William Barr Is The Energizer Bunny

William Barr is still holding to the theory that some sort of Establishment -- into which he has special insight -- is pushing the various cases against Trump in order to stampede Republicans into nominating him as a sure loser for 2024. I've said here that at minimum, this violates the law of parsimony, since it's too complicated a theory. Alan Dershowitz, a smarter guy, has been putting forward a simpler theory all along, which agrees with public statements by Trump's current prosecutor Alvin Bragg, that his indictment is meant simply to prevent Trump's 2024 candidacy in the first place.

Barr made his case on Trump most recently last night:

“I said he’s frequently his own worst enemy and he digs himself holes,” Barr said on CNN Primetime on Thursday night. “And he does some things that are reckless that are clearly gonna give rise to investigations and look into them. And that included both the documents in Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 episode.”

. . . Barr has been openly critical of Trump since leaving his administration, even saying last week that Trump is the “most likely” GOP candidate to lose to President Biden in a hypothetical 2024 presidential election. Barr stepped down as attorney general, apparently at Trump’s request, in his final month as president and just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The problem for Barr is that other legal analysts have been saying that all the potential cases against Trump are varying levels of flimsy, including the Mar-a-Lago documents case that Barr mentions. On that matter:

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, who serves as a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said President Joe Biden’s document haul and those found during the FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August will “neutralize” each other.

This will make it difficult for the Justice Department to make anything stick, he said.

“The end result here, by the way, will be a tie. Each of these allegations neutralizes the other,” Dershowitz said Friday evening in an interview with The National Desk.

“It means that it’s impossible that Donald Trump will ever be prosecuted for his mishandling of classified information at Mar-a-Lago, and obviously, the special prosecutor will not prosecute President Biden,” he added.

Now, it's certainly possible that even if Prof Dershowitz says these cases are weak, prosecutors will bring them anyhow, as indeed Alvin Bragg has done in the face of prior decisions not to go ahead with the New York indictment. The difficulty is the practical effect of bringing them. Up to now, Mr Barr has scoffed at Trump's rise in the Republican polls as an indication that they will simply nominate him as a loser in the general election. But this isn't such a sure thing now:

[N]ot once during the 2020 election did the average of [Real Clear Politics] national polls show Trump with a lead. Throughout the campaign, the closest Trump came to Biden was a four-point deficit.

Today, the RealClearPolitics poll of national polls shows Trump with an outright lead of 1.7 points. It bears repeating that this never happened once in 2020. Even left-wing pollsters show Trump doing well. The Marquette poll shows a tie. Quinnipiac only has Biden up two points. Rasmussen, one of the only pollsters that show Biden with a respectable approval rating, has Trump up by seven.

As I've been saying here, none of this is predictive so far in advance of the 2024 election. On the other hand, it does begin to refute any attempt by Mr Barr and others to discount Trump's potential candidacy on the basis that he's popular only with the Republican base and will surely lose in a general election -- at least, "if present trends continue", which is never a sound assumption.

But what this data does support is that the Bragg indictment is playing to Trump's strategy, which is to use the media itself to keep him in the media, and we might well begin to assume that the second wave of Republicans who are currently announcing or exploring 2024 candicacies, like Gov Haley and Sen Scott, are actually angling for the vice presidential spot. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, with no political experience, likely wants to raise his profile in anticipation of a cabinet appointment.

And what nobody's mentioned so far is that the Trump surge is also feeding off the Bud Light controversy, which industry observers say has gained surprising traction:

Backlash to Bud Light’s celebration of transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney’s "365 Days of Girlhood" doesn’t appear to be dwindling.

"This boycott seems to have more legs than most," Justin Kendall, editor of beer industry trade publication Brewbound, told the New York Post.

"It started out as a conversation on social media and has breached into mainstream media," Kendall said. "Bud Light is the best-selling beer in the country."

If it's in mainstream media, it's there right next to The Donald. The stories play against each other. I simply don't know if prosecutors in Florida, Georgia, and Washington will ever recognize that additional indictments on flimsy cases will do precisely what they don't want -- keep Trump in the nightly news month after month, portraying him as the one figure the establishment can't tolerate in the political process. They'll make Trump's case for him -- and Prof Dershowitz even makes the point that not only can he run for office from a prison cell, he can serve as president from there, too.

