In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

I've always thought that Sam Bankman-Fried was basically Jeffrey Epstein 2.0 -- both had perfected the skill of convincing people they were something they weren't, for instance, good at math. Although he never had a four-year degree in anything, Epstein got his first job teaching math and physics at the exclusive Dalton School, whose headmaster had been William Barr's father, apparently because he convinced "Ace" Greenberg, CEO of Bear Stearns, that he was good at those things. Epstein went on to build a highly successful career on smoke and mirrors -- even during his lifetime, there was occasional puzzlement over exactly how he made his money, and since his death, there still haven't been satisfactory answers. The one thing we're sure about is we can't be sure about anything. As of 2019, the consensus was something like this : Now, a new book is attempting to fill in those chilling details - with journalist Dylan Howard and a team of inve...

Yesterday, Mark Dice asked a question I haven't heard anyplace else : what is Bud Light going to do for Pride Month, which is coming up in June? Apparently they've had major campaigns in the past, as the artwork above reflects. Are they going to try to pull this off again? They've already gone out of their way to put themselves between a rock and a hard place. For instance, Though it didn’t come in June, Bud Light recently made a play for queer consumers when it produced a single can of the brand’s beer featuring trans TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s likeness. On April 1, Mulvaney made an Instagram post promoting Bud Light to her nearly 2 million followers. But the company’s response to the conservative backlash that followed suggests that its campaign didn’t come with any real commitment to inclusion. . . . After what's been reported as a significant dip in sales, the company tucked tail and sought to distance itself from Mulvaney. Anheuser-Busch C...

It looks like after more than a month of the ongoing Dylan Mulvaney-Bud Light debacle, Anheuser and its parent have settled on a communications strategy: their market is overreacting. Per the Daily Wire: Anheuser-Busch is trying to convince wholesalers that the Dylan Mulvaney controversy that has caused sales of Bud Light to plummet has been overblown. The brewery sent a letter to wholesalers about the backlash to the trans-identifying influencer posting a TikTok video with a can of Bud Light that had Mulvaney’s face on it. In the video, Mulvaney celebrated 365 days of “being a woman.” “This was one single can given to one social media influencer,” the letter declares. “It was not made for production or sale to the general public. This can is not a formal campaign or advertisement.” It looks like the global conglomerate that owns Anheuser Busch has signed on to this version aS well. Per CNN: Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Michel Doukeris addressed the Bud Light controversy in the c...

I never watched Tucker Carlson, I never fell for the fresh-faced preppie schtick , and the mod hairpiece always gave me a sense the guy was phony. I also have little sympathy for Fox, except to note they're in the entertainment business, and I sort of expect them to be competent at running that business, which at this point they don't seem to be. The most recent reports say Fox's overall ratings are down 45% since whatever they did to take Carlson off the air. This makes it a corporate crisis, and that makes it worth studying for its own sake. How is Fox responding? Mostly it appears Fox's strategy is to leak dirt about Carlson to distract attention from its own bungling. But not every adult was ever a Tucker Carlson fan, so this goes only so far. One Fox strartegy has been to tie Carlson's departure to the Dominion settlement, as well as to the Abby Grossberg suit against Fox for various sorts of discrimination. Indeed, some details of newsroom conduc...

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...