Fear Of Being The Next Bud Light

"There is a great disturbance in the Force."

"I have felt it."

"We have a new enemy, the young rebel who destroyed the Death Star. I have no doubt this boy is the offspring of Anakin Skywalker."

According to the New York Post,

The Los Angeles Dodgers have nixed plans to honor a radical group of “queer and trans nuns” at their upcoming Pride Night — following uproar over the allegedly “blatantly perverted, sexual and disgusting anti-Catholic hate group.”

The baseball team announced earlier this month that it was honoring the local chapter of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence with its annual Community Hero Award next month.

The “nuns” — who have names like Sister T’aint A Virgin, Sister Porn Again and Sister Holly Lewya — were being awarded for supposedly “promoting human rights and respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment.”

On Wednesday, the Dodgers announced they had had a change of heart.

The mainstream media reaction has echoed the response to other recent events like Trump's CNN town hall or the Bud Light boycott: Conservatives Bully L.A. Dodgers Into Dropping Charity Drag Group From Pride Night:

Bowing to pressure from conservatives including Sen. Marco Rubio, the Los Angeles Dodgers announced on Wednesday that they had uninvited an LGBTQ charity and drag performance group from participation in their annual Pride Night. The organization, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, is an order of “queer and trans nuns” devoted to “community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment,” according to their self-description.

Known for their campy, gender-fluid religious costumes and demonstrations, the Sisters have scandalized Catholics almost from the moment of their inception in 1979. In the Dodgers’ statement, the baseball team alluded to “people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening,” and said that the decision to drop them was made “in an effort not to distract from the great benefits” of the Pride event. The Dodgers’ senior director of public relations declined to comment further.

The sympathetic Wikipedia entry goes to some lengths to characterize the group as an established, non-controversial presence.

The Sisters have grown throughout the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, and South America, and are currently organized as an international network of orders, which are mostly non-profit charity organizations that raise money for AIDS, LGBT-related causes, and mainstream community service organizations, while promoting safer sex and educating others about the harmful effects of drug use and other risky behaviors.

Well, scandalizing Catholics isn't so bad, huh? The difficulty arises when Catholics, along with a good many others in the normal distribution, finally say "enough". Right at an inflection point, Bud Light stepped right into Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals:

Rule 11: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don't try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.

Bud Light thought it would be a great idea to identify its brand with Dylan Mulvaney, and the rest, so far, is history. CNN picked a skinny, unfeminine lady who might as well have been Dylan themself to moderate Trump's CNN town hall. Miller Lite picked a shrill, unfeminine, unfunny "comedian" to scold beer drinkers for liking traditional beer ads. All they did was let the normal distribution pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Suddenly the Dodgers seem to have woken up to what this would do to their brand:

This year, as part of a full night of programming, we invited a number of groups to join us. We are now aware that our inclusion of one group in particular – The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence – in this year’s Pride Night has been the source of some controversy,” the team said.

“Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening, and in an effort not to distract from the great benefits that we have seen over the years of Pride Night, we are deciding to remove them from this year’s group of honorees,” the Dodgers said.

Somebody must have begun to visualize what kind of memes could be made up that included the Dodgers logo and guys in beards and bikinis, and he must have belatedly broken into a cold sweat thinking about what happened to Bud Light.

Latins represent 43 percent of the Dodger fan base, and whatever they may individually feel about Catholic teaching, they will not tolerate disrespect for the Church -- plus there's the other problem with having your brand identified as gay friendly, that some will worry that buying the product, buying the merch, or supporting the team implies you're gay yourself, which Latins by and large don't think is a good idea.

And this all takes place as we're closing in on June, which is Pride Month. It looks like corporate support this year will be muted at best. I feel a great disturbance in the farce.

