"Rope. Tree. Journalist." shirt spotted at @realDonaldTrump rally in MN _ Reuters photo by Jonathan Ernst pic.twitter.com/1VTkYPOOVo
— Michael Biesecker (@mbieseck) November 7, 2016
You can’t make America great by turning your back on one of its core values and simultaneously making a a reference to lynching.
The T-shirt design isn’t new — long-time blogger “Digby” wrote about this t-shirt back in 2006.
Looking at Nate Gowdy’s photo from the Trump rally in Loveland, Colorado, I feel the need to point out a couple of quotes:
“Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities.”
— Khan Shoieb, How Trumpism Threatens Silicon Valley, October 20, 2016
Of course, the practice of appropriating or big footing an identity slogan like “Black Lives Matter,” especially to trash it, is an automatic fuck you. What makes a phrase like this so scintillating to the haters, and so toxic to everyone else, however, has to do with every other meaning it dredges up. The first and most inflammatory one that comes up for me is the most literal one. That’s the reference to (or “the matter of”) guns out there in the hands of blacks. Along those lines, it incorporates the racist stereotype of violent black dudes and how the white man, with his family to protect, can’t just sit there idle. … As if “WHITE GUNS DON’T.”
— Reading the Pictures, Trump Rally Wear Update: Black Guns Matter, October 27, 2016
In a mere 41 seconds, Florida woman Michelle Van Etten’s gave us the heart of her speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, which was such a rambling mess that the ABC affiliate station that posted the video gave it a title that starts with “Yikes”:
Here’s a transcript:
Fast-forward 26 years…going to my high school reunion (my 20th, of course). I decided to scope out the competition, and what I realized — they were driving BMWs and they looked like Barbie.
I was 30 pounds overweight, a stay-at-home mom, and driving a minivan. I decided at that point I needed a change. And I began to dream again.
Note both her body and verbal language: the agitation, the clenched fists, the BMW/minivan comparison, and the use of competition rather than classmates.
She is telling a story that will resonate with a number of voters in these fearful times: a story of envy, perceived failure, and the encroachment of undeserving “others” who somehow took away the success promised to her.
If you’ve got have 7 minutes and 8 seconds to watch the entire thing — a shambles from start to finish — here it is:
Who is this person, who sounds like one of those unintentionally funny people attempting to give a 3 a.m. deep philosophical pronouncement at Denny’s after an epic bar crawl, and as one YouTube commenter astutely observed, seemed “distracted by her own hand motions”?
Until it was corrected on Friday, here’s how Van Etten’s bio on the RNC site described her:
Its text reads:
Michelle Van Etten is a small business owner who was recently featured in “The Greatest Networkers in the World” second edition. Michelle employs over 100,000 people and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, knowing his policies will support businesses all across America.
Read that bio carefully again. She’s a small business owner who employs over 100,000 people. With that many employees, her “small business” would be larger than these dinky little “mom and pop” operations (using data taken from this list of the largest employers in the United States):
| “Small” business | Number of employees |
|---|---|
| General Dynamics (Aerospace, marine, and combat systems, and information technology) |
99,500 |
| Apple (Perhaps you’ve heard of them) |
97,200 |
| Exxon Mobil (As in the oil company) |
83,700 |
| Philip Morris International (Big Tobacco) |
82,500 |
| Halliburton (Yes, as in Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, another oil company) |
80,000 |
The RNC site was updated slightly, and it now reads like this:
Michelle Van Etten is a small business owner who was recently featured in The Greatest Networkers in the World second edition. Michelle runs an international multi-million dollar network marketing business with an organization of customers and distributors of over 100,000 people and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump, knowing his policies will support businesses all across America.
Van Etten had to “clarify” matters and in an interview with The Guardian, she said: “I don’t employ. Nobody works for me, because we are all individual contractors, and we all have our own individual businesses.”
That’s what her LinkedIn profile says at the time of writing:
If you’ve worked in the corporate world even only a week — or just watch Suits — you’ve probably looked at the title Senior Vice Chairman Marketing Director and thought “Wow, that sounds like a job title that a thirteen year-old with delusions of grandeur made up by stringing a bunch of ‘business-y’ sounding words together,” and you’d be pretty close to the mark.
Some simple Googling will reveal that this is a title that Youngevity seems to hand out like candy as an award rather than as an executive position.
