We Have Reached Peak VetBro Brand – By Matt Farwell (New Republic) / Jan 17 2020
The entrepreneurial warriors’ space is so saturated that a top shill now wants to make “Veteran” a brand unto itself, with a capital “V.”
Of course professional vetbro Patch Baker’s epiphany—that everyone needs to capitalize the V in veteran—came while he was writing an opinion column for Entrepreneur magazine titled “Building a Business Is Just as Hard as Combat.” Baker, once a Marine, subsequently launched a Change.org petition arguing his case: Changing veterans into Veterans would “magnify the honor we show for the valor and sacrifice by regarding their role with full respect and honor for the title they hold,” a circular argument that sounds better in the original German, where all proper and common nouns are capitalized.
Not that Baker is lacking for titles. He is the president and CEO of Mobius Media Solutions, a partner in American Dream U, the chief marketing officer of Leatherback Gear LLC, and the CEO of JavaPresse Coffee Company. Baker describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur” on his LinkedIn profile. When I was homeless and in and out of psych wards in the Bay Area after the war, I met a lot of self-described serial entrepreneurs.
Of course, Baker is also a mercenary. From 2010 to 2014, he worked overseas for Triple Canopy, a Panama Papers–connected Beltway bandit whose motto of “Assess, Avert, Achieve” attracted war contractors who were prone to possess, pervert, and deceive. This fact isn’t mentioned in any of his promotional material, though he’ll talk all day about once being a Marine. Figures. In 2017, after going all the way to the Supreme Court, Triple Canopy paid $2.6 million in settlement money to the federal government over allegations that the contractor sent guards who couldn’t pass a basic weapons qualification test to protect Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. This occurred during Baker’s time with the company—a whistleblower filed the complaint in 2011. Al Asad was and remains the second-largest American base in the country; you may remember it from the Iranian missiles that just landed there in retaliation for the U.S. assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the Quds Force dude. But the important thing is to think about the capitalization of the letter V in veteran.
Baker, like all MercMerch™ vetbro entrepreneurs in MAGAmerica2020™, deploys one of the strongest weapons in the veteran’s arsenal—shame—against others, the way the Air Force deployed Agent Orange in Vietnam, while somehow remaining immune himself to any of the weapon’s ill effects. It’s the audacity of dopes: The average pirate in the Gulf of Aden has more integrity than a guy who left the Marines, war unwon, to make more money killing people overseas for a private contractor before his next act—pulling the service-disabled veteran card to sell coffee and build his bro brand.
Continue to article: https://newrepublic.com/article/156236/reached-peak-vetbro-brand
