Scam Psychology: Engaging Antivaxxers: What I learned from them vs. Scheme Denialists

Recently, I engaged a couple antivaxxers on Twitter. It was a learning experience. One just wants to talk about his conspiracy theory (There is no reason for the government to care about your health!)   (Uh, what about taxes?)  while the other ONLY want to talk about the harm done by vaccines and ignore all the good it did (Let's talk about how many children the original Salk vaccine harmed...)

Let's be absolutely clear here: Yes, the original Salk vaccine did sicken 200 children and killed 10, but it also saved about 15000 (or even 20000) children from paralysis THAT YEAR ALONE!  Go ahead, Google that yourself. A vaccine that saved 98.6+% of the children (210/15000) from a crippling disease such as polio was a success, NOT a failure!

But the anti-vaxxers only want to talk about the children that were harmed, not the 14000+ children saved that year from paralysis. They are NOT interested in seeing the whole picture.

I am not going to provide a blow-by-blow of my encounter. I'll just say that as predicted, they engaged in multiple goal-post shifting (trying to shift the topic), citing bogus experts (Mercola), claiming conspiracy theory and Galileo gambit (Wakefield and Sears), outright refuting facts ("measles is not dangerous"), name-calling ("Where are the honest provaxers?") then concluded with pigeon chess mixed with conspiracy theory ("You are stifling dissent, but you can't suppress the truth forever! ")

And this is the virtually identical pattern to the financial denialists I've engaged before. Except they want to somehow prove their pyramid or Ponzi schemes are legitimate money-making enterprises. Which pretty much proves that more than a few scammers are "financial denialists".

Commentary: How MLM affects the current presidential campaigns

While politics is usually quite far from the world of multi-level marketing, presidential campaign is big enough that anything anybody ever did figures into the equation, and in this case, two of the presidential candidates have direct ties to MLM... Donald Trump, and Ben Carson.

Those of you who had watched "Celebrity Apprentice" should recall that ACN, the MLM telephone company, was featured on the show... twice.  And Donald Trump even had his own MLM, "Trump Network", which nobody hears about any more.

What you may not remember is Ben Carson previously offered testimonial that Mannatech stuff helped him in his battle with prostate cancer... since 2004.

And let's not forget how big some of these MLM businesses are... and they donated HEAVILY to Republican candidates of all levels. It's already documented that co-founder of Amway, Richard DeVos and two family members donated 25K per person to Scott Walker's campaign AND unknown amounts to Jeb Bush's campaign. When Mitt Romney ran he had support of Amway, NuSkin, and Xango, all big name MLMs.

So, what are some facts about ACN and Mannatech, and perhaps, related to Donald Trump and Ben Carson, that you don't know, but should?

Let's start with ACN and Trump

ACN / Trump

Did you know that in 2010, the average ACN Canada participant takes home about $41.00 per month? That's directly off their website:

"The average ACN Canada active IBO in 2010 earned approximately $500." -- ACN Canada website 

As it is 2015, and there is no update, clearly the figure had not risen (and may even have FALLEN!)


Did you know that despite ACN having sponsored Celebrity Apprentice twice, Donald Trump was quoted by Wall Street Journal of saying, "I (Trump) know nothing about the company (ACN) other than the people who run the company, I’m not familiar with what they (ACN) do or how they go about doing it, and I make that clear in my speeches."

This is also interesting considering that Trump allegedly boasted to WSJ that for a speech at an ACN event he got $2.5 million back in 2008, and pocketed another $1.3 million for 3 more recent (and presumably shorter) talks at ACN events.