Meagan Day

Meagan Day, currently a staff writer at Jacobin magazine, was raised in the San Antonio area by multimillionaire tycoons Jimmy Day, a serial entrepreneur, and Jennifer Day, an interior designer.

The family started out ranching imported South African goats, but in 1996 they sold the animals and got into the rent-to-own business, opening numerous Aaron’s franchises across Texas. They were so successful that in 2003, they reportedly banked $17.5 million after selling 15 of their 19 stores.

For those lucky enough to never dealt with these stores that deliberately exploit poor folks and trap them in a cycle of debt and despair, read this. Until recently, Texans who failed to pay these unethical businesses back could even be jailed.

The Days’ company, DPR Investments, has also owned franchises of J.D. Byrider, a similar chain of car dealerships targeting vulnerable people with bad credit:

The business model — which depends on what Day describes as “the lower third of the socio-economic ladder” — can be a lucrative one.

Around this time, Meagan attended the private Keystone School, where annual tuition was around $11,000 — pocket change for the Days, really, financed off the backs of the working class.

Three years later, Jennifer discussed how she and Jimmy sold their home in the exclusive Monte Vista neighborhood almost on a whim, only to buy a 32-room Italian villa down the block by the end of the week.

What, you don’t have a vaulted ceiling in your home?

Notably, the new home boasted call buttons for servants, crystal chandeliers, and even a dine-in wine cellar of the type leftist Twitter had a field day over when Pete Buttigieg held a fundraiser in one.

(Also among the decor: a framed photo of “Bloody” Bill Anderson, an ancestor who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. This isn’t a knock on Meagan, but it is amusing.)

However, despite having a bedroom “up a deep staircase to a third level,” Meagan may have been disappointed with the new digs:

With a sigh, Jennifer recalls the initial displeasure of her teenage children, whose home was “sold out from under them.”

Around this time, she moved onto Oberlin, the selective liberal arts college in Ohio with a reputation for campus politics so far left that they’re indistinguishable from parody. The annual cost of attendance there at the time was north of $50,000.

Since graduating in 2012 — and earning a master’s in cultural studies in London in 2013 — Meagan has bounced around between a number of cushy media jobs, including a fellowship at Mother Jones.

She wrote a book called Maximum Sunlight, described as a “vital and nuanced portrait of white identity and experience in an era in which rural isolationism and white nationalism have been thrust into the national spotlight.”

In case anyone needed a reminder, there is no “nuance” to white nationalism. It’s just racism.

Racism also seems to be a problem at the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Meagan, currently a gentrifier living in the Oakland area, is an active member.

Of her political evolution, she displays a classic sign of teenage rebellion taken into adulthood:

I grew up in a red state, but my parents leaned left. When I began to discover that I leaned even further left than they did, I started looking for media that could back me up.

In the meantime, Jimmy and Jennifer have since moved to New Mexico, where they own at least three homes and half a dozen restaurants. For Jennifer Day, 2018 was apparently “a boring year” because they opened no new eateries.

As for the Italian villa, the Days at one point rented it out to the show Top Chef, before selling it for $1.75 million.

Family firm DPR Investments recently broke ground on a development in an “opportunity zone,” a feature of Trump’s tax handout to the super-wealthy that allows them to shield their capital gains from taxation. So much for those “left-leaning” parents.

No, these are 1%-ers of the highest order. Again, I’m not blaming Meagan for who her parents are. But when confronted, all she has said is this:

You all realized what a rent-to-own furniture store was last month. I found out fifteen years ago. The conclusions I reached led me to the politics I now hold.

First, she implies a conscious understanding that her socialist peers come from a certain class well-off enough to avoid rent-to-own stores, because they didn’t “realize” what they were until “last month.”

Actual working-class Texans knew damn well that they were being screwed by the Day family and other rent-to-own leeches, but they had no other options.

Second, Meagan has not critically reflected on how the opportunities, connections, and social capital afforded to her by her background is what has allowed her to achieve her current position in life.

Her fancy private education, paid for by her parents’ empire of usury, is what allowed her to immediately embark on a dilettantish career as a magazine writer — a stereotypical bourgeois occupation if there ever was one.

Someone of similar politics from a poor family would likely never be able to do what Meagan has done. She probably wouldn’t get the chance to profit off of her writing, no matter how good it was — she would be too busy working a service-industry or manual labor job, or quite possibly two of those jobs, just to make ends meet.

Regardless of how “sincere” Meagan’s politics are, to my knowledge she has not had to struggle like that. Therefore, she is in no position to patronizingly lecture poor folks on what’s best for them. She certainly seems well aware of the irony of fascist hack Tucker Carlson claiming to be an anti-elitist while he himself is an heir to the Swanson frozen food fortune.

It’s time to cut the act. Meagan Day is a cosplay socialist.