It's easier to grift through an election campaign than it is to grift through government.
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Telling people what they wanted to hear used to be part of the average grift; lately, thanks to social media and crowdfunding, it works beautifully as a grift in itself.
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Occasionally these youthful businesses evidenced a casual relationship with grift.
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But like most elements of crypto grift, things get murky quickly.
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Johnson also found a lucrative grift in home and vacation rentals.
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Pruitt's greed and grift: These were permissible, because these were familiar.
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Another thriving online grift is the GoFundMe sob story fake-out.
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I do so by committing fraud, which I call The Grift.
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And T-Mobile had been pulling this grift for over a decade.
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As you've probably heard by now, it was all one big grift.
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"Grift" and "grifter" are old-fashioned words, but ever more useful ones.
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In a sane world we'd be trying to shut this grift down.
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The same goes for his racism, bullying, anti-intellectualism, corruption and grift.
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There were clear signs that it was a grift all along, of course.
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One does have to appreciate the chutzpah required for a grift on this scale.
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But in the case of Netflix's Fyre, the grift may have seeped into the
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It's the 21st-century grift, abandon the girl that brung you to the dance.
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But perhaps no moment has been so primed for grift as our current one.
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"It's a grift, it's always been a grift, and now that it is metastasizing into car parts and voting machines and juicers and artificial pancreases, what was once a peripheral nuisance has become a moral hazard and even an existential threat," Doctorow said.
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Asimo, in my mind, departs this world as the embodiment of Honda's great bionic grift.
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My gut reaction has always been a mix of disdain and respect for the grift.
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Keeping track of all the corruption and grift is exhausting, and maybe that's the point.
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The last rule you need to know to pull off this grift: spread it out.
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What's most frustrating about Musk's stunts is how everything feels a little bit like a grift.
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There is no need to grift innocents and reinvent identities; points meet you where you are.
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The Donald J. Trump Foundation was an audacious grift, even by the standards of its namesake.
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How did that tradition morph into the fact-averse, conspiracy-mongering grift that it is today?
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You just need to turn your focus from the grift to the negative space around it.
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He was Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, the son of Stevenson's remarkable wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne.
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One variety of online grift victimizes the influencers themselves with identity-fraud tactics common to phishing.
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The entire thing—the grift, the response, all these follow-up articles—is totally novel to me.
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CAPC, meanwhile, has been accused by former members and indigenous law enforcement officials of running a grift.
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To some extent, experts said, Amazon scammers were just honing a steadily-evolving grift of modern retail.
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If, considering what a freak-scene triumph 1978's Nite Flights, a pop sanctioned grift it ever was.
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And finally, Michelle recommends a recent podcast that spotlights yet another chapter in this American age of grift.
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The jarred bathwater quickly sold out, but it seems like others are trying to hop on Delphine's grift.
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The next level of the Grift works with fancy face cream, but this is a two-step process.
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But it'd be nice to get more Metal Gear in our lives that isn't just a zombie mode grift.
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If you're wondering whether there's room for grift if these transactions move further from the blockchain, so were we.
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While it's useful to know the extent of Pruitt's grift, his scandals are instructive when viewed from another angle.
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Amazon's return grift has been known for years, both within hacking circles and among sellers who have been scammed.
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Mark him down with Anna Sorokin as another casualty of the Summer of the Grift, as it rolls inevitably on.
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Lots of people in the Trump administration have used their position to grift from taxpayers in one way or another.
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Paul will be forgiven for his past sins and both will continue to grind, because the YouTube grift never stops.
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He has secured enough support that it has insulated him from serious consequences for his corruption, lawlessness, ignorance and grift.
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My original objections to Trump, the things that pushed me into the Resistance, were his immorality, dishonesty, fraudulence and grift.
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Danny Ocean is a criminal mastermind, and on the day he gets out of prison, he's already orchestrating his next grift.
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"Grift" evokes not so much specific criminal acts as a broad, opportunistic racket, executed with a bit of cunning and panache.
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What is the ultimate grift but to make good on your unlawful rewards and prove that you deserved them all along?
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It means banning judges from going on fancy junkets where they might essentially get bribed by industries trying to grift consumers.
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She didn't see a con man working his grift; she saw revenge on the people she thought took her dignity, her safety.
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Advertise on Hyperallergic with Nectar Ads In April 2017, millions watched as the latest tech grift imploded extremely publicly on social media.
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Her go-to grift is a modified version of catfishing, in which she confabulates a hot sister in desperate need of surgery.
