The New York Times Signs On To Biden-Is-In-Decline

At Hot Air:

Have you noticed that there seems to be a campaign emerging to second guess Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection? . . . Over the weekend, two major newspapers published editorials pointing out that Biden’s age cannot be ignored.

. . . Concerns about Biden’s age are legit, says the NYT editorial.

This is behind a paywall, and like the Wall Street Journal's version, it says nothing new. What's important is that received opinion is deciding Biden isn't working out, but they're settling on a version that absolves them of complicity. Yes, they supported Biden in 2020 (in the WSJ's case, implicitly by being never-Trump) but that was before Biden went into his terrible decline. How were we to know? This isn't the candidate we told you to vote for!

But the recoxrd is pretty plain that Biden's shortcomings were visible well before this year. As of 2008:

Rolling Stone magazine's Ben Wallace-Wells related an amusing anecdote about Obama attending his first meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which happened to be a confirmation hearing for Condoleezza Rice.

About midway through the meeting, Joe Biden is "going on and on" and Obama scribbles a note and passes it back to his aide.

The note said simply: "SHOOT. ME. NOW."

Although the anecdote was told in 2008, Rice's confirmation hearing took place in 2005. Yesterday I linked to a TIME piece from 2019 that, in discussing Biden's unimpressive start in his presidential campaign that year, linked farther back to a 1987 post-mortem on his disastrous first presidential campaign, where observers were concerned that he was a "shallow vessel", and whose staffers discounted his gaffes by claiming he was on "autopilot".

What we've begun to learn only more recently has been the decades-long family influence-peddling grift, and in connection with the grift, the wild overspending that's so far been most visible with Hunter, but the extent of the back-door financial relationships throughout the Biden extended family has yet to be revealed with any clarity. As Hunter's ex-wife Kathleen Buhle put it in excerpts from her memoir,

After filing for divorce in 2016, Buhle begins the slow process of taking back control over her own life after 23 years as a stay-at-home mom, including over her own finances, only to discover that they had no savings whatsoever. “Both our houses had a double mortgage and no equity. We had credit card debt and medical bills. We were in terrible financial shape. The sheer amount of our debt overwhelmed me. We owed as much for both houses as when we’d bought them. We were underwater,” she writes.

But it's increasingly likely that Hunter's financial issues had metastasized further throughout the Biden family:

There could be upwards of 12 Biden family members who benefitted from influence peddling by the president and his son, according to the top Republican on the Oversight Committee.

. . . There are nine known family members involved in the shady business deals, according to [Chairman James] Comer, but he now says there could be at least three more.

. . . 'I mean, this was the Biden family influence peddling scheme,' the chairman from Kentucky continued. 'And when people say, well, they were involved in ventures around the world, I haven't found a legitimate business on the Biden end.'

. . . He said these decisions and moves are likely related to payments made to LLCs from legitimate businesses as a way to launder money to Biden's family members.

'I found legitimate businesses that were paying the LLCs that were then turning around and laundering the money back to the Bidens,' Comer detailed. 'But I haven't found any legitimate business dealings on the Biden end.'

. . . 'This is bad. There are more laws that appear to me that have been broken than just tax evasion. And there are a lot more Bidens involved than just the president's son and his brother.'

I noted yesterday that we know very little about Joe's rapid rise to the Senate from an unsuccessful attorney to obscure member of a local county council, although a brief review of those early years suggests he was able to garner support in what Alan Dershowitz calls a highly corrupt Delaware legal environment.

The question in my mind is how all of this is such a big surprise. What's coming out is that Biden has in fact been the same guy for decades. His sister Valerie has run most of his campaigns throughout his career, and it appears that much of his extended family has been in on the grift for the same amount of time. Hunter was actually a latecomer. Ted Kaufman, a DuPont retainer, was a Biden adviser from his first Senate campaign until he became Joe's successor in his Senate seat. Kathy Chung, recently interviewed by Chairman Comer's committee, is another lifelong Biden functionary

If there's been nothing new in Bidenworld, why haven't we had coverage of Biden as he is now and always has been well before now? I'm deeply suspicious of this new explanation that Biden is "in decline".