If there's a monolithic establishment behind the scenes making the decision to indict Trump -- which Mr Barr seems to think, and he even seems to think he's part of it -- they've in fact got to be wondering if maybe it's going backfire on them if they keep it up.

So I Reread Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade"

Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run.

I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic, she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said,

I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

It looks like Wolfe wrote this essay right before Star Wars premiered, but the Force fits into this scheme as another 1970s manifestation. This is also consistent with accounts given by detransitioners in the Emma Jo Morris series. For instance,

"The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The objection many raise to Dylan Mulvaney's public persona isn't that it's "almost fake", it's that it's completely fake. Some use the term "womanface" instead of "blackface". But as with New Age cults and religions, transgenderism is sold as a therapeutic solution to life's problems. Morris quotes Pamela Garfield-Jaeger in another essay in her series on transgender:

"I don’t understand it, in terms of from the professional side, how they can believe in this,” Garfield-Jaeger told Breitbart. “I understand how a person can be tricked to believe in it if they’re told, ‘All of your pain and suffering will go away if you take this, almost, magic pill,’ which is become transgender, and then you get all this positive reinforcement.”

. . . She said that “naive” mental health providers, though, are acting out of codependence, as they do not “affirm” any number of other maladaptive behaviors, such as drug addiction or eating disorders.

. . . “If you look at other disorders — of course now they don’t want to call it a disorder, they compare it more to an immutable characteristic, but we know that’s not the case because people are choosing to do it — if you look at other mental health issues, like an eating disorder, or drug addiction, you don’t have institutions being, like, ‘Well you need to affirm their addiction,’ ‘We need to affirm their eating disorder.'”

Tom Wolfe has another important insight in "The Me Decade":

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me.

Wolfe attributes these aspirations to women, or at least women of the prosperous 1960s and 1970s, and the slogan was clearly meant to influence women of that time -- but the implication now is that it applies even more to transgender pseudo-women like Dylan Mulvaney. Wolfe is no longer around to draw new conclusions from this, but it seems convincing that the transgender movement is yet another outcome of the 1960s cultural changes.

Transsexualism In A Cultural Context

I spent my last two years of high school in Bethesda, which even in the 1960s was in the vanguard of secularism -- where I definitely lucked out was that even though my sister went to the exclusive National Cathedral School, some of my acquaintances there went to Sidwell Friends, and my college roommate went to St Albans, I went to one of the county public schools, although the culture there was equivalent (I dated the daughters of the DC Bar Association president and the US Ambassador to Mali). Somehow in that culture there was a sense in the atmosphere that the human race was evolving, and it was time to leave behind any childish or primitive reliance on religion.

It wasn't just Hugh Hefner who argued that religious proscriptions on this or that were of a piece with Old Testament dietary restrictions, which were perfectly fine for their day as a way to prevent food poisoning and such, but now we have refrigeration, so we have to rethink these things. By the same token, traditional natural-law ideas about chastity and marriage no longer apply, because now we have penicillin -- and when The Pill came on the scene, the arguments were so much the stronger.

It didn't help in my case that I was raised Presbyterian, which was weak tea indeed in the face of these arguments (my parents sent my sister to NCS for reasons of upward social mobility; the family continued to attend Bethesda Presbyterian until I left for college, but when I returned for Christmas, they'd moved on to All Saints Episcopal Chevy Chase). In college I was hearing about Darwin and Freud as established truth, and this effectively continued the argument that traditional natural-law moral theory was obsolete. What took place soon enough isn't really relevant to this account, but let's say for now that The Episcopal Church had nothing to do with it.

Nevertheless, recent developments that I've noted here, the apparent effort of the FBI to infiltrate the Catholic Church, and the effort of the Walter Reed medical center to decertify Catholic clergy for providing pastoral services there, follows the implicit public health policy during the COVID pandemic that religious services were "inessential" to remind me that the argument that religious belief is equivalent to childhood belief in Santa Claus is very much current, and it's driving public policy more than ever.

So I'm intrigued to see what's represented as the first part of a series at Breitbart News by Emma Jo Morris, who is currently Politics Editor at Breitbart News and had previously reported on Hunter's laptop at the New York Post. I believe she is a lesbian who is ardently opposed to trans ideology, which isn't actually unusual for traditionally same-sex attracted people.

In the piece, she ventures into religious issues as they relate to transsexualism. She talks with Estella Suarez-Hamilton, a young woman who “transitioned” as a teenager and presented herself as a man:

Estella views the transgender movement as a pseudo-spiritual belief system she describes as “modern Gnosticism,” which includes initiation, rituals, and rules.

