The Trump Indictment And The Starbucks Dilemma

A recent episode of the TV series The Food That Built America covered the rise of the upscale Starbucks brand, in contrast to the middle- and working-class Dunkin' Doughnuts. Howard Schultz, a marketing innovator, was inspired by the atmosphere of Italian coffee shops while he was traveling there and saw an opportunity: the episode didn't put it this way, but in effect, he could create a food experience that would remind his target demographic of their junior year abroad.

Through an indirect path, he took over a small boutique gourmet coffee retailer based in San Francisco and Seattle and turned it into a national brand that fed the narcissism of college-educated gentry and convinced them to pay extravagant prices for cups of coffee by giving everything fancy-schmancy names. But the show left out the rest of the story: the gentry has found itself in a precarious situation. Having once retired rich on the basis of one formula, he returned to find that formula was no longer working:

"We are beginning to close stores," because of safety issues, interim CEO Howard Schultz said in a video posted to Twitter [in July 2022]. "This is just the beginning. There are going to be many more."

Starbucks said last week that it is closing 16 stores over safety concerns. Around that time, Debbie Stroud and Denise Nelson, both senior vice presidents of US operations at the company, outlined the efforts that Starbucks is taking to make stores safer in an open letter.

Workers are "seeing firsthand the challenges facing our communities — personal safety, racism, lack of access to healthcare, a growing mental health crisis, rising drug use, and more," they wrote, adding that "with stores in thousands of communities across the country, we know these challenges can, at times, play out within our stores too."

The effort to make workers feel safer could result in more closings, according to Schultz's video, which was first reported by Insider.

This represented a change in policy over a 2018 controversy in which African-American customers complained that they were denied use of the store's tables and restrooms, although they didn't buy the overpriced products on sale there. So the chain responded by virtue signaling and making public an open-restroom policy -- except that public restrooms have increasingly become magnets for all sorts of undesirable activity, including shooting up and illicit sex. So Schultz is now closing stores where the problem is worst, and elsewhere allowing a return to a customers-only restroom policy.

This isn't a good solution, and Schultz seems to be fully aware of the dilemma: he's closing profitable stores on one hand, while he's losing his upscale do-gooder image on the other. This won't work in any long term, and Schultz retired again as CEO just a week ago. The dilemma remains -- how does the upscale gentry accommodate the Lumpenproletariat in an uneasy quasi-alliance while still wanting to feel like they're on junior year abroad?

This brings me back to a point I've been making about Karl Marx here for some time. Just to be clear, I'm a Roman Catholic convert generally aligned with Ven Fulton Sheen and Bp Barron. But as I said a year ago,

I don't disagree with Marx in my view that the objective of the gentry is to make life miserable for the workers. The question has always been precisely how to do this and how far to go. Under the worst despots, the explicit goal is to depopulate them, and this is effectively what's going on in Ukraine, although programs to encourage abortion, transsexualism, and disintegration of families in the more genteel west differ only in degree. As with other worldwide conflicts, each theater has unique conditions.

The particular problem in the US for two generations -- the 1972 election was the tipping point -- has been the disintegration of the New Deal coalition, whereby Franklin Roosevelt forestalled proletarian revolution via an alliance of the Ivy League upper class with the middle and working classes. A major element of the alliance was the alignment of northern wealth with southern segregationist Democrats. The 1960s changed this balance via the Civil Rights movement, with one unintended consequence being the false conflation of middle- and working-class African-American upward mobility with a perceived authenticity among the urban African-American criminal class. This conflation has maintained segregationist impulses favorable to the traditional Democrat agenda, something Scott Adams has most recently discovered.

This quickly led to the success of Nixon's southern strategy, in which the bourgeoisie of both races in the former Confederacy and border states aligned with the party of Reconstruction. The interests of neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class are aligned with Marx's Lumpenproletariat, something even African-American members of the Old Left acknowledged during the Civil Rights years. The 50-year trend since 1972 has been for the working and middle classes to abandon the Democrats, leaving them with a combination of college-educated gentry, the wealthy one-percenters, sexual special pleaders from radical feminists to transsexuals, and the urban criminal class, which now extends to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the mentally ill.

At this point, Democrats, in the process of losing Latins and Asians, can't afford to alienate anyone in the remaining coaltion: the deal seems to be that elderly Democrat stalwarts like President Biden and former Speaker Pelosi can stay in place as long as members of the remaining coalition, especially representatives of the Lumpenproletariat and the sexual special pleaders, have a place -- although the real payoff continues to be to the Ivy League upper class, the entrepreneurial one percent, and the gentry, who are the ones that actually continue to benefit from the alliance.

But here's the problem, which I think Howard Schultz understands in some inchoate way: as Marx understood, the Lumpenproletariat is not a reliable ally -- from his viewpoint, not with the workers, but in general, they're not a reliable ally with anyone, and that definitely includes the one-percenters and the gentry. If you let the street rabble into your restrooms, you get what you deserve.

But let's take a more recent problem, the Trump indictment. I noted over the course of the past week that just about everyone was starting to heave a sigh of relief that maybe the New York grand jury was going to adjourn for a month's vacation without taking any action on Trump -- after all, the case was shaky, and even the Alan Dershowitz gentry had lost faith in it. But at the last minute, just before they went out the door, they indicted.

Well, Alvin Bragg is a politican who identifies with the Lumpenproletariat. His agenda, financed by the one-percenter George Soros, is to treat members of the criminal class with extreme leniency by dropping felony charges and abolishing cash bail. This doesn't affect either the gentry or the one percent, since they live in gated communities or high-security buildings. But it does make their politicians, such as Mr Bragg, unreliable allies.

There seems to be a consensus that the Trump indictment will have unpredictable and likely unintended consequences. As far as we can tell for now, it's driven Trump back up in the polls. There are some people who think the Bragg faction is playing eight-dimensional chess, and giving Trump the nomination will make him an easy target for Biden. But I think it's far too early to make any sure prediction, except that I think the Republicans have learned something over the past few years, while the Democrats have learned nothing.

So far, for instance, Republicans have learned that if they resort to conventional rallies or demonstrations, they expose themselves to Antifa provocateurs and FBI informants, and they're likely not to use that strategy, even as Trump seems to want them to. On the other hand, Democrat allies -- especially the same Antifa types and sexual deviants -- are likely to continue both systematic riots and indivudual sorties like, for instance, the attack of a radical nudist on Paul Pelosi in his one-percent home, or the transsexual who murdered six at a Presbyterian school.

This will inevitably unite the solid citizens, but it won't have an equivalent effect on the remaining Democrat coalition, primarily because a major component of that coaltion is simply not reliable. As Howard Schultz discovered, you romanticize the Lumpenproletariat at your peril.

Wear A Mask

Amid all the hubbub over the Nashville shooter and the Trans Day of Vengeance, I'm wondering if I'm the only person who recognized that the instructions for those planning to avenge things include "Assemble at SCOTUS -- Wear a Mask -- Bring a Buddy". While there are several variations on this basic sign, and not all contain the "Wear a Mask" instruction, that at least one variation would say this is telling. "Wear a Mask" is so 2022. What message are they trying to send?

