In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

One of the explanations for Fox's sidelining of Tucker Carlson (even the actual nature of the personnel move is now up in the air) that's been making the rounds is that Tucker's invocation of religion finally got under Rupert Murdoch's skin: [Murdoch's} management of News Corp and Fox Corp had become increasingly erratic and one of my sources described him as a “crazy old man.” In particular, it was Tucker Carlson’s frequent invocation of religion and his own religious faith that unnerved Murdoch and left him aggrieved. On Tuesday, Vanity Fair reported that Tucker’s widely acclaimed speech at the Heritage Foundation 50th anniversary gala was a major factor in Murdoch’s sudden decision to terminate him. The speech had religious overtones, and Carlson spoke of the current political moment as being a spiritual battle of good vs. evil. . . . A source told the outlet “that stuff freaks Rupert out. He doesn’t like all the spiritual talk.” The Vanity Fair st...

In this morning's news: Hunter Biden is livin’ large while pretending to be a poor starving artist to avoid child support. At least, that’s what the mother of his out-of-wedlock child claimed in a briefing filed in an Independence County, Arkansas court Thursday. The story quotes Lunden Roberts's attorney Clinton Lancaster: “What Mr. Biden has paid, or received as a contribution, for paying these elite attorneys has a definitive and quantifiable value that goes directly to his income for child support purposes,” wrote Lancaster, arguing that attorney-client privilege did not bar the payment information from discovery. . . . If Mr. Biden can afford a Washington DC, Hollywood, Chicago biglaw, and the best domestic relations attorney on the Texas side of the Texarkana border, he surely must have income for child support purposes." This is a question I've been asking about both Hunter and his father all along, although i'm also skeptical that ...

The headline was a wweek ago in The Intelligencer, but so far, the rain just hasn't stopped. The most recent showers, though, haven't covered new developments -- instead, they've delved into details of the extended relationship among Hunter, his associates Devon Archer and Eric Schwerin, and now Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his wife, Evan Ryan. Much of this comes from a period around 2010 that's been documented all along on Hunter's laptop, and it turns out to be suggestive enough to lead one YouTuber to ask if Hunter was "creeping on" Blinken's wife, while another asked straight out if he was "shtooping" her (I have no opinion). I have, though, been maintaining a detailed file of links and data points covering Hunter's career, and I've been noticing that his life before the events of 2015, which extend from his brother Beau's death to his separation and divorce from his first wife and his affairs with Beau's widow,...

Now and then in the wake of the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney controversy, I've seen the observation that it marks the end of a moral panic. I certainly think this is true, but the odd thing is that the panic is backward. What we see in the conventional definition of moral panics is that, as in the image above, a new, seemingly threatening phenomenon arises that represents a potential undermining of prevailing social values. Thus past moral panics have involved witches, red scares, reefer madbness, crime waves, mods and rockers, and satanists. According to Wikipedia , [T]he concept was first developed in the United Kingdom by Stanley Cohen, who introduced the phrase moral panic in a 1967–69 PhD thesis that became the basis for his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. . . . According to Cohen, a moral panic occurs when a "condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests." To Cohen, those who sta...

I've already said, speaking of Alissa Heinerscheid, the former Bud Light marketing VP who hitched her wagon to  Dylan Mulvaney's star, that something about her reminded me of The Great Gatsby . This may have to do with the peculiar intersection of upper-crust society, the presumptive locus of stability and social confidence, with ambitious upward mobility, insecurity, and phoniness. We saw it with Ms Heinerscheid, the product of generational family wealth, Groton, Harvard, and The Episcopal Church, who nevertheless felt the need to hire a coach to tell her how to think : As it turns out, the Bud VP has herself a “professional coach.”. . . when speaking of her professional coach, she becomes animated, shifting her posture to a straighter, higher position, indicating she holds her “handler’s” ideas in higher esteem than her own. When shifting back into expressing her own thoughts or personal experience, Heinerscheid’s body language shrinks and retreats. Just recently, I...

I've noted here several times that Hunter has been seen frequently at the White House since the middle of last year, and in fact he went with Joe and his Aunt Valerie on a very private trip to Ireland earlier this month. The latest theory is from Miranda Devine at the New York Post , who has been following Hunter closely: Hunter Biden is believed to be hiding out at the White House while his baby mama goes on the warpath. . . . Roberts’ legal maneuvers in Arkansas lend weight to the rumor in Washington, DC, that Hunter has been living at the White House with his second wife, Melissa Cohen, and their 3-year-old son, Beau, allegedly to avoid being served with legal papers. Numerous sightings over the past six months lend credence to the idea, with Hunter and his family spotted trailing his father and the first lady onto Marine One for weekends away to Delaware or Camp David, or for longer vacations at the borrowed homes of billionaires. . . . Surrounded by his father’s Sec...

At Hot Air: Have you noticed that there seems to be a campaign emerging to second guess Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection? . . . Over the weekend, two major newspapers published editorials pointing out that Biden’s age cannot be ignored. . . . Concerns about Biden’s age are legit, says the NYT editorial. This is behind a paywall, and like the Wall Street Journal's version, it says nothing new. What's important is that received opinion is deciding Biden isn't working out, but they're settling on a version that absolves them of complicity. Yes, they supported Biden in 2020 (in the WSJ's case, implicitly by being never-Trump) but that was before Biden went into his terrible decline. How were we to know? This isn't the candidate we told you to vote for! But the recoxrd is pretty plain that Biden's shortcomings were visible well before this year. As of 2008 : Rolling Stone magazine's Ben Wallace-Wells related an amusing anecdote about...

