "false statements." Despite its shoddy history, numerous conservative outlets and personalities including Newt Gingrich, Fox Business, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Alex Jones, WND, and The Washington Times, have helped legitimize the firm and its wild investment schemes. The firm has also enlisted the help of former Fox News contributor Dick Morris, who has frequently promoted the firm in sponsored video pitches.
Read through the whole thing, it's a good rundown on how these things work. The fines in question relate to promises of stock tips based on false information and claims that that the company could increase your Social Security checks via "insider" magic. Yep, that's pretty seedy. But most of those same people and outlets also peddle gold-buying schemes that are, if not outright crooked, certainly intentionally misleading, and as you go from television to internet to email pitches the asks get progressively shadier and even more paranoid, almost always based on the overall premise that society is one lost paperclip away from collapsing entirely, oh-my-God, so you need to buy seeds or gold or silver or special anti-Obamacare helmets or pay for
secret advice on how to avoid the upcoming financial and/or health care and/or rabid squirrel apocalypse. Or, and this is the usual email approach, you can just send your money directly to the
imaginary African prince noble conservative hero who will fight this collapse of society by doing some unspecified
something that probably mostly involves him driving around in a better car and laughing at you. As it turns out, Stansberry seems to have his thumb in many of those dubious pies, so good show for being thorough. (That Stansberry apparently seems to be one of those that believes, or at least is willing to publicly claim, that Barack Obama is secretly planning a third term of office is a nice touch. Know thy audience, eh?)
Most of the pseudo-professional conservative movement—and 120 percent of what a World Net Daily does, for example—is based on the overall scam of asserting that every possible thing that happens in the news is a sign of wider imminent doom, then selling you all the various crap you're going to supposedly need to prevent that doom. You need (not kidding) a radiation detector in case nuclear war happens and you aren't sure if that huge fireball peeling your flesh off was a bomb or just your malfunctioning toaster. You need seeds delivered in a special can, because those little paper packages you can get in the garden supply centers would never stand up to the apocalypse. You need countless snippets of information on how to stay alive, and there is a noble conservative patriot willing to provide that information, but only if you pay through the nose for it; he's not so noble or patriotic that he'll just tell you fellow movement-movers how to survive for nothing.
So Media Matters deserves some high praise for pointing out the various schemes of this particular vendor, but will it make a difference to conservatives? Not a bit. I expect he'll get even more business from conspiracy nuts (e.g. the entire WND audience) who upon hearing that the government has fined him for actual fraud will say "oh, they must be persecuting him. Here, I shall shovel more of my hard-earned money directly into his gullet so that the government cannot oppress this fine upstanding shitstain." You can't really protect conspiracy theorists from fraud because the entire point of conspiracy movements is creating self-inflicted frauds. The Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, Alex Jones, Dick Morris and Newt Gingrich audiences are the survival seed garden in which hucksters grow their crops. Just water it once in a while with a newly worded prophecy of doom and wait for the money to roll in.