The Grifter Tax — Part 1

How to Kill the Misinformation Economy

In the Cost of Hyper-Tolerance series, we diagnosed a disease: 150 years of tolerating fascism, white supremacy, and Christian nationalism have brought us to the brink of losing our democracy. We catalogued the atrocities. We made the case for maximum accountability. We laid out what justice demands for those who have betrayed the republic.

That’s the reckoning—backward-looking. Holding people accountable for what they’ve done.

But accountability alone won’t prevent the next wave. We need to build immunity. We need to inoculate society against the machinery that spreads these ideologies, amplifies them, and makes them profitable.

This is that inoculation—or at least one critical piece of it. The economic piece.

Because here’s what we need to understand: fascism doesn’t spread on conviction alone. It spreads on cash. The misinformation economy isn’t a byproduct of extremism—it’s the engine. Lies are profitable. Truth is not. And until we fix that equation, we’re treating symptoms while the disease keeps multiplying.

And for anyone clinging to the notion that truth will eventually win out in the “marketplace of ideas”—the research has been done. MIT researchers tracked 126,000 claims over a decade on Twitter.¹ Even when you control for bots, the results are devastating: false news spreads six times faster than truth, reaches far more people, and is 70% more likely to be shared. Truth doesn’t win. Period.

The Economics of Lying

Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire empire generates tens of millions annually. PragerU pumps out slickly-produced historical revisionism funded by oil billionaires. Wellness influencers hawk miracle cures to millions of followers. Prosperity gospel preachers build megachurches by selling salvation to the desperate. Pseudo-historians get book deals peddling Confederate apologia dressed up as “alternative perspectives.” And fake journalists—people who slap “BREAKING NEWS” graphics on fabricated stories—rake in ad revenue while calling themselves “independent media.”

The grifters are getting rich. And we keep losing because we keep fighting on the wrong battlefield.

We fact-check. We debunk. We write earnest explainers about media literacy. We post infographics. We beg platforms to enforce their terms of service.

None of it works. None of it can work. Because none of it costs the grifters anything.

You can fact-check Ben Shapiro until your fingers bleed. He still gets paid. You can debunk every PragerU video frame by frame. They still get funded. You can document every lie Tucker Carlson tells. He still cashes the check.

The incentive structure is broken. Lying pays better than telling the truth. And you cannot shame people out of profitable behavior.

Why Our Current Tools Fail

Fact-checking is noble and necessary—but it’s asymmetric warfare. It takes ten times longer to debunk a lie than to tell one. And the debunking never reaches as many people as the original lie.

Media literacy education is a generational project. We don’t have generations. The damage is happening now.

Platform moderation is inconsistent, politically fraught, and easily gamed. The grifters adapt faster than the policies.

Social pressure bounces off people who have monetized shamelessness. You can’t cancel someone whose audience rewards them for being cancelled.

Every tool we have is either too slow, too weak, or too easily circumvented. The grifters know this. They’re counting on it.

We need a tool that hits them where it actually hurts: their revenue.

The Insight: It’s Commerce, Not Speech

Here’s what the free-speech absolutists don’t want you to understand: the First Amendment has never protected fraud.

You can believe the earth is flat. You can say the earth is flat. You can scream it from the rooftops. Protected speech.

But the moment you sell a “flat earth survival kit”—the moment you monetize the lie—you’ve crossed from protected speech into commercial activity. And commercial activity has always been regulable.

We already regulate:

• False advertising

• Medical fraud

• Securities fraud

• Consumer deception

• Unlicensed practice of medicine

The legal foundations exist. We just haven’t applied them consistently to the modern misinformation economy.

The principle is simple: we don’t regulate what people believe. We regulate what people sell.

This is the escape hatch from the hyper-tolerance trap. We can stop tolerating monetized deception without becoming the thought police. We can impose consequences on grifters without touching sincere belief or non-commercial speech.

The Grifter Tax

Imagine a framework where:

Every monetized lie is a liability. Not just direct sales—but YouTube ads, sponsorships, Patreon subscriptions, merch, affiliate revenue. If you’re getting paid because of the lie, you’re on the hook.

Revenue is subject to disgorgement. Not a fine. Not a slap on the wrist. Disgorgement—meaning you don’t get to keep money you should never have had. 100% of the revenue from deceptive content goes back.

It scales recursively. If one video violates, you lose that video’s revenue. If 25% of your channel violates, you lose all your channel’s revenue. Your clean content can’t launder your dirty money.

Pre-existing content isn’t grandfathered. If you keep a deceptive video monetized after the law takes effect, every day it generates revenue is a new violation. All historical revenue becomes subject to forfeiture.

Anyone can bring a case. Modeled on the False Claims Act, which has recovered billions through whistleblower incentives. If you successfully prove a violation, you get 20% of the disgorged revenue. Exposing grifters becomes profitable.

The rest funds science. 80% of recovered funds go to a Public Science Advancement Trust—funding research, critical-thinking education, public health communication, and historical literacy.

