More On Alissa Heinerscheid, The Bud Light Executive Behind Dylan Mulvaney

I noted yesterday that Alissa Heinerscheid comes from a wealthy family, but it's worth pointing out that, at least back in the day, wealthy people used to hire public relations firms to keep them out of the news, not in it. If Elon Musk is any indication, that's no longer the case, and it's certainly not the case with Ms Heinerscheid. I linked yesterday to a story about her in her pre-Bud Light days that ran in the New Yorker in 2021, which was likely placed by either a publicist or by Ms Heiderscheid herself. At the top of her LinkedIn profile is a plug for that piece, with this comment:

Childhood dream of being featured in the New Yorker achieved. Thank you Lizzie Widdicombe!

I've got to say that there must be something wrong with me, as my own childhood dreams were more like being a cowboy or a firefighter. If I'd had childhood dreams of being featured in the New Yorker, maybe things would have turned out differently for me. But whether she placed herself in the New Yorker or hired a publicist to get it done, we learn a great deal about her in that article.

I have a friend, Alissa Heinerscheid, who works in marketing at Anheuser-Busch. This has always been slightly hilarious, because Alissa is one of the last people I picture when I think “beer.” She’s a former teen harpist; in college, she was known for planning her schedule in twenty-minute increments, not shotgunning cold ones.

This takes me back to David Brooks's 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, in which he describes -- admiringly -- the ability of the Princeton students he interviews to micromanage their own daily schedules. From this, we might infer that Ms Heinerscheid is a grownup version of these same apprentice bobos, which Wikipedia defines:

The word bobo, Brooks' most famously used term, is an abbreviated form of the words bourgeois and bohemian, suggesting a fusion of two distinct social classes (the counter-cultural, hedonistic and artistic bohemian, and the white collar, capitalist bourgeois). The term is used by Brooks to describe the 1990s successors of the yuppies. Often of the corporate upper class, they claim highly tolerant views of others, purchase expensive and exotic items, and believe American society to be meritocratic. The term is also widely used in France.

But this characterization is in fact full of contradictions, both internally and as applied to Ms Heinerscheid. We saw yesterday that she's from a wealthy family and is in fact a Harvard legacy, since her father is also an alumnus. This in itself begins to detract from the idea that American society as the bobos know it is meritocratic, and the Gordon family has apparently been wealthy for several generations; they sold out their share of Gordon Jewelers for about 54% of $311 million.

Let's recall that Jerome Karabel's 2005 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion is a useful and near-contemporary antidote to Bobos in Paradise. According to the publisher,

Many of Karabel’s findings are astonishing: the admission of blacks into the Ivy League wasn’t an idealistic response to the civil rights movement but a fearful reaction to inner-city riots; Yale and Princeton decided to accept women only after realizing that they were losing men to colleges (such as Harvard and Stanford) that had begun accepting “the second sex”; Harvard had a systematic quota on “intellectuals” until quite recently; and discrimination against Asian Americans in the 1980s mirrored the treatment of Jews earlier in the century.

Beyond that, members of each prospective Ivy entering class are divided into "baskets" that are variously assigned to promising athletes, legacies, the children of influential people, prep school graduates, and the children of major donors. Karabel makes Harvard the chief example of this process. It's not hard to surmise that Ms Heinerscheid, a student from Groton, a legacy, and almost certainly also from a major donor family, was admitted under entirely different criteria from a white Catholic working-class public school kid from a rust-belt town. That kid's SATs would have had to be near-perfect, and he'd have had to have some stellar recommendations to boot. That Ms Heinerscheid's backgound was sorta-kinda Jewish is entirely beside the point.

Let's go back to the New Yorker profile:

She thought about an earlier chapter of her life: more than a decade ago, when she was twenty-five, she’d gotten Stage III melanoma. She’d recovered, and she’d had her three children via surrogacy to avoid risking a cancer recurrence. It had been a lonely, excruciating process, and she’d developed an informal sideline, counselling women who were considering surrogacy or in-vitro fertilization, or who were dealing with cancer, or some combination of the two. She’d had around sixty such conversations over the years, and, when she thought about it, she realized that they were among the most fulfilling things she’d ever done. “Talking to women, helping women,” she said—that’s what she cared about most.

