I haven’t been seeing Tom Selleck’s reverse mortgage commercials too much lately. You know, the ones in which he takes a deep breath and scolds us for thinking that reverse mortgages are a trick to take old people’s houses.
But I’ve been seeing an ad from Nationwide Coin & Bullion Reserve that is wrong in too many ways to unpack in thirty seconds. Not the one in which Chuck Woolery tells us about a wonderful Wheel of Fortune contestant who would’ve more than doubled his money if he had invested his winnings in gold. That one’s okay, and it’s from U. S. Money Reserve (disclaimer: not affiliated with the U. S. government).
The bad faith ad for gold coins and bullion is the one from Nationwide Coin & Bullion Reserve. The ad starts with the narrator asking us to picture ourselves safe at home at 3 a.m. when “the infamous red phone” at the White House rings. Who do you trust to take the call?
Here’s the first truly bad bit of the ad: the narrator claims it doesn’t matter! The reason it supposedly doesn’t matter is because “government spending has been unchecked for decades.” Well, God damn us.
Say the red phone rings because something that looks like a missile is coming from Russia. Do you trust Putin puppet Donald Trump to ask the right questions and order the correct reaction? In other words, do you trust Trump to do what President Joe Biden would do? Maybe we should just have voted for Biden.
But it would not matter who answers an urgent call like that, because… government spending!?
A couple of non sequiturs later, we’re told that we should send for Nationwide Coin & Bullion Reserve’s “unbiased” 2021 gold report. It’s a professionally printed book with a photo of the January 6 terrorist attack and the icons for the Republican and Democratic parties. Facepalm.
That’s a false equivalence. Using the symbols of the two major political parties suggests that the January 6 terrorist attack was a simple disagreement between those two parties, when in fact it was an attack carried out by a mob of pro-Trump terrorists intent on destroying democracy by terrorizing lawmakers before they could perform their constitutionally mandated duty.
There was no “antifa” in the lot of them. The Easter Bunny wasn’t there either. But hey, I could be wrong, I will admit that if anyone identifies even just one terrorist in the January 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol who wasn’t pro-Trump.
I think there’s a deliberate but unspoken message in this Nationwide Coin & Bullion Reserve ad: the U. S. government could collapse (it got dangerously close to that on January 6), making the dollar bills in your wallet worthless. So buy some gold. And don’t read too much into the fact that a lot of the January 6 terrorists carried Trump flags.
Having the right people in the White House and in Congress is extremely important. If we let Republicans finish what Trump started, the United States will become a post-apocalyptic hellhole in which all the gold you might have won’t even buy you a gallon of water.
Maybe you’d prefer your grandmother buy gold coins than get mixed up in a reverse mortgage. But maybe tell her to go with a different company, one that doesn’t advertise with false equivalencies between peaceful protesters and violent traitors.
And I do sleep a lot better now, knowing that President Joe Biden is the one who would answer the theoretical 3 a.m. call to the red phone about incoming missiles. Trump probably would’ve said “Oh, just let them through, Vladimir said they’re okay.”