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Young people look at their paychecks and suspect that their college educations were a grift, or at least the student loans were.
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Given the scale of subsidies we give to fossil fuels, the industry as a whole should be regarded as a gigantic grift.
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The extent of the Theranos grift is so gargantuan, its effects are still rippling even after Holmes was first caught lying in 2015.
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Though show caves are not a specifically American phenomenon, their American iteration comes with a unique whiff of desperation and alluring entrepreneurial grift.
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Several of the defendants are also big-names in the investment industry, and their grift now puts their colleagues and clients at risk.
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Photo: Alex Cranz (Gizmodo)In a grift for the ages, two engineering students allegedly scammed Apple out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Such is the reality The Boys reveals behind the idolatry: greed and grift and outright homicide, all the while preaching exceptionalism and sanctimony.
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Even an operator so skilled in the art of the grift didn't realize just how deep the GOP con on health reform went.
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A search on the subreddits r/legaladvice and r/scam turn up several instances in which people were caught up in a similar grift.
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The episode implies that all tourism is some version of a grift, where guides are responsible for producing the exact experience that guests expect.
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Particularly after the brazen grift attempts so lazily hidden by Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, few headlines are likely to surprise a numbed public.
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Unlike the apparent targets of the anti-media grift du jour on the right, Riley isn't a journalist, or any kind of public figure.
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We, too, have our cheats and impostors, so many these days that some commentators have cited grift as the ascendant ethos of our time.
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Failure is built into grift; after all, if you get away with it, you're no longer on the outside — you're part of the system.
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Gizmodo has reached out to DJI for further details and clarification on how many of its people are believed to have joined in the grift.
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The Handmaiden begins as the story of a young Korean pickpocket (Kim Tae-Ri) who tries to grift a Japanese heiress out of her money.
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Deadline reported in June that Shonda Rhimes would write the series adaptation for Netflix of Jessica Pressler's New York Magazine story about Sorokin's spectacular grift.
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The opposite of a grift, you find, is creating things of real value, paying fair wages, asking what is right more than what is profitable.
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Bruni: Let's pivot super quickly back to Tuesday's results and then let our patient readers move on to other news, like Scott Pruitt's latest grift.
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Our institutions have long been gutted, pared down, privatized, and otherwise optimized for grift and profit, and fatal outcomes were always part of that calculus.
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A guy like me, if I wanted to grift, you go do major corporate work—$100,000 a month and you're just wallowing in the mud.
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A whole lot of grift During his tenure as EPA chief, Pruitt wielded his influence to try to solicit favors for his family and friends.
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Indeed, that small digital interface piloted by your dominant hand may very well have been the greatest grift ever devised until the dongle hit the scene.
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One aspect of this particular grift that makes it tough to detect is that the scammers will spoof the numbers of real government and police agencies.
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As USA Today reported in June, Trump has pulled this crude grift hundreds of times on everyone from cabinet-builders to dishwashers, plumbers, painters, and lawyers.
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In 2007, as fraud and grift in Iraq and Afghanistan ran "into untold billions," legislators attempted to close a loophole in the laws against war profiteering.
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For Trump and many of his allies, government is yet another avenue for grift and personal enrichment, a pattern he has maintained for his entire life.
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But a greater truth is that great grift looks obvious only in retrospect, as the startup world previously saw in lower-profile cases like Canopy Financial.
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But it's unclear to me what grift Jimmy has in mind and the Season 1 episode ("Alpine Shepherd Boy") featuring another Hummel figurine offers few clues.
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But over the course of the year, it has begun to feel that the energy behind calling everything a grift is the very opposite of jaded.
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To that end, for this week's Giz Asks, we reached out to number of animal behaviorists, who helped us explore whether or not animals grift each other.
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Grift between individuals of the same species that may or may not be social, but do not live in a true social colony, have occasioned heated disagreements.
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To make things even more confusing, the person behind the grift looks to have set up fake Twitter accounts to attest to the legitimacy of the con.
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Because if you're still proffering ideas like this after this season, you're clearly running a grift in which nobody can ever escape, not even you, the grifter.
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I've been doing this for years, and on the way to perfecting this grift, I've fucked up once or twice, so you can learn from my mistakes.
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If you ever feel like the old-fashioned grift has gone the way of fast-talking men in hats and three-card Monte on street corners — the way of Harold Hill in "The Music Man," commencing his 1912 grift with a rousing patter song about moral decay — all you have to do is Google terms along the lines of "elaborate Walmart returns scheme" to witness the American ingenuity still on offer.
