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Like a lot of startups run by nerdy hype-men – WeWork, Fyre Media (producers of the Fyre Festival) and anything promoted by the MyPillow guy – the weird Ozy Media operation you might have heard of. talking this week was largely a scam.
But unlike these other startup downsides, Ozy is the kind that should have been very obvious because his build was based on a much larger scam, a scam widely known as “social justice.”
Ozy, led by an allegedly charming man (aren’t they all?) Named Carlos Watson, is currently on the verge of collapse after the New York Times reported last week that the company was trying to defraud investors for million dollars by lying about the size of its audience and influence.
Ozy has been marketed to its investors as a semi-soft news organization delivering videos and articles online to a predominantly black audience. Watson himself is black, and that, combined with what was apparently a relatively milquetoast product, made Ozy “the perfect, brand-safe opportunity for people to say they supported a media company. black, although the only black person to be supported in the process was Mr. Watson, as she was described in The Times by Lauren Williams, a journalist also black.
Since the initial story broke, there have been resignations, additional fraud investigations and, more importantly, an essay by a former Ozy staff member who, even inadvertently, explained to the naive how exactly does a social justice scam like Ozy work.
“You know, I’ve had a lot of bosses in my life, but I’ve only had one boss who looked like me, and oddly enough, he was the worst boss I’ve ever had,” he said. writes Eugene S. Robinson, who produced articles for the Ozy website. . The boss he was talking about is Watson.
Robinson continued, “In fact, some of the African American employees felt there were two OZYs. The white OZY and the black OZY, where, like America, the employees were treated less well.
He described Watson as “the smiling, handsome, nervous, dead-eyed Watson who made venture capitalists toss him millions of dollars,” and as “a cheerful bon vivant, like the black sidekick in a movie. ‘action, done [investors] feeling good about everything that passes for “awakening” in the valley. “
He also said that over the years he grew up, Ozy seemed more and more “designed to impose Watson on the rest of America,” through increasingly web and TV shows. produced. Of one of those programs, the “Carlos Watson Show,” said Robinson, “I was confused as to how the show could be a success. In a universe of Kimmels, Fallons, Eric Andre, Trevor Noah, Bill Maher for g-dssake, how did people even think choosing Watson made sense.
It didn’t make sense because it wasn’t real. Everything indicates that Watson was inflating the size of Ozy’s mediocre audience in order to squeeze more money from ignorant white investors who adhere to the idea that they can be saved from cultural exile if they demonstrate A certain deference to people who say race, gender, and gender identity should be the main concern when doing anything.
Watson had a lame product. Have you heard of it before this week? But more important than what he was selling was what he and Ozy stood for: the supremacy of race, gender, and gender identity in all facets of contemporary American culture.
Perhaps Watson never explicitly raised the issue of “social justice” at its easy marks, but let’s not kid ourselves. Everyone in the country knows how it works now. In corporate America, you can either embrace the social justice scam, bring up race, gender, and gender identity grievances (sometimes referred to as “issues”), or you can be its next victim. Saving yourself is getting ahead by, say, giving millions of dollars to a curious man with no remarkable talent, but who is an ethnic minority selling a product for and about other ethnic minorities.
This is the social justice scam, in which race, gender, and gender identity are in themselves of great value – at least until someone comes along and pulls the curtain again.
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