See Part 1 for some background to this.
I had seen Jessica Wildfire's Substack several months ago, I think after I first saw her on Medium, and eventually clicked to get it.
A solidly middle-class, maybe even upper middle class, married or partnered woman with, I think, one child or two, per this interview of her, and a GenXer by age, not Millennial, at first appeared to have some smart left-liberal takes on the world. (A Millennial wouldn't pun on Boomers with "OK Doomer.")
Then, I realized otherwise, and her most recent hot take on "we're running out of food" shows why, as her main internal link contradicts herself.
First, per the header, she says you can buy a year's worth of shelf-stable food without panic-buying. She recommends buying from bulk suppliers, along with recommendations that show her socioeconomic level by saying to go buy your own wheat grinder if you're serious about this. (On the socio side of socioeconomic, per Medium, she's a teacher, if she hasn't quit, and not just any teacher; per this piece, she's got a Ph.D.)
Second, if she's referencing places like "Survival Mag" and a website with "prepper" as part of the URL, that also goes to mindset. (Oh, and is she a paid influencer? I dropped a fairly subtle hint to that end in my second comment there. Yeh, she calls herself an "unfluencer" on Twitter, but ... given the amount of hustles she runs, c'mon.)
Third, she said there's reasons to buy from these bulk sites. Why? As I responded:
As for who you're cleaning out? Bulk food sellers have to buy their bulk commodities from the same people as Kroger's one-pound bags. It's just a different middleman. (And, some groceries have bulk food aisles anyway.)
Simple enough, right?
Now, the biggie. A Mother Jones piece she links undercuts most her panic-mongering, as I noted:
“It’s easy to lose track of the scale of global agriculture,” says Scott Irwin, a widely followed economist and chair of agricultural marketing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “It’s just massive, and it’s extremely distributed geographically. If you have a problem in one area, at least historically, that will tend to get offset by better than average growing conditions someplace else.”
“The fact is,” he adds, “as of today, the world has adequate supplies of grain.” ...
“A couple of days ago, there were headlines saying South Dakota’s corn crop was unusually low this year—and they have a terrible drought—and that Nebraska was a little below normal,” says Daniel Sumner, an economist and director of the Agricultural Issues Center at the University of California, Davis. “But as of the middle of August, USDA was still projecting a normal national corn and soybean crop in the United States. And that’s because Indiana and Illinois and Iowa had relatively good crops, and are much more important in the national total, than Nebraska or South Dakota would be.” ...
The challenge for crop experts right now is determining whether droughts and other disturbances—and the crop shortfalls they may cause—add up to a predictable trend. That’s especially important because, while productivity might not look bad overall, there isn’t much surplus grain stock thanks to scattered droughts last year and the supply shock of Ukraine’s breadbasket being temporarily locked out of the global food system.
I also noted that MoJo tends to avoid talking about the Ukraine war, and as generally liberal not leftist doesn't discuss Warmonger Joe refusing to listen to the Goldilocks Three Bears plus Pope Francis on a negotiated peace.
At that point, whether she's addicted to generalized anxiety disorder or what, it's clear that she likes writing this. She DID choose the title of her Substack after all.
Next we note that her claims the world is at all-time lows on grain stores is simply not true. Or to be blunt, a lie. We're at 14-year-lows and on wheat only, per the site she linked.
Beyond that, and not meaning to sound American exceptionalist, WE won't run out of food. Prices may continue to go higher, but "run out" isn't happening.
As for a potential railroad strike meaning "we're all going to run out of electricity"? Tosh. First, the electrical grid has redundancies, unless you're in Tex-ass. Second, we're at the start of fall, where, unless you're a pansy-ass, you don't need heat or air conditioning.
And, if we DID actually run out of electricity? Unless you have an electric car along with a house with solar panels, you're up shit creek, unless your gas station has an electric generator for its gas pumps. Of course, that probably itself would require fossil fuel to run ... And, your bulk commodities supplier ain't shipping anything to you.
So, add this all up, and yes, I wonder if she is a paid influencer for any prepper sites. That's in part because this isn't new; a week earlier, she claimed that "We're on the brink of worldwide starvation," and yes, that was the actual header, not just body copy.
Also, the subhead on her Substack home page, of "Doomsday Barbie tells it like it is," in addition to being untrue, loudly screams "marketing" at me.
Meanwhile, on her most recent Medium post, she disses preppers and talks about people too poor to afford .... well, too poor to afford stockpiling a year's worth of food at one time, like she recommends on Substack. I noted dissing or cat-clawing of fellow faculty in Part 1. Speaking of, she once had a different Medium site. (She's had one piece from that site picked up by NYU's student blog. See Part one for more details on that.) Per that and the two self-published self-help books she has, she probably figured there was more money in being a doomer than a relationship coach, whether or not she's a paid influencer on top of that.