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And yet somehow, in this summer of scamming, IRL grift is easily outpacing the current big-screen visions of cons, heists, hustling, and fraud for sheer escapist satisfaction.
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This helps explain why the "advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift," Ms Konnikova writes, as it has upended everything from dating to shopping.
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Thankfully, New York Attorney General Letitia James has ordered you to stop this disgraceful grift, but she can't stop you from filling your fans' heads with poisonous ideas.
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A major part of AMLO's presidential campaign was his anti-corruption initiative, in which he vowed to end high-level grift for the benefit of the average Mexican.
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This is the thing about grift-logic: It immediately radiates outward, by analogy, from literal scams to broad systems that merely have the same sensibility as a scam.
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The recent glut of fantastical scammer tales — including magazine profiles of the faux-socialite and the faux-explorer — continues with a set of new podcasts devoted to grift.
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"A lot of [Republicans] who held back criticism of the president on Ukraine grift are unleashing at him over Syria," tweeted Tamara Cofman Wittes of the Brookings Institution.
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By the time the caramella arrived, with Tootsie Roll-shaped pasta that gave way to an oozing flow of shockingly sweet caramelized cauliflower, the cereal grift was forgiven.
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The internet is a global gathering of strangers and money, which means that a fraud, a trick, a swindle, a grift or a graft is obviously never far.
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Completed GRift runs — both the map(s) and the gear/skill build used — are captured as a snapshot and then offered up to other players as a timed challenge.
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The scammer in question was running a grift that tried convincing people their iCloud accounts had been hacked, and the only solution was to pay $400 in tech support.
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So did Cheryl Lankford, a young black woman who was ripped off by the colossal grift that is Trump University, after losing her husband to the war in Iraq.
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Here's the grift: You are directed to send a small fee for instructions, after which you are instructed to recruit other people to buy the same envelope-stuffing opportunity.
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Just a few months ago, two engineering students in Oregon were charged after trying to swap counterfeit iPhones with real ones in a grift that cost Apple about $900,000.
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But once Ryan successfully cast himself as the party's leading conservative wonk, it seemed that nothing—neither repeated policy failures nor evidence of his grift—could dent his standing.
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This line of thinking can, pretty obviously, be a glib one; to say something like "capitalism is a grift" is to express an intuition, not file a detailed indictment.
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The Sandler clique is so incestuous that it's sometimes the subject of fevered speculation suggesting that Happy Madison is a grift to keep Sandler's mediocre friends in the money.
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This is the surprisingly wholesome, traditionalist set of values that sneering at grift inevitably pushes you toward: old-timey rectitude and integrity, honest work and firm handshakes and mutual respect.
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Notes on the Culture As stories of theft and deception have come to dominate the cultural conversation, it can often feel like grift is a modern phenomenon — but it isn't.
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It's a good grift, exploiting the emotional insecurities of the Trump-imperiled liberal professional class, and Halperin should not be thought a fool for trying his hand at this game.
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It's an almost direct follow to the "opportunity zones" scheme the administration cooked up—a grift claiming to help poor neighborhoods that was actually a massive tax break for developers.
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An election a few months earlier had delivered Labour a great victory, despite three years of rule during which Caruana Galizia had made serious allegations of grift by party leaders.
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It keeps his voting base focused on the vague idea of an enemy at home, rather than the politicians who continue to grift their way around Washington's as-yet-undrained swamp.
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While one does have to admire the size and scale of this particular scam, it also illustrates that the bigger the grift, the more likely you are to eventually get caught.
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Roy then puts his grift into action, insinuating himself in Betty's life by feigning a knee injury so that he can move into her guest room in a secluded retirement community.
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But it's also a rousing and fun caper about a family of con artists and some strange secrets hidden away in the house of the rich people they try to grift.
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The grift reached a fever pitch in 2017, when bitcoin prices spiked and scammers lured victims to invest millions in cryptocoins or blockchain-based products that would never come to exist.
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The long, tangled tale of Scott Pruitt — a pile of grift and corruption come to life — as head of the Environmental Protection Agency may finally soon be coming to an end.
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As Sharon becomes interested in spicing up her life with a little larceny, Robyn is torn between admiring her roommate's emergent pluck and her own resolve to get off the grift.
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The president's singular governing innovation has been to engage in grift so baroque, so galactically expansive, that trying to comprehend it all at once tests the limit of the human mind.
