During yesterday’s show I made a prediction that, in retrospect, was a bit premature. I said that Apple’s “Mother Nature” skit would be, by far, the cringiest example of corporate virtue signaling over the past few weeks. In case you missed it, Tim Cook trotted out an overweight black woman playing Gaia, who was written to be as obnoxious and overbearing as possible. This plus-size Mother Nature kept harassing a bunch of chubby multicultural actors (playing Apple executives) about their environmental initiatives, and of course, the Apple executives, being the committed pagans they are, somehow managed to meet all of her demands. After watching that, in my defense, it didn’t seem like any other major corporation could one-up Apple in terms of over-the-top, shameless pandering to the most unappealing, self-loathing elements of the far Left.
But as it turns out, Apple was not the only big company recently that has been looking to exploit the archetype of a severely overweight black woman for political gain. Dove, which is supposedly a beauty company, has just doubled down on that strategy. They’ve hired a morbidly obese BLM grifter by the name of Zyahna Bryant. And this effort takes the cake, in every conceivable sense of the phrase. Dove’s latest marketing strategy is not simply cringey. It’s not simply calibrated to deliver a very clear anti-white message. It’s also a window into the logical endpoint of leftism, because it is a manifestation of all of the seven deadly sins — especially gluttony and sloth.
Before I get into why this is such a revealing moment, let’s begin with the first video that Dove has paid Zyahna Bryant to make. This is apparently what companies do now when they want to light their reputations on fire. Bud Light did it, and now Dove is getting in on the action. Watch:
Zyahna Bryant ruined a white girl’s life over a non-existent remark
Dove just did a brand partnership with her to support “fat liberation” pic.twitter.com/7mgaOuXQco
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 14, 2023
This is not the critical point here, but it’s always worth noting the absurd, comically pretentious way that these people speak. The woke crowd speaks in something that is not really a human language. Nobody talks this way. “Maneuvering through spaces in a fat body.” No normal human being would ever use a phrase like that. You’re not maneuvering through a space in a fat body, you’re just a fat person walking into a room. But their worldview is so empty, so vacuous, so lacking in any intellectual substance, that they have to add 14 extra syllables to every sentence to distract people from the fundamental stupidity of everything that they’re saying.
Anyway, Zyahna Bryant is a member of a “marginalized” group, she says. She’s seeking something called “fat liberation.” You might assume that the way to achieve fat liberation is to go for a jog and eat a salad. But that’s not what she means. To her it means we need to be “aware of the fact that people have different bodies.” Apparently, that was something that most Americans were not aware of.
To understand what the actual purpose of this advertising campaign is, you need to know more about Zyahna Bryant, and why she’s a hero in leftist circles. In the summer of 2020, during the BLM riots, Bryant — who, again, is supposedly a member of a “marginalized” group — destroyed the life of a white student at the University of Virginia named Morgan Bettinger. The details of what happened are outlined in Bettinger’s recent lawsuit against UVA, alleging anti-white discrimination by the school’s administrators who endorsed Bryant’s lies.
This is a lawsuit that hasn’t gotten much coverage. But ultimately it could rival the landmark litigation against Oberlin by Gibson’s Bakery, which Oberlin smeared as racist. That lawsuit, as you might remember, ended with a $36 million verdict against Oberlin. UVA may soon face something similar.
Here’s the background. On the evening of July 17, 2020, Bettinger was driving through downtown Charlottesville in her Subaru station wagon. That’s when she came across a massive BLM protest that, as BLM protests tend to do, was blocking all of the major roads in town. Demonstrators were lying on the roadway, obstructing traffic. To protect these protesters from getting hit by cars, the City of Charlottesville deployed a dump truck to block the main road completely. So, the city didn’t arrest the BLM rioters for breaking the law and preventing people from going where they needed to go. Instead, the city effectively encouraged them and even participated in the riot. They lent the thugs a dump truck, for all intents and purposes.
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Bettinger, understandably, didn’t know what to do. She was just trying to get home from her 12-hour shift at her summer job. After waiting a bit, she exited her car, and approached the dump truck driver to see what was going on. She said the following words to the dump truck driver or something to this effect. “Well, it’s a good thing you’re here, because otherwise they could be speed bumps,” referring to the protesters lying in the street.
This was such an innocuous conversation that when university investigators later asked the dump truck driver about it, he had no recollection that Bettinger had said anything to him. There was nothing threatening in her tone. She was making an idle observation, to one person, about the fact that the dump truck was preventing those rioters from getting run over by cars going at high speed.
But some of the BLM rioters nearby heard Bettinger’s comment and decided it was a threat. They swarmed her car and threatened to kill her. One of the BLM activists who didn’t hear what Bettinger said, but was nonetheless very offended, was Zyahna Bryant. Bryant wrote a series of viral tweets claiming that Bettinger’s statement, which she heard about secondhand, amounted to a dangerous act of white supremacy. For example, she wrote, quote, “EMAIL these UVA deans now to demand that Morgan face consequences for her actions and that UVA stop graduating racists.'”