This description tiptoes carefully around the issue of surrogacy, and it suggests she hired surrogates to bear all three of her children for medical reasons, but according to cancer.org,

Often, pregnancy after cancer treatment is safe for both the mother and baby. Pregnancy does not seem to raise the risk of cancer coming back.

Both in vitro fertilization and surrogacy raise similar ethical questions. The Catholic Church, for instance, defines "surrogate mother" in part as this, which likely fits Ms Heinerscheid's case:

the woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of “donors”. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy.

These arrangements are typically quite expensive, and they're available primarily to the affluent or the rich. As far as anyone knows, all of Elon Musk's ten children were borne by surrogate mothers. Surrogacy in the US can cost $130,000 and up. That Ms Heinerscheid's New Yorker profile shoud even mention it must be seen as an instance of conspicuous consumption, even if the the profile tries to justify it on medical grounds, or mitigate the ethical issue by claiming she counsels women who are apparently conflicted by it. (We must assume she reassures them it's OK.)

So much for David Brooks's claim that the bobos disdain pretentious display of wealth and privilege. But let's look at another feature of Ms Heinerscheid's lifestyle, the Harvard network. I noted above that she thanks someone named Lizzie Widdicombe for her New Yorker profile. It turns out that Ms Widdicombe is also a Harvard alum, and it's likely that the profile appeared as part of an intricate system of favors and obligations that was already in place among members of Ms Heinerscheid's circle.

Or, for that matter, The Rev John H. Finley IV, who, although an associate priest at a Boston-area Episcopalian parish, presided over her wedding in an affluent San Diego suburb. This can happen if he parties are wealthy enough to fly the priest in for the ceremony. It appears that The Rev Finley IV is another part of Ms Heidenschid's network and an alumnus of both Groton and Harvard. His father, John H Finley III, was also an alumnus of Groton and Harvard, but above all else:

was a family man. Whether bundling the kids into the car for weekends in Waitsfield, VT, at "Toad Hall" or presiding over a house overflowing with friends in York Harbor, ME (where he had an impressive vegetable garden), or expanding a fisherman's shack in Boca Grande, FL, to accommodate visiting children and grandchildren or making time for family trips to special spots from Kenya to Tonga, John did everything for his family.

Again, we're talking about an exclusive, wealthy background. The Rev Finley IV continues a tradition of largesse and service on charitable boards, almnost certainly buttresed by family money:

Reverend John H. Finley IV is the co-founder and head of Epiphany School, a tuition-free independent school for children from economically-disadvantaged families and children who have been abused and neglected. John has also helped launch dozens of other schools inspired by Epiphany’s example and has been involved in starting other initiatives in education including the Nativity Preparatory School in Boston, the NativityMiguel Network, Codman Academy Charter School, Boston Scholars, and Bridge Boston Charter School. He has served as a judge for the Caplow Children’s Prize and is also a trustee of the Stephen Phillips Scholarship Fund, which awards several million dollars a year in college scholarships.

A graduate of Harvard, he remains involved there serving on the boards of the Charity of Edward Hopkins, the Memorial Church, the Open Gate Foundation, and the Signet Society.

His husband, Stan McGee, is a Harvard alumnus (of course), as indeed is Ms Heinerscheid's husband Henry. The cursory seach I made for this investigation suggests she inhabits a close-knit network involving Harvard, Groton, and family money, and she's clearly also a member of David Brooks's bobo class -- certainly as he characterizes it, an American upper class, but there's nothing new about it. In fact, if anything, there are echoes of The Great Gatsby here, something deeply phony.

I'm still not sure how to fight this, but I think it's important to know as much as we can about it. One thing that strikes me is that, unlike the post-Civil War industrialist elite families, Ms Heinerscheid strikes me as deeply insecure -- her childhood dream was to be covered in The New Yorker, and every time she talks about herself, it's Harvard, Harvard, Harvard. From a Jewish family, she somehow felt the need to identify as an Episcopalian. We should at least keep this desperate phoniness in mind when dealing with the current upper class.

