What Problem Are They Trying To Solve?

Ever since my colleague Phil began piping up with the question, "What problem are we trying to solve?" in staff meetings at a very stodgy company 30 years ago, this has been one of my favorite analytical tools. I'm sorry to say this never helped Phil's career, though. Indeed, if I were still attending staff meetings, I'd probably have the good sense not to ask it myself. But it's still a useful question. Let's apply it to Dylan Mulvaney, whose latest endorsement is with Nike:

Transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney has secured another major partnership deal, days after Bud Light was criticized for partnering with her.

Mulvaney, an actor and comedian who has been documenting her transition across social media, is now a sports bra model for Nike. It comes after Bud Light partnered with Mulvaney for her Day 365 Of Girlhood video series. The beer brand was met with scorn and calls for a boycott from furious social media users.

Actually, there might be some compelling logic behind having Mr Mulvaney advertise bras, since as far as I can figure this out, bras can do some remarkable things, and if the claim is that with our bra, even a skinny guy can have a bustline, this might even be a winning ad, maybe along the line of the old Avis "When you're only No. 2, you try harder,", or Volkswagen's "It makes your house look bigger". Indeed, from what I read, Mr Mulvaney has so far had no surgery below the neck, and that could be a credible pitch.

But that doesn't seem to be the pitch at all. The difficulty is in trying to determine what the pitch is. Has Nike decided the sports bra market is saturated with women, and it's time to start promoting them with men? It's hard to imagine that. You'd have a better time trying to get Keanu Reeves, for instance, to push your sports bra if you seriously wanted men to buy them. But my purpose here is not to try to answer the question of what problem they're trying to solve, it's simply to ask it.

We do have slightly more information to work with in the case of Bud Light. Alissa Heinerscheid made her debut as the first woman brand manager for the product with its 2023 Super Bowl ad.

Bud Light, the popular beer that has for years used silly ads and sometimes frat-boyish humor to stand apart from the (six)pack, is getting ready to grow up.

. . . “We are ushering in a new era for this brand,’ says Alissa Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, in a recent interview. She vows to “strip away all the loudness and the distractions.”

. . . the younger consumers Heinerscheid wants to bring to Bud Light are looking for something different from the outreach it makes to them.

“Consumers young and old want a brand to stand for something,” she says, and to hear about “a unique benefit.”

The new Bud Light positioning represents a bid to speak to a broader and younger crowd. “We have to bring in new drinkers. That is the name of the game,” says Heinerscheid, who is also the first female executive to oversee Bud Light’s marketing efforts.

. . . “What has worked for us, it’s about zigging when they are zagging,” weaning the brand off the easy jokes and finding something that is more resonant and meaningful. The new ads “are telling a story you want to watch again and again, and that might be the key to standing out.”

Except that if anything is more the opposite of resonant and meaningful, it's Dylan Mulvaney, a 26-year-old actor whose public persona is a giggly, vapid pre-teen girl. But there's no question that people have been watching his Bud Light ads again and again, though it would seem mostly in horror and disbelief. Standing out indeed. Very few stories have covered the reactions of professional marketers to the Bud Light campaign, but an exception is the UK Daily Mail:

Caitlin Wiggins, Director of Marketing at Liquified Creative, also told DailyMail.com that they would not have advised Bud Light to go with the campaign.

She said: 'They are going to have to say something publicly, obviously you are going to get a mix of negative and positive reactions, it doesn't matter on the stance.

'But a lot of the response has fallen under a demographic of a Kid Rock fan, or a typical Bud Light consumer.

'They have obviously tried to get hold of a different demographic, but their previous campaigns seem to be primarily white males doing silly dumb things - and that worked for their marketing previously.

'As a professional I wouldn't have recommended something that is such a 180 from their typical marketing and demographic.

Well, it would be against the law to market beer either to giggly pre-teen girls, which is Mulvaney's schtick, or indeed to those under 21 at all, which is certainly the market transgender therapists and doctors are trying to reach. But in fact, isn't Mr Mulvaney actually a white male doing silly dumb things? In that light, the Bud Light campaign is nothing new. The Daily Mail story quotes another marketer,

Gareth Boyd, Marketing & PR Director at Forte Analytica, says that while he can understand where the decision came from it is 'not the right way to go about it.'

Speaking to DailyMail.com he said: 'I really cannot understand their approach for this because their core audience just cannot relate.

'Cutting your core audience in the hope you can draw a completely new audience in, who haven't been exposed before, doesn't make sense.

. . . 'People pouring beer down their sink, it says quite a bit about how out of touch they have been with this campaign.

'If we had been working with them then it isn't something that we would ever have recommended.

There seems to be little on the web about the outcome of past disastrous woke ad campaigns like Gillette's 2019 “The Best a Man Can Be”. Forbes observed at the time,

Reaction to "We Believe in the Best in Men" has been overwhelmingly negative, with comments on its own Youtube channel running negative by an astonishing ten to one margin. There are those who really like the ad really like the campaign a lot and argue that it is simply trying to reinforce positive behavior. However, the much larger group who dislikes it includes many men who are saying the ad is insulting to men and full of stereotypes. What is perhaps most dangerous for Gillette, however, is the large number of posters who are threatening to never buy the product again.

I would imagine that Ms Heinerscheid is part of a mahogany row in-group, perhaps full of Harvard grads, that will maintain a tight-lipped silence over the outcome of the Dylan Mulvaney campaign -- but I also suspect the whole idea will be quietly dropped and treated in the future as if it never happened. And I'm still not sure if anyone will ever be able to figure out just what problem they were trying to solve.

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.