“If you are thinking about how to describe the sect, it is very much connected to, like, the modern Gnostic principles. This is a syncretic cyber sect of modern Gnosticism,” Estella said, “and I love how complicated it sounds, because the trans community loves language, and they love to complicate language to the nth degree. So, I think that this term is just very — from my experience — very accurate to explain what I went through, that’s what I think happened, and that’s how I can articulate it.”

“The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The term "gnosticism" is productive here, as it actually is in reference to a wide range of New Age beliefs not immediately associated with transsexualism. This essay at Word on Fire puts the traditional Catholic view of gnosticism in a contemporary context:

Gnosticism tends to set up the material and the spiritual – the body and soul in particular – in opposition, spurning the former as “the darkness” and clinging to the latter as “the light.” But this is far from some extinct or esoteric belief system. As Ross Douthat argues, “the Gnostic spirit is everywhere in contemporary religion” – from new age spirituality to the New Atheism.

For instance, we see the “utter pessimism” of Gnosticism in the hit series True Detective when Rust Cohle reflects on the tragic death of his daughter. His neo-Darwinian commitments notwithstanding, Cohle’s pessimism pushes him into Gnostic territory, where the soul is “yanked” out of non-being and “forced” into being, flesh is “meat,” life is a “thresher,” and parenthood is a “sin”. (Most Gnostics in the ancient world, not wanting to perpetuate the bondage of bodily life, were notoriously ascetical when it came to sex and reproduction.)

As a practical matter, that the current corporate-political establishment is endorsing transsexualism is not a Marxist-derived atheism, but in fact, it's a radical revision of gnosticism, the idea that your soul is so unattached to your body that you can simply adopt a whole new "gender identity". There's a lot to consider along this line -- I relize now that I need to reread Tom Wolfe's 1976 "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening".

It's Worse Than They Told Us

A couple of montha ago, on February 24, I used the photo of a Stasi informant above at the top of a post covering the February 2023 leak of a memo from the FBI Richmond field office talking about the danger of traditionalist Catholics, the sort who go to Latin mass, and how they might turn into domestic terrorsts. As of March 23, the FBI issued a statement saying

that the "Domain Perspective (report) did not meet the FBI's exacting standards and was withdrawn." He added, "Upon learning of the document, FBI Headquarters removed it from our internal system. The FBI also initiated a review — which is now ongoing."

In my February 24 post, I asked,

Given this is the FBI, I'm suddenly suspicious that they say they've removed a document, but, er, have they stopped paying any informants who've been spying on Catholics suspected of attending Latin masses? They said nothing about that in their annoucement, but given that by their own admission, they had some nice lady spying on defendant Rehl's family prayer meetings without result, how do we know one or more of our own dear family friends isn't an FBI informant?

In the February coverage of the Richmond report, it was revealed that the FBI did have at least one informant infiltrating Latin masses in Virginia. It turns out that I wasn't the only person curious about how far this whole idea had gone. Via the Washington Examiner link above,

The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray over the agency's investigation into Catholic parishes in the United States.

Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) demanded that Wray testify regarding a Jan. 23 document from the Richmond Field Office. It was titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

. . . Jordan described the [FBI's March 23] response as "substandard and partial" because it contained a significant number of redactions. He demanded full access to the documents relating to the effort, characterizing those given so far as preventing "the Committee from fully assessing the content and context of the documents and obtaining information requested from the Bureau."

Jordan quoted a passage from the Richmond document as particularly concerning. It encouraged agents to engage congregants in Catholic parishes "to enlist their assistance to serve as suspicious activity tripwires."

Although the Richmond field office document has apparently not been released and was heavily redacted in the first place, new accounts like this one at CatholicVote say

According to the limited documentation the FBI released to Congress, the FBI had sought to use Catholic churches as “new avenues for tripwire and source development,” including at “mainline Catholic parishes” and among “local diocesan leadership.”