The Wall Street Journal, Alan Dershowitz, And The "Delaware Way"

Although it's behind a paywall, the Wall Street Journal has editorialized that Biden shouldn't run in 2024, and the web has picked up the main points:

The Wall Street Journal editorial board argued President Joe Biden is too old to run for re-election Friday, amid reports he is likely to announce his 2024 bid next week.

"The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake," the editors wrote.

The editors continued, "asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish."

This is not the WSJ of the supply-side 1970s, when it had new things to say. They don't like Biden, but they don't like Trump, either. Maybe they hope Romney will stage a comeback. Their interpretation of Biden is utterly conventional:

The editors alleged the White House "goes to great lengths" to hide what they speculate is Biden's declining health.

"But his decline is clear to anyone who isn’t willfully blind," they argued.

They pointed to his lack of press conferences, scripted appearances, and public stumbles as evidence for their position.

The hypothesis here is that Biden is in a decline from a different Biden of an earlier era, but my problem is that we don't really have evidence of that more capable, dynamic younger Biden. During the runup to the 2020 presidential campaign, TIME noted Biden's unremarkable performance as of 2019 and looked back to his disappointing perforrmance in 1987 and 1988:

By the time he did declare his candidacy for the presidency, on June 9, 1987, he had been in the Senate for more than a decade, though his age — now seen by some as a weakness — was still one of his strengths.

“What people don’t remember today about Biden in the 1980s is that he was considered by quite a few people as a bright new hope, different from other Democrats,” says [Laurence I.} Barrett, [a former TIME national political correspondent].

. . . “The Democrats had taken two shellackings at the hands of Reagan, and there was this thought, not really based on a lot of facts, that the Democrats were too soft, too feminine, too much into interest politics, and Biden was seen by his own people as an antidote to that — good looking and athletic — who would come across as stronger,” Barrett says.

Not that the candidate was without his drawbacks: “Biden’s mouth is both his greatest asset and his greatest liability,” Barrett wrote shortly after Biden announced his candidacy. That analysis would prove enduringly prescient.

The 2019 TIME piece brought up the 1987 charges that he plagiarized a speech by UK politician Neil Kinnock and the fumbling responses by his handlers, including

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know what he was saying. He was on autopilot.”

In other words, the argument that the Biden of 2023 is in a decline from a youthful, adroit, dynamic Biden assumes facts that are not in evidence. He was Mr Magoo in his early 40s as he is now in his early 80s. If he was thought to be strong, good-looking, and athletic in the 1980s, this was proven to be a fantasy at the time.

But this leads to another question: If Biden has always been a shallow vessel on autopilot, how did he get to the Senate in the first place, and how did he manage to stay there? Interestingly, Alan Dershwoitz made remarks just this past week that may be helpful. In this YouTube video at about 2:25, he says in a completely different context,

Let's remember this is Delaware. I've argued cases, I think it's now 32 states, out of the 50, 32, maybe 34, something like that; I've never argued in a more corrupt state than Delaware. In Delaware the judges basically pick each other. They come from a small number of elite law firms, and then they go back to those law firms, and then they favor the lawyers from those law firms. The favorite word in Delaware, everybody knows it, is "home cooking" or home court advantage. If you're a Delaware lawyer, you get a home court advantage.

But this isn't necessarily limited to Delaware, either: the South Carolina "Murdaugh Murders" scandal shows how a tight insider clique can control things elsewhere in small backwater states. What Dershowitz saw -- and he's quite an insightful guy -- was a courthouse version of a larger phenomenon called the "Delaware Way", described in more depth by The Intercept:

The Delaware Way is the idea that there is a synergy between the success of the state’s benevolent corporate monarchies — the chemical companies, debt collectors, and pharmaceuticals that call the First State home — and the well-being of the state’s people, all of it eased by compromise and good will among leaders of both parties. The Wilmington News Journal explains that the locally famous ethos is possible because the state is “so small, the line goes, that we can get all the right people in one room and get things done.” Like runoff from its chemical plants, the Delaware Way is in the water.