Let's Take A Closer Look At Dylan Mulvaney And Bud Light

One of the few news stories to hold its own against the Trump indictment over the last several days has been Bud Light's advertising endorsement of TikTok trans entertainer Dylan Mulvaney:

The trans activist revealed Saturday that the beer company sent packs of Bud Light featuring the influencer’s face as a way to celebrate a full year of "girlhood" that Mulvaney recently reached. Mulvaney said the cans were her "most prized possession" on Instagram with a post featuring "#budlightpartner." A video then featured Mulvaney in a bathtub drinking a Bud Light beer as part of the campaign.

This story supports two of the points I've been making lately, first, that the traditional Ivy League upper class has allied itself with the special-pleading sexual fringe (as well as the urban petty criminal class, but that's a separate subject), and second, that transsexualism is so outside natural law that almost nobody actually wants to have sex with a transsexual.

On the first question, I was fascinated to learn about the background of Alissa Heinerscheid, the Anheuser VP who's running the Bud Light campaign. A screenshot from Linkedin:

As I've sometimes noted here, an Ivy degree is less an indicator of social class than whether someone attended an exclusive prep school, and Groton's alumni include Dean Acheson, Louis Auchincloss, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Francis du Pont, Averell Harriman, Endicott Peabody, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John Hay Whitney. Her wedding announcement appeared in the New York Times:

Alissa Mary Gordon and Henry Charles Heinerscheid were married Saturday evening at St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in La Jolla, Calif. The Rev. John H. Finley IV, an Episcopal priest, performed the ceremony, with the Rev. Eleanor Ellsworth, also an Episcopal priest, taking part.

The bride, 27, and the bridegroom, 28, met at Harvard, from which they both graduated cum laude. In August, they will each begin studying for an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Rev John H Finley IV is also a graduate of Groton School and Harvard College, and he lives in downtown Boston with his husband, Stan McGee.

Her father, Douglas B Gordon, is also a Harvard alumnus and, although he's an attorney, he was also Executive Vice President and Board Member of the Gordon Jewelry Corporation, "the second largest retail jeweler in the USA". He then became President/CEO and Board Member of the Patton Foundation, a "nonprofit founded by granddaughter of General George S. Patton, Jr".

This suggests to me that Ms Gordon Heinerscheid's family is extremely well-connected, although for someone in her father's position -- the apparent beneficiary of a jewelry fortune -- he seems not to have lasted all that long in any of his various career choices, even at running the family business. In fact, it appears that he was the last Gordon to run Gordon Jewelers, which had been in decline under his leadership:

The Gordon Jewelry Corporation, a Houston-based retail jewelry company, agreed today to be acquired by the closely held Zale Corporation for $36.75 a share, or about $311 million, the companies said today.

The cash sale of Gordon, a family-controlled company that was started as a general store in 1905 by Meyer M. Gordon, a Lithuanian immigrant, ends months of speculation over its future.

The shares of Gordon, which traded between $15 and $18.50 in 1988 because of the company's flagging performance in recent years, jumped to $24 in April, when Gordon said it had hired Goldman, Sachs & Company and was considering a sale or a restructuring.

. . . Gordon family members, their relatives and several other investors owning 54 percent of the company have agreed to tender their shares to Zale, the companies said.

But leaving that aside, we can only conclude that the family is upper-crust. Interesting as well is that the Gordon family patriarch was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, and the Gordon family endowed the Gordon Chapel at Houston's Temple Beth Israel, but Alissa and her husband were married at an Episcopalian parish -- I've noted in the past that exclusive New York apartment buildings began to be opened to "Episcopalian Jews" in the early 20th century.

This is the background of the executive who decided it would be a great idea to partner with Dylan Mulvaney to rebrand Bud Light. If you google Alissa Heinerscheid, you learn a lot, actually -- there's a story about how she's dealing with the COVID lockdowns in a 2021 New Yorker piece. She seems to have everyone who's anyone in her rolodex.

