Critique: The Scam Artistry of the Right’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Source: jacobin
Authors: ByMatt McManus
URL: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/peterson-musk-tate-right-victimization

What the article reports

Matt McManus reviews Confidence Men: Peterson, Musk, Tate and the Duping of the American Mind by Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss, summarizing the book's critiques of Jordan Peterson's intellectual influences, Elon Musk's business record, and Andrew Tate's "manosphere" rhetoric. The piece argues that all three figures exploit a blend of victimhood and superiority claims to serve a reactionary political project. McManus closes with an explicit call for a "democratic socialist" counter-narrative.

Factual accuracy — Mixed

The piece makes several verifiable claims that hold up and a few that don't or can't be checked as stated.

Accurate or plausible:

• Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal does use the phrase "truthful hyperbole" — this is verifiable and correctly attributed.
• Andrew Tate was a competitive kickboxer; his rape and trafficking accusations are documented in ongoing Romanian and UK legal proceedings.
• Elon Musk did not found Tesla (it was Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning); the hyperloop remains unbuilt as a commercial service. These are defensible summary claims consistent with public record.

Questionable or imprecise:

• Roger Scruton is described as having "called for a society composed largely of 'unthinking' people." No source, page, or work is given. Scruton used the word "unthinking" approvingly in discussing tradition (in The Meaning of Conservatism), but characterizing his overall project this way without citation is a selective compression that could mislead.
• The article attributes a quote to Sam Altman — "Elon desperately wants to save the world. But only if he can be the one to save it" — without naming where or when Altman said it. This is a substantive, widely-circulated quote, but the absence of sourcing in a published piece is a craft gap.
• The article misspells co-author Harrison Fluss's first name as "Harrion" in the opening paragraph — a minor error but notable in a piece centered on the book.
• Ayn Rand's quote "I will not die; it's the world that will end" is presented without source or context, making it unverifiable as stated.

Framing — Advocacy

1. Headline and label: "The Scam Artistry of the Right's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" — the headline adopts the book's thesis as its own framing before the reader encounters any evidence. The phrase "dirty rotten scoundrels" is authorial, not attributed.

2. Unattributed moral verdict as news: "Con men are irritating for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is how little respect they have for their marks" — the piece opens in the author's own voice rendering Peterson, Musk, and Tate as con men. No qualifier signals that this is the book's argument rather than established fact.

3. Loaded verb and noun choices throughout: "griftosphere," "reactionary vogue," "megalomania," "fabulist," "hypersolipsistic," "butch worldview," "wokescolds" (used in mock-quotation but without distancing), "uppity bitches" — the piece deploys the book's language as its own rather than maintaining reviewer distance.

4. Comparative claim stated as fact: "Far from signing on to the Enlightenment project of liberty, equality, and solidarity for all grounded in reason, these thinkers adopted a dark view of human vulgarity." This is a contested historiographical characterization of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky presented without attribution or qualification.

5. Explicit conclusion: The final paragraph recommends "democratic socialism" as "the real deal" vs. the Right's "con" — this is an advocacy conclusion, not a book-review observation.

Source balance

Ratio — critical of subjects : neutral : supportive of subjects = 5:0:0. No scholar, journalist, or commentator who defends or contextualizes Peterson, Musk, or Tate is quoted or paraphrased. No fan, follower, or sympathetic analyst is given a voice, even to be rebutted. The "why do people follow them?" question is raised but answered entirely from within the critical frame.

Omissions

1. No steelmanned version of the subjects' arguments. The piece acknowledges that Peterson, Musk, and Tate have massive audiences but does not represent their most defensible claims before criticizing them — a standard expectation even in adversarial book reviews.

2. No independent assessment of the book's claims. McManus reviews Confidence Men by essentially agreeing with all of it. No evidence is introduced that the reviewer checked any of Frim and Fluss's factual claims independently.

3. Peterson's actual academic record unmentioned. Peterson held a tenured position at the University of Toronto and published peer-reviewed research in clinical psychology. A reader would not know this from the piece, which might affect the "former academic" framing.

4. Legal context on Tate is thinly drawn. Tate's Romanian and UK legal cases are ongoing and contested; the piece characterizes him as "perennially hounded by accusations" without noting that no conviction has been secured as of publication — a material omission given the severity of the claims.

5. No engagement with critics of the book. Book reviews at journalistic outlets typically note other critical responses; no such context is offered.

6. The claim that democratic socialism is "the real deal" is presented as a closing argument without evidence or engagement with critiques of that project — unusual even for an opinion piece.

What it does well

• The structural thesis is clearly stated and consistently pursued. The organizing claim — that all three figures share a "postmodern right" epistemology that treats reality as "clay to be molded" — is introduced early and tracked through each section, giving the piece coherence.
• The Peterson-as-postmodernist inversion ("there are more than a few respects in which he is a distinctly right-wing postmodernist") is a genuinely interesting analytical point that a reader unfamiliar with the academic debate would find illuminating.
• Self-critical moment: McManus acknowledges a "weakness in their otherwise excellent book" — that Frim and Fluss lack "a comprehensive answer to what the appeal is." This is honest and improves the review's credibility.
• The Tate-Morpheus comparison ("Morpheus in The Matrix was a revolutionary who wanted to liberate humankind…Tate, by contrast, thinks the goal of seeing through the Matrix is fighting your way to the top") is a crisp, illustrative contrast.
• Byline and publication date are present; Jacobin's editorial identity as a democratic-socialist outlet is publicly known, providing implicit disclosure of perspective even without an explicit editor's note.

Rating

Overall: 4/10 — A fluent and internally consistent piece of left-advocacy writing that functions more as a co-signed brief than a critical book review, with significant gaps in source diversity, attributed framing, and contextual fairness.