Though I was unaware of her existence until the poor dear was recently brought to my attention, it appears that there is a severely brain-damaged lady named Nancy Grace who has (against all odds) been allowed to host her own TV show on Headline News for some time now. From what I can ascertain, it looks as though she can form moderately coherent sentences and speaks as if she at least partially understands the individual words she hurls at the camera, so she presumably would be described as “high functioning” in light of her obvious mental defects. What quickly becomes clear when watching her show, however, is that the information processing/reasoning portion of her brain has been stunned into a non-responsive state, perhaps by repeated blows or an inherited physical deformation, or possibly by a tragic accident of some kind. What is left, and presumably what her audience tunes in to see, is a woman who, bereft of knowledge or cognition, emotes with great passion into the camera about subjects she is completely and wholly ignorant of. What is so startling is that she performs this act with a passionate certainty, supremely convinced of her correctness while simultaneously appearing to be totally unaware of her own crushing imbecility. It is akin to watching a gibbon wildly scratch numbers and mathematical symbols on a chalkboard with great confidence, while the stunned observer wonders if he is witnessing the creation of some kind of mysterious equation, only to eventually realize it is nothing more than gibberish utterly devoid of any computational logic or significance- mere meaningless scrawls made by an uncomprehending creature. This, in a nutshell, is the Nancy Grace show.
I bring up Nancy, aside from my amazement at discovering that someone who should probably be wearing a helmet at all times has been given her own TV program, because a clip was recently brought to my attention (thank you AG1969) in which her bizarre babblings prefaced something that I suspect we in the gold and silver investing community are going to be seeing more of in the future. Like a radio broadcasting whatever happens to be floating along the airwaves, I believe this lady may have inadvertently channeled the future media “take” on precious metals investing. Pay attention, because if the Keynesians running things ever get it in their heads to repeat Roosevelt’s 1933 grab for goodies, then what you are about to see may be coming to a nightly news program near you.
In 2012 a Texas doctor was charged in a killing for hire case, having contracted with a hit-man to carry out a murder he apparently wanted done. Nancy, as should be expected from someone of her mental abilities, was immediately distracted from this criminal story by something shiny... literally. The portion of the story that fascinated her was that the accused man allegedly offering to pay the for the hit either in cash or in silver bullion. What followed was a Tourette’s-like barking of nasty names and random aspersions to describe what she apparently viewed as the typical silver investor. I apologize for the poor quality of the video, but this is the only clip I could find that did not include extraneous commentary. Nonetheless, you will get the gist. Brace yourself for the analytical powerhouse that is Nancy Grace:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v53y0_deygc
Bullion? Bull-yawn? I suppose when she was a little girl she read the book The Black Stall-Yawn, too. I am not going to waste time rebutting the sheer ignorance displayed in this, as it is rather pointless to refute the mentally unfit. Suffice it to say that Nancy does not appear to possess the ability to separate in her mind the actions of this one man from all precious metals investors, and is entirely ignorant of any reasons why ordinary, intelligent, and law-abiding people would invest in this asset class. She hasn’t the first clue about currency devaluation over time, hard assets investing, the role of PM’s as a portfolio hedge or a store of value, or any of the other myriad fundamentals of this sector, but her complete ignorance doesn’t dissuade her from confidently tossing her opinion about like offal in the monkey cage.
Nonetheless in her own bumbling way, what Nancy Grace is attempting to do is called “Othering”. It is a variant of the logical fallacy Dismissal by Definition, and is simply the act of taking a group whose opinion you disagree with and trying to publicly portray them as “the other”, something distasteful and not like us in the hopes of convincing bystanders that anything this group says should be ignored because they are so strange, different, and repulsive. Such an approach frees the attacker from having to make rational arguments, grapple intellectually with the reasoning behind the position, or even be familiar with associated facts of any kind. Think about the clip again: there is no data, no evidence provided for the claims, no studies, no surveys to demonstrate proof for any of the (ridiculous) assertions made about people who buy silver. Indeed, there is nothing but an emotive torrent of name calling: Weird. Rich. White. Male. Lonely and alone. Insane. Stalker. It never occurs to Nancy that she herself is rich (probably far richer than 99% of silver investors) or that she herself is white (possibly whiter than 99% of all silver investors too, from what I can see… the woman is nearly translucent). Hell, for all I know she might be male, too. But none of this matters. No, what matters is the process of Othering- “They are nasty and bad, and different from normal people, and that’s all you need to know”.
Here’s the irony: in my personal experience with PM investors, they are incredibly normal, average folks. Most are indeed male, but so are most investors in EVERY asset class including stocks, and there are a large number of women who regularly read and post at PM blogs, including this one. PM investors run the economic gamut from people buying gold in bulk to people working hard to put aside a single silver eagle per month. I have corresponded with someone on this blog who was literally homeless and between jobs, and SHE was just trying as hard as she could to hold on to her hard-earned stack through difficult times. No family? People who are married and/or have kids are by far the norm, not the exception. White? I suppose this is her code for “racist” but I’ll tell you what- I have only had the pleasure of meeting four of my fellow Turdites in person over the years, all of us were married, and three of the five married couples were interracial marriages, including mine. So much for the “racist” aspect, and so much for the “lonely and alone” hogwash. We are overwhelmingly wives and husbands, fathers and mothers, and we are doing our best to save what we can for our kids and grandkids.
In fact, when you get right down to it, my children are the number one reason I stack. I am trying desperately to ensure they are secure and well-provided for, and nothing else even comes close in my personal hierarchy of needs. And this is exactly what we all should be talking about, every chance we get in every comments section of every mainstream PM article, to counter the idiotic “Othering” of precious metals investors that is already out there and that we may well be seeing more of.
Our narrative is a simple and honest one: we are ordinary people who care deeply about taking care of our families and we work very hard to do so. Unfortunately, when we try to save our money to do this, we are thwarted at every turn. We see a profligate government determined to promise everything to everyone and spend without limit, we see endless Quantitative Easing by a central bank determined to devalue our currency, we see an ever declining real value of pensions and paychecks, we see a decimated middle class losing 30% of its net worth in just five years, we see interest rates on our savings approaching zero, and we see a wild west stock market that no sane person should trust their entire future to. So in our efforts to protect our families and our financial futures, we invest in something tangible, valuable, and (over time) stable. We store a portion of our hard-earned value in gold and silver. And we aren’t going to be dissuaded from protecting our families by the insults of cognitively challenged TV hosts.
We are going to keep stacking.
