A few months ago the professional billionaire and financial grifter Grant Cardone traded lawsuits with his former business partner: the wellness-scammer Gary Brecka. The resulting flood of court documents spilled out onto YouTube for all the world to see—inadvertently exposing the anatomy of the American griftocracy that goes all the way up to RFK Jr and President Donald J Trump.
I’ve spent the last month synthesizing more than 230 pieces of audio and video. I’ve combed over legal proceedings and interviewed multiples sources in an effort to understand how the spread of wellness scams and inspirational seminars online transmuted into the basis of political power in America. The reason why these lawsuits are so important is because Cardone and Brecka are some of the most prominent faces in the MAGA and MAHA movements. They’re regulars at Mar-a-lago. Cardone shared the stage with Trump on the campaign trail and now seems gearing up to run for governor of California in 2026.
The lawsuits content that both Cardone and Brecka run disingenuous scams (of various types) to personally enrich themselves at the expense of their supporters and business partners. They accuse one another of defamation and are both seeking upwards of $100 million dollars in damages. These suits sit on top of a pattern of similar lawsuits—from broken business arrangements that ultimately forced Brecka to declare bankruptcy more than ten years ago—to a another $100 million defamation case between Cardone and the former T-Mobile CEO John Legere. In the latter case, Legere called Cardone “a conman of the highest order” in a live audio chatroom.
Cardone also contends that Legere “called me a pedophile”.
Which, as far as I can tell, Legere didn’t do.
Eventually Legere and Cardone settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money, but not before millions of people engaged with the story.
If something about this sounds familiar: it’s because it’s also exactly the same playbook that Trump uses to silence his enemies. Instead of using defamation laws to protect their reputations from actual malice, both Trump and Cardone use the court system to publicize their willingness to fight dirty and silence their detractors. Instead of protecting their reputation as honest brokers, they aim to bolster their own reputations as bullies.
This has turned out to be a somewhat effective ruse, with Trump winning a high profile settlement against ABC News, which emboldened him to file similar frivolous motions against CBS and the Des Moines Register. The settlement instigated a cascade of fear among the free press and ultimately have stifled free speech. This is odd to me, because most legal experts agree that if the cases did make it to court they would almost definitely fail. Press outlets caved because the couldn’t stomach even the minimal risk of losing a $20 billion case.
The perverse outcome is exactly what professional scammers like Trump want. Almost by definition scams depend on the con artists’s reputation for trustworthiness. If they’re successful a scammer can accumulate vast amount of wealth through broken promises, lies and outright fraud. This creates a strange situation where the fact of a scammer’s success is also the cause for damages against the free press that outs them.
Meanwhile, there is almost no financial up-side for a whistleblower or journalist to actually expose a scammer’s malfeasance. I know this from personal experience. A story that I did on the criminal record of the founder of Athletic Greens ultimately caused the CEO of the company to step down and, I’ve heard, prompted $44 million worth of subscribers to the nutrient powder to cancel their memberships. For the month of effort and taking on tremendous legal risk, I made just over $6,000 in YouTube ads.
Here' are the actual stats for that video:
It’s a lopsided arms race between billionaires and passionate truth tellers. When telling the truth results—at best—in barely a living wage there’s very little incentive for the press to do anything other than tow the party line.
Trump wants it this way.
His administration is busy rooting out any potential ethics oversight—from the coterie of inspector generals he fired, threatening to impeach judges, and aiming to eliminate the Consumer Protection Financial Board—it’s likely that we are living through the last gasps of accountability in America.
Anyone with clear eyes can see where this is going: America’s legal system and power structure is morphing into a grifter’s paradise. While the Trump administration empowers Elon Musk to efficiently destroy government institutions, the department of Health and Human Services under the direction of RFK Jr is busy undermining the standards of medical evidence in favor of unsubstantiated wellness claims. Instead of “making America healthy again” with necessary reforms that prioritize common sense health initiatives around clean drinking water, childhood vaccination, women’s health, and science-backed nutrition, he’s begun a war against medical professionals.
There’s a reason that just about every health grifter I’ve exposed on this channel has had their pictures taken with RFK — from Bryan Johnson and Gary Brecka, but also JW Ross the convicted felon founder of the Kratom-Kava “health elixir” Feel Free. Under RFK’s direction human health is on sale to the highest bidder—whether they are a wellness scammer or a duplicitous pharmaceutical company.
America today is less a democracy than it is a pyramid scheme.
I haven’t spoken much about how Gary Brecka fits into this puzzle, and I think I’l leave that for you to find out by watching the video above.
What I will say is that we should all retain the privilege of judging people by their past actions and the reputation that they’ve accumulated over the course of their careers. The people surrounding Trump have a history of lying, scamming and even criminal convictions of fraud. The great American experiment in self-rule that began 250 years ago appears to be coming to its natural conclusion where power and money win out over liberty and self-determination.
One more thing: In the video I mention a set of terms and conditions for continued viewing of my content. Thank you so much for being a subscriber to this channel!
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