The DuPonts are at the center:

Two du Ponts would go on to become U.S. senators, and a third would serve as Delaware governor. Delaware’s elite social and political circle has largely remained intact for more than 200 years now.

From what I read, the Bidens' Wilmington home is a former DuPont mansion that was apparently provided to young Joe at the start of his career at a considerable discount. Biden's rise hasn't been well covered, but it took place at an early age, and his accomplishments were unimpressive: from the TIME link above, he graduated 76th out of 85 in his Syracuse law school class, and he "failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote." The lad was clearly not white-shoe law firm material.

But he found favor with the DuPonts presumably because he looked good, had no center, and would do precisely what he was told. This was Biden in the beginning, is the Biden now, and is the Biden that ever shall be.

Semi-Denouement For Bud Light

This moirning's news was full of gleeful headlines that the horsefaced and sublimely self-satisfied Alissa Heinerscheid, late brand marketing VP for Bud Light, is on leave of absence:

Anheuser-Busch has shared a statement with Beer Business Daily, informing the publication that Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid is off the brand in the wake of the Mulvaney Bud Light can controversy.

“We understand she has decided to take a leave of absence,” Beer Business Daily announced. “Todd Allen is now VP of Bud Light, reporting directly to CMO Benoit Garbe. It appears Todd was most recently VP of global marketing for Budweiser.”

However, I posted a week ago that Alissa was already out, and that she'd deleted her LinkedIn profile was a good indication. I suspect that she hadn't been in to the office since the Dylan Mulvaney story broke. But let's read some other tea leaves here. The story says, “Todd Allen is now VP of Bud Light. . . . It appears Todd was most recently VP of global marketing for Budweiser.”

That says to me that Todd has been demoted, and he's been told to fix Bud Light fast or else. I think the next head to roll will be Brendan Whitworth, the show horse CEO of Anheuser. A couple of weeks ago, the talk was that Dylan Mulvaney was the biggest marketing blunder since New Coke, but I think it's becoming clearer that Dylan Mulvaney is the biggest marketing blunder since marketing even became a thing, whenever that was.

That Anheuser would make such an announcement, in even this offhand way, is an indication that they've begun to get the message, and what was needed was a firing. But the other thing that's needed by general consensus is a specific apology. I assume Todd Allen has the task of working this out in a way that satisfies both the suits and the public, or he'll be the next to go. But I think some sort of semi-specific apology will be the next step, followed by an announcement on Mr Whitworth's plans.

And one of my favorite topics has been the Fringe TV series and how it's a sendup of Harvard, which gave us Timothy Leary and Ted Kaczynski, a blend of which characters the actor John Noble brilliantly portrays in Dr Walter Bishop. But Harvard has more recently brought us Ms Heinerscheid and Mr Whitworth. Indeed, Mr Whitworth was formed as well in the CIA.

It isn't helpful to gloat, but at least in this one inning, it's plebs 1, toffs 0.

The Frammis Is Taking Shape

One of my stylistic models for some years has been the mid-20th century noir writer Jim Thompson, author of titles like The Alcoholics (1953), The Criminal (1953), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), and The Grifters (1963). He never titled any of his novels The Frammis, but it was a term his characters frequently used, which in context referred to the overriding scheme of avarice and betrayal that drove the narrative.