I'm sure there will be well-publicized scenes from the demonstration, and we'll just have to wait and see how many people actually turn up in masks. But during the COVID panic, not a few observers noted that ordinary cloth or paper masks had no efficacy in limiting the spread of an airborne virus, Dr Fauci famously reversed his own position on masking, and the refusal of airlines and key transit agencies to continue mask enforcement by the middle of last year marked the end of that particular charade.

Yet the organizers of the 2023 Trans Day of Vengeance are urging attendees to mask up. I can only see this as nostalgia for the atmosphere of the COVID moral panic. COVID skeptics said throughout that the masks were far less a legitimate public health measure than a compulsory visible sign of assent, and it's hard to avoid thinking this is part of the message here: trans activists are with the program, and you'd better be with it, too. Thus we had all the right people scrambling to correct their pronouns:

The mainstream media did an about-face after Nashville police said several hours after the attack that the assailant was transgender, with some outlets issuing statements explaining their initial use of female pronouns as gender-identity advocates blasted them for misgendering and deadnaming the shooter.

“5 times @cnn misgendered. No correction. A mass shooting is horrible. Misgendering does not make anything better,” said a much-retweeted post by the “Karen Lopez” account.

There's an odd inversion going on here. On one hand, the trans rights movement might be seen as yet another stage in the sexual liberation movements that began in the late 19th century and culminated, at least for a time, in the Stonewall riot or Ms Magazine. But that was part of a trend in the 1960s and 70s to let it all hang out -- grow your hair and beard, burn the bra.

Instead, we now have a new generation of the grammar police, rewriting pronoun rules on the fly. In fact, I saw one media outlet so terrified of the new (but as yet entirely uncodified) pronoun rules that it noted that Nashville shooter Audrey Hale went by Aiden, and her preferred pronouns were he/him -- except that the story kept referring to Hale as they/them.

This isn't in fact just one more progression in the march of sexual liberation. Trans activists can't let it all hang out like old-time hippies or bra burners, because, er, the vast majority stop short of the one surgery that matters, male-to-female. In fact, this topic is verboten:

DON'T: Ask "what's going on in your pants?"

It's natural to be curious, but that doesn't mean you should ask. After all, nobody is coming up to you and asking you about your genitalia. "As a common sense and common courtesy, we don't going around asking people about their private parts," Milan says. "You don't ask me, I don't ask you. Just because a person's trans doesn't mean that you can ask them. They're still a human being, they're still a person, they're still a person that lives by the same etiquette standards that we all do, you don't just ask a person about their genitals. It's just rude. Don't do it."

But of course, this allows trans people to finesse the whole question of just how much they believe they're a woman trapped in a man's body or vice versa. This is the opposite of Stonewall, the outcome of which Wikipedia characterizes as seeking

“to create new ‘social form and relations’ that would be based on ‘brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality.”

Instead, we have a new radical trans movement that urges its members to Wear a Mask, while warning even its allies not to ask about genitals. This is not what you see at your typical gay pride parade, which if anything celebrates genitals. Instead, we have a new prudery, a concealment of genitals, an insistence that they don't matter, a new grammar police imposing a whole new unwritten set of pronoun rules, and an endorsement of masking, not under even a pretense of public health necessity, but just masking for its own sake.

As I noted yesterday, there's a growing body of scholarly literature that suggests transsexualism is an entirely separate form of kink from same-sex attraction, and transsexuals have an entirely different agenda. Just what that is is hard to define, but it's there. Here's a piece at the BBC:

I became aware of this particular issue after I wrote an article about sex, lies and legal consent.

Several people got in touch with me to say there was a "huge problem" for lesbians, who were being pressured to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ".

I knew this would be a hugely divisive subject, but I wanted to find out how widespread the issue was.

Ultimately, it has been difficult to determine the true scale of the problem because there has been little research on this topic - only one survey to my knowledge. However, those affected have told me the pressure comes from a minority of trans women, as well as activists who are not necessarily trans themselves.

They described being harassed and silenced if they tried to discuss the issue openly. I received online abuse myself when I tried to find interviewees using social media.

Nevertheless, as I discussed yesterday, there are in fact studies that indicate that nobody, male or female, straight or gay, wants to have sex with a trans person. All I can think for now is that this is, if anything, a strange inversion of the traditional idea of sexual liberation.

Natural Law And Trans Pathologies

Yesterday I brought up my struggle as I approached adulthood with the idea of "natural law", which I said, having been raised Protestant, was new to me around the time I went to college. I instinctively associated it with Catholic thought, and at least in a way, I was correct. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

If any moral theory is a theory of natural law, it is Aquinas’s. . . . For Aquinas, there are two key features of the natural law . . . . The first is that, when we focus on God’s role as the giver of the natural law, the natural law is just one aspect of divine providence; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective just one part among others of the theory of divine providence. The second is that, when we focus on the human’s role as recipient of the natural law, the natural law constitutes the principles of practical rationality, those principles by which human action is to be judged as reasonable or unreasonable; and so the theory of natural law is from that perspective the preeminent part of the theory of practical rationality.

The school where Audrey Hale, the biological woman who is alleged to have identified as a man, shot her way into and murdered six children and adults on Monday, identifies as Presbyterian. I spent my entire childhood as a Presbyterian and was confirmed in that denomination, and neither Aquinas nor natural law theory was mentioned at all in my religious education, which led to my deep suspicion of both when I began to study philosophy. However, it's probably correct to say that whether Presbyterians formally endorse anything like natural law theory, something like Aquinas's view pervades most Christian belief. Tucker Carlson had a remarkably perceptive take on his show last night, March 28:

The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy.

In Christianity, the price of admission is admitting that you're not God. Christians openly concede that they have no real power over anything, and for that matter, very little personal virtue. They will tell you to your face that they are sinful and helpless and basically absurd. They're not embarrassed about any of this. They brag about it. "That saved a wretch like me" goes the most famous Christian hymn ever written in English.

The trans movement takes the opposite view. Trans ideology claims dominion over nature itself. We can change the identity we were born with, they will tell you with wild eyed certainty. Christians can never agree with the statement because these are powers they believe God alone possesses.

That unwillingness to agree, that failure to acknowledge a trans person's dominion over nature, incites and enrages some in the trans community. People who believe they are God can't stand to be reminded that they're not. Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled. They are on a collision course with each other.

What puzzles me, though, is that the Covenant School is pre-K through 6, and I doubt that even a Catholic religious education class would get very deeply into sexual function of any sort with children of that age, let alone same-sex attraction or transgenderism -- and a Presbyterian school even less so. And I can almost guarantee it won't bring up either Aquinas or natural law (the last Presbyterian writer I consulted on Aquinas said he treated reason as an idol, and he was also too fat).

And beyond that, I very much doubt that Ms Hale ever studied Christianity very closely as either a child or an adult -- and at age 28, her Christian schooling was almost 20 years behind her. So it may well be that she associated the school with her family or her upbringing in general. I saw another opinion piece that suggested she was trying to hurt her family in doing the shooting, and in fact her family may have been the next set of victims she had in mind.

