In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

There's no need to dwell at length on what's starting to look like a steady decline in Bud Light's numbers -- for instance : In the week that ended April 22, the brand’s in-store sales plummeted more than 26%, according to figures reported by Bump Williams Consulting, a Connecticut-based firm that specializes in the alcoholic beverage industry. And the decline is only accelerating. The week before, sales dropped by 21%. The week before that, it was 11%. . . . But if the company can’t stop the decline in sales, especially as the peak beer-drinking summer season approaches, “then Bud Light is in serious trouble this year. And I think it runs the risk of losing that No. 1 position at the end of calendar year 2023 to Modelo Especial,” Williams said. But I think the most significant comments came in Tim Pool's podcast yesterday , where he said at about 0:50, I'm hearing people talk about how at bars, it's not even political. There are people chatting t...

It's important to repeat that neither Fox nor Tucker Carlson has said much of anything about exactly what happened with Mr Carlson or why. Fox's statement a week ago was, "FOX News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor." But even this appears not to be fully accurate, since Carlson himself later texted , "I'm still employed by Fox." On Sunday I posted the explantion that I've found most credible, though it's only one of many possible ones, that Rupert Murdoch, 92 years old and behaving erratically, fired Carlson impusively in a fit of pique over largely uncontroversial remarks he made at a Heritage Foundation gala. One factor that supports this surmise is that Fox has had so little else to say about the whole episode, which suggests that Murdoch, the big boss who can fire anyone, was behind it, but nobody who works for him has been able to com...

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...