To my second question, whether trans women turn anyone's crank, the UK Daily Mail reports,

'Why will nobody kiss me?' Dylan Mulvaney's man-to-girl transition has won her TikTok fame, riches, and allies in the White House, but left her lonely and undateable.

. . . Now the trans poster girl has revealed how her personal relationships have fallen apart, that she struggles to get a date — and is still to be kissed 'as a girl'.

A 2019 Breitbart piece discussed a study that examined the sexual unattractiveness of transgender people:

The government should intervene to boost the sexual attractiveness of transgender people because they are sexually rejected by roughly 97 percent of heterosexuals, and by most gays and lesbians, according to a survey by pro-transgender advocates.

. . . The government intervention is needed because the authors admit their survey of 956 people shows that transgender people are sexually unattractive.

The survey contained a disproportionately large share of young female Canadian graduates and American sexual minorities, but only 3.1 percent of the straight men and women said they would date transgender people.

Transgender men who try to live as women face sexual rejection from 71 percent of lesbians and 97.3 percent of men, the survey said. The survey did not say if the men had undergone cosmetic surgery.

It seems fairly plain that transsexualism is a largely manufactured preference that's being forced on the public by an out-of-touch upper class. Ms Gordon Heinerscheid appears to be the creature of an extensive network that enables this high-level campaign to rework the culture. However, Jeff Goldstein errs in calling trans wokery cultural Marxism:

Whether it’s a country music drag act, a trans-identified light beer, or a march for willing subjugation and a surrender of natural rights to the State, the memetics of cultural Marxism are performative — phony Maoist struggle sessions delivered in swarms to project strength and to dispirit opponents by displaying the inevitability of the mob and its power. It’s a cultural troll. It’s their way of telling you that they are in charge, and that you are helpless. You will conform. You must. What else is there?

What we're seeing with Bud Light is actually an alliance of the Ivy League upper crust -- including inherited wealth and even Episcopalianism of all things -- with the sexual fringe. Neither the upper class nor the sexual fringe has anything to do with Marx or his philosophy, either as he envisioned it or as it was practiced under Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, or any other variation. I don't think we'll be able to confront upper-crust wokery unless we make a greater effort to understand it.

Please Don't Throw Me Over There In The Briar Patch, Brer Fox!

In 2021, I thought Bill Clinton was a pretty good Br'er Rabbit. How wrong I could be. Among yesterday's headlines was, Trump’s Legal “Super Tuesday”: The Trump Arrest Will Start One Of The Most Bizarre Presidential Elections In History. Prof Turley's implication in that piece is that Trump has got the 2024 primary process wrapped up a full year ahead of time, and of course, this is courtesy of his enemies, or more accurately, an unreliable and out-of-control faction of his enemies, the Lumpenproletariat represented by leniency-for-criminals District Attorney Bragg.

The New York political establishment is belatedly waking up to what it's done.

Acting New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan rejected pleas for extended coverage by multiple media outlets — including the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post — ahead of Trump’s first court appearance after they declared “this indictment involves a matter of monumental significance.”

. . . Merchan said while the media’s request was understandable, the news organizations’ interests in providing the broadest possible access to the proceedings must be weighed against “competing interests.”

His ruling came after Trump’s legal team argued against having cameras in the court room, saying a “circus-like” atmosphere would result, as Breitbart News reported.

I think the intent from Trump's team is not so much to avoid a "circus-like" atmosphere entirely, rather that it be Trump's circus-like atmosphere. Rolling Stone reports,

A law enforcement official tells Rolling Stone that the former president was offered a chance to surrender quietly and be arraigned over Zoom. Instead, Trump opted for a midday, high-profile booking at the Manhattan courthouse, the official says.

“He wanted a perp walk; he wanted daylight hours,” says the law enforcement official, who’s involved in aspects of the security planning. “He wants to get out of the vehicle and walk up the stairs. This is a nightmare for Secret Service, but they can only strongly suggest — not order — that Trump enter through the secure tunnels. Trump wants to greet the crowd. This should be a surprise to no one — especially not his detail.”