So what we're looking at is less a specific objection to Christian doctrine, although the most complete expressions of Christian doctrine do say that same-sex attraction and transgenderism are violations of natural law, but instead more of a free-floating resentment of common sense and a troubled conscience, which in her case are only generally related to Christianity. And this likely involves matters beyond just gender identity. Andy Ngo made an interesting point in his interview on the same Tucker Carlson show from March 28:

. . . in my reporting on Antifa for years now, one observation that I notice was that disproportionately the riot arrestees are gender diverse, they don't identify with their biological sex. On some nights it was as high as 20%, magnitudes higher than what the -- what we held on people in the wider American population who are trans identifying.

Separately, Study: ‘Transgender’ Youth at Highest Risk for Violent Radicalization:

It found that “transgender and gender diverse students reported higher support for VR compared to students who identified as women.” In fact, youth who identified as transgender or gender-diverse were at the highest risk for violent radicalization.

The whole question of transgenderism is highly charged politically, which is preventing any sort of dispassionate discussion. Nevertheless, a body of clinical literature is emerging that suggests transgenderism is a separate paraphilia from same-sex attraction.

Blanchard's transsexualism typology is a proposed psychological typology of gender dysphoria, transsexualism, and fetishistic transvestism, created by sexologist Ray Blanchard through the 1980s and 1990s, building on the work of earlier researchers, including his colleague Kurt Freund. Blanchard categorized trans women into two groups: homosexual transsexuals who are attracted exclusively to men and are feminine in both behavior and appearance; and autogynephilic transsexuals who experience sexual arousal at the idea of having a female body.

This theory is reinforced by empirical evidence that shows that neither cisgender nor same-sex attracted people are sexually drawn to transgender individuals.

The current study sought to describe the demographic characteristics of individuals who are willing to consider a transgender individual as a potential dating partner. Participants (N = 958) from a larger study on relationship decision-making processes were asked to select all potential genders that they would consider dating if ever seeking a future romantic partner. The options provided included cisgender men, cisgender women, trans men, trans women, and genderqueer individuals. Across a sample of heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and trans individuals, 87.5% indicated that they would not consider dating a trans person, with cisgender heterosexual men and women being most likely to exclude trans persons from their potential dating pool.

This is to say that even same-sex attracted people across the board -- we're talking almost 90% of every possible orientation -- won't date trans people. Apparently even among the conventionally gay, trans is just too phony, it doesn't seem to turn anyone's crank. Is this the source of the free-floating resentment that observers are noting among trans people?

For that matter, is this why it's such a key objective in the trans movement to get kids started on hormones and surgery before puberty, which is to say before they can even begin to realize what their sex lives will be like when they become adults?

All I can think are there are lots of questions, and there are limits to what you can do even when you make an effort at violating natural law. We've been in a moral panic, and it's been over more than COVID. We're about done with COVID, but less so with the other stuff.

Remember Dr Koop?

More than a dozen years ago, my doctor told me I needed to start monitoring my blood sugar and changing my diet to keep things within limits. So I did, and my readings stayed within normal parameters for some time, or they did until the COVID lockdowns, masking, and social distancing. Once I was allowed to go back to the doctor -- remember, this activity was proscribed as well -- he began to worry, my numbers were climbing to the point that something might need to be done.

But my diet hadn't changed at all, although given the lockdowns and everything, I wasn't getting as much exercise. In any case, for nearly three years after 2020, my blood sugar readings were wildly erratic, and the doctor was getting more and more worried, although my diet hadn't changed, other than a few foods becoming unavailable due to the pandemic-related supply chain crisis.

Then all of a sudden, the pandemic went away, or more precisely, everyone was catching COVID in spite of everyone having to get vaccines and boosters. For much of 2022, the LA County health department was threatening to reimpose one or another form of closure, social distancing, or masking, until the health director, the notorious Dr Ferrer, finally threw up her hands and told the press and the county supervisors that reimposing restrictions would cost the health department its remaining credibility -- as I chronicled here, the TSA had finally refused to enforce masking at LAX, and Amtrak and Metrolink had refused to enforce masking on trains.

Somewhere right around that time, when all the remaining restrictions went away, the authorities power-washed the social distancing stickers off the sidewalks, and even the most timid barbers and retailers went mask-optional, I think right around the holidays, my numbers suddenly went back to normal.

In fact, over the past several weeks, my numbers have wound up pretty much the best ever, better than when I was 15 years younger. No meds, just the same diet. I think the final influence was that since the holidays, the number of people wearing masks at Sunday mass has gone from maybe 50% to 10%. I haven't been back to the doctor yet, but I'm assuming he'll recognize the results. I think it's generally understood that the public health response to the perceived COVID crisis damaged everyone's health in all sorts of ways yet to be fully quantified, if ever.

Now and then over the period of the pandemic, I've run into YouTube homilies by Fr William Nicholas, a pastor in the Archdiocese of San Francisco, most recently here:

One of his homilies three years ago, after the lockdowns started, made the point that humans aren't meant to have their faces covered, viz, by wearing masks. He didn't use the term specifically, but I think his implication was that this type of general masking was a violation of natural law. Just recently, in fact, we had Pope Francis by implication invoking natural law in the matter of transgender ideology:

“All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences,” the pope said. “The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”

Almost simultaneously, the US Catholic bishops issued a statement on medical care that uses hormones or surgery to modify a person's apparent sex:

As such interventions “do not respect the fundamental order of the human person as an intrinsic unity of body and soul, with a body that is sexually differentiated,” the committee states that Catholic health care services must not perform them.

Somewhere around the time I went to college, the term "natural law", which I hadn't heard before (I was raised Protestant) made me shudder. It struck me as part of a whole bundle of Catholic terms like "immaculate conception", "beatitudes", "state of grace", "mortal sin", and so forth, that were simply alien. It took me much of a lifetime to get past all that. But even leaving its religious context aside, the term "natural law" is extremely useful, as in discussing the case of the self-identified transgender woman who killed six people at a Nashville, TN Christian school.

The legacy media is struggling to get its head around the incident. According to NBC News,

A sense of “resentment” might have played a role in a 28-year-old’s deadly attack on the private Christian school they once attended, Nashville police said Monday.

. . . The former student is alleged to have left behind writings being studied by local and federal investigators.

“We have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” Drake told reporters hours after the shooting. “We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.”

He said Hale was transgender.

Officials “feel that she identifies as trans, but we’re still in the initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident,” Drake said.

Another piece notes that a group of trans activists had scheduled a well-publicized “Trans Day of Vengeance” for April 1. While there is no formal connection yet established between the shooter and the event or the group, it

purports to seek revenge for what they term “trans genocide,” a conspiracy theory that claims that transgender people are systemically targeted with violence. However, an examination of FBI statistics by the Daily Wire shows no proof to corroborate this claim. In 2021, only two of the 271 recorded hate crimes against transgender individuals resulted in murder. These figures are substantially lower than those of other groups and insufficient to substantiate allegations of “trans genocide.”

The Nashville police chief did, nevertheless, speculate that "a sense of 'resentment' might have played a role" in the attack.

Another factor that's hard to avoid is that the public health establishment has been hijacked by crazies. The COVID pandemic gave them a foot in the door that allowed them to impose destructive policies on world populations for a period of years. This is in contrast to someone like Dr C Everett Koop, Reagan's Surgeon General, cited as "the only surgeon general to become a household name" due in particular to his campaign against smoking as a public health issue -- under his tenure "smoking rates in the United States declined significantly from 38% to 27%."