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Whatever pleasures they offer, they're disappointingly uninterested in the glee of the grift; none of them manage to provide the kind of giddy thrill that the evening news has been supplying lately.
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To rekindle a sense of civic pride and community, Yang proposes annual $100 Prosperity Grants to be donated to the charity of one's choosing but might just breed grift and fake charities.
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Many on Twitter have wondered how, particularly as the head of a scientific company, Holmes allowed her hair to appear so chemically fried, and whether the look played into her larger grift.
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Twitter is rife with #Resistance hucksters and scammers, but the majority of these bottom feeders merely live in the shadow of the undisputed kings of anti-Trump grift, Ed and Brian Krassenstein.
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Conservative politics in general and the Republican Party in particular have always been a pretty obvious grift; in his atavistic sadism and greed, Trump represents more of an apotheosis than a reckoning.
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Fox will still be a lucrative grift after that, because while the audience it caters to may be a small minority of Americans, but it is real, wealthy, and it will remain loyal.
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Then, Kate Wagner at The Baffler: It is a Vessel for capital, for a real estate grift that can charge more for an already multi-million dollar apartment because it merely faces it.
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It's a cynical critique that sees art schools as a big private grift that ask you to do a bunch of arbitrary assignments in a classroom setting that are graded purely by magic.
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I've never been traditionally pretty myself; never more than a four in the flyover states, but, in my youth, I was a solid coastal seven so I can get down with the grift.
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This conservative media grift is remarkably easy—you can be extremely dim and lazy and still find a sinecure, or be as generally pathetic as Joe Walsh and get a talk radio gig.
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Contributing Opinion Writer The two great literary bookends of President Trump's half-term of grift and chaos have come from survivors of the most broken white communities that helped put him in office.
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It's been clear, ever since the last of the never-Trumpers were rooted out of the party, that the G.O.P. would be an extension of the grime and grift of Trump's personal brand.
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The Grift, "a show about con artists and the lives they ruin," investigates all sorts of swindlers—from card sharks to cult leaders—while trying to find out why we keep falling for it.
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The society we built on the premises of grift, waste, cruelty, and greed, is not one that can survive even a moderate disruption like a nasty virus without mass casualties and wrecked lives and bodies.
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But even after a search with police dogs, police couldn't find a burglar, and after two weeks, they concluded that it was all one big grift: Instead of being stolen from, Couture was a thief.
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I believe that, like Edwards, Trump ascended to folk hero status among the people who like him, and so his lying, corruption, sexism and grift not only do no damage, they add to his legend.
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At every step, the establishment Republican Party has done their best to grift tired Reaganism on to Trumpism itself, trying to fool voters into thinking that this time, it will finally deliver with a uniquely Trumpian flair.
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Especially nomadic millennials, the subject of burnout think pieces, who have less money than their parents, who aren't buying homes, who are submerged in debt, and who are the masters and victims of a grift-laden society.
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Between the ineffective poles of Trump sleeps with porn stars and Trump is a Manchurian candidate lies the most compelling Trump-specific message: That his administration is a grift that's in desperate need of policing, oversight, constraint.
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Steven M. GreenProfessor Emeritus, Biology, University of Miami, whose research focuses on behavior and behavioral ecologyThere is grift between individuals of different species, particularly those with a predatory-prey relationship, examples of which are interesting but not rare.
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In the end, our investigation uncovered an eerily dystopian approach to the age-old grift of selling diet pills, one that incorporated a variety of shady internet tactics, including catfishing, plagiarized tweets, manufactured virality, and fake news sites.
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All of this assumes that Trump cares about Trumpism as something more than a grift, and that he can accept advice and counsel in a sustained way, without changing his mind the instant someone makes a different case.
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Apparently, for this particular grift, AT&T is planning to replace the "4G LTE" icon on certain Android phones with an icon that says "5G E," even though those devices won't actually be running on a true 5G network.
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Plenty of people have preemptively criticized this book as an opportunistic grift, though Anonymous has announced a plan to donate a portion of the royalties to "nonprofit organizations that focus on government accountability," including the White House Correspondents' Association.
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That doesn't necessarily preclude the possibility that they were Russian agents or the tools of Russian agents, but it suggests that they may have been running their mouths off to Russian agents because they were looking for their next grift.
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They make a cynical, race-baiting, adulterous campaign-finance fraudster like Dinesh D'Souza a rich man after he abandons an intellectual career for a Michael Moore-imitating grift — and then cheer when Trump pardons D'Souza because it owns the libs.