The media, even on the right, have been on an extended spring break, but as they slowly return to working at the office, the intermittent leaks are beginning to reveal the shape of the Biden frammis. First, he's clearly going to run. This was solidified during that strange trip to Ireland with his sister, Valerie, and his living son, Hunter. We all know who Hunter is, but it's worth catching up on Valerie. According to Wikipedia,

Valerie Biden Owens (November 5, 1945) is an American political strategist, campaign manager and former educator. She is the younger sister of Joe Biden, the 46th and current President of the United States. . . . Owens has played a substantial role in all of her brother's political campaigns. She was the campaign manager during all of his Senate elections and for his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns, as well as a senior advisor to his successful 2020 presidential campaign.

Based on the sketchy reports that have been coming out, Valerie appears to be a key beneficiary of the baksheesh that streams into the Biden family accounts, while Hunter has been, and apparently remains, the financial vice president of the enterprise. As I've noted here, the program at least since last summer has been to rehabilitate Hunter, with his wife Melissa and toddler son Beau providing a renewed beard of respectability.

But it seems fairly plain that Hunter and Valerie have been Joe's key advisers all along, with the trip to Ireland serving as a strategy session for both the campaign and the continuing family business. Meetings could be held in effective seclusion, without even the presence of normal White House aides who might prove untrustworthy.

Their plan is in general conformity with the new Democrat agenda -- as Victor Davis Hanson puts it, the purpose of the elderly white guy Joe and other figures like Nancy Pelosi, Steney Hoyer, and Dianne Feinstein is to provide a veneer of respectability for the crooks and radicals who are actually running the show.

Decades ago, they sometimes supported strong national defense, secure borders, gas and oil development, fully funding the police, and a few restrictions on partial-birth abortions.

Not now.

. . . Their final role is to acculturate the electorate to the new Democratic Party.

Its radicals are breathing down their necks to get out of the way. Yet for a while longer they still need such an ossified veneer of respectability to ease the transition to what is now essentially a socialist-European green party.

It seems to me at this point that the deal, for Joe and the Biden family -- or more colorfully put, the frammis -- is to charge the radicals, and the corporations who are paying the radicals off for protection -- money for their part in enabling the scheme. The radicals are making out big time on several counts. They're promoting an alliance with the urban petty criminal class, which must certainly involve payoffs from the organized crime that sponsors drugs, sex trafficking, and other activities, with woke policies, which require corporate payoffs to evade implementation and enforcement.

All well and good -- but figures like Sen Feinstein have probably been naive all along in not demanding to be paid handsomely for their part in enabling the corruption by making it respectable. Thus the radicals want her out soonest, but they'll certainly tolerate Joe for another election cycle -- in fact, at least for the next cycle, they even need him. Joe knows this, and his proxies Valerie and Hunter spent their time with him out of view in Ireland finalizing the plan.

A key part of the deal is that Joe on one hand won't oppose the radical quasi-agenda, which will be implemented at the deep state level, while there will effectively be no expectations for Joe himself, who can continue to spend much of his time retired but nominally on the job. As long, of course, as Joe and the family get their cut.

The problem with a frammis is that it involves a fairly intricate scheme of avarice and betrayal -- but at some point, all options for betrayal are on the table. What if the cartels and corporations who are funding the frammis decide finally not to pay the Bidens? That question is at the back of my mind here.

Two Headlines Over The Past Week

One: Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits

At least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation that was covered up at the highest level, according to an explosive new court filing.

A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI.

The story reprises, in more detail and with new information, a concern that had been raised in the wake of 9/11, that protocols between FBI and CIA operations prevented agents on the ground from reporting what they were learning about the upcoming attacks to their respective chains of command.

In late 1999, with “the system blinking red” about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the US, the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an “operational cadre” within an Al Qaeda cell that included the Saudi nationals Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The pair would purportedly go on to hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar had attended an Al Qaeda summit that took place between January 5th and 8th 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was secretly photographed and videotaped by local authorities at Alec Station’s request although, apparently, no audio was captured. En route, Mihdhar transited through Dubai, where CIA operatives broke into his hotel room and photocopied his passport. It showed that he possessed a multi-entry visa to the US.