Contrast Dr Koop with Admiral Rachel Levine, the first transsexual to do whatever they's been doing:

Wikipedia notes that Dr Koop was the first recent surgeon general to revive the tradition of wearing an admiral's uniform, and here we see that Dr Levine, although they isn't surgeon general, is wearing such a uniform, primarily to hitchhike on Dr Koop's prestige. (It's arguable that they's become a household name, though for different reasons, I suppose.) The problem is that Admiral Levine is a public health authority who's in essence declaring that natural law no longer applies, unlike Dr Koop, whose general public health position appears to have been to avoid doing things that are bad for you.

It's pretty clear to anyone who pays attention that transsexualism brings with it a whole cluster of pathologies. I don't care if it's Trump, DeSantis, or some other Republican, but a major 2024 platform needs to be to get the crazies out of public health. Whether it's COVID or transsexualism, they've been actively promoting things that are bad for everyone.

More On Secret Agent CHS-SA

It looks like the story of multiple FBI informants within the Proud Boys isn't going away. The New York Times interviewed Agent CHS-SA, Jennilyn Salinas AKA "Jen Loh", on Friday -- this version seems to be the same as the Times story, which is behind a paywall. However, I'm posting excerpts out of order. The first is nearly at the end of the story:

Ms. Loh said that she began working with the F.B.I.’s office in San Antonio, Texas in 2018 or 2019 after falling victim to an attack from what she described as activists from the leftist movement antifa. At first, she said, she gave the bureau what she believed was “useful information” on leftist protesters.

Soon, however, she began getting paid for her work. At that point, Ms. Loh, who once served as a top official in an organization called Latinos for Trump, started providing information to the F.B.I. on “any type of domestic terrorism — on the right or the left,” she said.

So OK, as far back as five years ago, she started "working with" the FBI after some sort of episode with Antifa. But then the FBI began to pay her. Now it's not too hard to extrapolate that this probably wasn't a car payment, but it was maybe her morning latte, it was something in any case, and she didn't want to lose it. And "working with the FBI" made her feel important. (Can you say grooming?) So she gradually expanded her role to inform on "any type of domestic terrorism". The piece goes on to say that, apparently during this time, she was "a top official in an organization called Latinos for Trump", which sounds pretty terrorist to me.

Intriguingly, "Jen Loh" does turn up as a self-described Trump supporter in stories here and there during her time as an FBI informer, as here on November 4, 2020, the day after the election:

Police in Washington said they were investigating a stabbing near the White House after a confrontation between Trump supporters and another group in the early hours of November 4.

This footage, livestreamed to Facebook by Texas woman Jen Loh, shows the incident.

Loh said the she was among a group of conservatives, including Proud Boys members, who were walking from Harry’s Restaurant towards the White House when Christian activist Bevelyn Beatty was attacked.

Loh told Storyful that Beatty and a Proud Boys member were both stabbed. Loh said Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio was also present.

Isn't that odd? Here's "Jen Loh", a San Antonio resident, turning up in Washington as a "Trump supporter" in the midst of a violent protest after the 2020 election. This story places "Jen" with some of the same Proud Boys who are now on trial at that event:

On election night [sic] in 2020, Nell was filmed with Tarrio, other Proud Boys including Jeremy Bertino and anti-choice activist Bevelyn Beatty in what appears to be a melee on an otherwise deserted street one block from the White House. The incident was livestreamed on Facebook by Jennilyn Salinas, a far-right activist better known as Jen Loh, who can be heard in the video saying, “Whoa, whoa, hey… Black Lives Matter over here…. Oh shit, they stabbed Bevelyn Beatty right now.”

The first link on that episode above goes on to say of "Jen",

Loh describes herself on Twitter and Facebook as a leading member of right-wing political organizations called ‘American Up’ and ‘Texans United for America.’. She also describes herself on Twitter as a former vice president of Latinos For Trump. That organization confirmed in emails to Storyful that Loh was previously a member, but sought to distance themselves from her, writing: “We have no association with her and do not want our organization name tied to her name.”

Isn't that strange? Latinos for Trump wants nothing to do with this lady, whom we now know, courtesy of the FBI, was an FBI informant. (Remarkably, her Facebook page is still up, and she still lists Latinos for Trump on her CV.) A story behind a paywall in the San Antonio Express-News places "Jen Loh", a San Antonio resident, at a Portland, OR protest in 2019. It teases, "Salinas, who goes by Jen Loh, recorded videos from the middle of crowd in Portland, Ore., at the 'End Domestic Terrorism' rally." So wait a moment. A few moments spent on the web brings up a legend of "Jen Loh", leading right-winger, traveling on somebody's dime to video protests in Portland and Washington, DC.

Maybe the FBI paid her more than just latte money, huh? In fact, it sounds like from 2018 or 2019 or whenever it was, she was quite a busy girl, serving as a "leading member" of Latinos for Trump, American Up, and Texans United for America, posing as a "far right activist", going to protests, and, er, taking videos.

One problem for the FBI is that "Ms Loh" likes to talk about herself, something we've already seen in news stories from 2019 and 2020. She certainly opened up to the New York Times on Friday. At the link above,

In an interview on Friday, Ms. Loh said that she had never spied on the Proud Boys or their lawyers and said that the F.B.I. never asked her any questions directly related to the trial that is now unfolding in Federal District Court in Washington. She also confirmed that she had parted ways with the bureau when she started talking with Mr. Tarrio’s lawyers.

Ms. Loh maintained that while she provided the government information about some of the defendants before the trial began, her interest in their families and legal situations was genuine.

“It’s hard to see people calling me a rat and a fed and things like that,” she said. “I think it’s sad that we’ve gotten so polarized in this country.”

But wasn't she taking video in Washington after Election Night 2020? Was, er, the FBI covering her expenses on that trip? Did she, er, turn over her video footage to her FBI handlers? Isn't it a coincidence that she, by at least two news accounts, was with now defendant Tarrio and several other Proud Boys? But she never spied on the Proud Boys, oh, no. All she did was provide the government information about some of them. What's the fuss all about? We're so darn polarized. Can't we all get along?

Sounds like Latinos for Trump was on to something. It also sounds like there's a lot more to learn. Let's recall, though, that a major activity of the KGB back in the day was to sponsor anti-Soviet organizations among Russian émigrés for the purpose of gaining intelligence -- especially to find out whom to liquidate back home. That the FBI should be infiltrating apparently legitimate political organizations like Latinos for Trump on the pretext of seeking out domestic terrorism is very disturbing.

On the other hand, back in the day, the KGB knew there were flakes and nut jobs it didn't want to touch, like, for instance, Lee Harvey Oswald. In the case of Secret Agent CHS-SA, maybe the FBI needed to study the KGB a little more closely.

Remember, Trump Created Dr Fauci -- And By The Way, Dr Birx

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit quotes a James Taranto piece at the Wall Street Journal behind a paywall:

In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. [Gov Brian] Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”

The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.

That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:

“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”

Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”

“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”

“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”

A month ago, I posted a timeline of Trump's early actions on the pandemic.