Secret Service had argued in favor of holding the proceedings outside of court business hours, at night with minimal cameras and less risk. But Trump, a source close to his legal team says, wants to create the type of scene that he believes will galvanize his supporters.

“It’s kind of a Jesus Christ thing. He is saying, ‘I’m absorbing all this pain from all around from everywhere so you don’t have to,’ ” says the source. Describing the message Trump hopes to send his supporters, the source says: “ ‘If they can do this to me they can do this to you,’ and that’s a powerful message.”

If the "law enforcement source" is with NYPD, there's a good chance he's Catholic, and when he calls it "a Jesus Christ thing", he's referring to Holy Week. Somehow somebody in Bragg's office thought it would be a good idea to get him in soonest, like Tuesday, and seems not to have noticed it's Tuesday of Holy Week. This is just one of the problems Bragg's people have brought on themselves.

Trump's progress to his arraignment from Mar-a-Lago was national news with live coverage of his quasi-presidential motorcades.

The route to the airport was lined with supporters holding pro-Trump flags and cheering for the president. Trump entered the airport with an 11 car motorcade.

Most networks carried the historic departure. Trump is the first president in history to be indicted.

Trump sells papers. Trump brings viewers. People click on Trump. No matter how they hate him, the media can't resist Trump. And now he's historic news. Pace William Barr, there's been no eminence grise to warn the Democrats of what they've created.

Consider: even if Judge Merchan imposes a gag order on Trump, he'll just go to ralles and say, "You know? There's ONE THING I can't talk about! And you all know what that is!"

The crowd will go wild.

Nobody thought this through. The Trump indictment looks to have unified the Republicans behind Trump a year ahead of the primaries -- while Biden may postpone his own decision to run until fall.

As Long As We're On William Barr

Yesterday, Mr Barr continued to speak on interview shows on Trump's legal issues. On Fox News, he said,

In a Sunday interview with Fox News' Shannon Bream, Barr was asked whether Trump would personally defend himself in court if his indictment went to trial.

"I'm not his lawyer, generally I think it's a bad idea to go on the stand," Barr replied. "And I think it's a particularly bad idea for Trump because he lacks all self-control, and it would be very difficult to prepare him and keep him testifying in a prudent fashion."

Here I think Barr is seriously missing the point. Trump has a public persona to be sure, and part of it is his irrepressible naughty-boy image. But it's a persona, and it's part of his appeal to a broad swath of the public. Take the famous example of the Access Hollywood tape, which culminated in remarks he made about Arianne Zucker, whom he and Billy Bush were waiting to meet in a 2005 studio visit:

I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the [redacted]. You can do anything.

The great irony of the episode was that, despite the unaninous condemnation of Trump from all quarters, he went on to win the presidency in the 2016 election, while Billy Bush, his interlocutor and a prominent member of the Bush family, was the one who lost his job as Today show anchor in consequence. What was delicious was Trump's role as truth-teller, the Huckleberry Finn, the Holden Caulfield, the Caleb Trask or Jim Stark as played by James Dean. An executive coach describes the role of the truth-teller in leadership:

If you’re in a powerful position or leadership role in which people look up to you, you’re expected to lead in integrity and truth. If leaders lie, how can they ever be trusted?

In my leadership coaching, one of the most important things I teach my clients, is the remarkable power of being the truth teller and what it takes to speak with candor:

A truth teller will communicate and not hold back. Communicate, communicate, communicate. That’s the role of a leader. If you hold back, people will know something’s going on, and they’ll fill the gap with gossip, paranoia, and suspicion—wreaking havoc on the culture of your organization. Be the leader who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

. . . Great leaders are remarkable truth tellers. They know that honest hearts produce honest actions.

Well, if you're a star, they'll let you do it. Isn't that the lesson Harvey Weinstein taught us?