The reference to "mainline Catholic parishes" and “local diocesan leadership” strongly suggests FBI efforts have gone beyond Latin mass traditionalists in attempting to penetrate Catholic institutions. 22% of the US population in 2017 was Catholic. On Feb 13, 2023, in the wake of the initial leak of the Richmond Field Office document, Bishop of Richmond Barry Knestout issued a statement that read in part,

The leaked document should be troubling and offensive to all communities of faith, as well as all Americans. I am grateful for the Virginia Attorney General and 19 attorneys general who have called upon the government to publicly release all materials related to the production of this memo. If evidence of extremism exists, it should be rooted out, but not at the expense of religious freedom. A preference for traditional forms of worship and holding closely to the Church’s teachings on marriage, family, human sexuality, and the dignity of the human person does not equate with extremism.

. . . “I call on all national representatives from the Commonwealth of Virginia in the House and Senate to exercise their role of oversight, to publicly condemn this threat to religious liberty, and to ensure that such offenses against the constitutionally protected free exercise of religion do not occur again. Racism, religious bigotry, violence, and discrimination have no place in our Church or teachings.

As of yesterday's statement from Chairman Jordan, the FBI had not responded to his requests to provide all the documents relating to the effort to recruit Catholic informants, something Bp Knestout would clearly like to see as well. How many informants nationally does the FBI have attending Catholic masses, Bible studies, or Knights of Columbus meetings? What are they finding? What are they reporting? And as we've been learning, the dividing line between "informant" and "provocateur" is thin indeed. Who's doing what here?

When I look at Abp Timothy Broglio's difficulties with the Walter Reed medical center canceling the ability of the military services archdiocese to supply Catholic chaplains there, it's hard to avoid thinking there's a more widespread sentiment at high levels of the deep state against the Catholic Church, but when I consider the National Catholic Reporter's alarm that the US bishops voted for the conservative Abp Broglio as USCCB president by 138 to 99, and the following day,

elections for other positions indicated a near sweep for conservative candidates. Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City defeated Newark Cardinal Joseph Tobin for secretary. New committee chairs included Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois; and Bishop Michael Burbidge of Arlington, Virginia,

I've also got to think the bishops are on to something. The Church is changing.

In a more or less unrelated episode in Boston two weeks ago,

The FBI and other federal agents burst into the wrong Boston hotel room Tuesday night during a training exercise, startling the guest inside who had no idea what was going on as he was handcuffed.

The incident occurred on the 15th floor of the Revere Hotel as agents were conducting a mock investigation. FBI agents were assisting the U.S. Department of Defense in a training exercise inside the hotel to simulate a situation that DOD personnel might encounter in a deployed environment.

"Based on inaccurate information, they were mistakenly sent to the wrong room and detained an individual, not the intended role player," the FBI said in a statement.

The agents targeted room 1505, where a Delta Air Lines pilot was sleeping inside and opened the door, WBZ-TV reported.

When agents went in, they handcuffed the man, who is in his 30s, before interrogating him and putting him in the shower, the news report said.

In a different news story on the raid, a retired FBI agent said,

I do question using a very public hotel and at night is just the very strange piece, because most interviews and interrogations are done in the day, and the law enforcement personnel generally work 9-5, so why are you choosing the nighttime which makes no sense. If this was in fact routine, I think they'll be changing their practices.

Well, maybe they're just trying to get us all acclimated to the midnight knock on the door, huh? It's becoming more clear that the FBI must become an issue in 2024 -- and where's Catholic Joe Biden on the issue of recruiting Catholic informers?

What's Going On At Walter Reed?

I've been following the news releases on the Walter Reed National Medical Center terminating its contract with Holy Name College, a community of Franciscan priests and brothers that had provided pastoral care to service members and veterans there for nearly two decades. Frankly, most of the accounts seem to leave important information out. The most complete is the news release from the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA. I also found the Archdiocese's statement of its mission very helpful. It says in part:

The Archdiocese serves as the sole endorser (certifier) of Roman Catholic chaplains to the United States government. A Roman Catholic priest cannot serve within the United States Military as a priest without the express permission of the Archdiocese.

. . . The Archdiocese is the sole endorser of chaplains for the Veterans Administration hospitals. In 2008, 242 priests were endorsed for service in the Veterans Administration.

. . . Unlike a conventional diocese, the Archdiocese has no parishes or parish registries. Chapels are property of the United States government. Although the Archdiocese exercises jurisdiction over the religious education programs and the celebration of Catholic Liturgy, it maintains no legal jurisdiction over the physical property of the chapel.