During March 2020, the hospital ship Comfort was ordered to New York, and the Mercy was ordered to Los Angeles as part of the federal government's initial response to the COVID pandemic. On March 16 of that year, President Trump declared a national emergency, and under the theme "15 days to slow the spread", he endorsed the quasi-national lockdowns ordered by state and local health departments, which famously lasted much longer than 15 days.

If we were simply going to take 15 days to slow the spread, the lockdowns should have ended on March 31. But by then, Trump had ordered the hospital ships to New York and LA, and by just April 7, the US Navy was complaining there weren't enough COVID patients to go around. By April 27, the hospital ships were ordered back to their home ports, having proven completely unnecessary. By April 20, Gov Kemp, if nobody in the White House, had gotten the message. The WSJ piece goes on,

Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”

There can be no question that, in nearly three years hindsight, Kemp had things right. Interestingly, Kemp was ahead of even Gov DeSantis:

At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”

Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”

Of course, Dr Fauci himself takes the line that he was just making science-based recommendations to the president, while Trump is now saying he left things up to the governors. But let's face it, Trump isn't stupid -- if nothing else, he knows how to make money, and he knows how to run for US president as a rank amateur to politics and get himself elected. So why didn't it dawn on him by late March or early April that the predictions of the public health establishment weren't being borne out?

There can be no question that Trump was afraid not just of Dr Fauci, but perhaps even more afraid of Dr Birx. He let them bully him, when he should have been pressing them for actual numbers vis-a-vis the predictions of their models and beginning to hold them accountable.

I've read -- it was a long time ago, and I can't remember who wrote it or where -- that what cost Gerald Ford the 1976 election was the 1975 assassination attempt by former Manson cultist Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, followed by a second attempt by Sara Jane Moore three weeks later. That two flaky women would be able to come so close to assassinating him was, in the opinion of that writer, a subconscious cue that irreparably damaged Ford's credibility.

I don't necessasrily endorse that view, but when I think of a situation where Dr Fauci, who for his entire career was able to convince people that rather than being gauche, he was actually authentic, and Dr Birx, who was Nurse Ratched in frumpy scarves, were able to convince the country that Donald Trump was an unscientific bumpkin, I've got to think there was some equivalent subliminal prompt, and I do think it cost Trump the 2020 election.

But think about it. Trump was terrified of Dr Birx, I have no doubt. But as soon as someone called her on the family visit she had at Thanksgiving that year, something that was prohibited to the plebs as a potential superspreader event, she skedaddled. Big threat. He could have fired her sooner, on better grounds, I'm sure.

Trump's COVID calls were catastrophic. For now, I'm betting DeSantis is smarter, he's ruthless, and he's even a bit mean. My money's on DeSantis or someone like him.

Lost The Plot

Whatever else they may be, Trump supporters aren't dumb, and in some cases, they're quite a bit smarter than Trump himself. I noted in Thursday's post that hardly anyone believed the characters shown in a viral video from the "protest" at the Manhattan courthouse were actual Trump supporters, certainly in large part because actual Trump supporters knew well enough to stay home. But that leaves aside the fact that the stars of the vignette looked like, one, an Antifa, and two, a Jacob Chansley wannabe, neither of whom struck anyone as a solid-citizen Republican type.

It turns out the skeptics were right:

During Tuesday’s protest in support of President Trump against his impending arrest by the radical Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, Antifa members disguised as Trump supporters had apparently already infiltrated the demonstration.

Independent reporter Rebecca Brannon uncovered these fake “Trump supporters” in Manhattan, who appeared to stand out like a sore thumb.

One such protestor was dressed like the well known “Q-Anon Shaman,” who was recently sentenced to four years in prison for walking around the Capitol with police as his tour guides.

. . . Brannon also tweeted about the Anarchist tattoo she noticed on the neck of the “Trump supporter” who demmanded the “Q-Anon Shaman” prove he wasn’t wearing a wire.

. . . “I noticed his circle-A tattoo—the classic symbol prominently associated with Antifa and anarchists,” she tweeted.

“He knew I noticed, then put his hoodie up,” she wrote.

The reporter also found that the guy dressed as “Q-Anon Shaman,” is actually an actor who appeared “America’s Got Talent,” whose real name is Danny Wolverton, aka “Specialhead” of Brooklyn, NY.

This simply confirms the suspicions among Republicans, whose good sense made the event disappointing for the media, which wanted a show.

Over the weekend Donald Trump called on supporters to protest his expected indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. On Monday, few in the city heeded the call.

“We threw it together at the last minute, the last 24 hours,” said Gavin Wax. The president of the New York Young Republican Club organized the demonstration outside of the Manhattan Criminal Court where Trump could be arraigned in the coming days.

“We weren’t sure we even wanted to come out because some people don’t like us, but we are here to show that there is support for President Trump in the bluest area in the country, here in Manhattan,” said Wax, trying to account for the small gathering of some 50 people when he’d predicted a crowd of at least three times the size earlier in the day.

So Politico estimated 50 people turned up, and some large percentage of those were presumably FBI informants, Antifa provocateurs, and wannabe actors who wound up with nothing better to do than denounce each other for not looking like Republicans, who were staying home out of good sense. This says quite a lot about January 6 as well, but at least the Antifa provocateurs at that event changed into MAGA outfits.

So with the courthouse protest a big fizzle, the media fell back on a last-resort tactic of desperation:

Emergency personnel have responded after a package with suspicious white powder was delivered to the mail room for the New York City building housing the Manhattan District Attorney's office, according to police.

A law enforcement source confirmed there was a note saying "Alvin – I’ll kill you" in the envelope. District Attorney Alvin Bragg is currently weighing whether to proceed with an indictment against former President Donald Trump for alleged hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016.

The envelope delivered by the U.S. Postal Service Friday has been "deemed non-hazardous" at the scene, the mail room to the DA's office, officials told Fox News.

Police responded to the scene shortly after 12 p.m., and as yet, no one has been ordered to evacuate.

For decades, episodes of white powder, racist graffiti, vandalism, burned churches, nooses, and death threats have turned out to have been perpetrated by members of the same groups against which the putative threats were made, largely as ploys for sympathy or attempts to divert attention from legitimate personnel-type concerns. This instance, coming as a Trump indictment from Bragg's grand jury seems less and less likely, looks like a similar attempt at distraction from a narrative that's going south in a hurry.

The problem is that this stuff is no longer working. Michael Barone just yesterday made a point I've been making since I started this blog:

Ironically, after the 1964-68 civil rights acts changed America for the better, there were cries that racist treatment of blacks was as bad as ever. America was going crazy again, on schedule.

And so it has in the last few years. After the election and reelection of the first black president, we heard Black Lives Matter, like the Black Panthers 50 years before, proclaim that America was even more racist than it ever had been. Since the "mostly peaceful" riots of summer 2020, there have been sharp increases in violent crime and moves to defund and delegitimize police departments, which are, in fact, far less racist than in the 1960s.

America went crazy too over COVID, in my view, by treating a virus fatal to just a small segment of the population as if, like Ebola, it had an infection fatality rate of around 50%. Authorities imposed lockdowns and mandates while ignoring economic costs and lasting collateral damage, like adults missing cancer screenings and children missing first and second grade.