But let's consider another factor: Trump is no dummy. Billy Bush, a mediocre member of the Bush extended family, began a television career at the same time his uncle Dubya rose to the presidency. Somewhere in that encounter, Trump recognized that Billy Bush wasn't playing in Trump's own league, and whatever the outcome of the confidences he exchanged, they would be at best harmless -- but in fact, after 11 years, they would actually help him be elected president. The Wikipedia link above covers the aftermath of the revelation:

The incident was condemned by numerous prominent Republicans. Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus said, "No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever." The RNC suspended all support of Trump's campaign shortly thereafter. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, tweeted, "Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America's face to the world." Ohio governor John Kasich, a former primary rival to Trump, called the remarks "indefensible"; former Florida governor Jeb Bush, also a former primary rival, called them "reprehensible".

They, of course, would all be among those Trump might characterize as "losers", which they all literally were, but in their conventional mindsets, they were keen to get out of the way as Trump rode to inevitable defeat. I doubt if William Barr was prominent enough in 2016 to be asked for his reaction to the story, but his 2023 characterization of Trump as lacking all self-control could certainly be consistent with Romney, Priebus, Kasich, or indeed Billy's uncle Jeb.

But let's look at what I think is Trump's strategy. On March 18, he made a social media post claiming his indictment and arrest would take place the following Tuesday, but when that didn't happen, commentators began to suiggest that District Attorney Bragg was backing down, or that the grand jury had lost its will to indict. Trump was theoretically going to fade from the scene. But Trump has had a team, or actually teams, of lawyers working on his cases for months, certainly since the Mar-a-Lago raid. We've got to assume they've been planning contingencies and gaming outcomes for a Bragg indictment for a lot longer than just March 18.

So the indictment happened almost two weeks late, on March 31, but it happened. Let's be aware that Trump's lawyers have had an indictment and its outcomes in the script all along. Over the weekend, commentators began to say, "Oh, no! What if the judge, Juan Merchan, imposes a gag order on Trump?" as if this was going to be a big surprise. Right, Trump's lawyers sure will be surprised by that move, huh? What did Trump post this past Friday?

“The Judge ‘assigned’ to my Witch Hunt Case, a ‘Case’ that has NEVER BEEN CHARGED BEFORE, HATES ME. His name is Juan Manuel Marchan,” Trump wrote, alleging he’d been “hand-picked” for the case by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat.

Now, if I were William Barr, I'd be about to bust a blood vessel over Trump's irresponsibility and lack of self-control. What a terrible thing to do, assail the judge's integrity! How did his lawyers, who must be impotent in the face of this man's narcissistic rage, allow him to post such a thing? Now Judge Marchan will certainly impose a gag order! Indeed, Trump's subsequent announcement that he would make a statement after his arraignment will just provoke the judge further!

But Trump and his lawyers, who probably don't charge as much as Hunter and Joe's, have certainly gamed this whole sequence out weeks ago. The judge will impose his gag order, and there'll be more hand-wringing about an unprecedented crossing of the Rubicon -- and Trump will be the center of the news for a week and more, with his sympathy and support growing apace. And what's crazy is that Trump and his lawyers have taken a page from the Chicago Seven trial of 1969. Judge Marchan will become the next Judge Julius Hoffman:

Hoffman's most notable case was the trial from April 9, 1969, to February 20, 1970, that involved charges against protesters arrested during the 1968 Democratic Convention, originally known as the "Chicago Eight". During the course of the Chicago Eight trial, Hoffman refused to allow the defendant Bobby Seale to represent himself after Seale's original attorney became ill. This prompted conflicts with Seale that led to Hoffman ordering Seale to be gagged and shackled in the courtroom and eventually jailed for contempt. Finally, Hoffman removed Seale from the trial, leaving the case with only seven defendants, at which point the trial became known as the "Chicago Seven" trial. Because of this, and his non-objective attitude, Hoffman became the favorite courtroom target of the Chicago Seven defendants, who often openly insulted the judge. Abbie Hoffman (no direct relation) told Judge Hoffman "you are a shande far dee Goyim" ["a disgrace to the Jewish community in front of the Gentiles" in Yiddish] and that "[y]ou would have served Hitler better." He later added that "your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room." Both Rennie Davis and Jerry Rubin told the judge, "This court is bullshit."

