3 questions to help you avoid the grifters

Like most Americans, I’m a sucker for a good scam story. (I still think about the 2018 story about the guy who pretended to be a Saudi prince on a too-regular basis.)

But also like most Americans, I get mad when people I like are on the receiving end of the scam — I want worse people (ideally already evil people or big corporations!) to get got, not my people.

So I was a little sad last week when I emailed out the news about my book, and got emails back from folks telling me that they were participating in an economic blackout day and to remind them to buy it next week. (Consider this your reminder!)

“No Buy Friday” gave me the ick for reasons I’ll get into shortly, but if you participated in it, I don’t blame or judge you! I want to help you make a more strategic decision in the future.

It’s not your fault. Most people don’t have a framework for evaluating whether or not their political engagement or activism will be effective.

That’s not a personal failing nor a moral judgement. I’m not an expert in designer bags; I could not tell you whether or not something is a Birkin or a Wirkin, and to be honest, I wouldn’t care one way or another. That doesn’t mean I’m a bad person or don’t deserve to buy handbags. It just means it’s not my area of expertise.

Similarly, if you haven’t been knee-deep in political engagement and activism for a long period of time and haven’t had the need to apply a critical lens to how power and politics works, it’s not always easy at first glance to tell what is or is not worth doing or supporting.

And tbh, most of the time, you shouldn’t need to. Find the messengers you trust and take your cues from them!

But at this particular moment in time, we are in era ripe for grifters and scammers, from top to bottom.

I never watched Game of Thrones but my husband keeps quoting Littlefinger from season 3 to me: “Chaos is a ladder.” And right now, the grifters are scampering up that ladder and skipping rungs as they climb, empowered by the OG grifter president himself.

This sucks. At a time when so many people are desperate to do something — anything — to make a difference, a concrete way to take action feels like a life-raft we will cling to, and the scammers know it. They’ll take advantage of folks’ desire to be proactive and redirect it (either maliciously or incompetently) to be to their own benefit.

So this week, I want to talk you through a simple three-question sniff test for political grifters so you can make informed decisions on how to move forward.

These three questions can be asked of any political activity (outside of direct campaign contributions to candidates, which are pretty straightforward — if you like the candidate or think the opponent sucks, or if the stakes of the race matter to you, chip in — I personally have opinions on better vs worse campaigns to give to, but that’s a different conversation).

There aren’t always clear-cut answers on and there’s certainly more to consider based on what the actual goals of your political engagement are — but if you start with these three questions, you’ll at the very least avoid falling into the biggest traps…

Question 1: If I do what I’m being asked, how will I know if it worked?

This was my first flag with No Buy Friday: The instructions were vague and the demands were unclear. The call to action was supposedly simple but actually confusing if you thought about it for more than two seconds: No Amazon, no Walmart, no fast food, no gas, small businesses only, use cash — okay, sure, but why? What counts as a small business? Why cash? Why those companies?

There’s a term in organizing called “theory of change” — a jargony phrase that simply means: A hypothesis that if you do X thing, it will cause Y outcome.

I didn’t clearly see a theory of change for this No Buy Friday — without clear goals or expectations, how was I supposed to know if it worked? (And FWIW, seems like it didn’t do whatever it was supposed to do?)

When someone asks you to give money or take action in some way, you should feel relatively confident they have a goal in mind — whether it’s a demand of a company, an electoral win, a policy victory, a strategic news story that will put pressure on an elected official or influence public opinion, whatever. The goal is less important than the organizers having one in the first place.

If you can’t clearly explain “how will I know if this mattered,” pause.

Question 2: Who is behind this?

I absolutely believe everyone and anyone is capable of organizing effective activism or political activity, and we’ve seen that be true over the years. And/but: Credibility matters.

Coming back to that boycott,

Virginia Sole-Smith

’s excellent newsletter about No Buy Friday, was the first thing I read that went into the details of the origin of the boycott. An excerpt:

When the mainstream media trotted out to cover it, they all found the same “founder” to interview: John Schwartz, also known as “J” or “Jai,” the self-identified founder of The People’s Union USA.¹ Schwartz has 273,000 followers on Instagram, where he is a pushing a GoFundMe to support his “movement” that has, as of this writing, raised a little over $71,000.

But the People’s Union is made up of Schwartz, and only Schwartz. And I can’t understand why nobody is talking about this, because: Those GoFundMe donations are going to… him.

It’s worth reading Virginia’s full essay, which gets into details on the fuller extent of J’s background.

But her point stands: This is not someone who has any grounding in political engagement. The dude is branding himself as an organization with a base and a community, but is raising money through a GoFundMe to do, what, exactly? Unclear. His strategic plan, such as it is, does not particularly inspire confidence. His schtick makes it seem like a movement, but there’s no meat on those bones — it all feels a little shady.

More broadly, you should take a look at the website or whatever materials you can find and if possible, peruse the bios of whoever’s leading the work. They don’t need to have long resumes or be organizers with decades of experience, but if you see something that leaves your spidey sense tingling, trust that.

This is especially true with organizations that don’t list any people as their staff or founders.

I find this is a particularly big tell for a scam PACs — a term used to mean political organizations that do nothing but raise money in order to raise even more money in order to pay themselves more. If whoever runs the effort is too embarrassed or ashamed to put their name on it, you should be skeptical.

If you can’t quickly and easily identify who’s behind something (or see a very strong security reason why the people are staying anonymous), pause.