“Man. . . I Wish We Could Just Have A Normal Human Being As President”

Elon Musk explained the basic problem in a CNBC interview last night: the sitting President of the United States is a hybrid of a hologram and Louis XVI. This echoes an interview he gave Tucker Carlson last month, not long before Carlson was airbrushed from the picture:

“I would prefer, frankly, that we put just a normal person as president, a normal person with common sense and whose values are smack in the middle of the country, just center of the normal distribution and I think that they would be great,” Musk told Tucker Carlson of Fox News in an interview which aired on the cable network on Tuesday.

But isn't this just a sideways explanation for the Bud Light phenomenon? Bud Light decided to privilege an unarguably not-normal person as its brand spokestrans, and the normal distribution staged a revolt. But none of the marketing experts who've tried to deliver explanations has come close to the real point: yes, beer is a working-class drink. Yes, working-class guys don't identify with trans, and in fact, they're acutely aware now that if someone sees them with a Bud Light, people will think they're gay.

But the real point is what political analysts have understood since the 1972 election, the working class has left the old New Deal coalition. That's the real lesson of Bud Light, and for that matter now Miller Lite: college-educated women aligned with Ivy League wealth are running their ad campaigns, and the Ivy shareholders are hoping Joe Sixpack won't notice, or well, er, if he noticed, maybe it'll all blow over.

Thus we have Newsweek's current take -- but let's look at the current Newsweek:

In 1937, News-Week merged with the weekly journal Today, which had been founded in 1932 by future New York Governor and diplomat W. Averell Harriman, and Vincent Astor of the prominent Astor family. As a result of the deal, Harriman and Astor provided $600,000 (equivalent to $11,310,000 in 2021) in venture capital funds and Vincent Astor became both the chairman of the board and its principal stockholder between 1937 and his death in 1959.

. . . During 2008–2009, Newsweek undertook a dramatic business restructuring. Citing difficulties in competing with online news sources to provide unique news in a weekly publication, the magazine refocused its content on opinion and commentary beginning with its May 24, 2009, issue. It shrank its subscriber rate base, from 3.1 million to 2.6 million in early 2008, to 1.9 million in July 2009 and then to 1.5 million in January 2010—a decline of 50% in one year. Jon Meacham, Editor-in-chief from 2006 to 2010, described his strategy as "counterintuitive" as it involved discouraging renewals and nearly doubling subscription prices as it sought a more affluent subscriber base for its advertisers.

In otrher words, Newsweek itself, much like the Democrat party with which Averell Harriman was closely identified, moved from a populist coalition aligned with post-Civil War robber baron wealth, to trying to appeal to a much smaller, much more upscale market. So this is its account ot the current state of the Bud Light rebellion:

A photo of cases of Bud Light sitting untouched on the shelves of a CVS in Florida has gone viral on social media, as furor aimed at the beleaguered beer brand continues.

Over the past several weeks, Bud Light has been the focus of a divisive debate after the company sent transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a personalized beer can.

In fact, it's been seven weeks, and the decline in sales for Bud Light has been disastrous. The marketing and demographic experts are calling it a working-class phenomenon. Newsweek is tiptoeing around that question, it's just a "divisive debate", while poor Bud Light is "beleaguered". I doubt if Averell Harriman ever drank much beer, but he knew the rail workers and working-and-middle-class Americans who'd built his family fortune and rode his trains, and as a politician and diplomat, he was acutely aware of the Marxist-Leninist threat. (He was the force behind George Kennan's Long Telegram.)

Newsweek continues,

In an apparent demonstration of the conservative boycott's effect on Bud Light sales, far-right internet troll and Capitol rioter Anthime "Tim" Gionet recently took to Twitter to share an image from a CVS pharmacy in West Palm Beach.

. . . Gionet—who according to court documents pleaded guilty last July for his part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—responded to the tweets regarding Bud Light's apparent struggling sales by writing "keep it up."

Similar photos and videos have gone viral on social media in recent weeks, as boycotters seek to illustrate the purported success of their aversion to Bud Light.