Although it's behind a paywall, the Wall Street Journal has editorialized that Biden shouldn't run in 2024, and the web has picked up the main points : The Wall Street Journal editorial board argued President Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election Friday, amid reports he is likely to announce his 2024 bid next week. "The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake," the editors wrote. The editors continued, "asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish." This is not the WSJ of the supply-side 1970s, when it had new things to say. They don't like Biden, but they don't like Trump, either. Maybe they hope Romney will stage a comeback. Their interpretation of Biden is utterly conventional: The editors alleged the White House "g...

This moirning's news was full of gleeful headlines that the horsefaced and sublimely self-satisfied Alissa Heinerscheid, late brand marketing VP for Bud Light, is on leave of absence : Anheuser-Busch has shared a statement with Beer Business Daily, informing the publication that Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid is off the brand in the wake of the Mulvaney Bud Light can controversy. “We understand she has decided to take a leave of absence,” Beer Business Daily announced. “Todd Allen is now VP of Bud Light, reporting directly to CMO Benoit Garbe. It appears Todd was most recently VP of global marketing for Budweiser.” However, I posted a week ago that Alissa was already out, and that she'd deleted her LinkedIn profile was a good indication. I suspect that she hadn't been in to the office since the Dylan Mulvaney story broke. But let's read some other tea leaves here. The story says, “Todd Allen is now VP of Bud Light. . . . It appears Todd was most rece...

One of my stylistic models for some years has been the mid-20th century noir writer Jim Thompson, author of titles like The Alcoholics (1953), The Criminal (1953), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), and The Grifters (1963). He never titled any of his novels The Frammis , but it was a term his characters frequently used, which in context referred to the overriding scheme of avarice and betrayal that drove the narrative. The media, even on the right, have been on an extended spring break, but as they slowly return to working at the office, the intermittent leaks are beginning to reveal the shape of the Biden frammis. First, he's clearly going to run. This was solidified during that strange trip to Ireland with his sister, Valerie, and his living son, Hunter. We all know who Hunter is, but it's worth catching up on Valerie. According to Wikipedia , Valerie Biden Owens (November 5, 1945) is an American political strategist, campaign manager and former educator. She is t...

One: Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits At least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation that was covered up at the highest level, according to an explosive new court filing. A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI. The story reprises, in more detail and with new information, a concern that had been raised in the wake of 9/11, that protocols between FBI and CIA operations prevented agents on the ground from reporting what they were learning about the upcoming attacks to their respective chains of command. In late 1999, with “the system blinking red” about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the US, the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an “oper...

I really have no comment to make on his recernt dire predictions about artificial intelligence -- either he doesn't understand it very well, or I don't, but this is a guy who has something like ten kids, all parented via surrogacy from what we can tell, along with an additional bunch of frozen embryos he made with Amber Heard. Allegedly. I'm going to trust my judgment over his in practically any matter, including what to do with Twitter. On the other hand, he's unexpectedly said something smart : Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “if anyone would know about aliens on Earth it would probably be me.” “To the best of my knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere in the universe,” Musk said. “So it might be there. You know, in physics they call it sort of the Fermi paradox after when Enrico Fermi, he’s an amazing physicist, asked the fundamental question, where are the aliens?” “I’ve seen no evidence of aliens,” Musk said, adding that i...

Maybe it's my age, but in recent days I keep returning to the 1970s, rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade", thinking about the implications of the 1972 election, suddenly realizing that the Teixeira leaks are nothing but a reprise of the Pentagon Papers, and musing that this all carries lessons for the Bud Light fiasco. What brought me to focus on this was remarks by Marianne Williamson, a member of my 1970s demographic, that President Joe Biden “hasn’t done enough” for working-class Americans . She spoke at a restaurant in Dover, NH: “Now, I am a Democrat. I am a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe that the Democratic Party should stand for unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States,” she went on to tell the restaurant. “In order for us to win in 2024 and in order for us to repair this country, we have to be willing … to cut the cord with the last 50 years of history, we have to be willing to begin a new era,” Williamson said. It's hard ...

The two intelligence experts I quoted yesterday (if that's what they are) are in agreement that the documents in the Teixeira leaks are valid, and they suggest an imminent reassessment of Western policy. But the overall context of the war had begun to convince me that there was going to have to be a reassessment whether secret documents were released or not. An expected winter counteroffensive didn't take place, while the consensus now is that the spring counteroffensive has been delayed . Here is a CNN assessment from last Friday of what the Teixeira documents say about the Ukraine war. It's worth noting that the US right has been opposed to the war from the start, while CNN, aligned with the left, has up to now supported it. Somne of the documents divulge key weaknesses in Ukrainian weaponry, air defense, and battalion sizes and readiness at a critical point in the war, as Ukrainian forces gear up to launch a counteroffensive against the Russians – and just a...