06/03/2021
""""Last year, Young Living claimed to have more than 3 million members worldwide, and 89 percent of those distributors hadn’t moved up the sales ranks at all, netting an average annual income of $3. Meanwhile, women like Jordan Schrandt are at the tippy top, which means that there are likely at least thousands of women beholden to her in some way—watching from afar as she posts about her success, and giving her a chunk of their income.
Julie, 46, became a member of Young Living in 2015. Some money from her sales and purchases gets tossed up the ladder—through several rungs—until it reaches Melissa Poepping, a Royal Crown Diamond who was apparently captivated by the Wayfair conspiracy theory in July. “Tell me it’s just a crazy theory. It’s not,” Poepping wrote. She also directed her 18,000 followers to go to Etsy’s website and search for listings that could be fronts for child trafficking, tagging the post “ ,” a popular QAnon slogan. (Julie asked to go by only her first name, out of concern about professional consequences. Poepping did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
“I don’t really like contributing to Melissa’s bottom line,” Julie said. She believes Poepping’s posts are particularly dangerous because of her high rank in Young Living. “When you see leadership posting these things, there are people who just accept it, because they’ve trusted and accepted what these leaders have said in the past on other things.” Later, she added, “[These women] have a target audience out of the box. It’s different than just, like, someone’s cousin posting something.”"""
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/10/why-multilevel-marketing-and-qanon-go-hand-hand/616885/
Why the grandiose promises of multilevel marketing and QAnon conspiracy theories go hand in hand