Meanwhile, from a site not her own (and it's the only place that gives me a goggling hit for the quote), we have:
“Every day, I carve out time for listening to music alone and reading for a couple of hours. My spouse and I are the same way. We take a couple hours for ourselves that have nothing to do with work in the immediate sense. We go for 30 minute walks, too, either together or on our own, to think and decompress. It’s the cornerstone of stability.”
In other words, you're time-privileged. Unlike the people you diss above.
There's further reason to think that, if not a paid influencer, she's writing her stuff for the money, not the real care. And, that is that she dropped that other Medium site, then switched to her current one, right when COVID took off. Hey, pushing "doom" to late-end Gen Xers? Lots of Medium money in that if you get enough followers.
If she's not a real prepper, she's not being honest about what would be involved with being a real prepper. And, maybe not being fully self-honest.
AND!
Thin skinned.
She deleted both my comments and banned me, but responded to one of them. Technically, I think it's not a deletion but that the banning blocked the visibility on one, that she responded to, and deleted the other:
His information is out of date. If you read literally anything else, you'd see that the USDA has already downgraded expectations for wheat and soy.
I noted it was posted just 23 days ago, and was clearly about WHEAT ONLY anyway, not all grains. And, I said, if it was that out of date, then why link to it in the first place. And, the MoJo piece is from earlier this week.
Anyway, she's out of her league elsewhere, like in international affairs. A Medium piece from six months ago on Putin's invasion of Ukraine had her saying she thought Putin would win. What else she said, along with reading between the lines? A generic #TeamBlue claiming that Republicans were all on Putin's payroll. No look at NATO barking at Russia, as Pope Francis said, nor calls for a negotiated peace, made by Francis and the Goldilocks Three Bears. Simplistic tribalism. And, from what goggling tells me, most her takes on the Russia-Ukraine war are about as bad.
I think I'm banned because of not only challenging her, but wondering about her motives, in my second comment, and mentioning "capitalism."
And, I figured, what the hell, in for penny, in for a pound, so I also asked her on Twitter if she was indeed a paid influencer.
Back to the thin-skinned. Blogger doesn't allow for bans, but it does allow for content moderation. And, whenever someone wants to keep repeating the same argument time after time on the same post, and I think I've adequately refuted it and them, I simply tell them in my comment to their last comment, something like, "You've got one more chance; if you can't come up with something new, that's it."
But, here, with the ban, I wasn't even given a chance to reply. She replied to one of my two original comments, then banned me. In other words, she didn't want an in-depth discussion, as I see it. (I should add that, beyond calling her out on getting these links wrong, I made the observations about MoJo. Seeing that she's knee-jerk #BlueAnon, that may also have pissed her off.
Whether money-making, anxiety-addicted, or a bit of both? It's hard to let go of that, I guess. Factoring in the Medium piece leads me to keep tilted "money," not that the two are mutually exclusive.
Beyond that? The assumptions she makes that can no longer be challenged. The day after writing that column about turkey supply, I got the latest USDA statistical forecast via the Texas Farm Bureau. So, her assumption was not only unwarranted, per the second part of the header, I take it as snide and condescending. Especially since as of Sept. 1, it said corn and beans were both up from last year. Per this plus the presumably willful errors elsewhere, we've got the bulls-eye fallacy or some similar fallacy or fallacies of informal logic in play, obviously.
And, making it more fun is that Substack offers different lengths of bans, and I got the "100 year" ban. Other options are an hour, a day, a week, a month.
Thin-skinned.
Update, Oct. 14: Since monkeypox as a new plague possibility has fallen through (in Europe, too) she's now pimping Ebola. Twice. (No prepper tools to fight it involved. Yet.)
Update, Oct. 20: She now is strawmanning "mansplaining doomsplaining," all without directly quoting the man/men any man who allegedly said any of this. Sounds like she's worried about her capitalist grift and brand being hurt, like when she blocked me from commenting.
Update, Nov. 2: She has now called out people writing "anti-doomer clickbait," attacking them mainly for their alleged monetization liust. If you read through the piece, it's psychological projection 101 about how and why she writes doomer clickbait. Add in that she's afraid this IS cutting into her own monetization and there you go.
Update, Nov. 24: She now claims no college prof she knows goes without a second job. She's at a state university and not an adjunct. That said, she DOES use the word "teachers," and as I posted there, and documented here, she's got a history of conflating K-12 teachers and college profs. (She'll probably block me at Medium, too.)