But moral panics have a "morning after" phase, which we're currently going through. The moral entrepreneurs have finally lost the plot.

You Know That Dear Family Friend Who Prayed With You For Your Mother? She Works For The Stasi.

The photo above is of a real Stasi informant taken from German press stories, but she may as well have been sent by Central Casting, so I'll use her for this post. Yesterday I linked to a story about the Proud Boys trial, in which on Wednesday the prosecution revealed at the last minute that a witness (so far unidentified) whom the defense planned to call as part of its case was an FBI informant. Yet again, this brought the trial to a screeching halt when the defense moved for a mistrial, and Judge Kelly scheduled a hearing for yesterday afternoon.

I followed the story with great interest yesterday, but although the hearing yesterday afternoon was public, there's been little reporting. The best story I could find was this one:

As revelations that a defense witness was also an FBI informant roil the already contentious Capitol riot trial of members of the far-right Proud Boys group, prosecutors said Thursday that the informant was never told to gather information about the defendants or their lawyers.

The FBI ended its relationship with the informant this past January after it learned that the person had received a subpoena to testify, an agent said in an affidavit filed in court.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said there's no clear evidence of wrongdoing by the government and allowed the trial to continue Friday, but is also set to hear additional arguments about how deeply enmeshed the informant was with the case.

There's a PDF of the government's filing with the testimony of the informant's handler here. The informant, identified as "CHS-SA", according to the FBI handler, had been employed to gather information on two of the defendants since 2019, but it didn't relate to this particular case. Although CHS-SA had been spying on two of the defendants, it was for something else, not their conduct on January 6, and the FBI never asked the informant about their relationship to January 6.

However, CHS-SA had been spying on two of the defendants over something right up until January 9 of this year, when she notified the FBI that the defense planned to call her as a witness. The FBI then terminated their relationship with the informant, but the prosecution didn't notify the defense that she'd been an FBI informant until just before they called her as a witness during the trial.

So it's all just pure as the driven snow, at least according to Judge Kelly. Now, I suppose he sees this as a narrow legal question, and he's the one competent to rule on this, at least for now. But I have problems that won't go away. According to the story from Wednesday that I linked above,

The informant, who was not identified in the court filing, also participated in prayer meetings with members of one or more of the defendants’ families and engaged in conversations with one of the defendant’s family members about replacing one of the defense counsel, the attorney added.

According to the PDF, CHS-SA had been working for the FBI to spy on two of the defendants and their families, apparently including in prayer meetings, since 2019, but not about their involvement in January 6. What on earth was she spying about, then? Whatever it was, there've been no indictments or arrests on whatever that case, or those cases, may have been. It's just pure coincidence that defendant Rehl had been on the FBI's radar since 2019 for something else that never quite jelled, but now they've got him on something else that CHS-SA wasn't working on.

How many spies like this are out there? I think about our own dear family friends, and I suddenly recognize that there's no reason any of those couldn't be FBI informants. Let's recall that just last month, we had this story:

The FBI says it is retracting a leaked document published on the internet Feb. 8 that appears to reveal that the bureau’s Richmond division launched an investigation into “radical traditionalist” Catholics and their possible ties to “the far-right white nationalist movement.”

In response to an inquiry from CNA, the FBI said it will remove the document because “it does not meet our exacting standards.”

Given this is the FBI, I'm suddenly suspicious that they say they've removed a document, but, er, have they stopped paying any informants who've been spying on Catholics suspected of attending Latin masses? They said nothing about that in their annoucement, but given that by their own admission, they had some nice lady spying on defendant Rehl's family prayer meetings without result, how do we know one or more of our own dear family friends isn't an FBI informant?

After all, we might go to a Latin mass -- or, heaven forbid, our own novus ordo parish even prays now and then in Latin. Shouldn't the FBI be made aware of that? I surely think so, whether or not they've withdrawn one or another document that says they're interested.

Let's say one or another House Republican takes it upon himself to ask the FBI if they have informants among Catholics, whether or not they've withdrawn some document or other. You know the standard answer will be, "Congressman, we don't comment on ongoing investigations."

At this point, I no longer think abolishing the FBI is a far-out idea.

Fool Me Once

The scene above is a screen shot from a video that's been going atound the web -- you can see more of it at this post on YouTube. It was taken at a protest in New York earlier this week, ostensibly to support Donald Trump as the district attorney there cogitates indicting and arresting him. However, Republicans were nearly unanimous in urging supporters to stay home, and there seems to have been a general recognition that over half those in attendance at such a rally would be informants, provocateurs, or dupes. This appears to have been the main lesson of January 6 for Trump supporters, and it looks like it was well learned.

Anthony Brian Logan, the YouTube commentator at the link, thinks the QAnon Shaman clone on the right was certainly a provocateur, but his interlocutor on the left was quite possibly one as well. I certainly don't think Mr Logan is crazy to speculate about that. The QAnon Shaman clone is copying Jacob Chansley's January 6 outfit so closely -- just with antlers instead of horns and a MAGA flag cape instead of a US flag on a spear -- that it suggests he's capable of deliberate, goal-oriented activity, when during his exchange with the guy on the left he seems to be pretending to be psychotic.

Doesn't work, sorry. If he himself is disorganized in his thinking, he's got to have handlers who aren't. Somebody went shopping for those furs and antlers, and if he was incapable of putting on the face paint, somebody behind the scenes was.

This brings me to the latest development in the seditious conspiracy trial of five Proud Boys members:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) revealed yet another government informant, according to an attorney for one of the Proud Boys facing a seditious conspiracy case tied to January 6.

This latest twist came on Wednesday when the government conveyed to the defense that this person, who was set to appear on behalf of one of the defendants on Thursday, served as a “Confidential Human Source” (CHS) from April 2021 through at least January 2023, according to a court filing.

. . . The informant, who was not identified in the court filing, also participated in prayer meetings with members of one or more of the defendants’ families and engaged in conversations with one of the defendant’s family members about replacing one of the defense counsel, the attorney added.

. . . U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly had told U.S. government to respond to the filing by 9 a.m. on Thursday, but then ordered the deadline to be extended to the afternoon followed by a hearing on the motion and pushed back the trial to resume on Friday.

What's going on here isn't exactly clear, but the prosecution had rested its case in the trial, and the defense was set to put on its own witnesses -- except that one of the first witnesses they wanted to call turns out to have been a government informant, which was apparently news to them. The story says farther down at the link,

Already, the Justice Department indicated the FBI had upwards of eight informants inside the Proud Boys leading up to January 6. The New York Times, which reported these revelations in November, insisted that no “evidence has surfaced” suggesting that the FBI “played any role in the attack.”

Except that anywhere anybody turned on January 6, it looks like there was a good chance he'd be talking to either an informant, a provocateur, or a dupe. The guy on the left in the photo at the top of this post makes an insightful observation that Republicans, Trump supporters or not, don't normally wear fur headdresses and face paint, but of course, they don't dress in black outfits with face masks like the guy on the left, either. There's something staged about that whole vignette. The story at the link continues,

The filing on Wednesday from [Zachary Rehl's attorney Carmen] Hernandez said the defendants are “preparing a separate motion to dismiss the Indictment or for an evidentiary hearing, raising serious and substantiated allegations of governmental misconduct surrounding the surreptitious invasion and interference of the defense team by the government through a confidential human source, at the government’s behest.”