A contemporaneous internal CIA cable stated this information was immediately passed to the FBI “for further investigation.” In reality, Alec Station not only failed to inform the Bureau of Mihdhar’s US visa, but also expressly forbade two FBI agents assigned to the unit from doing so.

It appears from this account that "Alec Station" was a rogue CIA operation that had its own priorities, and it had actually enlisted the hijackers Hazmi and Midhar for its own operation. In doing so, it concealed their 9/11 plans from the FBI as part of an effort to keep its whole operation secret.

Alec Station’s tireless efforts to protect its Al Qaeda assets raises the obvious question of whether Hazmi and Mihdhar, and possibly other hijackers, were in effect working for the CIA on the day of 9/11.

The real motives behind the CIA’s stonewalling may never be known. But it appears abundantly clear that Alec Station did not want the FBI to know about or interfere in its secret intelligence operation. If the unit’s recruitment of Hazmi and Mihdhar was purely dedicated to information gathering, rather than operational direction, it is incomprehensible that the FBI had not been apprised of it, and was instead actively misdirected.

An FBI agent involved in the thwarted investigation concluded, "To this day I’m unsure who was behind September 11, nor can I even guess… Someday the truth will reveal itself, and I have a feeling that people won’t like what they hear.”

Second headline: Intel community may be stalling COVID origins assessments for political reasons, ex-director says:

The CIA's "unjustifiable" refusal to formally assess COVID-19 origins suggests the Biden administration is afraid to face the "enormous geopolitical consequences" of a confirmed lab leak "head-on," in line with its reluctance to confront China on its spy balloon, according to President Trump's final director of national intelligence.

. . . Personal and political motivations may be at play in the holdout IC agencies, according to [former Director of National Intelligence John] Ratcliffe. He cited a January 2021 unclassified report where IC analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf told the Senate Intelligence Committee that in-house China analysts "appeared reluctant" to share analyses that could aid Trump administration policies "they tended to disagree with."

"I do think there were headwinds to get new information" from analysts when he was DNI, Ratcliffe said, and "on occasion" he felt analyses were withheld from him or altered.

Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) pledged the panel would examine the motives of IC analysts reviewing the origins evidence. He said he's seen further evidence of this as a House Intelligence Committee member privy to more sensitive information.

Let's consider that the two events that have been most influential in driving public debate and public policy so far this century have been the 9/11 attacks and the COVID pandemic. The hints we're getting here, which strike me as being not just wild conspiracy theories, suggest that the intelligence community knows more than it will admit about how these events came to pass, and it appears to be actively working against efforts to learn more -- to the extent that, as the FBI agent put it, when the truth does eventually come out, people won't like what they hear.

This is an indication of how big a task is facing anyone who wants to reform the system in Washington.

 

An Elon Musk With Gravitas? Don't Be Too Sure.

I really have no comment to make on his recernt dire predictions about artificial intelligence -- either he doesn't understand it very well, or I don't, but this is a guy who has something like ten kids, all parented via surrogacy from what we can tell, along with an additional bunch of frozen embryos he made with Amber Heard. Allegedly. I'm going to trust my judgment over his in practically any matter, including what to do with Twitter.

On the other hand, he's unexpectedly said something smart:

Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “if anyone would know about aliens on Earth it would probably be me.”

“To the best of my knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere in the universe,” Musk said. “So it might be there. You know, in physics they call it sort of the Fermi paradox after when Enrico Fermi, he’s an amazing physicist, asked the fundamental question, where are the aliens?”

“I’ve seen no evidence of aliens,” Musk said, adding that if he did he would instantly post about it on Twitter — a company that he purchased late last year and where he currently serves as CEO.

. . . He said the military, which is often suspected of hiding knowledge about aliens, would be acting in its own interest to disclose an extra-terrestrial threat. He paraphrased a defense official who once said the Pentagon would get carte blanche from taxpayers if it produced an alien.

