In honor of Kevin Trudeau's 61st birthday, a look at the dark side of conspiranoia

Today is the 61st birthday of serial scammer and multi-convicted felon Kevin Trudeau, aka KT, aka Katie on this blog, so it's a good day to showcase the really dark side of conspiranoia. Conspiranoia is a word I've used often on this blog to describe the paranoia that both fuels and is fueled by an addiction to conspiracy narratives. All too often these narratives are marketed as "secret"/"forbidden"/"exclusive" (mis)information by cynical and greedy hucksters -- hucksters such as Katie, whose stock-in-trade for decades has been conspiranoia crapitalism. After all, he's the grifter who shot to giddy heights of fame and wealth by offering to sell you all of the "secrets" that "they" don't want you to know. And he's still at it today.

The shameless sycophants who, under his direct supervision and instruction, run Katie's Facebook fan club page, have helpfully informed followers that they are welcome to send him money for his birthday. I certainly won't try to stop you; you're welcome to send him anything you want if you don't have any problems with gifting a grifter. (Although I would like to mention that I had a birthday recently myself, and if you really want to give money to someone who needs it, just click on the graphic above, or here, or on the "Donate" button on the right-hand side of the Web version of this blog.)

At any rate, I think it's appropriate to observe Kevin Trudeau's big day with a shout-out to his massive contribution, over the years, to the dumbing-down of humanity via nonstop exploitation of people's deepest fears and longings.

Into the darkness
I have celebrated KatieDay on this blog before -- most notably in 2016, when a decision by an appellate court determined that Kevin was going to have to stay in prison instead of being released. (Of course, that just gave him more opportunities to grift by playing up his big hero/martyr narrative, begging his followers to send more money to help free him.)

Today's celebration, though, was inspired by an AP article published on January 31, 2024. entitled, "Days of Darkness: How one woman escaped the conspiracy theory trap that has ensnared millions." It's framed around the story of a young woman referred to as "Ramona," whose life was nearly wrecked by her belief in the conspiracy narratives embraced by her ex-boyfriend, "Don." The situation was both fueled and exacerbated by the widespread panic over COVID-19.

“I have a lot of fear about what I can’t control,” Ramona, now 23, said of her vulnerable mindset as COVID-19 spread. Ramona agreed to tell her story to The Associated Press after she detailed her experiences on a forum for recovering conspiracy theorists. The AP is not fully identifying Ramona or her ex-boyfriend to protect her privacy and safety. “The stuff he was telling me, it made me feel like at least we understood. He had an explanation for what was going on. I didn’t realize what I was getting into.”

This alternate reality nourished by these conspiracy theories would transform Ramona’s life, sending her down a dark path of paranoia and loneliness that upended her life and spun her dreams of the future into turmoil. Convinced that a “New World Order” was already underway, she fell into a trap that has ensnared millions of Americans and even, at times, hijacked the nation's politics.

Isolated from friends and family, distrustful of the explanations offered by officials and the media, Ramona and Don began to prepare. The military might try to put Americans like them in concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. They had to be ready to flee.

The couple began stockpiling food and supplies. Don started a “go-bag” containing survival gear. He used their modest savings to buy a rifle, a handgun and ammunition.

One cold day in January 2021, Don read about a power outage in Vatican City on one of his conspiracy theory websites. The couple discussed what it might mean: Perhaps the Pope had been secretly arrested for his role in the conspiracy to control the world. Or maybe the bad guys had knocked out the power so they could smuggle child sex victims in or out of the Vatican.

Either way, the outage meant something big was happening. There are no coincidences. Just clues to be deciphered...

Ramona's story was not all that unusual.

The AP spoke with more than a dozen people whose lives were disrupted by conspiracy theories — either because they believed them or because a close loved one did.

Many spoke of the social isolation that comes from spending more and more time on conspiracy theory websites and message boards.

They talked about money lost to investment scams or products that claimed to reverse aging or cure COVID-19. They talked about a mounting sense of paranoia and distrust as they began to lose faith in their community and their fellow Americans.

Former believers said conspiracy theories offered them meaning when they felt empty, even if those promises proved to be hollow themselves.

“I was suicidal before I got into conspiracy theories,” said Antonio Perez, 45, a Hawaii man who became obsessed with Sept. 11 conspiracy theories and QAnon until he decided they were interfering with his life two years ago. Back then, when he first found other online conspiracy theorists, he was ecstatic. “It’s like: My God, I’ve finally found my people!”

“I think I got a sense of self-importance” from conspiracy theories, Perez said. He believed that he alone “was figuring everything out. It all ties into wanting to be a hero.”

Perez, who happens to be a Facebook friend of mine, has written a book, Converting Conspiracy Theorists: Rescue Anyone from Dangerous & Destructive Conspiracy Theories. I have not yet read the book so I cannot evaluate it at this point, but I'm providing the Amazon link. If you have MAGA friends, the book might come in handy.

I urge you to read the AP piece (here's that link again), because it provides insight into the darker side of a phenomenon that all too many folks -- including me, at times -- have dismissed merely as comical lunacy.

Behind every good conspiracy tale is a scammer (or multiple scammers)
What is both sad and infuriating is that the conspiranoid movement is led by parties who may not even believe what they're spouting, but who are motivated by money, ego, money, power, and money. Like all successful grifters, they know their target markets well. Take Kevin Trudeau (please).

During the height of the COVID panic, while Trudeau was still confined in the minimum-security federal prison camp (FPC Montgomery, AL) where he spent eight years, he used his proxies to spin out a wealth of conspiranoid content about COVID-19. Characteristically, he framed his misinfo as exclusive, seekrit stuff that he and he alone was getting from various un-named sources, and was generously sharing it with the public at great risk to himself. To get the full story, of course, you had to pay to join his mega-scam GIN (the Global Information Network), which he was still running from the clink, and continues to run to this day.

Kevin's COVID-19 "updates" were, as I put it on a May 2020 blog post about a related topic, "essentially overcooked sales letters for the Trudeau-founded GIN (Global Information Network), mixed well with stale whines about Katie being 'censored,' and well-seasoned with recaps of conspiranoid and right-wing talking points." Nothing original, in other words. A main thread in the KT narrative was that COVID had been deliberately created to crash the American economy in order make Donald Trump look bad and cost him the 2020 election.

I honestly do not think that Trudeau actually believed that. But he knew his gullible target market would. Plus, he was all-in for Trump in those daze (and he may still be, though I don't know for sure), and he most likely felt that burnishing Trump's own hero/martyr narrative would benefit both Donald Trump and Kevin Trudeau, who are, as I like to say, turds of a feather.

Kevin's ludicrous COVID claims were previously showcased not only on his Facebook fan page, but also on his main web site. Here's a former link to the latter, but now... "Oops! That page can't be found." Fortunately you can still read all you need to know about it on this Whirled:

• March 20, 2020 ~ The lie-land of Dr. Trudeau: Kevin Trudeau joins the ranks of the corona-crapitalists
• April 2, 2020 ~ Lockdown, schlockdown: Kevin Trudeau is still pooping out COVID-19 nuggets from Camp Cupcake

In the larger scheme of things, Trudeau's COVID content was part of a pattern of what I have dubbed coronacrapitalism, a phenomenon in which Grifter-in-Chief Trump and his allies and cronies also engaged, to the detriment of the entire country. There was money to be made, including significant political capital, not only from hawking dubious and dangerous "preventives" and "cures" for COVID, but also from spreading conspiranoia and mainstreaming even the craziest lies.

And Kevin Trudeau, even though he didn't get nearly the amount of publicity for his COVID lies that Trump and gang did, was right in the thick of it.

Naturally that was totally on-brand for him, especially since the marketing of the aforementioned GIN was, particularly in the early years, centered around conspiracy narratives, "secret" knowledge that Katie had supposedly learned from a mysterious "Brotherhood," and an imaginary "GIN Council" of elites whose names remained a closely held secret (because, of course, they didn't actually exist). There's no telling how many susceptible folks were sucked in by these whoppers, some of which read as if they were ad copy for a secret club for kiddies in the 1950s, but the marketing strategy apparently worked very well for years.

I first wrote at length about GIN's ludicrous marketing in December 2009, shortly after the club was launched. If you want a much more comprehensive history of GIN, here's a June 2022 post that will provide just that.

Why Kevin Trudeau still matters
Kevin Trudeau established himself decades ago as a scammer. And I've made my point, over and over, that GIN was a huge scam until the courts stepped in, and now it's a smaller scam but still essentially a scam, simply because Kevin Trudeau is involved. So why don't I just move on and quit writing about Trudeau? Why does he still even matter, especially since his recent-ish COVID misinformation seems to be wiped from the Internet?

I've answered those questions several times previously on this Whirled, but the points are worth repeating in this context. Once again, in the interest of expediency, I'm going to quote myself instead of rewriting.

In a January 2022 blog post about Kevin Trudeau, for instance, under the subhead "Why this still matters, after all these years," I wrote:

..one major reason that I think Kevin Trudeau is still important, apart from my concern that he has spent decades cheating people out of their hard-earned money, is that he is flagrantly symptomatic of a nearly out-of-control trend of misinformation/conspiranoia crapitalism.

