Grifty

Episode Summary Welcome back to Grifty Pod. If you are listening to this episode without a helmet or a seatbelt, you are far braver than we are. This week felt like the entire nation had a stroke while standing upright. The Epstein documents dropped and inside that cursed file dump we discovered the soul bending phrase Trump and Bubba which was not on any of our bingo cards. Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to pick a political fistfight with Trump and it looked like two malfunctioning Roombas colliding in a hallway. Every headline seemed to be written by a bored demon trapped in a newsroom. So today we are taking you on a tour of American unreality. First we slide back into the nineties to revisit the DARE program which gave entire generations a deeply misplaced sense of safety. Then we blast forward to the current moment where right wing influencers are turning on their own in something called transvestigation which is exactly as deranged as it sounds. The circus is in town. Let us begin. What You'll Learn in This Episode The DARE Program and the Comforting Lie That Posters Fix Everything Charlie and Erika Kirk and the Digital Fever Dream of Transvestigations Is it A Grift? Real News or Fake Grift Fever Dream? The DARE Program and the Comforting Lie That Posters Fix Everything What DARE Was Selling The DARE program arrived in Los Angeles in 1983 and quickly metastasized into a national tradition. A smiling uniformed officer would walk into an elementary school classroom and deliver a series of highly scripted moral lectures about resisting drugs, alcohol and peer pressure. Children signed pledges. Children received neon yellow T shirts that glowed like irradiated dandelions. Children were assured that they were now fortified against the evils of the world. By the mid nineties DARE had infected more than seventy percent of school districts across the United States. It was not a curriculum so much as a branding operation. Parents adored it. Politicians bragged about it. The police treated it like a goodwill tour. The problem is that the entire thing did not work. Multiple meta analyses found that DARE had either no measurable effect on future drug use or effects so small they barely registered. A few studies found that students who completed DARE even experimented more possibly because children are curious, confused and easily entertained by forbidden concepts. The program was built on slogans rather than science. It substituted good intentions for meaningful intervention. It made addiction look like a moral failure instead of the complex social crisis it is. DARE was America in miniature. A shiny T-shirt pretending to be a solution. Why This Matters Today DARE is a perfect case study in institutional showmanship. It demonstrates our national desire for easy answers. It teaches us that if something feels helpful enough people will stop asking whether it is actually helpful. This is how grifts survive. This is how nostalgic myth becomes public memory. ⸻ Charlie and Erika Kirk and the Digital Fever Dream of Transvestigations What Transvestigation Actually Is Transvestigation is a conspiracy subculture devoted to claiming that public figures are secretly transgender. The reasoning is not medical, psychological or scientific. It is forensic fan fiction. These groups analyze photos of celebrities and politicians and apply invented rules about jaw shape collarbone angle shoulder width rib cage length wrist thickness and something they ominously call