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As SFGate reported on Monday, a stack of two rascals on each other's shoulders, draped in a literal trench coat and cosplaying as a grown-ass detective, tried to grift some beer from the Loop Neighborhood Market along Gellert Blvd near I-280.
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Subsys, a fentanyl-based spray, was approved for managing pain for terminally-ill cancer patients, but with a little elbow grease and a lot of grift, Insys managed to get doctors to prescribe it to patients with a slew of other conditions.
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But not all of these cases technically qualify as grift, which in its highest form goes beyond mere fraud to question and undermine the institutions that control us, the systems that keep us from getting ahead — and the world as we know it.
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Germany's motor authority found that some 280,000 Mercedes-Benz C-class and E-class vehicles had been outfitted with software that made them look cleaner than they were during testing, similar to the grift that Volkswagen had pulled (though on a smaller scale).
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It's a brilliant grift, taken at a distance: Amazon promises jobs—often low-skill sortation and fulfillment jobs in to-be-built warehouses in small, blighted cities without much of a local economy, like San Bernardino, California—in exchange for a buffet of subsidies.
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As the summer of grift has rolled on into a fraudster's fall filled with new schemes and financial chicanery that are seemingly revealed daily, one storyline has remained relatively consistent: the ongoing legal troubles of convicted Fyre Festival founder and confidence man Billy McFarland.
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Once a high-flying blood-testing company that made its founder, Holmes, the richest self-made woman in the country, Theranos has since been described as "massive fraud" by the Security and Exchange Commission—the most high-profile grift in a decade of grifts.
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Now Wikileaks chief Julian Assange, whose behavior and vaguely pro-Trump leanings have grown more concerning in direct proportion to the amount of time he has spent locked inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, is warning the public not to fall for Big Safety Glasses' grift.
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But the new Times piece, and the massive amount of documents it relied upon, suggested the best way to grift the government might not be by offshoring (or often legal tax avoidance) at all, but rather by engaging in a series of bald-faced crimes (a.k.a.
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The alleged grift is extensive: New York's 41-page lawsuit accuses Trump and his eldest children—Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—of violating state and federal laws for more than a decade by using the foundation's tax-exempt coffers as a personal expense account of sorts.
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To the very end, many people were convinced his entire campaign had been a long-game self-promotional exercise — a man wandering past real estate, casinos, reality television, mail-order steaks and wealth-building seminars to arrive at right-wing politics as a high-quality grift.
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Two years after Oobah Butler gamed TripAdvisor and sent people in search of the site's highest-rated restaurant to his shed instead, Brits have been had yet again: The Italian Stallion was fake, the meal microwaved, and all of it a big grift, done for YouTube.
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The victors in the battle of alleged grift versus arms-for-hostages emerged on Monday: LaPierre was unanimously re-elected by the NRA board, along with Carolyn Meadows, who will replace North as president (and who was previously associated with a Confederate monument with historic ties to white supremacists).
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The RWA's mystery/suspense chapter has also canceled its annual award, and publishers continue to withdraw from the national conference, prompting wry comparisons of the fiasco to the notorious Dashcon, which went viral in 2014 as a disastrously disorganized grift of its attendees: live footage of the rwa convention pic.twitter.
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Reading those stories now brought me to a depressing realization: The people who said they were going to beat Donald Trump in 2020 by emulating his supposedly highly sophisticated digital targeting operation have instead emulated Trump by turning their campaigns into a lucrative grift for a small group of well-connected party insiders.
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You can see this grift at work in the delusional maps that Schoen Consulting drew up for Bloomberg when he flirted with a run in 2016, which envisioned him winning Florida and Tennessee in a three-way contest with Trump and Sanders, or winning Arizona and Michigan if he faced Clinton and Trump.
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Axios reported Thursday that Trump plans to fill a seat on the monetary policy-making board with Herman Cain, a Republican presidential candidate during the 2000 cycle who briefly led in the primary polls while touting a "9-9-9" tax plan, withdrew, and has since used his email list to grift people.
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Yes, the writer Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, who married the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, took up after his death with a young writer, Ned Field, nearly 40 years younger and wild about her when she was in her 70s (which 100 years ago was the equivalent of today's 823 or 90).
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The outpouring of sympathy for Ngo, in this account, is actually evidence that the mainstream media is falling for Ngo's grift — funneling money to his Patreon and legitimizing a right-wing smear campaign against a group that's working to protect people from the threat of violence from groups like the Proud Boys.
