A bold plan to save bourbon taters from themselves

One of the many jokes about Tesla’s disastrous Cybertruck is that the most valuable thing to come out its launch was the waiting list for it. A million people willing to plunk down $100 apiece for the future privilege of spending $80,000 on a rickety divorce-mobile from a yakked-out white supremacist and serial liar, the logic goes, are some of the dumbest marks alive—and thus, lucrative leads for other grifters looking to part fools with their money. But those are Elon Musk’s wealthy dipshits, and he isn’t done bleeding them for all they’re worth. Luckily for aspiring conmen, there’s another cohort of stone-cold rubes out there, possessed of too much discretionary income and a kink for getting fleeced: taters.

A lot of them are probably on the Cybertruck list, actually. You’d have to dedupe it. But America’s whiskey-addled doofuses are myriad, and absolutely primed to be taken advantage of in their mindless pursuit of brown liquor. As whiskey mania raged, hustlers used some pretty obvious schemes to trick taters into paying for bunk product. Even now, with the boom receding, scammers have stumbled onto a new way to take taters for a ride. And it’s so deeply stupid, so painfully evident, that once you hear it, I think you’ll agree that the only compassionate thing for Uncle Sam to do is tax these bourbon bumpkins until they no longer have enough money to be worth scammers’ time in the first place.

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