Well, we got rare common sense from him on one issue, but then what about his fantasies of a Mars mission?

A crewed mission to Mars could happen in 2029, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hints.

A tweet on Monday comparing the moon landing to a future Mars landing attached a photo of the moon landing dated 1969, on top of an image of an envisioned Mars landing, labeled "20 --." The tweet, from Space_Hub, an account that posts about space and astronomy, read "What's your guess" and tagged Musk.

Two days after the tweet, Musk replied "2029."

Musk has long seen a visit to Mars as a goal. In 2016, he said he wanted to build a rocket capable of taking people to Mars and supporting a permanent city on the planet.

"It's something we can do in our lifetimes," he told an audience of 100,000 watchers at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. "You could go."

But Musk's older predictions don't necessarily match up with his latest. In 2016, he told the Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, that getting a "meaningful number of people" on Mars was possible "in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe nine years."

However, efforts to simulate Mars missions or a Mars colony have pretty uniformly ended in comical failure, a little like Musk's attempts to have a family. For instance,

For the past five years, small groups of people have made [a] drive [to the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii] and moved into [a] dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

In February of this year [2018], the latest batch of pioneers, a crew of four, made the journey up the mountain. They settled in for an eight-month stay. Four days later, one of them was taken away on a stretcher and hospitalized.

The remaining crew members were evacuated by mission support. All four eventually returned to the habitat, not to continue their mission, but to pack up their stuff. Their simulation was over for good. The little white dome has remained empty since, and the University of Hawaii, which runs the program, and nasa, which funds it, are investigating the incident that derailed the mission.

According to the Guardian,

In 1991, members of an experimental theater troupe undertook an audacious project to create a completely self-sustained ecosystem. At the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona, a mixed-gender group of eight volunteers were enclosed in a giant terrarium, with water, plants and animals, for two years.

Tensions ran high; food, and eventually oxygen, ran low. The mission was only completed with the aid of emergency supplies smuggled in. In 1994 a second group tried, but were forced to end their mission early because of a power struggle in the Biosphere’s ownership.

Think of it -- an intrepid crew of astronauts reaches Mars only to be recalled due to conflicts in SpaceX's ownership. Sound believable? But since Mars mission or colony simulations seem mainly to fall apart due to personnel conflicts, it's worth noting that so far, even the most rigorous selection and training programs for astronauts seem to fall short of what would be needed to staff a Mars mission:

Lisa Marie Nowak (née Caputo, born May 10, 1963) is an American aeronautical engineer, convicted criminal, and former NASA astronaut and United States Navy officer. Nowak served as naval flight officer and test pilot in the Navy, and was selected by NASA for NASA Astronaut Group 16 in 1996. . . . In 2007, Nowak was involved in a highly publicized incident of criminal misconduct for which she eventually pled guilty to felony burglary and misdemeanor battery charges, resulting in her demotion from captain to commander, and termination by NASA and the Navy.

Her termination followed an extramarital affair with a second astronaut, something NASA culture has been unable to prevent despite adultery being a criminal offense in the US armed forces. What on earth can anyone do to prevent this sort of hanky-pank on a months-long flight to Mars, let alone in a colony staying for years? And if NASA can't prevent it, how can SpaceX?

There's more frivolity in outer space than just the aliens, and Elon Musk is hardly immune.

Bud Light, Marianne Williamson, And The McGovern Dilemma

Maybe it's my age, but in recent days I keep returning to the 1970s, rereading Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade", thinking about the implications of the 1972 election, suddenly realizing that the Teixeira leaks are nothing but a reprise of the Pentagon Papers, and musing that this all carries lessons for the Bud Light fiasco. What brought me to focus on this was remarks by Marianne Williamson, a member of my 1970s demographic, that President Joe Biden “hasn’t done enough” for working-class Americans. She spoke at a restaurant in Dover, NH:

“Now, I am a Democrat. I am a Roosevelt Democrat. I believe that the Democratic Party should stand for unequivocal advocacy for the working people of the United States,” she went on to tell the restaurant.