So Newsweek characterizes a phenomenon that's almost universally characterized as working-class and populist as "far right" and connects it with January 6 -- which is to say, Donald Trump. This is simply an acknowledgement that the working class has left the Democrat coalition, while the Democrats are happy to say good riddance. Elon Musk as a rich guy who at least understands balance sheets, maybe a little like Averell Harriman, isn't sure about this.

If you've lost touch with the normal distrubution, something's wrong. For now, people are thinking Donald Trump, whatever his flaws, understands and personifies the normal distribution,for all its own flaws. Biden, at least for now, doesn't even seem quite human.

How does DeSantis fit in here? We'll have to find out.

Only Tom Wolfe Could Have Dreamed This Up

I woke up this morning to discover that a Miller Lite ad from Women's History Month last March has gone viral. I watched several YouTubes on the ad -- indeed, a couple of YouTubers have already done multiple videos on it -- and just trying to parse out the message, as far as I can tell, its pitch is that Miller ads used to be sexist back in the day, because they featured women in bikinis. However, Miller now regrets this, apparently because women actually invented beer, or something like that.

So Miller has more or less begun a campaign to get people to look in their garages for old beer ads, or something like that, and maybe send them in to Miller, which will shred them and turn them into compost. Miller will then either donate the compost to hop growers, who will donate the hops to women-owned breweries, or maybe donate the compost to women-owned breweries directly so they can start to grow the hops themselves, or something like that.

But I don't see any place Miller wants people to send the old sexist beer ads to, or there's no announcement that there'll be neighborhood drives to collect old beer ads for shredding, so there's no real call to action, except maybe to think general good thoughts about Miller. Just sort of feel regretful that Miller used to sell its beer by exploiting women in bikinis, but we're past that, so just drink whatever.

So first, this wasn't really an ad. If anything, it said Miller used to be an evil sexist company but is now going to do something vague and completely ineffective to expiate for it, so drink our beer, except they're calling it [redacted] Well, good [redacted] anyhow.

Three months later, people discovered the ad when looking for other ridiculous beer marketing campaigns in the wake of the Dylan Mulvaney catastrohe, and they found this one. Nobody noticed it when it came out, but now it's likely to do the same sort of damage to Miller Lite as Mulvaney did to Bud Light.

Only Tom Wolfe could have dreamed smething like this up.

Here's why Tom Wolfe would have had so much fun with it. The ad isn't meant to sell beer, although you'd think that's what a beer ad is supposed to do. Instead, the ad is there to appease government or government-approved watchdogs who monitor corporate conduct for adherence to diversity-and-inclusion guidelines. The ad is there to show that a cetain percentage of the corporate budget goes to goodthink. Nobody pays attention to it, it's just there because that's what the authorities want.

There's an added bonus that the marketing trade guilds will give their members little awards for their corporate goodthink campaigns, and the game goes on. Somebody named Geoffrey Ingersoll sums it up very well:

The oddest thing about ads like these is that they’re designed to target people who have nothing to do with the brand from soup to nuts.

Elite, probably female dominated and undoubtedly very liberal ad agency and marketing professionals and then of course the twitterati.

But if… https://t.co/ASjNuM0DQ9

— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) May 15, 2023

The Bud Light paradigm is repeating itself with the media revealing the overrated, overcredenialed gentry behind the awful ads:

Elizabeth Hitch, the senior director of marketing for Miller Lite explained that the company wanted to shed light on how women play a key role in the production of beer.

. . . It seems like Hitch was one of the leads responsible for the creation of the controversial advertisement. The Chicago, Illinois-native has also been the Marketing Director for Molson Coors’ Hard Seltzers in the past. A few other roles she had taken up in MillerCoors includes marketing manager, associate brand manager and regional business analyst amongst others.

Hitch obtained her MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing and finance from Marquette University.

At the time of writing this article, her LinkedIn account seemed to have been taken down.

Other sources identify another culprit:

The ad was the brainchild of chief marketing officer Sofia Colucci. "We recognize that Miller Lite played a contributing role in this in the past. We’ve been collecting our and other brands outdated, old sexist ads, displays and posters for months. We have been buying and removing any pieces we could find on the internet.”