The poetic justice is almost too perfect: every dollar Kenneth Copeland squeezed out of desperate people goes to fund actual medical research. Every dollar PragerU spent spreading historical revisionism goes to fund actual historians.

The grifters fund their own destruction.

The Incentive Flip

This is what changes everything.

Today:

• Lying is profitable

• Fact-checking is thankless labor

• Grifters face no financial consequences

• The misinformation economy grows

Under the Grifter Tax:

• Lying becomes financially catastrophic

• Exposing lies becomes lucrative

• Every monetized lie has a bounty on it

• The misinformation economy collapses

Ben Shapiro has to worry that someone is building a case against his historical claims right now. PragerU has to wonder if their entire revenue stream is one successful lawsuit away from forfeiture. Wellness influencers have to calculate whether selling that miracle cure is worth losing everything.

The economics flip completely. Lying stops making sense.

What This Is—And What It Isn’t

Let me be clear: this is not THE solution to misinformation. It’s the economic piece of a larger puzzle.

We still need:

• Cultural change in how we value truth

• Educational investment in critical thinking

• Political will to confront liars in power

• Platform accountability (though the Grifter Tax helps here too)

• Stronger democratic institutions

But none of those work if lying remains profitable. You can’t build a culture of truth when deception pays better than honesty. You can’t educate your way out of a problem that’s economically incentivized.

The Grifter Tax doesn’t replace those efforts. It enables them. It levels the playing field so truth has a fighting chance.

Who Gets Caught

Let’s be specific. Under this framework:

Caught:

• Daily Wire and PragerU monetizing historical revisionism and scientific misinformation

• Prosperity gospel preachers selling non-falsifiable spiritual benefits for money

• Anti-vaxx influencers generating ad revenue from content that contradicts scientific consensus

• Wellness grifters selling supplements with false health claims

• Pseudo-historians monetizing fabricated or misrepresented evidence

• Political operatives selling historically false narratives

• Fake journalists monetizing fabricated “news” while claiming journalistic authority

Not caught:

• Sincere religious belief and non-monetized practice

• Non-commercial speech of any kind

• Fiction clearly presented as fiction

• Legitimate scientific minority positions (protected by Scientific Inquiry Defense)

• Academic disagreement among historians (protected by Historical Inquiry Defense)

• Good-faith journalism that makes honest mistakes (protected by Journalistic Inquiry Defense)

• Political or religious expression not tied to commercial transactions

The line is clean. Believe what you want. Say what you want. But the moment you sell it, the rules apply.

Breaking the Cycle

In the Cost of Hyper-Tolerance, we identified how our commitment to openness gets exploited by those who don’t share it. How tolerating intolerance leads to the destruction of tolerance itself.

The Grifter Tax is one way we break that cycle—without becoming what we fight against.

We’re not banning ideas. We’re not prosecuting beliefs. We’re not giving the government power to decide what’s true.

We’re doing something much simpler: we’re making commercial deception expensive.

The grifters have exploited our tolerance for too long. They’ve hidden behind the First Amendment while getting rich off lies. They’ve counted on our principled commitment to free speech to protect their unprincipled exploitation of it.

The Grifter Tax calls their bluff. You want to lie? Fine. Lie for free. But the moment you try to profit from it, we’re coming for every dollar.

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There’s more below, but first: If work like this—designing actual solutions instead of just diagnosing problems—feels worth having in the world, please consider supporting The American Manifesto. Paid subscriptions make it possible to do the slow, careful work of building frameworks that might actually change something.

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What Comes Next

This article is the why. Part 2 is the how.

In Part 2, we’ll lay out the complete framework: the four categories of prohibited claims, the defenses that protect legitimate inquiry, the mechanics of revenue capture, the constitutional safeguards that make it bulletproof, and the full draft legislation.

For now, understand this: we have a tool. It’s constitutional. It’s enforceable. It attacks the problem at its root—the economics.

The misinformation economy survives because lying is profitable.

The Grifter Tax makes it bankrupt.

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Your Move

This is the economic piece of the puzzle. What other pieces do you think we need?

• What grifters would you want to see targeted first?

• What concerns do you have about a framework like this?

• Does framing it as “commerce, not speech” feel like the right approach?

Share your thoughts below.

1. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The spread of true and false news online“, Science, March 9, 2018.

The largest longitudinal study ever conducted on the spread of true and false news online. MIT researchers analyzed approximately 126,000 stories tweeted by roughly 3 million people between 2006 and 2017, verified by six independent fact-checking organizations. The findings devastate the “marketplace of ideas” assumption: false news reached more people than truth, with the top 1% of false cascades reaching 1,000–100,000 people while truth rarely exceeded 1,000. Falsehoods spread six times faster and were 70% more likely to be retweeted. Critically, bots were not responsible—the researchers controlled for automated accounts and found human behavior drove the disparity. The study attributes this to novelty bias and emotional response: lies are more “novel” and trigger stronger reactions (surprise, disgust), making them more shareable.