You may remember an Inspection column a while back where I ranted regarding those teabaggers who shout people down and whose purpose in town meetings seems to be only to prevent any meeting from happening at all, unless it only covers their random, senseless rants. And tonight the newest edition will be out that briefly mentions Joe Scarborough.
This column at The Chimp mentions both, and provides a lot of information…
“I became a target of this campaign when I appeared at the University of California-Riverside on October 1 to discuss my book and join in a panel discussion about the Republican Party in the age of Obama. As soon as the panel began, a group of approximately twenty College Republicans leapt in front of the stage, deliberately blocking the view of audience members with signs labeling me a ‘Michael Moore Wannabe’ and ‘Leftist Hack.'”
“The demonstration might have been amusing had it stopped there.”
“Then a husky young man Ryan Sorba who seemed to be directing the College Republican theatrics began heckling my fellow panelists with racist and homophobic slurs. When Mark Takano, an openly gay former Democratic congressional candidate and local community college trustee, attempted to speak, Sorba blew kisses at him and shouted, ‘Autograph my dick!’ Sorba echoed Glenn Beck’s critique of Obama as ‘a guy who has a deep-seated hatred of white people’ in heckling Jonathan Walton, an African-American professor of religion. ‘Racist! Racist!’ Sorba screamed when Walton attempted to field questions from the audience.”
“When a university administrator summoned campus police to remove Sorba, he was dismissively told by Sgt. Seth Morrison that I was ‘not a legitimate speaker,’ though I was invited as part of a regular university speakers’ program. And the disruption continued.”
“Sorba, I discovered, is not a disgruntled citizen, but a professional agitator, a paid operative of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a heavily funded, Delaware-based outfit that provides a support structure for conservative academics while grooming a cadre of student activists to, in the group’s own words, ‘battle the radicals and PC types on campuses.’ Sorba has received his paycheck through a fellowship established by Rich DeVos, a far-right Republican billionaire who founded the Amway pyramid scheme and owns the Orlando Magic.”
– Max Blumenthal
Amway rears its’ ugly head. Their onerous brand has been so tarnished that they have changed their name in North America to Quixtar. A couple of friends made the mistake of getting involved with Amway to supplement their income about ten years ago. The Amway people not only hounded them with seminars and visits to ‘successful’ Amway distributors (most of which they had to pay for), but they also constantly pushed their form of Christianity and far right-wing politics on them. They also encouraged them to deceive friends by asking them over for dinner or a drink — “Hey, let’s get reacquainted!” — and then plying them with an Amway sales pitch. They were told to go through everyone they had ever met and get them to buy Amway or, even better, become Amway distributors themselves. More than a few of their friends were highly offended that their friendship was abused to peddle Amway crap to them under false pretenses. My friends finally woke up and and realized how awful this company really is, how much it had taken over their lives, and how much money they had spent on the products, seminars and other BS Amway was constantly pushing. After a couple of years of this they were in the red for several thousand bucks and hadn’t made a dime.
That’s where DeVos’ money comes from to support these right-wing political front groups, and pay college kids to disrupt meetings. In my opinion, that scumbag DeVos should be in jail, but he has enough money to hire lawyers to help him skirt the law, and bribe polticians to keep from being prosecuted.
BTW, Ken, don’t forget to credit Max Blumenthal for writing the excerpt.
I thought the link would lead to “credit,” but you’re probably right. Will do.
We actually had the reverse happen. A causal acquaintance, at best: an almost neighbor, invited us over in the very early 80s to “get to know each other better” and discuss the idea of starting my own business. (Which I was thinking of at the time and did: what I have done since the mid-80s.) When we told him we’d think about it, but wouldn’t commit, he got all hand wring-y and: “Wouldn’t you help a neighbor out?” Very Glen Beck-ish with all that implies. Of course that drove us even further away. Beside the fact that the model just didn’t seem “me,” it seemed more than a bit of a pyramid scheme. I didn’t even know the term at the time but recognized that people making money off of people making money off of was a very bad model for the bottom feeders. (I told him that and he was genuinely puzzled: didn’t understand.) Didn’t know they were Righties, but if you had asked me to guess before I read this article I probably would have said, “Yes.” Their idea of “free enterprise” is often the same “freedom” the moving medicine show man might promote: the freedom to move as fast as necessary to get away from the corpses they help create… giving what few good medicine men out there there might be a worse rep than they already have.
One of my favorite quotes from that long ago meeting was, “You don’t even have to sell anything! You have friends, right? Get them into it and you’ll make money when they get their friends into it, and their friends….”
That’s it exactly: “Get your friends into it and make money off them.”
The couple I know were told to ‘take a vacation’ in Florida (at their own expense) to visit an Amway ‘success story’ and learn his ‘secrets.’ This guy and his wife welcomed them to a nice Art Deco house with a large swimming pool, full-time housekeeper, and matching his-and-her Mercedes convertibles.
This ‘successful’ couple actually charged my friends for their worthless advice — “You know, just like an attorney or doctor” — which basically amounted to the line above, “Take advantage of your friends, sit back and let them make money for you.” And, I guess, if you made enough money to afford the home, pool, live-in maid and matching luxury cars, then you’d be paid by Amway, or Amway’s suckers, to be one of their ‘success stories.’
Somewhere I read that only 10 percent of Amway distributors have ever turned a profit. That figure actually seems high to me.