Turns Out Your Favorite 'Let's Go Brandon' Shirts Not Made In America

And now the Trump apparel company that made them has to pay $200K to the FTC.

The owner of a pro-Trump clothing line is being forced to pay a $211,335 fine to the Federal Trade commission (FTC) for being a lying liar who pretended his junk was made in America when it was in fact made in China. This seems both poetic and entirely expected.

Utah-based clothing company Lions Not Sheep, which sells very classy "Let's Go Brandon" and "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED" T-shirts and definitely-designed-by-a-man "No Beard No Booty" crop tops for the ladies, made a real big thing in all its advertisements about how its products were American-made. Online and on labels, the brand proudly declared its products were “Made in the USA,” “Made in America,” “Are your products USA Made?” “100% AMERICAN MADE,” and “BEST DAMN AMERICAN MADE GEAR ON THE PLANET.”

But then someone found a video from 2020 featuring the brand's founder Sean Whalen (who — rudely — is not in fact the actor from the Aaron Burr "Got Milk" commercial and Pauly Shore's Jury Duty ) titled "Made In America." In the video, which he posted to his own social media, Whalen stood next to a Chinese flag and demonstrated the ease with which he could remove "Made In China" tags and replace them with "Made In America" tags. Once made aware of the video, the FTC investigated his company and found this is exactly what he had been doing, at least from May 10, 2021 and Oct. 21, 2021.

Whalen has now been ordered to pay the fine, stop making these claims and to come clean about his foreign production. Not that anyone who buys his crap will care.

"Under the order," an FTC press release explained, "Whalen and Lions Not Sheep must stop claiming that products are made in the United States unless they can show that the product’s final assembly or processing—and all significant processing—takes place here and that all or virtually all ingredients or components of the product are made and sourced here."

Let's take a look at some of the Not Made In America crap this company sells, shall we?

IT'S A FUCKING AMERICAN FLAG ONESIE. On sale for $50. 

"Give Violence a Chance" t-shirt and hoodie 

Get it? Because 'One Nation Under God.' So clever! 

THE TRUMPINATOR 

If the clothes and the fugazi "Made In America" tags were not tacky enough, Sean Whalen also uses the line to promote his wannabe macho self-help crap, which he claims, of course, will help people be LIONS, not sheep, like some kind of Opposite Lambert the Sheepish Lion . Apparently a thing LIONS do is lie about where their product comes from, to brand themselves as super-patriotic without actually having to pay for products made by people earning a fair wage.

This actually matters, though maybe not for the people who buy this kind of crap, or who only care about "buying American" for reasons of nationalism and xenophobia. It matters for those of us who care about where our clothing comes from and how it was made.

There may be no ethical consumption under capitalism, but a lot of us really do try to do our best to get as close as we can.

One of those things we do is try to buy things that are at least somewhat ethically made, and one factor we consider is where clothes are made. Things made in the US are somewhat more likely to be ethically made than clothing made in China or Bangladesh or Indonesia. This is not to say we don't have our own sweatshops or that we don't have prison labor. We do, but it's at least rarely child labor or situations where union organizers are being murdered by death squads trained at The School of the Americas (now the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation"), or the kind of horrific labor abuses known to have happened at Ivanka Trump's factory in China. The supply chain is also frequently slightly less hazy, especially when companies actually follow the guidelines the FTC sets for labeling things as "Made In America."

So when some cynical bastards slap a "Made In America" tag on their ugly T-shirts, that makes it difficult to trust other sellers who say their clothing is "Made In America." Hopefully, the FTC making it more expensive to lie about products being Made In America than it is to actually make those products in America will serve as a deterrent.

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