If you look just below that made-up title, you’ll see a more accurate one beneath it, in smaller letters: “Youngevity Distributer”. And before you ask, “Distributer” is an acceptable spelling in American English, but considered to be an error — or at least not so erudite-looking — in International English.
If her job title seems a little wonky, what appears below it is downright sketchy. Below any job in a resume, which is what a LinkedIn profile basically is, you’d expect to find a description of that job, including the responsibilities of the role, the tasks involved with fulfilling those responsibilities, and any achievements and accomplishments (go ahead and look at mine, for example). Van Etten doesn’t do this; she instead opted to copy and paste Youngevity’s recruiting spiel. You’d think that someone who “runs an international multi-million dollar network marketing business with an organization of customers and distributors of over 100,000 people” would have something impressive to say in their job description.
Your first warning should be what you see when you visit her website, which she lists just below her job title in her LinkedIn profile: challengeshop.my90forlife.com…
From appearances (along with the “Youngevity” name), it looks like Youngevity is in the business of selling health supplements. However, upon closer examination, you’ll notice that the “I want to join” button comes before the “I want to shop” button. It’s almost as if they’d rather you join the company rather than buy stuff from it.
The format of the web address “challengeshop.my90forlife.com” suggests that this Van Etten’s site is a small part of a larger site, which you can get to by deleting the first part of the web address and going straight to my90forlife.com. Here’s where the story gets better/worse:
On this page, there isn’t a single scrap of information about health supplements. It’s all about enticing you to join the company.
At this point, you should be asking this question: What kind of retail business puts more energy into getting customers to buy into the business than getting customers to buy their goods?
The answer to this question becomes quite clear when you look at this “quick start” document for Youngevity distributors (and yes, their material spells the word as “distributor”):
Any time someone provides you with a business opportunity using phrases like “quick start to reaching your dreams” and “simple system”, alarm bells should go off in your head.
Here’s page 2, which features a checklist:
Note that the first four of the five items in the checklist involve placing an order for product or materials from the organization. Is your Amway sense tingling yet?
Not surprisingly, page 2 is the only page (out of 12) that shows the products that Youngevity purports to sell.
The heart of Youngevity’s business model becomes more apparent on page 4, which instructs you to create a list of prospects:
Again, note that prospects aren’t being sold health supplements, but an opportunity to work for Youngevity. This becomes more apparent on page 10, where they provide a “mathematical illustration” of how you could — in theory, if you work really hard — make $120K a year if you make 5 contacts a day, 5 days a week:
I suspect that the design for page 11 was created on a dare. They actually include a diagram of their pyramid scheme while doing their damnedest to make it not look like a pyramid. At this point, they might as well just print it as a headline in all-caps — YOUR GULLIBILITY IS OUR BUSINESS MODEL:
“Youngevity already has hundreds of million and multi-million dollar income earners,” the document says. I’m going to assume that a printing or editing error caused the end of the sentence to go missing: “…thanks to suckers like you.”
Go read this summary: Are all MLMs scams?
(The answer, by the bye, is yes.)
Youngevity’s founder and the guy behind its supplements, Joel D. Wallach, sports titles that are listed in order of increasing worrisomeness…
…and the Google results for the search terms joel wallach quack should also concern you.
Wallach’s big claim is that all diseases are caused by mineral deficiencies, and he says that 99% of Americans have a mineral deficiency, since we need 90 essential nutrients (this is where his products’ names come from), 60 of which are minerals. One document he cites as proof is actually a 1936 article from Cosmopolitan (back when it was a literary magazine) about a passing mineral fad written by a farmer in Florida (of course).
Wallach also:
If that doesn’t settle matters for you, here’s Wallach talking with infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (who sells Youngevity products and says their vitamins make him feel “crazy”) about why we don’t need vaccines:
For starters, we’ve learned that whoever organized the RNC didn’t worry too much about vetting speakers or reviewing their speeches, or even giving coaching to new speakers. We’ve also learned that:
Van Etten’s speech points to an appalling mix of poor business acumen, misinformation, and misplaced anger over one’s own sub-optimal life choices, and it’s the perfect representation of many voters who are going to be casting their ballots for Trump come November.