Of course Trudeau was in many respects far ahead of the curve, since he has been trading in "information that 'They' don't want you to know" for decades. Most of that "information" has consisted of misinformation, distortions, exaggerations, lies, repackaged selfish-help/McSpirituality content, or, in some cases, cherry-picked data about issues that have been addressed by far more responsible consumer advocates, whistleblowers, and muckrakers. But the nebulously evil "They" were the perfect scapegoat for Trudeau's marketing strategies.

Shortly after Trudeau was convicted and sentenced back in 2014, Salon.com published a piece by Mary Elizabeth Williams, which I've cited on this blog before, but here it is again. The headline reads, "Kevin Trudeau's empire of 'they' collapses," and the tag line said, "The TV pitchman goes to prison -- but his conspiracy shtick lives on." The piece was spot-on in many ways, but the truth is that Trudeau's own scampire never did completely collapse. As noted, he continued to run it throughout his confinement

And unfortunately, the Error of Trump mainstreamed the conspiranoid, "alternative-facts" mindset that has been the foundation of KT's hugely successful marketing efforts for years, and that has attracted so many gullible people to his "teachings" and schemes. Kevin and his most devoted fans and enablers are emphatically part of the problem, but the problem is so much bigger than they. It's bigger than Alex Jones and Mike Adams and the other conspiracy-porn peddlers I've written about on this blog. It's even bigger than Donald Trump.

What is happening now goes beyond the fact that conspiracy theories have become a booming business. America (and to a large extent much of the developed world) have entered a "post-truth" era in which we're all susceptible, some of us more than others, to conspiracy theories, science denial and extremism. In the May 2021 edition of Scientific American, Andy Norman wrote that we are all being played by liars, and that those lies not only further divide us but also manipulate our brains in a way that we lose the capacity for reasoned reflection....

...Kevin Trudeau has made money for decades not only on peddling questionable products for which he has made outrageous and in some cases fraudulent claims, but also, and more importantly, on pushing conspiracy narratives and misinformation that he always frames as exclusive info that "They" are trying to keep from you, but which can be all yours -- for a price.

And Trudeau has never missed an opportunity to crapitalize on the fears and concerns of the masses, while placing himself firmly front and center as the only source to be trusted for vital information. He has long played on and nurtured people's growing distrust of government and mainstream media...

Later that year, in September, I made the claim that Kevin Trudeau's scampire of misinformation is actually enabling fascism. And for the benefit of anyone who might have thought that was an exaggerated claim, I had this to say:

Perhaps you're thinking that I'm being a bit histrionic (or hysterical), and that I exaggerate the threats to cherished freedoms posed by Trudeau and other scammers. Possibly you even think I'm overstating the threat of Trump and Trumpism. I'm not. Both Trumpism and "Trudeau-ism" feed into, and are fed by, many of the same base aspects of human nature, particularly the aforementioned need for scapegoats and the yearning for a hero.

And both Trumpism and Trudeau-ism rely -- and I can't state this often enough or forcefully enough -- upon the cult of personality: Kevin with the laughably transparent GuruKev shtick, among several other longer-standing ruses; and Trump with a Messiah-ish scam that has sucked in millions of gullibles. As progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann wrote in a September 23, 2022 opinion piece in Daily Kos:

Donald Trump has built a cult around himself. This is dangerous to America and dangerous to democracy.

Cults of personality in governance are broadly incompatible with democracy. They usually erupt in dictatorships where the Great Leader’s face and sayings are splashed all over public places. Think Mao’s China, Stalin’s USSR, Hitler’s Germany, Kim’s North Korea...

...Rational people know that messiahs don’t molest women and brag about it, don’t fleece people with a phony school who just want a college education, don’t encourage racial hatred, and don’t get crowds to try to overturn democracy and kill a policeman.

But Trump isn’t after the rational people. He’s a predator, and his prey are the psychologically and emotionally vulnerable, people crushed by 40 years of Reagan’s neoliberalism, now desperate for simple answers to complex problems.

We should have known when Trump said, in a Charles Manson moment, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him.

Charismatic con men can make some people believe anything.

For example, nearly a third of all registered Republicans believe that top-level Democrats are running international child trafficking rings to torture and abuse kids before draining their blood...

Again, Trump is just Trudeau, writ large. Or, for anyone who needs to have the point hammered home, Trudeau is just Trump, writ smaller. Both are ruthlessly exploiting, and profiting from, the inherent irrationality of humans.

And ultimately, that's not good for freedom or democracy.

I stand by my opinions.

False narratives, real dangers
Another opinion I stand by is that, beyond Kevin Trudeau's various schemes and scams, conspiranoia in general is a danger not only to public health but also to American democracy.