It's important to keep in mind that the Proud Boys' attorneys are following a variation of Defense Strategy 101, which is to attack the investigation as variously incompetent or unconstitutional, but the defendants are entitled to a vigorous defense, especially in a case that bears some resemblance to the Chicago Seven. Judge Kelly has been struggling to maintain an appearance that the trial is a serious legal proceeding, but the defense has continued to show success in interrupting it and, if nothing else, creating a record for appeals, as well as a subversive public narrative, just as the Chicago Seven defense was able to do.

Meanwhile, it's hard to dismiss the idea that the scene in the video is a scripted dialog between two actors, and some part of the whole drama we've seen over the past few years is just badly written reality TV.

DeSantis And The Trump Bump

In this morning's headlines at The Hill: DeSantis sees lowest level of support since December in new poll, trails Trump by 28 points:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) received just 26 percent support in the latest GOP presidential poll from Morning Consult — the lowest number he’s hit in the survey since December.

DeSantis, who has not entered the GOP primary but is expected to do so, trailed former President Trump, who won 54 percent, by 28 percentage points in the new poll published on Tuesday.

It's worth pointing out that predsidential polls this far out from an election year are meaningless. A quick web search brings this from NBC News in June 2015:

A brand-new national NBC/WSJ poll finds Jeb Bush leading the crowded Republican presidential field, with 22% of GOP primary voters saying he’s their first choice. He’s followed by Scott Walker at 17%, Marco Rubio at 14%, and Ben Carson at 11%. While Jeb had a similar five-point lead in our April NBC/WSJ poll, you see his current position has strengthened when you look inside the numbers of this new poll. (It was conducted during the buildup and coverage of Bush’s official presidential announcement on June 16.) The latest survey shows him ahead among self-identified conservative GOP primary voters -- when he was in third place in April behind Rubio and Walker. And as we unveiled on Sunday, 75% of Republican primary voters in our new poll say they could see themselves supporting Bush -- up from 70% in April and 49% in March.

By December 2015, the picture had radically changed:

Donald Trump just got a little more vault in his ceiling. Nationwide, the polling-obsessed Manhattan multi-billionaire and leading Republican presidential candidate broke into the 40s on Monday.

According to the results of the latest Monmouth University pollsurveying voters identifying as Republican or independents leaning toward the GOP, Trump earned 41 percent, nearly tripling the support of his closest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who took 14 percent.

. . . Monmouth’s survey also held good news for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who moved up to 10 percent support and third place, and bad news for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who plummeted from 18 percent in October to 9 percent in this latest survey. Other candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, polled within the margin of error, with 6 percent remaining undecided.

Searching the web for more on 2015, I ran into this essay at the Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Meida, Politics, and Public Policy:

[D]uring the year 2015, major news outlets covered Donald Trump in a way that was unusual given his low initial polling numbers—a high volume of media coverage preceded Trump’s rise in the polls. Trump’s coverage was positive in tone—he received far more “good press” than “bad press.” [But of course, as others say, there's no such thing as "bad press". ]The volume and tone of the coverage helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls.

. . . Although journalists play a political brokering role in presidential primaries, their decisions are driven by news values rather than political values. Journalists are attracted to the new, the unusual, the sensational—the type of story material that will catch and hold an audience’s attention. Trump fit that need as no other candidate in recent memory. Trump is arguably the first bona fide media-created presidential nominee. Although he subsequently tapped a political nerve, journalists fueled his launch.

. . . Journalists seemed unmindful that they and not the electorate were Trump’s first audience. Trump exploited their lust for riveting stories. He didn’t have any other option. He had no constituency base and no claim to presidential credentials. If Trump had possessed them, his strategy could have been political suicide, which is what the press predicted as they showcased his tirades. Trump couldn’t compete with the likes of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush on the basis of his political standing or following. The politics of outrage was his edge, and the press became his dependable if unwitting ally.

This is precisely what's happening now, for good or ill. Recall from my post yesterday that Trump himself broke the story of his impending arrest, which nevertheless hasn't happened as predicted, but House Republicans have hopped gleefully onto the bandwagon:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg faces a Thursday deadline to come forward to appear before three congressional panels for a transcribed interview, the chairman of one of those committees told Breitbart News exclusively here at the House GOP retreat.

“We gave him until Thursday to come forward,” House Administration Committee chairman Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) told Breitbart News of the push to bring Bragg in. “We look forward to his response.”

Steil chairs one of the three congressional committees—the others being the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and the House Oversight Committee chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY)—that demanded Bragg appear for a transcribed interview with congressional investigators to explain his rationale in the looming indictment of former President Donald Trump.

As long as this kabuki continues, it's good for Trump, and he'll continue to look good in the polls. The conventional wisdom is that Bragg and the leftists who've pressured him to move are doing the worst possible thing for themselves, unless you atrribute to them a calculation that this will give Trump the 2024 nomination and make him an easy target for whomever the Democrats nominate. Actually, I think it's still too early for that sort of handicapping.

But I don't rule DeSantis out. In his interview with Piers Morgan last week, he made a good case against Trump on two major issues:

[I]n a series of jabs at likely his biggest rival for the Republican nomination, DeSantis slammed Trump over his character failings, chaotic leadership style, and for his handling of the COVID pandemic — especially in keeping controversial health chief Dr. Anthony Fauci in his post helping to run the White House coronavirus task force.

. . . When I asked DeSantis to cite specific differences between him and Trump, he said: “Well, I think there’s a few things. The approach to COVID was different. I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he got way too big for his britches, and I think he did a lot of damage.”

DeSantis also slammed Trump’s chaotic, self-obsessed, divisive management style: “I also think just in terms of my approach to leadership, I get personnel in the government who have the agenda of the people and share our agenda. You bring your own agenda in, you’re gone. We’re just not gonna have that. So, the way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama, focus on the big picture and put points on the board, and I think that’s something that’s very important.

". . . you can call me whatever you want, just as long as you also call me a winner because that’s what we’ve been able to do in Florida, is put a lot of points on the board and really take this state to the next level.”

DeSantis in that interview is saying he isn't going to go after Trump on issues like Stormy Daniels -- they play into Trump's strategy, to stoke sensation and get press coverage, which benefits him no matter what. On the other hand, Stormy Daniels? I wouldn't go near someone like that without a hazmat suit. Somehow I think DeSantis has that much sense. In fact, my gut instinct is that DeSantis is that smart, and he's also ruthless.

Whoever goes after Trump has to be smart, which people like Liz Cheney or Alvin Bragg aren't. But they have to be ruthless and even mean, which is what you also have to be to beat the Democrats. I think DeSantis is the guy to watch.

Kabuki

At pto-Trump Breitbart News: Donald Trump Jr. and Others Blast DeSantis Response to Looming Donald Trump Arrest: ‘Pure Weakness’. At never-Trump Red State: Trump Keeps His Eye on the Ball, Rants About Ron DeSantis by Insinuating He's Gay.'