Say the word “silicon” and chances are, you’ll think of technology. After all, silicon’s relationship to tech – it’s part of what makes transistors and chips – has been part of popular culture for decades, from the “Silicon chip inside her head” opening line from the Boomtown Rats’ song I Don’t Like Mondays to “Silicon Valley” as the nickname for the suburban expanse between San Francisco and San Jose.
Silicon is only part of the equation, however. The chips that drive our computers, mobile phones and assorted electronica are actually a “layer cake” consisting not only of silicon, but also oxide and metal.
There’s also the matter of key non-chip components like capacitors, which momentarily store an electrical charge. They’re made of thin layers of conductive metal separated by a thin layer of insulator. We use their “buffering” capabilities to smooth out “spiky” electrical currents, filter through signal interference, pick out a specific frequency from a spectrum of them and other “cleaning up” operations.
One of the metals used in the manufacture of capacitors is tantalum, which you can extract from a metal ore called coltan, whose name is short for “columbite-tantalite”. About 20% of the world’s supply of tantalum comes from Congo, and proceeds of from the sale of coltan are how their warlords – the scum driving the world’s most vicious conflict, and who’ve turned the country into the rape capital of the world – are bankrolled.
I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.
Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”
Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.
He also points to the Enough Project’s latest video, which used humour and a reference to the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” TV commercials to draw the public’s attention to conflict metals and to encourage them to contact electronics manufacturers and ask them to be more vigilant when sourcing components:
The Enough Project says that auditing component supply chains at the smelters to see whether the metal was sources from “clean” places like Australia or Canada instead of lining the pockets of Congolese warlords would add about one cent to the price of a cellphone, and that this figure originates from within the industry. I’d happily pay a thousand times that for each of my devices – a mere ten bucks – to ensure that I wasn’t bankrolling rape and murder.
I’ll close this post with the closing paragraph from Kristof’s op-ed:
We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.
Take a look at the photo accompanying the SFGate article below, which is about the all-hands meeting being called at Facebook over complaints about their approach to privacy:
Click the image to see the original article.
While the photo is probably not the one they wanted to use for the article, it’s a pretty good metaphor for the scene at a company when they call emergency all-hands meetings of this sort.
I read Hustler for the pictures, but every now and again, Larry Flynt publishes a spot-on editorial, like the one below:
![Full page ad in Hustler featuring Larry Flynt: "A Message to the Tea Party Movement - You have a reason to be angry. You are being screwed. The bankers get bailed out, but the working class is left to fend for itself at a time when jobs are hard to find. But your anger is misdirected. You are being lied to. It's the corporations that have brought this about. They have corrupted both the Republicans and the Democrats. Aside from shipping your jobs overseas, corporations want their taxes reduced as a way of further increasing profits. Reduced tax revenue means less money for schools, hospitals, police, roads and everything else we need to keep our country running. The focus of your anger should be not just the government but also the banks and corporations that are looting taxpayer dollars. Your taxes -- the taxes of working Americans -- have already been cut by the Obama Administration. It may indeed by time for a revolution. Just make sure you go after the right people. [Signed] Larry Flynt, Publisher."](https://www.joeydevilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/amessagetotheteapartymovement.jpg "Full page ad in Hustler featuring Larry Flynt: \"A Message to the Tea Party Movement - You have a reason to be angry. You are being screwed. The bankers get bailed out, but the working class is left to fend for itself at a time when jobs are hard to find. But your anger is misdirected. You are being lied to. It's the corporations that have brought this about. They have corrupted both the Republicans and the Democrats. Aside from shipping your jobs overseas, corporations want their taxes reduced as a way of further increasing profits. Reduced tax revenue means less money for schools, hospitals, police, roads and everything else we need to keep our country running. The focus of your anger should be not just the government but also the banks and corporations that are looting taxpayer dollars. Your taxes -- the taxes of working Americans -- have already been cut by the Obama Administration. It may indeed by time for a revolution. Just make sure you go after the right people. [Signed] Larry Flynt, Publisher.\"")
Click the image to see it at full size.
My only question is: “Damn, Larry, where do you buy your paperweights?”
Memo to John McCain: When Glenn freakin’ Beck sounds more reasonable than you, something is seriously wrong.
In case you needed a reminder of Glenn Beck’s usual level of reasonableness, here’s a collection of his greatest hits: