Originally published at: Trump advisor Kimberly Guilfoyle hawks gold and silver at CPAC | Boing Boing
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An effective grifter knows that you have to go where the suckers are to sell your scam. I can think of few better venues for that than CPAC in 2023.
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Ok, pretending for a moment that this company is legit…how tf does putting your money in gold and silver hedge against inflation? Gold prices fluctuate wildly at times. Precious metals are NOT what you want to sink your retirement savings into. Even as a long term investment, it’s pretty risky without much chance at a high return.
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As you say, its makes no sense from a rational and realistic view of finance and economics. Reason and reality don’t play into it, though.
It’s all an element of a right-wing prepper’s post- apocalyptic fantasy. Their vision of the future where the collapse of the USD as the world’s reserve currency is the best-case scenario – not any environment for a peaceful and pleasant retirement even if you have piles of gold stacked around you.
The classic of this grift’s genre was Glenn Beck hawking pricier numismatic gold, as if the Mad-Max warlords are really gonna go wild when you come to them with Krugerrands or St Gauden’s double eagle.
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Do they send me the gold or hold it for me?
My biggest red flag is the only way to do business with them is to call and talk to someone.
If I just want some gold at today’s price why can’t I just order it and pay some sort of standard processing fee?
In other words what are they going to hard sell me when I talk to someone?
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People keep using the stagflation era of the 1970s and early 80s as an indicator of gold’s viability when the rest of economic history doesn’t read so favorably. Also, some folks think shiny things are inherently valuable despite the contrary.
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Yet, what were there, like maybe 40 or fifty people in the audience? And 20 or thirty were family members.
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It’s really just sad when the grift because so nakedly obvious. The majority of people aren’t in right-wing politics because they are passionate about government, they’re just there because they see all the dollar signs they can be earning from it, siphoning it away from other more worthy causes. Unfortunately all the rhetoric they use to pump up the value of their shitty offerings does real harm in the world and is killing people. So, fuck her and her fellow grifting sacks of purulence.
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They probably set up an ivermectin dispensing station as well.
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The only thing better than hooking a whale for these grifters is cheating a friend or family member and getting away with it.
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Moreover, people are not banks or precious metal brokers. Whatever value one may think it has is reduced by the costs of converting that shiny stuff into cash or a series of binary digits associated with a bank account.
And you can’t generate income from it like a security. But then again, you pretend to be Smaug the Dragon sitting on a bunch of stock certificates.
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It doesn’t, of course. The reason they push this grift is because there’s a very long standing right-wing and accelerationist belief that gold is a magic flawless value store. A lot of things feed into it- nostalgia for the Gold Standard times, fear of (and/or belief in) societal collapse, and general ignorance about value stores.
It’s a lot of the same reasons the right leaned so hard into crypto. If you hate and/or distrust government then you need another form of value store besides fiat currency. It may be because you don’t believe government will survive, or because you want it to die, or both. Either way you need an alternative and there aren’t many. Precious metals is one that people feel like they can wrap their heads around so they latch on to it. Crypto was exciting to these people because it seemed like money without government. Everything they believe about gold and crypto is wrong, of course, but there’s a lot of very motivated reasoning going on.
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My problem with this is that, unless I’m mistaken, this garbage company doesn’t actually send you the gold.
I’m pretty sure they just “hold” it for you, which means the post-apocalyptic fantasy doesn’t work. Now…I’m sure the people buying this don’t realize that when they first make the call, but how do they sell them on this once they find out they’re not actually going to be possessing the gold? Like…it doesn’t take a very smart person at all to see through this scam. An idiot should still be able to see through this scam, it’s so transparent. Does anyone know if this company is actually doing any business, or is it a front for something? Or a tax avoidance scheme?
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Turning CPAC into HSN…
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If you buy gold and keep it in your house, then when people break in to steal it you have an excuse to shoot them with your guns!
/s, though there likely are some ammosexuals that would become aroused by reading that sentence.
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You are correct, but these people either think it does or they trust this company more than they trust government because they perceive this company as being “their people”.
I’ve long said that a fundamental distinction between liberals and conservatives is whether you trust companies more than government or vice-versa. Personally I trust government more because of that couple thousand years we spent building accountability and transparency into the ideals of democracy. Nobody voted for the Koch brothers to run things, but that doesn’t seem to bother these folks.
It works for the same reason all scams work- motivated reasoning. People want to believe it’s all real because it aligns with their ideology. Never underestimate the power of that, lest someday someone find your buttons too.
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Yeah I feel the same about their arguments a few years ago when the ACA was passed that they feared government run “death panels.” My response was always “so you’re ok with the corporate run death panels at insurance companies we have now?”
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More gold of course. Maybe some silver or platinum. Perhaps palladium.
But probably just more gold.
Well, more certificates promising you gold. Not actual gold you could make into some jewelry or anything. Just, like, platonic gold.
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It always comes back to authoritarianism. They want an authoritarian and/or they believe an authoritarian is always in charge. If you believe dictatorship is the only true form of leadership (as they do) then you work toward a benevolent dictator (defined as one sympathetic to your views).
They can’t imagine a world where power is distributed as thinly as possible to prevent authoritarianism (ie. democracy). At the end of the day, they don’t want democracy because they think it works less well for them than a dictator would. Which, if your worldview is hate-filled, is probably true.
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