Wouldn’t you like to buy some $TRUMP, the meme coin tied to the current U.S. president?
How about some golden sneakers? A trading card? Some gold coins? A reverse mortgage? Some catheters?
Step right up. Step right up. Don’t you dare miss this deal of a lifetime. Act now. Get yours. Sign here. Don’t delay. Supplies are limited.
Get in on the ground floor of the latest, the greatest opportunity pushed upon you by (insert rightwing host of TV/radio/podcast here). It’s a can’t-miss, can’t-be-beat deal that requires only your belief that basic common sense—the kind of sense that typically tells people that I shouldn’t take financial investing advice from a guy who told me the Haitians were eating the dogs—will never come between you and your money.
This is the world that has infected the right. From Fox News and Newsmax to the rightwing radio shows and the far-right podcasts, it is a never-ending stream of grift. All of it built around a central theme of using political bias to encourage you-should-know-better purchases of absolute crap.
And God help the poor folks when religion gets tossed into the mix.
Just ask Alabama State Auditor Andrew Sorrell.
Last week, multiple media outlets reported on the implosion of a long-running Ponzi scheme in the state of Georgia. It was set up by Edwin Brant Frost IV, who, with a name like that, was destined to operate either a Ponzi scheme or a cotton plantation, and was exposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission for bilking investors out of more than $140 million.
Frost and his First Liberty Building and Loan, which sounded like a bank but was definitely not a bank, was supposedly in business to make short-term, high-interest loans to small businesses. That never really worked out, and Frost instead simply used new investors to pay old investors their promised returns and used the bulk of the money to buy himself and his family really nice stuff and really great vacations.
Frost lured in many of those investors by leaning into politics … and Christianity. Because when has the mingling of those things ever not worked out spectacularly?
Using some of the far right’s most well-known voices, like Hugh Hewitt and Erick Erickson, Frost promised a “Christian” investment opportunity. Hewitt called Frost “Georgia’s George Bailey.” Erickson called the Frosts “a good Christian family.”
Not because any of that was true. But because Frost paid the radio hosts to promote their Ponzi scheme.
It was very successful. The ads got plenty of victims, conned into investing by the dual pull of religion and politics. Among them, Sorrell and his Alabama Christian Citizens political action committee.
Sorrell’s PAC dumped $29,000 into the Ponzi scheme in April 2024, and it began receiving monthly returns of $290 almost immediately thereafter.
He wasn’t alone. According to multiple sources who spoke to APR, a number of people tied to the Alabama Republican Party also invested in the scheme, including several in north Alabama.
That makes sense, given the political contributions from Frost to politicians in Alabama. AL.com’s Kyle Whitmire reported that those include Sorrell, state school board member Allen Long and state Representative Benjamin Harrison. All of them in North Alabama.
These are the dangers of comingling politics and religion with business and investing, of allowing yourself to be sucked into investments because they’re deemed “patriot funding,” as this Ponzi scheme was, or billed as “Christian investments.”
It’s really odd that this still works, given that the schemes themselves almost never work. Those trading cards have never amounted to anything. The gold coins have never made oodles of money. That $TRUMP meme coin has lost people billions of dollars.
But it continues on. And realistically, I suppose, it must. Because if those who are the marks in this con ever start truly asking questions about the validity of what they’re being sold, why, that might very well start them down a very slippery slope. One in which they start to wonder about other things these people are trying to sell them.
If the crypto coins and trading cards are just cash grabs in Christian clothing, what about that Trump tax plan or the trickle-down theory? If the gold coins and Trump University are phonies, what about that whole Epstein thing?
No, those are too many questions. Better to just buy the reverse mortgage and maybe an extra catheter.
