So cynical marketers featured a cynical left-wing grifter on their candy bar, knowing the cynical right-wing grifters would give them free advertisement through controversy, and then it's all explained to us by that cynical grifter on youtube.
Beautiful.
Edit: I woke up hours before I needed to and got sucked down this rabbit hole, so I'm pulling you all down with me.
Who is the trans person on the chocolate bar? That person is Fae Johnstone, who was already an LGBTQ activist, attempting to make a career of that before transitioning, who then transitioned and posted their first post-transition Instagram headshot with the caption "reminder that I'm looking for honorarium/paid gigs", seemingly trying to make money off of it immediately. That instagram seems to have been scrubbed to the ground, and I'm not linking the Daily Wire content that showed me the post because none of you care about that, so lets set aside all of that and start from scratch. Who is Fae Johnstone?
About | Fae Johnstone
www.faejohnstone.com
"As the Executive Director and Co-Owner of Wisdom2Action, she has taken a boutique consulting firm and scaled it up to a full-fledged business with a growing team."
Where most of that page is implying passion for the subject matter, an activist who travels and engages in communities, the one sentence reeks of pure corporate buzzwords. Taking a small firm and scaling it to a full-fledged business is a brag you expect from Mitt Romney, not a Canadian trans activist. But context is key, so lets look at the business, Wisdom2Action, and see how the puzzle pieces fit:
Who We Are – Wisdom2Action
www.wisdom2action.org
Wait, what? You started as a federal program under a different name and transitioned to a consultant business? How does that happen? Their website didn't help me navigate that, other than saying one became the other, so I went back to google and found this which explains a little:
So, it began as a government funded program to share knowledge and resources supporting the mental health of children, with particular focus is underserved communities. Ok, sounds good. A few years in, they started a program called Wisdom2Action, which would bring people from different places physically together to workshop their strategies for supporting children's mental health. Still sounds great. Apparently that networking proved valuable, and they made these workshops a repeated event, to the point where they incorporated the name of the events into the name of the organization. Everything seems good so far. And then somehow a year after that document, it became a private business. I'm not sure how exactly, I found no detailed documentation on this. It's possible that their program lost funding and they had no choice but to take it on as a personal endeavor, I can't say with any evidence that they actively decided to tear away the program that existed, but I can say for certain the Wisdom2Action program enacted by the Children and Youth in Challenging Contexts Network did not survive the transition. If we look at their youtube page:
Through August 2018, the year it went private, there were videos about their networking events every few months consistently. Then one video about a report they made. Then nothing at all for several years, and its 100% the Fae Johnstone show since then. It's a hard turn to a totally different thing. The networking events where the name started are gone, not just on Youtube but also their website. They aren't bringing people together to share knowledge, they are trying to sell Wisdom2Action's personal expertise to organizations that can afford them. Predictably, no prices listed on their website, but Fae Johnstone offers speaking engagements on a sliding scale from $1500 to $2500 back on the personal webpage.
It's not just the name that transferred, many of the people in the older videos are listed as team members on W2A's page. It's the same group of people made the transition from a knowledge network, to hosting community networking events, to hosting closed door events for a fee to whoever wants to pay them, and so far as I can tell, that last step is specifically where Fae Johnstone enters in. Fae was already looking for private paid speaking gigs when Wisdom2Action was just taking form within the CYCCN, and now that Windom2Action is private, with Fae Johnstone as co-owner, it has dedicated it's efforts to seeking those sorts of gigs, along with other profitable consulting services. Which I guess is how you "take a boutique consulting firm and scaled it up to a full-fledged business with a growing team", you stop doing charitable events for the benefit of children's mental health and start doing corporate diversity consulting.
Also, apparently that's how to get your face on a candy bar.
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