As soon as I saw, "owned the Super Fruit in Chambersburg", I knew who this joker was. Man, I doubt this guy even sold the Super Fruit, I bet he went bankrupt. That place was a dump. He probably only told everyone he sold it for a lot of money. And even if he did sell it, what he thinks is "a lot of money" was probably only a few dozen kilobucks, maybe enough to live a year in Chambersburg.
I grew up in Chambersburg and the surrounding area. I now live in DC and am trying to get my parents to move out of Chambersburg. It may be cheap to live there, but there are other cheap places that aren't as awful. There is a certain culture of two-faced, get-rich-quick scheming there. Every redneck and his brother is trying to work an angle, trying to convince everyone they know the score, they did the leg work, you should invest, when all they really did was watch something on Discovery one night. This entire story is just not terribly surprising.
See, the problem with the Amish isolating themselves so much is that it makes them incredibly naive about the rest of us that they call "The English". They think we're all awful people, that we praise Satan with our morning cereal. You do anything that clearly demonstrates that as false, like... I don't know... letting them see you be a normal person for more than 15 minutes, and it breaks their brains. They don't know how to deal with it. So Moffitt handing out free fruit probably short circuited everything they knew about "The English" and they just lapped up his bullshit with a deer-in-the-headlights-look. But if they weren't so cut off from their surrounding community, they would have never paid attention to the guy.
Read up on their history. Their reason for coming to America, as well as a bunch of other other Germanic religious groups around the same time, was basically, "you know what? I may be a simple farmer, but I think our local church is wrong and we should be a lot more strict about our religion. But what's this? Most of the other people in our town don't want to be flogged for not going to bed at 8pm? Religious persecution! Let's move to America!"
So they cut themselves off and didn't live in their geographic community. If they were involved with The English, they would have known Moffitt was an asshole. I've seen this script played out so many times IN THIS VERY TOWN. It's probably the reason I haven't ever fallen for an MBA idea-guy's scheming, I had plenty of practice listening to the bullshit streaming out of old guys' mouths back home.
I grew up in Chambersburg and the surrounding area. I now live in DC and am trying to get my parents to move out of Chambersburg. It may be cheap to live there, but there are other cheap places that aren't as awful. There is a certain culture of two-faced, get-rich-quick scheming there. Every redneck and his brother is trying to work an angle, trying to convince everyone they know the score, they did the leg work, you should invest, when all they really did was watch something on Discovery one night. This entire story is just not terribly surprising.
See, the problem with the Amish isolating themselves so much is that it makes them incredibly naive about the rest of us that they call "The English". They think we're all awful people, that we praise Satan with our morning cereal. You do anything that clearly demonstrates that as false, like... I don't know... letting them see you be a normal person for more than 15 minutes, and it breaks their brains. They don't know how to deal with it. So Moffitt handing out free fruit probably short circuited everything they knew about "The English" and they just lapped up his bullshit with a deer-in-the-headlights-look. But if they weren't so cut off from their surrounding community, they would have never paid attention to the guy.
Read up on their history. Their reason for coming to America, as well as a bunch of other other Germanic religious groups around the same time, was basically, "you know what? I may be a simple farmer, but I think our local church is wrong and we should be a lot more strict about our religion. But what's this? Most of the other people in our town don't want to be flogged for not going to bed at 8pm? Religious persecution! Let's move to America!"
So they cut themselves off and didn't live in their geographic community. If they were involved with The English, they would have known Moffitt was an asshole. I've seen this script played out so many times IN THIS VERY TOWN. It's probably the reason I haven't ever fallen for an MBA idea-guy's scheming, I had plenty of practice listening to the bullshit streaming out of old guys' mouths back home.