So far, Bragg and Judge Marchan are playing into Trump's hands. Small-time New York machine politicians are setting themselves up for a national loss, in the media and almost certainly in the courts, even if they temporarily prevail over a rinky-dink case.

Trump understands media. So did Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, and the rest of the Chicago Seven, along with their lawyers. William Barr does not.

William Barr Returns To The Debate

Willaim Barr, a never-Trumper who was Trump's second attorney general, has become the most visible proponent of the eight-dimensional chess interpretation of the Alvin Bragg Trump indictment:

“Politically, it’s gonna be damaging, I think, to the Republican Party simply because I think it’s a no-lose situation for the Democrats,” Barr continued. “I think the impetus is really to help Trump get the nomination, focus the attention on him for two years, have this thing swirling around, plus whatever else comes, which I think will be damaging to whoever gets the nomination.”

In other words, whatever prospers Trump hurts the Republicans, and this is prospering Trump (darn it!). My overall view continues to be that at this stage in 2015, Jeb Bush was the consensus favorite for the Republican nomination, while Hillary was likely to win the general. But the whole story of 2015 was that the elite consensus never factored Donald Trump into the equation, and as best I can tell from current reports,

New post-indictment polling data from former President Donald Trump’s campaign shows that not only does he hold a commanding lead in the GOP primary and a lead over Democrat President Joe Biden in a likely general election matchup but that more voters in both the primary and the general election say they are now going to vote for Trump because of it.

The one thing to keep in mind is that, as we learned in 2015 and 2016, politics is never a sure thing. But we also learned in those years that it's also a major error to discount or underrate Donald Trump. Wlliam Barr, an Ivy League white-shoe lawyer who worked for the CIA out of college, is a multimillionaire member of the one-percent elite that, Republican or Democrat, has been instinctively opposed to the populist movement Trump represents. Barr, possibly because he's a member of C Wright Mills's power elite himself, seems to view Trump's opposition on the left as something like his own comfortable environment, run by a concursus bonorum omnium. But this isn't the current actual state of the leftist coalition.

As I pointed out on Friday, the New Deal coalition has been gradually fraying at the edges since the 1972 election, and as Joel Kotkin points out in a recent interview, the Silicon Valley one-percent have become the main funders of the Democrat party, when previously it had been labor unions.

[T]he old industrial companies in Silicon Valley, such as Hewlett-Packard, were very cognisant of the importance of their workforce. Business management author Tom Peters wrote about this quite a bit. Executives were dependent on the people on the factory floor. The grunts were important. But if you’re a social-media company, there are no grunts. You will hire grunts to do your catering, but that’s about it. You don’t have a bunch of high-school graduates who may be very good at doing one particular thing – you don’t need those people anymore. So they don’t even have any contact with the vast majority of the population. Early 20th-century business magnates like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford, bad as they were, at least had to think about the people on the line, because they made their products.

. . . At the same time, in their unbelievable arrogance, Silicon Valley elites decided to become the main funder of the Democratic Party and to identify with every ‘progressive’ cause.

This brings us back to the Starbucks dillemma, that the one-percent entrepreneurial elites and their allies in the broader gentry romanticize the Lumpenproletariat and the sexual special pleaders who make up other key members of the current leftist coalition without recognizing that neither of those factions is reliable, and indeed, as Kotkin also points out, they've lost touch with labor, which had previously been a reliable member of the New Deal coalition. We need look no farther than another aspect of the Starbucks saga, the growing movement to unionize its workforce.

I think Mr Barr is assuming there's still some Averell Harriman type quietly arranging things at the top of the Democrat coalition, and District Attorney Bragg has just as quietly squared the whole strategy with his office. But Bragg is not a quiet sort of guy, and if that were the case, we wouldn't have people seriously advancing these opinions on the Trump indictment:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg thrust America into uncharted political and legal waters when he secured a grand jury indictment against Donald Trump. Soon his team will face withering scrutiny that will test three crucial elements of his case: the credibility of his witnesses, the clock known as the statute of limitations and the consistency of his application of fraud law.

