In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Maybe it's because even conservative media seems to be on permanent spring break, but one observation I simply haven't seen is that both the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney fiasco and Tucker Carlson's firing from Fox are textbook corporate crises. I sometimes worked in corporate contingency planning when I worked, so I have some familiarity with the field. Of the two, Anheuser-Busch seems to be the company that belatedly recognized it was facing a textbook crisis, but its response was, and continues to be, nevertheless textbook wrong. Over the weekend, this news came out : Anheuser-Busch executives have promised beer distributors that going forward marketing will be heavily screened following Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney backlash. Bosses held a closed-door meeting with distributors in Washington, DC, this week where they laid out future plans - and promised to 'spend heavily' on Bud Light to salvage its public image, according to reports. Accounts differ on...

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...