I'm far from the only one who believes this. The conservative Bulwark site ran a disturbing piece today (February 6) titled, "Mike Johnson Is Mainstreaming the Spirituality that Gave Us the Capitol Riot." While I think that the headline is an insult to actual spirituality, it's a good article, focusing on a prayer gathering with faith leaders who mobilized their followers to storm the Capitol. It provides insight into the way conspiracy theories, in tandem with increasingly powerful ultra-right religious factions, played a large part in the violent January 6 attempt to overthrow the US government and keep Trump in power.

This event has been billed as a more radical alternative to the newly bipartisan and toned-down National Prayer Breakfast. It was designed for Republican politicians—including, most prominently, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson—to meet and pray with right-wing charismatic/Pentecostal and evangelical Christian leaders. This year’s gathering was a somber affair, focused on national penitence and lamenting the many sins of America. It also demonstrated the mainstreaming of the beliefs and values of a new set of insurgent Christian-right leaders—several of whom played major roles in bringing about the violent events of January 6th.

Yes, you read that correctly: This past week, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line to the presidency, spent hours praying with the Christian leaders who did the most to encourage religious participation in what became the Capitol riot."

The NAR, not to be confused with the NRA (though equally if not more dangerous than the latter), has Cheeto Jeezus' back. I'm pretty sure that Original Jeezus would be appalled. Also from the above article:

In my work as a scholar of American religion, I’ve been tracking a tectonic shift over the last few years in the leadership of the American religious right. In my forthcoming book and in a short documentary released this week, I detail how a fringe set of charismatic evangelical Christian leadership networks known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) have become a vanguard among Christian elites supporting Donald Trump and the Trump administration. The NAR is the backbone of Christian Trumpism, offering not only theological rationales but supernatural prophecies to support Trump, and they have inspired other Christians to rally around the embattled former president, as well."...

...There is, today, a January 6th–based spirituality built around conspiracy theories [emphasis mine ~ CLS], around upholding Trump as a type of messiah, and around aggressive Christian theologies of power and dominion. We see it in the cult of martyrdom that surrounds the violent criminals who are now being prosecuted for attempting to overthrow the government. We see it in the integration of evangelical worship music into right-wing political rallies. We see it in the mystical ties that continue to bind evangelical Christians to Trump.

And if you care anything about Church/State separation in the US, that should scare the bejeezus out of you.

While I do not consider Kevin Trudeau to be one of the ultra-right Christian nationalists who are doing their part to destroy American democracy and turn it into a theocracy in their own image, he has shamelessly pandered to Christians for years. After all, their money is as green as anyone else's, and they're noted for their gullibility, and many of them seem to possess both money and gullibility in large quantities.

Moreover Trudeau certainly has aligned himself with the American political right, on everything from immigration to support for Donald Trump (particularly in more recent years, when Katie and his buddies were furiously, and as it turned out vainly, campaigning to get Trump to commute Katie's prison sentence and even pardon him).

I'm speculating that since the long-dormant Kevin Trudeau Show is poised for a comeback on February 21, 2024, according to an announcement on Katie's Facebook fan club page, we might be subjected to plenty more reich-wing rhetoric and orange-nosing from Katie and friends, not to mention more conspiracy tall tales and secrets that "they" don't want you to know about. Hopefully I'll be able to access the show, and won't be blocked from it the way I am, for some reason, blocked from the aforementioned and otherwise public Facebook fan club page.

It's a big, big problem
There's no doubt that conspiracy theories have become much more mainstream in recent years than they were in the past, and they are playing an outsize role in American politics and society at large. This is not a good thing for anyone but those who stand to gain money and/or power from the public's gullibility (people such as Donald Trump and Kevin Trudeau, if I may belabor a point). In fact, and it can't be overstated, belief in conspiracy narratives can be dangerous. From AP, January 31, 2024:

Polls show nearly half of Americans believe a conspiracy theory and that those beliefs are almost always harmless. But when fringe views interfere with a person’s job or relationships, they can lead to social isolation. And when people put their conspiracy theory beliefs into action, it can lead to violence.

In recent years, conspiracy theorists have tried to stop vaccine clinics, they’ve attacked election officials and they’ve committed murders that they say were motivated by their beliefs. The Jan. 6 riot is perhaps the most notable example of how conspiracy theories can lead to violence: The thousands of people who stormed the Capitol and fought with police were motivated by Trump’s election lies.

Here is a link to more AP articles on the topic of conspiracy theories.

So... Happy Birthday, Kevin. Thank you for your contributions, all in the service of fleecing the public, to the dumbing-down of humanity and the possible dismantling of American democracy. Well done, Sir. Well done.