Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that Mike Huckabee is a presidential candidate today—sort of, anyway—partly based on his willingness to cash in on his true believers by marketing crap and hokum to them for money. Mother Jones has a deeper dive into one particular group the ex-governor sold his mailing list to, a group that preys on conservative fears with a hodgepodge of investment advice, "secret" health tips, and the usual. He's not the only one: a good part of the conservative machine is built on bilking their own supporters.
Gingrich sent out more than a dozen Agora-related emails after he dropped out of the 2012 race, including one from an investment newsletter warning that Obama might seek a third term (sell, sell, sell!). In April, [Ron] Paul appeared in a 51-minute video for an Agora subsidiary in which he argued that the United States was on the verge of martial law and societal collapse. [...] Agora's emails skirt the line between spammy and scammy. An email sent last year to followers of the popular right-wing site RedState on behalf of the Health Sciences Institute claimed that the Obama administration was blocking a miracle cure that "vaporizes cancer in six weeks."
You know, there has for hundreds of years been a surefire way to tell whether a particular health cure or supplement is a total and complete scam. If the claim is that actual experts don't want you to know this secret because it'll just make you too darn healthy and they'll have to all give up and wash cars for a living, that is the defining characteristic of a scam. I interject this here only because those particular scams make up a good chunk of all internet advertising and if people would stop falling for them, the rest of us could stop seeing that crap and all our lives would be considerably improved.
Huckabee, of course, got used for the Jesus pitch—sorry, I mean for diet secrets from the "Book of Matthew." Apparently St. Matthew was not a fan of carbs, but you have to read deep between the lines to get that one, then you have to read other texts backward while playing Beatles records and burning a ShamWow as ritual sacrifice. There, I just saved you 74 bucks. Oh—or you can try the surefire Mike Huckabee diabetes cure, which is to eat lots of cinnamon. What the hell, do 'em both. You don't need to pay a con artist to try either, though.
So what has Mike Huckabee said about these very sketchy emails going out touting his own endorsements of these "products" and their sketchy claims? The same thing all the other conservative touters always say.
Huckabee argued that he wasn't responsible for sponsored emails sent out to his supporters. "My gosh, that's like saying, 'You run some ads on CNN, do you personally agree with all the ads that run on CNN?' I doubt you do," he told anchor Jake Tapper. Pressed further on the email's "hucksterism," Huckabee responded, "I didn't actually run that part of my company."
From a strictly cynical perspective, the lengths to which the far right goes to scam their supporters is good news for opponents of the far right; if their fans are spending money on miracle cures and bunk financial advice (Glenn Beck says buy gold! The world is ending, and you'll need gold!) they aren't spending that money on actual conservative causes. From a less cynical perspective, it's still pretty damn rotten for a whole arm of the conservative movement to be built on mail-order scams. But this may be one of those "family values" things that we liberals just don't understand.