The George Santos cases like so many other modern scams reveal a new trend—making the scammer into a celebrity. This requires that the scammer go public. One would think that would kill the scam, but amazingly it doesn’t. This often does the scammer’s work for them. No one should be surprised that Santos did not tell the truth. That is what made him famous. So why was that fact not enough to stop the grift?

This made New Yorker writer Alexandra Schwarz ask, “Who do we empathize with? The scammer or the scammed? Why do we love the scam stories? Vinson Cunningham, also of the New Yorker suggested part of the answer was that we wanted someone to succeed spectacularly. We love to see a glorious success. We want to believe that the big win is really possible in the land of opportunity. If it can’t be us, at least let it be someone else. And someone on some level close to us.  And if it requires some chicanery, we hope we will have enough guts to pull it off when we get the opportunity. The scammer shows us that if only we had fewer scruples we would become winners.

Once again, the classic scammer is New York real estate baron Donald Trump. The trial by New York against Trump shows that banks were eager to deal with Trump. They considered him one of the rare “whales”.  In fact that was Trump’s entire defence in his recent law suit which he spectacularly lost. Trump might be right. Even bankers love the scammer. Scammers are in some way attractive that keeps the rest of us watching.

I think too this is part of Trump’s political attraction.  People know he is a scammer. After all his lies are so outrageous how could they be true?  Yet a lot of people love him. 68% of Republicans love Trump, sometimes with astonishing devotion.  Others, like me, ask how is that possible? How can so many voluntarily put their love and support behind an outrageous liar or scammer? Truth be damned; they just want Trump!

No wonder truth is dying.

Alexandra Schwarz the third New Yorker writer on the Critics at Large podcast about George Santos made an important point about technology. Scams are given a golden opportunity by new technology like the rise of televangelists in the 1980s. The latest example is Crypto Currency where space for scams has skyrocketed and as P.T. Barnum said, suckers are born every minute. The Internet itself is a giant example. So is Go Fund Me. And of course, as a result scams abound

Closely related is the arrival of new immigrants to a new country. Mae West starred in the 1937 film Every Day’s a Holiday, written by and starring Mae West as Peaches O’Dea who sold the Brooklyn Bridge for $200 to greenhorns arriving straight off the boat to the land of opportunity. She assured buyers that if the bridge got run down she would send them another one. In the land of opportunity buyers were eager to buy because they were in the land of opportunity, not knowing that no one had a better opportunity than scam artists.

As Alexandra Schwarz said, “We are again in a golden age of scamming stories.” There is an IT fest of scams  happening in books and movies. Another example was Elizabeth Holmes who in January 2022, was found guilty on four charges of defrauding investors in the Theranos scandal where a young woman claimed to be doing complex chemical engineering with a mere high school degree. She claimed to be making health care accessible to everyone in the country by her revolutionary inventions related to blood analysis.

When I started listening to the podcast about George Santos I did so because I thought it would be funny with amusing stories of Santos’ scams.  Many of them were funny. In many cases the victim of the scam deserved to be duped. But there is also a dark side to the scamming. It is not all fun.

Naomi Fry made the point that the scams could be used to critique not just the scammer but even society. Yet, at the same time, “It also means that there is so little to enjoy in contemporary society that it’s almost as if we as audiences fully aware of being scammed are also begging please make this fun for us.”

We love scams of course. We laugh at how George Santos gets away with outrageous scams. They are fun. But there is a dark side too. This is profoundly true. For example, one of Santos scams involved a dog who was owned by a poor homeless man. The dog was sick and Santos was to help him set up sort of a Go Fund Me plan to raise the money for the proper care of the dog. But according to Vinson Cunningham one of the panelists of the podcast he pocketed the money, did nothing for the dog, and left. The tumor kept growing and, in the end the dog died! That’s not fun.

Cunningham wanted to critique the scammer, but what was important was not the individual, “but the system in which they flourish.” The people are really mad at the system not just George Santos. According to Cunningham there is not a person bad enough to eclipse the context.” In fact, in a way Cunningham appreciates Santos, for “at least he has a figured out a way to expose the deeper nefariousness of the swamp from which emerges.”

Of course, once you are in this heart of darkness you will have people ask, as Cunningham suggests, “how different is George Santos from Marjorie Taylor Greene?” Or Donald Trump? The answer of course, is not at all. If scams are everywhere as many suggest, then all is permitted. Even if God is still alive, all is permitted. Dostoevsky got it wrong. As Naomi Fry added, “I think the obviousness is a relief too. The lies are so flagrant and the performance is so outrageous, and the shamelessness is so galling that there is a release and a relief that is associated with the relief.”

A scam such as the bailout of those who caused the financial crisis in 2008 while ordinary working people got screwed, “shows us,” the New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham said, “the structure of the con.  Once you realized how powerless we are against the forces that create such scams, all you can do is watch it burn.” At that point you are in the heart of darkness which is the scam. And you can’t escape.