“In order for us to win in 2024 and in order for us to repair this country, we have to be willing … to cut the cord with the last 50 years of history, we have to be willing to begin a new era,” Williamson said.

It's hard to determine what Ms Williamson means by cutting the cord with the last 50 years of history, but I would actually trace some part of the problem to the 1972 presidential election, in which the Democrats nominated George McGovern to run on a platform essentially the same as the one they've run on in most elections since, but in the process publicly lost the support of George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, over McGovern's opposition to the Viet Nam War.

This in turn became a more general paradigm for the Democrat Party's loss of support from the working class over what Ms Williamson calls the last 50 years of history, and it's hard to think the 1972 election wasn't somewhere in the back of her mind when she said this. And she explicitly calls herself a Roosevelt Democrat, which can only refer to the New Deal alliance of the working class with the Ivy League-prep school upper class embodied in figures like Averell Harriman and Roosevelt himself.

Ms Williamson, however, is more a creature of the Me Decade than the New Deal, prep school, the Ivy League, or the working class, having bypassed the upper-class rites of adultood to do drugs and lead a New Age church. Me Decade types in fact have far less commitment to either party, being essentially hedonistic and narcissistic, which probably is what links them to the current gentry, who fancy theselves more or less non-partisan. This brings us to Bud Light. Brendan Whitworth, the CEO of Budweiser, is a registered Republican. Donald Trump Jr defended Budweiser fior donating slightly more to Republicans than Democrats.

Indeed, Alissa Heinerscheid, who approved Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, could easily be Ms Williamson's granddaughter; the loyalty of both is to their affluent bobo lifestyle, not to any solidarity with the working class. It was Mr Whitworth, the registered Republican (although of the CIA and Harvard Business School faction of Republicans) who belatedly acknowledged that "Anheuser-Busch employs more than 18,000 people and our independent distributors employ an additional 47,000 valued colleagues." Thus Trump fils complains that hurting Bud Light hurts Republicans, while Mr Whitworth adds that hurting Bud Light by the way also hurts the working class, or at least that part of the working class that sells Bud Lignt.

Neither Ms Williamson nor Ms Heinerscheid was available for comment. The working class is not in their wheelhouse.

The Statement Mr Whitworth released on Friday, and the subsequent new "spirit of America" Clydesdale ad, is an attempt to press the reset button back to bland without acknowledging the blunder. As this writer put it,

While [Trump Jr] might want the boycott to end, it looks like a large chunk of people have no interest in doing that, and this video is not going to fix the situation. All of a sudden playing on patriotism isn’t going to fix this problem. Anheuser-Busch still has a long way to go to fix this PR nightmare. It might eventually happen, but this isn’t the fix they’re looking for.

Ms Williamson has essentially the same approach. At her New Hampshire appearance, after paying lip service to the working class, she went on,

“There is no reason why we in this country do not have universal health care, do not have a guaranteed livable wage, do not have free college tuition, do not have paid family leave, and do not have guaranteed sick pay.”

She also hit Biden for not being radical enough on climate change. Specifically, Williamson criticized his administration’s approval of a “$39 billion-dollar project to export liquified natural gas from Alaska,” arguing that “this is at a time when scientists are telling us that we absolutely must be ramping down, not ramping up, fossil fuel extraction.”

Issues like climate change and free college are for the one percent and the college-educated gentry, not the working class, who are fully aware that their taxes will pay for the gentry's kids' college, and electric cars and trucks will make it more expensive for them to get to work. Appeals to McGovern-era Democrat chestnuts won't work any better than appeals to patriotism to make people forget the corporate elites are catering to the latest trans darlings of the rich.

But at least Ms Williamson is saying words that reflect we're still in the 1970s, like it or not.