. . . "It's the worst, weakest, most abusive case of prosecutorial indiscretion," Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, an unbashed liberal and self-described Joe Biden supporter, told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "In my 60 years of practicing law, I have never seen a weaker case."

If there were in fact some Averell Harriman, some Nelson Rockefeller, quietly guiding affairs via a Henry Kissinger or a George Shultz, there might be a sure thing behind something like a Trump indictment. The problem is that nobody has any sense that there's a sure thing here -- instead, it's uncharted territory, a crossing of a Rubicon, which an established elite simply does not envision. If an elite were running the show, everything would already be a done deal, Trump would be off to Lompoc or Lewisburg as we speak, having already entered his guilty plea a la, say, Martha Stewart, Michael Milkin, Ivan Boesky, Bernie Madoff, or Spiro Agnew.

That this hasn't happened is already an indication that there's no Averell Harriman type quietly guiding events, and Bragg is instead simply playing with fire. In this sort of uncertain atmosphere, the one mistake past experience suggests we shouldn't make is to underestimate Donald Trump, however events may ultimately play out.

Woke Vs Natural Law

I mentioned briefly in yesterday's post the contradiction that emerged in the US Left after the first phase of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The general abolitionist argument dating from the 18th century was that Africans are fully human and can't, unlike animals, be treated as property. Lincoln's very similar arguments against slavery were always natural-law arguments concerning human rights:

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Or more succinctly, at the same link:

I have made it equally plain that I think the negro is included in the word "men" used in the Declaration of Independence.

A problem arises when other movements, seeing the tremendous success of the natural law argument behind first, abolitionism, and then its successor, the Civil Rights movement of the earlier 1960s, attempt to hitchhike on natural law to claim equivalent prestige. This happened beginning in the late 1960s with an assertion of equivalent natural rights for the same-sex attracted, but this fell into something of a gray zone from the start. Natural law theory would in fact suggest that same-sex acts are against nature, but there's a separate question of whether they should be criminal that is much more distant from just natural rights.

The current Roman Catholic pontiff just recently expressed a position that isn't really opposed to Catholic tradition, which itself is generally based on natural law:

“Being homosexual isn’t a crime,” Francis said during an exclusive interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Francis acknowledged that Catholic bishops in some parts of the world support laws that criminalize homosexuality or discriminate against LGBTQ people, and he himself referred to the issue in terms of “sin.”

But sin isn't always a crime -- it's a mortal sin to stay away from mass, and it's a mortal sin to cuss in the name of the Almighty, but nobody wants people arrested for those things. If you do stay away from mass or cuss in the name of the Almighty, I'm sure any pastor is delighted to welcome you back if you change your mind and want to stop, which I think is Francis's meaning here. And he's still perfectly clear on transsexualism:

“Gender ideology, today, is one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations,” Francis said in the conversation.

The pope made the comments in a March 10 interview with Argentinian newspaper La Nación — the conversation was translated into English by the Catholic News Agency.

“Why is it dangerous?” he continued. “Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”

“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.”

This is a natural law argument. Transsexualism is against nature, especially if it involves changing our bodies to mimic the other sex via surgery or hormones. (In fact, I think it's a confirmation of natural law that, as some studies are beginning to show, almost nobody wants to have sex with a transgendered person -- they just don't appeal to our natural instincts.) Here's where President Biden's remarks from yesterday are especially sad:

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we want you to know that we see you just as you are: Made in the image of God and deserving of dignity, respect, and support.

We’ll never stop working to create a world where you won’t have to be brave just to be yourself.

In the natural law context, as articulated just weeks ago by the Holy Father, people who want to deny the differences between men and women are pretending both men and women weren't created individually in the image of God, specifically male and female, not as generic unisex beings. President Biden, a nominal Catholic but a man without insight or reflection, approved words written for him that contradict recent statements by the pope himself -- indeed by a pope who is thought in some quarters to be a heteodox liberal.

The overall problem is what happens to a country whose founding principles have been deliberately turned against natural law.

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.