The Reporter vs. The Grifter Spectrum

I envision sometime in the future, not knowing if it is the near or far future, when the low key gematria grift we see today has a revival.  That’s basically what happened in the mid to late 2010’s.  There was nothing new presented.  Some effort was put into researching what happened in the past, it was tweaked to update to Alex Jones era circumstances, and it found a new audience that had never seen it before.  The big question seems to be if it will continue to go after the same target audience it has now or if perhaps someone with the magnetism and charm can pull off a big Ocean’s movie style heist or if it will continue to be like the lottery it is today.  (Lotteries being essentially a tax for people that don’t understand math who can’t afford yet another tax.)  

There is no neat and tidy box to place your gematria disseminating weirdo.  Unlike the gematria presentations that claim a completely binary outcome there is nuance and context.  Truth = 113 and Dishonest = 113.  The more they cry and proclaim that it MUST BE dishonest has no actual 1+1 = 2 proof behind it.  You are perfectly fine with being skeptical of anyone claiming that gematria has real value in analyzing what most people call real life.  But the nagging question remains - is the person a clueless idiot or a greedy and unscrupulous grifter?

Let’s take a side trip on someone that is obviously up to no good.

Checking through previous posts, we find they have a YouTube channel with gematria content.  And the first pass- it’s not good.  There are thumbnails of the Gematrinator calculator, so they are aware of our favorite insane number of ciphers available to cherry pick from site. 

And neither LabubuDolls or Six Six Six result is our magical 225.

Being correct about anything related to gematria is never much of a necessity, so that’s not really a big surprise.  Even the simplest sniff test shows that whatever the motivation is to post blatantly bad gematria, we don’t need to take anything they have to say seriously.  Including non gematria related topics.

There are two main products for gematria.  Gaining attention or money.  And our nuanced scale has a gradient or spectrum of belief in the actual gematria part.  And very simply at its most black and white it’s whether the focus is on the attention part or the money part.  Attention can be limited to an individual seeking solace and comfort in analyzing Bible phrases on their own.  It can extend to a tribe of like minded individuals.  It can get pushy where two opposing tribes could get opposite meanings and fight (hopefully a friendly discussion) over interpretation.

The money side.  That’s always had a fair number of people, especially during the NFL season like now, who don’t really give a damn about the gematria other than belief in the false hope it might give them an edge on their gambling.  Their lottery tax is the inevitable Patreon subscription where it’s pay to play.  The supposed master can provide their expertise.

Being a gematria grifter requires some effort to be successful.  For starters, posting gematria that actually equals what you claim it does is a great start.  It requires advertising.  And that’s blog posts and regular YouTube videos.  And hooking lots of clueless attention seekers into the mix.  They are getting the Attaboy!^TM in exchange for their time.  More Attaboys will be given if you just make sure to sell your soul to the cult leader for at least this sports season.  In its current form it requires rage baiting.  Some people on the scale are fixated on the idea that “All liberals are evil”, or “The Yankees are allowed to cheat because I love them” or “Trump is great”.  Or the polar opposite of those.  Conspiracy theories are equal opportunity employers, it just so happens that at this point in time hard right wing conspiracy thinking dominates the landscape.

For example, there’s a glut of film critic content on YouTube.  Everyone fancies themselves a great critic and not all of them are right.  Some are just bad critics.  Some don’t care about the criticism part and just want to pump up the view count for advertising value - making an entertaining video based on cinema (think MST3K on a small scale).  Some are focused on being controversial just for views.  Some use that rage baiting to branch out into selling merch.  Some are good critics that can explain their position, and maybe even cite legit references.  Some are good critics with no audience just doing it for fun.  And some are so obviously asking for money so frequently it’s insane to believe their audience hasn’t caught on that it’s more about the money than the message.

These same ideas of YouTubers as critic fight in to gematria YouTubers as journalists.  And the makers of the videos have audience members that all fit into different parts of the gradient.  The unfortunate side effect is the same psychological pressure to continue to be more extreme as the world around us gets more extreme.