What seems to have happened is that the contracting officers at Walter Reed terminated its contract with Holy Name College as of March 31 and substituted a new pastoral services contract with a secular, for-profit company. It then issued a "cease and desist" order to Holy Name to stop providing Catholic pastoral services as of that date, which was just before the start of Holy Week. In response to criticism, Walter Reed told the press on Saturday, April 8,

"Tomorrow, Catholic Easter Services will be provided to those who wish to attend. Services will include a celebration of Mass and the administration of Confession by an ordained Catholic Priest," the statement said. "For many years, a Catholic ordained priest has been on staff at WRNMMC providing religious sacraments to service members, veterans and their loved ones. There has also been a pastoral care contract in place to supplement those services provided."

The Archdiocese's press release, dated Friday, April 7, said in part,

The Franciscans’ contract for Catholic Pastoral Care was terminated on March 31, 2023, and awarded to a secular defense contracting firm that cannot fulfill the statement of work in the contract. As a result, adequate pastoral care is not available for service members and veterans in the United States’ largest Defense Health Agency medical center either during Holy Week or beyond. There is one Catholic Army chaplain assigned to Walter Reed Medical Center, but he is in the process of separating from the Army.

In other words, past the date on which the current Army chaplain leaves the Army, there will be no Catholic chaplain available to Catholics at the largest Defense Health Agency medical center. Without the endorsement of the AMS, no Catholic priest can serve as a VA hospital chaplain. This isn't a service a secular contractor can provide. Separately from the press reklease, AMS Archbishop Timothy Broglio on April 7,

faulted those overseeing contracting at Walter Reed “for not doing their homework on what it takes to ensure Catholic coverage.”

The text of a statement from Walter reed quoted by CNA went on to say,

“Although at this time the Franciscan Diocese will not be hosting services on Sunday at WRNMMC, parishioners of the Diocese while patients at WRNMMC may still seek their services,” the statement concluded.

Clearly there's confusion at Walter Reed about what a diocese is and more particularly the canonical status of the AMS, which has no parishes and thus has no parishioners. The Archdiocese's press statement linked above says,

Ms. Elizabeth A. Tomlin, Esq., General Counsel of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA (AMS), has reached out to the contracting officers at Walter Reed numerous times throughout Holy Week asking for the Franciscans’ Catholic ministry to be reinstated at least through Easter. Walter Reed National Military Medical Center has not responded to these requests from the Archdiocese.

While Walter Reed’s chaplain office claims Catholic care is being provided during Holy Week, the AMS maintains that without Catholic priests present at the medical center, service members and veterans are being denied the constitutional right to practice their religion.

The bottom line seems to be that only the AMS can endorse a Catholic chaplain for a Veterans Administration hospital. Catholics must have Catholic priests to perform key sacraments for the practice of their religion, including the eucharist, confession, and anointing of the sick. A secular contractor has no ability to supply a Catholic priest to a VA hospital. At best, Walter Reed didn't do its basic homework in this matter, especially since about 25% of US service members are Catholic.

Abp Broglio was also elected president of the USCCB last November. At the time, The National Catholic Reporter denounced him as a "culture warrior" and called his election "a mistake". But I think the archbishop is giving the politest possible interpretation to Walter Reed's action in calling it "not doing their homework". I tend to see its action as more of a piece with COVID-based restrictions on religious observance, something that needed to be fought at the time, and something that needs to be fought now. There are people in influential positions who think it's time to wean the human race off religion.

I'll be following developments with great interest.

I'm Just Not Sure About Received Opinion Here

Ann Coulter this past week:

The endless stream of preposterous charges against Trump only helped him.

So why not launch another ridiculous accusation to help him get the nomination? That’s exactly what they did in last year’s GOP primaries, supporting Trump’s nut-bar candidates, knowing they would go on to lose the general election. By boosting Trump’s candidates, Democrats managed to pull out a historic midterm victory for Biden.

And now, they’re doing it again, trying to trick Republicans into choosing the worst possible presidential nominee. Guess what? It’s working! New GOP motto: unable to learn from the third kick of a mule.

In response to Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday, all conservative media swept aside news of out-of-control crime, chaos at the border, fentanyl overdoses and the looming recession. Their No. 1 job became: SAVE TRUMP! A major conservative talk radio host even suggested DeSantis stand down and endorse Trump.

In this case, Ms Coulter is echoing William Barr -- don't be deceived, he's saying, Trump is a loser, and she agrees. But Barr, for whatever reason, nevertheless chose to serve as Trump's attorney general, and if it was just to undermine him as an establishment mole, that says more about Barr than it does about Trump. In 2016, Ms Coulter published In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, and in 2018, she published Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind. Since that time, for whatever reason, she's completely reversed her view. What will she publish next year? Who knows?