At least for trhe short term, the beneficiary of the arrested-on-Tuesday kerfuffle will be Trump, simply because he'll be the focus of the news cycle whether he's arrested or not. The best point I've seen has been that the arrested-on-Tuesday issue is Trump's creation, since he made the announcement, and for that matter, his gift has always been finding ways to get free coverage from the media. And if there have been complaints that the possibility of a Trump arrest or indictment stole news coverage from the latest Hunter Biden payments, that's still Trump's doing, right?

This piece at Hot Air suggests there's only upside for Trump.

Until the actual order (if it exists) is signed, Alvin Bragg still has time to walk back from the brink. And that would probably be a good idea. Virtually every legal analyst who isn’t effectively on the payroll of the Democrats has said that the hush money charge wouldn’t amount to more than a misdemeanor and even then the prosecution would have to prove there was an intent to commit fraud of some sort. Granted, Bragg could probably find a never-Trump judge who is willing to throw the book at him, but the conviction would probably crumble on appeal.

Then we have all of the people who are predicting that arresting Donald Trump in this fashion would prove to the world that the Democrats are engaged in a political witch hunt. Trump would use that moment to his advantage and, at least according to some, it might just launch him back into the White House.

I’m not at all sure that this should be seen as a foregone conclusion this early in the primary process. There is a lot of ground to cover between now and then and Trump’s support, while still significant, is far from universal in his own party. But none of that makes arresting him a good idea, even for his loudest critics.

And even if the arrest doesn't happen -- remember that Trump himself predicted it -- he can claim that Bragg backed down. and he made him do it.

But let's recall that the subtext of the coverage over the last several days is DeSantis, which again Trump has raised with his Truth Social post:

Trump took to Truth Social to say it would be unfair if DeSantis were attacked for grooming young girls or being gay. Trump's post didn't leave much to the imagination: It included a picture of a man, allegedly a younger DeSantis, standing with a group of young women, one of whom is holding a bottle.

"Ron DeSanctimonious will probably find out about FALSE ACCUSATIONS & FAKE STORIES sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser and better known, when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are 'underage' (or possibly a man!)," Trump wrote. "I'm sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do!"

The picture is from a 2021 blog post on a site called The Hill Reporter, which purportedly showed a picture of DeSantis with several young women during his brief time as a high school teacher more than 20 years ago.

As other commentators have said, people have been predicting for seven years now that Trump will be indicted; this is nothing new. It's also too early to predict what will happen in 2024, DeSantis hasn't announced, while several others are already running or are serious about it -- and Biden himself hasn't announced.

So this is all kabuki. But I like DeSantis's attitude:

“We are not involved in this [and] won’t be involved in this. I have no interest in getting involved in some type of manufactured circus by some Soros DA, ok?” DeSantis said, accusing Bragg of creating a “political spectacle” and virtue-signaling to his leftist base.

DeSantis added he has “real issues” to deal with in the Sunshine State.

We need to have someone really mean and really focused to win in 2024.

Superficial To The Core

As I continue to follow the revelations about the Biden family business ventures, I keep getting the impression that we're learning less about payoffs or influence peddling and more about Joe's character. For instance, as of Friday, he went so far as to say about the current revelations of Hunter's 2017 payments to James, Hallie, and another generic Biden, "That's not true".

On Thursday, GOP lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee revealed that they had obtained bank documents showing that Hunter Biden, the president's brother Jim, and Hallie Biden, the widow of his son Beau, received payments from Hunter's business associate Rob Walker and their joint venture with Chinese energy firm CEFC. A spokesperson for Hunter Biden's legal team confirmed the payments Thursday but emphasized that the recipients' accounts "belonged to Hunter, his uncle and Hallie – nobody else."

However, Biden denied that the payments were made when confronted by a reporter on the White House lawn Friday.

"That's not true," the president said, when asked about the GOP lawmakers' findings.

I basically put this in the same category as the legends he tells of himself, along with things like the Amtrak chestnut:

And so, I’m getting on the train on that Friday, and these guys who all became my family — all — the conductor. And a guy named Angelo Negri came up, and he goes, “Joey, baby!” Grabs my cheek like that. (Laughter.) And I thought they were going to shoot him. I really did. (Laughter.)

I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He’s a friend.” He was like, “What the hell.” And he said, “Big deal, Joey. A million…” — whatever it was — “…three-hundred thousand miles. You know how many miles you’ve traveled on Amtrak, Joey?” And I said, “No, Ang. I don’t.” And he said, “At that retirement dinner, we calculated it. We estimated 127 days a year, 250 miles back and forth, 3 — 36 years, then as Vice President. Joey, you traveled more on Amtrak.” (Laughter.)

CNN fact checked the story:

Biden’s account simply does not add up. Biden did not reach the million-miles-flown mark as vice president until September 2015, according to his own past comments. But Negri retired from Amtrak in 1993 and died in May 2014, according to an obituary published online and in the Asbury Park Press, a New Jersey newspaper.

He does this because he can get away with it, and in fact, he's been getting away with it all his life. I think one reason observers think he has cognitive issues is that he wasn't a nationally familiar figure before he became vice president, but when he was vice president, he was, after all, vice president. But as Rich Lowry put it last year,

If the country thought that it was getting a buttoned-up, by-the-books communicator after four wildly undisciplined years of Donald Trump, it knew nothing about Joseph R. Biden’s long career as Washington’s standout long-winded, seat-of-the-pants, poorly informed and misleading talker.

What we're seeing is nothing new:

When his first presidential campaign was falling apart in 1987 because of plagiarism scandals and obviously false boasts about his resume, Biden apologized, saying, “I exaggerate when I’m angry, but I’ve never gone around telling people things that aren’t true about me.”

Nevertheless, The New Yorker reported that at the time he was “getting a reputation as a pompous blowhard, and congressional staffers circulated a spoof résumé with Biden’s picture and accomplishments, including ‘inventor of polyurethane and the weedeater’ and ‘Member, Rockettes (1968).’”

. . . And Jon Favreau, speechwriter for then-President Barack Obama, said, “Biden’s reputation before he became vice president wasn’t ‘middle-class Uncle Joe’ and it also wasn’t too old and out of touch—it was that he was a blowhard.”

My developing view is that Hunter business deals will continue to come out -- Chairman Comer has teased 11 more over the weekend -- but they're going to continue to be small potatoes, five-figure payoffs to one or another of six or seven likely suspects in the Biden family, mostly with plausible deniability to the big guy, who'll continue to bloviate that they have nothing to do with him.

And in fact, net-net, as I've been saying, Hunter has been, and will continue to be, a loss to the family finances, but Joe will simply continue to pay his debts, alimony, legal, tax, or whatever else. Except that Joe won't have the money to back his promises up -- I have no doubt that Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen has been led to believe Joe will backstop her $37,000 a month alimony payments, just as I have no doubt half a dozen lawyers have been led to believe Joe is good for $2000 an hour billings. Good luck.

Joe's a blowhard, and he's always been one. He says what he thinks he needs to say at any given moment, and he gives it no subsequent thought. So far, he's gotten away with it. The upside for him is tht Hunter's rinky-dink con games will never amount to impeachable high crimes, even if Joe got $10,000 here or $50,000 there. Whether he'll ever have a downside in this life remains to be seen, but he's a man utterly without insight and without reflection, superficial to the core. There are people like that, and they prosper. It's a mystery.