In response, local news outlets accepted Bryant’s claims without any hesitation. One outlet, C-Ville, reported that Bettinger had issued a “chilling and violent” threat. Several UVA faculty members openly mocked Bettinger (as well as Bettinger’s faith) and called for her immediate expulsion. The school opened not one, but three investigations into Bettinger. Ultimately, UVA kicked her out of school and banned her from stepping foot on campus. They released public statements implying she’s a white supremacist. Very quickly, under the guidance of a UVA dean, a four-member panel of undergraduates convicted Bettinger of misconduct at three in the morning. This was not exactly a rigorous judicial process. Evidence shows that if the panel of undergraduates didn’t convict her, they feared that day’s big football game would have been canceled by a BLM riot.
Around the same time, as the lawsuit lays out, UVA took other actions that made it clear they have a strong and pervasive anti-white bias on campus. To give one example, a black student stood up and told white students to leave the common area, and the administration didn’t do anything about it. That incident was caught on video. There are several more examples like that one in the suit.
It wasn’t until more than a year after the incident that UVA cleared Bettinger of wrongdoing, although they still treated her like a pariah. Zyahna Bryant, at long last, admitted that she might have “misheard” what she was told, secondhand, that Bettinger had said. But by that point, the damage was done. Bettinger’s career prospects were ruined. She wanted to go to law school, but no law school would take her. Her employer fired her. After all the death threats and investigations, to this day, Morgan Bettinger suffers from an array of serious psychological problems. And just to emphasize the injustice that was done to Bettinger, consider that this treatment would have been way, way overboard even if she had really done what they accused her of doing. Even if she had said in a threatening or taunting way that the idiots lying in the road would become speed bumps — or even should become speed bumps — that would still not even come close to justifying anything that was done to her. In that case, she would be expressing entirely understandable frustration at the moronic thugs clogging up the road. She shouldn’t face any consequence at all. But that’s not what happened. That’s not what she said or did. And her life was still destroyed.
Zyahna Bryant’s life, on the other hand, has had a very different trajectory. For destroying a white student at UVA based on a falsehood, Bryant has received one award after another. In 2021 — a year after her lies went viral — Bryant was honored by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, which is supposedly a “civil rights group.” The National Action Network named Bryant as the “Youth Activist of the Year.” Here’s part of her acceptance speech:
Well, Zyahna Bryant definitely demonstrated that she can bring together “crowds of people.” That much is clear. What the National Action Network is doing here is honoring someone who gathered a lynch mob to harass, threaten, and defame a young women solely because of her skin color. Two years later, Dove is doing the same thing.
At some level, this isn’t surprising. Dove has been on this trajectory for a while. They’ve unleashed one woke advertising campaign after another. This month, the company set up billboards in New York’s Times Square, showing a bunch of women exposing their unshaven armpits. And as Outkick pointed out recently, Dove is owned by Unilever, which owns Ben & Jerry’s, maybe the single most anti-American corporation you can find outside of Tehran. This is a “beauty” company that is clearly set on promoting ugliness and Left-wing propaganda.
But even by the standards of corporate wokeness, this latest move by Dove is extraordinary. It’s revolting in every sense, yes, and it’s a deeply bizarre act of self-sabotage by a brand that’s already failing. But it’s also a clear sign that we are approaching the end of the runaway train of leftist ideology that’s taken hold of this country in recent years. The “fat liberation movement” that they’re embracing is the logical end point of leftism. It’s what we’ve been leading up to after the past decade or so. “Fat liberation” and “body acceptance” explicitly promote and glorify hedonism. They enable the absolute most useless people to feel like martyrs and heroes. All you have to do is lie around and eat and suddenly you’re part of a “movement.” And once you’re that inert and powerless, there’s not much else you can do. There’s not really any more activism you can undertake at that point. I expect the fat liberation movement to become more and more popular, as it is the perfect opportunity for those who crave victim points. All you need to do is nothing — nothing but eat — and you can gain access to a “marginalized group” along with all of the social capital that comes with it.
It’s no surprise that corporate America is a fan of this idea. They want us all to be mindless consumers sitting around sedentary with our mouths open, ingesting whatever they shovel in. That’s why it’s not just Dove that’s pushing this. It’s why Apple selected several overweight actors for their little “Mother Nature” sketch, as I mentioned. It’s why Calvin Klein and Abercrombie and Victoria’s Secret now throw obese models in our faces. It’s why Gatorade — supposedly a brand that promotes athleticism — is putting fat yoga instructors in its ads. And so on.
At the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which was the last time corporate America was truly worried about the Left in this country, there was a saying you’d hear a lot. Outside of the home of JP Morgan’s president, and outside Citibank’s corporate headquarters, activists would chant, “Eat the rich.” It took a while, but these mega corps have finally found a way to stop those chants outside their offices and to ensure they’ll never again come back. The race stuff and the BLM propaganda and the trans hysteria was a good start, but now they’ve identified their finishing move. They’ve realized that what they need to do is to convince the Left to eat. Not to eat the rich, but just to eat. And as of now, that effort is now succeeding beyond their wildest imagination. They’re sleeping soundly in the financial district tonight. That’s because they know that the fat liberation movement, now unleashed, will soon devour what remains of the Left.
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