And her characterization of Biden's performance last November isn't a "historic midterm victory" -- if it were, it would be comparable to Dubya's in 2002. More accurately, the Republicans underperformed but still eked out control of the House, which has allowed them to pursue an anti-Biden legislative agenda without the need to control the Senate. Nobody ever predicted the Republicans, with or without Trump, woud gain a veto-proof majority in either chamber. Short of being able to defeat a Biden Supreme Court nominee, the Republicans did about as well as they could have done with a Senate majority as well.

In 2015, Rush Limbaugh made it plain that he intended to be neutral over the 2016 Republican nomination, although his listeners sometimes became uncomfortable when he made too many favorable references to Trump.

Consider a caller on Tuesday’s show. Ted Cruz is someone who has proven his conservative character over years, the caller said, whereas Trump is “an overnight thing.”

He told the talk radio host, “I'm a character guy, which I believe that's who you are.” But the caller was beginning to have doubts about Limbaugh’s earnestness. Is the positive coverage he’s given Trump due to genuine faith in the candidate’s virtues? Or is Limbaugh boosting the insurgent campaign for entertainment value?

This was a story from August 2015, when a good many commentators were in fact calling Trump a temporary blip. (I recall Michael Medved calling Trump a combination of Mussolini and the Music Man. He lost his syndication a couple of years later.) Up through the 2016 primaries, as the link above suggests, the "serious" candidate for conservatives was Ted Cruz, but my sense of things at the time was that Limbaugh was leaning increasingly to Trump. I recall him suggesting strongly on his show in the spring of 2016 that yes, if you wanted a down-the-line conservative, Cruz was your guy, but if you wanted someone who could win, it would be Trump.

I remember Limbaugh also favorably quoting Robert Reich, who said Trump was far more dangerous to the left than Cruz, because Trump had the flexibility to change his strategies, while Cruz would be a predictable conservative on any issue. But true to his promise (and his established policy), Limbaugh never endorsed Trump before he won the nomination.

The 2023 equivalent to the 2015 Trump vs Cruz is Trump vs DeSantis. I've spoken favorably here on DeSantis's positions on key issues from COVID to transsexualism, and Ann Coulter's position in the link above would be the equivalent to the 2015 view that Trump isn't so much a conservative as a self-promoter, and what we need is a conservative. But so far, rank-and-file Republican opinion doesn't match this view:

Former President Donald Trump gained ten points of support among Republicans since his arrest on Tuesday, expanding his lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), according to a hypothetical Republican primary poll.

The Ispos/Reuters poll conducted after Trump’s arrest in Manhattan for a case many conservatives have dubbed “politically motivated” finds that 58 percent of registered Republicans want him as their nominee. DeSantis, who has not announced a candidacy for the race, secures second place with 21 percent of support. No other candidate eclipsed five percent of support[.]

I think the Barr-Coulter theory that the Democrats are pursuing criminal cases against Trump to stampede Republicans into nominating a loser violates the law of parsimony, "a principle according to which an explanation of a thing or event is made with the fewest possible assumptions". To assume Tuesday's arraignment is actually a sleight-of-hand to distract Republicans from nominating a better candidate is simply too complicated. A more reasonable assumption is simpler: Democrats think Trump is the most dangerous for their agenda, something people like Robert Reich have understood from the start, and voters are picking up on that signal.

What happens in April 2023 has very little predictive value for anything that may happen any time in 2024, but one thing we've learned about Trump as a public figure is that voters already know eveything there is to know about the guy. There are no more October surprises to spring on him -- even if some new Playboy bunny comes out of the woodwork to allege this or that from 1997, it's already factored in. The same applies to the series of criminal cases they're trying to bring against him in Florida, Washington, or Georgia -- they're all of a piece, all clearly political, and none would be brought against a Democrat.

The public -- that is, that part of the public that isn't aligned with the one percent, the gentry, the sexual fringe, or the urban criminal class -- has already factored this in, and each subsequent indictment will simply increase Trump's popularity as the single candidate who's dangerous to the Democrats and who'll act in the plebs's overall interests. Neither the Democrats nor the Barr-Coulter types have figured this out yet. But Trump himself certainly has.

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.