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The Grift began with an experiment — if I purchased a $40 foundation from Nordstrom, used it until it was spent, put the empty bottle in a new box of the same foundation I purchased (in cash, naturally, so as to ensure the lack of a paper trail), and returned it, would they allow me?
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But Silicon Valley tech companies have by and large been been kowtowing to the latest right-wing grift, and conservative talkers and other right wing personalities have found great PR success in breaking tech platform rules and claiming that the apolitical punishment doled out is specifically targeted to curtail voices and the rights of those on the right.
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Holmes fits right in with Billy MacFarland and Anna Delvey, sure, but take the Fleischmann empire into account, and the whole thing fits right into the eternal grift of generational wealth, where people with money prove over and over that they'll do anything to keep their big pile of money big—no matter the true cost.
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It's the reason that these men got into YouTube in the first place, the reason that they desperately plug merchandise in every video, and the reason that Weller, KSI, and both Paul brothers have put out songs and music videos in spite of a lack of musical talent: it is all just a grift and the targets are children.
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On the news site Splinter, the writer Alex Pareene has characterized much of modern conservatism as a grift gone wrong — pulling from the historian Rick Perlstein's 2012 Baffler article "The Long Con," which traces out just how much of the movement's far-right fringe was born and nurtured in self-enriching direct-mail and media operations.
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What starts as a family pulling an ever-escalating grift on a much wealthier one in an upscale part of town ends up a powerful commentary on how people relate to and value each other, and the ways the anxieties and messes of the rich often have to be assuaged and dealt with by the poor.
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In particular, the paralysis of Congress, it's abdication of power to the presidency and its inability to function as a legislative body — plus the ideological sclerosis of the Republican Party, its collapse into an entertainment-wing-driven grift — these have been defining features of life under President Trump, as they were under President Obama before him.
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All of this didn&apost help his credibility and to the degree that the jurors begin to think of this as kind of one grift reverse as another grifter, maybe they are more sympathetic to Manafort than the sense at why is this guy being charged for something that could send him to jail for 200 years and the other guy got off.
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So perhaps what makes the story of Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes so compulsively interesting is that it's the rare double grift, subtext and text: Holmes, who promised that technology her company had supposedly developed would change the world of medical testing forever, fed the con through sucking the metaphorical blood of wealthy people's bank accounts and through, well, actual blood.
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When I see him covering his bald spot with an embroidered cross dad hat and pitching Islamophobic DVDs that keep his cycle of fear-based consumption alive, I see a scared animal with his back against a wall, a desperate man turning back to the only grift he's ever known, clawing to stay alive no matter who he harms in the process.
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Once you begin to identify such arrangements as grifts, you are bound to discover, in our baroquely capitalist society, that loads of things are essentially grift-shaped, from oddball start-ups to arcane financial services: They begin with a slick appeal, go on to create nothing of concrete value and end, like any good bilking, with your money in new pockets.
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The same greed-driven calculus has seeped into every cranny of a Trump administration that prefers to mine illicit connections for personal profit rather than do what's best for the U.S. The entire Giuliani-Ukraine affair is only the latest example of a White House apparatchik who's willing to sell out his country's interests for an electoral advantage necessary to sustain the grift.
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The now-departed Marianne Williamson and still-in-it Andrew Yang both have the air of a grift about them—the former having hawked a The Secret-style psychic salve to our political problems, the latter pitching a bad version of universal basic income with gimmicks like handing out $116.53,000 a month to 10 people, as if his campaign were the Monster Energy Epic Presidency Raffle.
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Then, this past August, Neumann invited the public to the bonfire, filing an initial public offering prospectus that consolidated, in lurid detail and buzzword-heavy prose, the breadth of Neumann's grift and the depth of WeWork's balance-sheet disaster: The company had a staggering $47 billion in lease obligations; Neumann and his "strategic thought partner" wife, Rebekah, (her official title, per the prospectus) had extracted close to three-quarters of a billion dollars out of WeWork over the years.
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The tale of JT Leroy's unmasking still has a tawdry tabloid fascination, and Ms. Albert's account of her frantic attempts at spinning and wagon-circling are in some ways the most forthright part of her narrative, even if she still seems a bit wounded that anyone could have doubted her or JT. Ten years later, Ms. Albert is too ambitious and too intoxicated with her own grift to venture a frank assessment of its causes and consequences.
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