Question 3: If they’re asking me for money, where does it go?

As someone who spends a lot of time raising money for an organization that has a very clear theory of change, a ton of publically available documentation for our work, and a bunch of legal paperwork (and bills) to back it up, this is one of my personal pet peeves:

If an organization says they work with candidates or give money to candidates, or if they’re electoral in any way, do they have their shit together? Do you have a clear sense of how they pick the candidates they work with and why? Do they have the legal infrastructure set up to move money to the people they say they do, or do they have program that supports candidates in a different way?

Here’s a good example for you: There’s a scam PAC that popped up a few months ago called the Democratic Leadership Project that says they support “the next generation of leaders” — I’ve gotten some people asking me if they’re legit or I work with them, since the organization I run literally supports the next generation of leaders.

Alas. They are almost certainly not legit, and the way you know is there’s no staff listed on the site, they’re not actually filed with any legal entity, they have no criteria for candidates nor any program laid out that they run, and the emails they were sending some of their “supporters” (who got on the list through sketchy email swaps behind the scenes) were doing surveys about DEI at Costco. Not usually something a credible org does! The money almost certainly just goes back into the consulting firm’s pockets.

If someone is asking you for money to support a cause, they should be able to explain what it’s being spent on and what the mechanics of moving it around are. That doesn’t necessarily mean they need to be incorporated, be a formal legal entity, or anything extensive — mutual aid groups, for example, are amazing! — but you should be able to know where the money is going to and how decisions around spending it are being made.

If you can’t get an answer to that question, pause.

All that being said: It’s (sometimes) okay to do stuff that isn’t the most effective thing.

When that No Buy Friday effort popped up, there were a bunch of thinkpieces and some social media that critiqued it, followed by social media and thinkpieces critiquing the critiques, because how dare someone criticize people trying to take action!

I don’t intend to be part of any of that discourse. Here’s where I ultimately land:

• Grifting is morally bankrupt and lacks integrity. Taking advantage of anxiety to make a profit is cruel and the people who do it should be named and shamed.

• The scam PACs in particular are straight up evil and should be illegal.

• There are some calls-to-action that are not grifting, exactly; they’re just ineffective and kind of silly. I suspect the No Buy Friday thing falls closer to that end of the spectrum, although the founder’s backstory does feel a bit suspect.

• Even still, I am wary of things that ask people to take action without a clear path to success — if we can’t either prove something worked or explain why it didn’t but why the effort itself mattered, the people who participated could become demoralized, cynical, and disengage the next time they’re asked to do something that could be effective.

And: I think many operatives and insiders tend to forget that for a vast majority of people, the question is not a choice between “do I do this sort of effective thing or this very effective thing?” but rather: “do I do something or nothing?”

The answer is almost always: Do something rather than nothing, even if that something isn’t perfect.

If not buying from Amazon, Walmart, or any other big businesses last Friday was your first time considering an economic boycott, or you shared it on social media and it started a conversation or two about the overwhelming role of big corporations and the wealthy in our society, or it made you think even a little bit about what it means to put your money where your values are and spend your resources differently, that’s good! I’m glad you did that, even if the dude behind it is mad sketchy!

And if you’ve ever got questions about whether something is good or silly or a scam or a malicious actor, don’t hesitate to ask me. I’m always happy to opine.

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Some book recs:

• Show, Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfield — I’m a long time Curtis Sittenfeld stan; this is a delightful batch of short stories that reads like a bunch of hot gossip about mostly middle aged women you don’t know. I loved these. The last one is a sequal to PREP, if you read that like every other millennial woman I know.

• Unlikely Story by Ali Rosen - A take on You’ve Got Mail (kind of) - Nora is a therapist in NY who secretly writes an advice column for a British paper. Over the last few years, she’s been falling for her editor she’s never met and only communicated with via Google doc comments. As she decides to do something about it, she meets her new handsome, cranky British neighbor. You can see where this is going but it’s a nice ride.

• Back After This by Linda Holmes - Cecily, a podcast producer in DC who aspires to host her own show, finally gets the opportunity when she’s offered the chance to be the subject of a dating show as a real-life subject for an influencer/relationship coach. At the same time, whoops, she falls for a handsome man she keeps running into around town. Very funny, very charming, and deeply rooted in the reality of podcast production (as you’d expect from an NPR host!)

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A few other reading recs from the last week:

• One of my favorite think-pieces about that No Buy Friday was this one: What comes after a one-day boycott? [New Means by J.P Hill]

• “Perhaps what so many of us are grappling with is the realization that no amount of hard work was ever going to change the system — and we had burned ourselves out by trying. And yet the rub, of course, is that there is no other system — at least not yet. So, then what?” [Jessica Bennett on the end of ambition — a topic I have a full chapter on in my book!]

• Millennials are cool, actually. [Embedded on the Millennial redemption arc]

• “Working mothers today devote more time to active child care than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations." [The New Yorker on The End of Children, an article that could have made it’s point in about 60% as many words but is still good.]

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Liked this? Then you’ll love my new book, WHEN WE’RE IN CHARGE, which the Financial Times called “an ambitious & refreshingly practical examination of modern management.”

Or, as a stranger on Goodreads succinctly put it: “Most leadership books suck and feel out of touch. This one is worth your time.”

You can get WHEN WE’RE IN CHARGE wherever you get your books in hardback, e-book, or audio book (which you can start listening to ASAP if you have Spotify Premium!)

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