We knew we were overdue for a Sussex story since the Duke and Duchess of Montecito haven’t scored a tabloid headline in a fortnight, when the desperately-in-pursuit-of-privacy Prince Harry announced his memoir. So it comes as little surprise that, like the wannabe influencer she is, Meghan Markle made sure to capitalize on her 40th birthday for some woke points.
While lounging in her $14.65 million mansion, Meghan, last spotted on camera during the Oprah interview while Harry whined that Prince Charles cut the poor couple off from free cash, debuted her “40×40” campaign with a wildly under her paygrade Melissa McCarthy. After a sketch between the former Suits actress and the A-list comedienne, Markle proceeds to announce her solution to women fighting to return to the workplace after the peak of the pandemic: 40 minutes of mentorship from her and her rich friends.
“Because I’m turning 40, I’m asking 40 friends to donate 40 minutes of their time to help mentor a woman who’s mobilizing back into the workforce,” Markle said. “Over two million women in the U.S. alone and tens of millions around the world have lost their jobs due to Covid, and I think if we all do it and all commit 40 minutes to some sort of active service, we can create a ripple effect.”
Think about it: the wife of Princess Diana’s son sits next to an Hermes blanket with Oprah on speed dial, and the way she best thinks to help the women explicitly trounced from their jobs because of devastating school lockdowns and all the adjacent poppycock ranging from mandatory indoor masking on kindergarteners to mandatory quarantines is to have her multimillionaire friends FaceTime some plebian for 40 minutes.
Stella McCartney, the Beatles baby who signed on as one of Markle’s “40,” is donating not a thousand suits from her fashion line to women’s shelters for job interviews, but instead the time it takes to get a facial. Sophie Trudeau, wife of Canadian Prime Minister Justin, could pledge to donate vaccines from one of the world’s most vaccinated nations to women in the developed world, and racial essentialist Ibram Kendi could commit one of his $22,000 speaking fees to classrooms for HEPA filters that allow students to go maskless. Hell, even Stacey Abrams, the supposed rightful governor of Georgia, could have reopened the schools, according to her believers! Even better yet, all of Markle’s famous friends could use their overwhelming social media presence, media and political contacts, and social cache to call for an end to the pandemic’s experiment in childhood and the working woman’s sacrifice: the school closure that every other nation in the Western world has proven are unnecessary in our winning fight against the pandemic.
Instead, Markle has decided that she will grace some little person with her (formerly) regal presence. For less than an hour.
Let’s be clear here: the school madness is to blame. Half — half — of all mothers of school-aged children were out of work last spring, down from just three in ten in normal times, half of the other half of mothers who managed to stay employed during the pandemic had to take unpaid sick leave because their child’s school or care was closed. That leaves just one-quarter of mothers of school-aged children whose careers weren’t devastated by the pandemic, and that doesn’t include the increased cost of sitters or assistance of family to aid children in the sham that is distance learning.
Markle has the platform and the position to have advocated to demand that the teachers unions release working moms from their hostage, and instead, she promises to Zoom with a fan in the name of service.
If that’s not virtue signaling, literally advertising how selfless you are with the bare minimum amount of performative work, I’m not sure what is.