It's been a while since I took a marketing class, but if you look at this and the Bud Light VP or Marketing fiasco, it appears the latest textbooks include a new cardinal rule of marketing: if you have the opportunity to alienate your core customer base by interjecting your personal political agenda, take it! As Daily Caller's investigative reporting has uncovered, Colucci is a raging leftist. Or at the very least, supports the current thing.

Wait a moment. So Miller Lite has both a senior director of marketing, an Elizabeth Hitch, and a chief marketing officer, Sofia Colucci. Who both seem to have come up with this expensive ad that nobody in fact was supposed to notice, and nobody in fact did until Bud Light did something so egregious that it drew attention to how overpiad and overrated corporate types spend their time.

Reports are that the two ladies at Miller Lite have already emulated Alissa Heinerscheid and deleted all their social media profiles. There's no word yet on whether they'll be taking leaves of absence.

What About Ukraine?

Over the past six months, I've gradually moved toward the conservative position on the Ukraine war. I've recognized that Ukraine hawks are basically neoconservatives, and neoconservative policies haven't played well since Reagan. Still, I was inclined to buy Zelensky's talking point last year that supporting Ukraine was a cheap way to dismantle the Russian empire. Whether dismantling the Russian empire was a goal worth pursuing is a separate question, and I more or less lost sight of the fact that whatever else, it's a neoconservative certainty that this must be done.

The problem is that here we are in the middle of 2023. A predicted Ukrainian winter counteroffensive never took place. There was lots of anticipation for a spring counteroffensive that was supposed to happen, maybe in April, but this keeps getting pushed back. Here's Reuters on April 28:

Ukraine is wrapping up preparations for a counteroffensive against Russian forces and is largely ready for it to go ahead, Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said on Friday.

"As soon as there is God's will, the weather and a decision by commanders, we will do it," he told an online news briefing.

He gave no date for when the counteroffensive would start but said: "Globally speaking, we are to a high percentage ready."

And nothng has happened since. I don't know if God is still on spring break or what. But as of last week, according to AP:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in remarks broadcast Thursday that Kyiv is delaying its long-awaited counteroffensive against Russia’s occupying forces because Ukraine lacks enough Western weapons to succeed without suffering too many casualties.

. . . A Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia’s more than 14-month-old invasion has been expected since warmer weather improved battlefield conditions, and Zelenskyy said it’s possible that “we can go forward and be successful,” the BBC reported.

“But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable,” he was quoted as saying in the interview, conducted in Kyiv with public service broadcasters who are members of Eurovision News, including the BBC.

“So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time,” Zelenskyy was quoted as saying. “In terms of equipment, not everything has arrived yet.”

This is not the Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Churchill whose wartime rhetoric I admired last year. Nor do we hear his last year's argument that arming Ukraine was the cheapest way to dismantle the Russian empire. My guess is that Zelensky is under domestic pressure to minimize casualties and isn't going to press forward as he'd done last year. The Russians have adapted to battlefield conditions, and there's likely no longer the possibility of dramatic breakthroughs or general retreats we saw last summer and fall.

In fact, the US assessment of Ukraine's abilities has been pessimistic since early this year:

“I still maintain that for this year it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from all –– every inch of Ukraine and occupied –– or Russian-occupied Ukraine,” he said during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Germany on Jan. 20. “That doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but it’d be very, very difficult.”

. . . The issue of retaking Crimea has been a contentious one for months, as American and European officials insist the peninsula is legally part of Ukraine, while often stopping short of fully equipping Kyiv to push into the area.

One person familiar with the thinking in Kyiv said the Zelenskyy administration was “furious” with Milley’s remarks, as Ukraine prepares for major offensives this spring. Ukrainians also note that U.S. intelligence about their military abilities have consistently missed the mark throughout the nearly year-long war.

But the one factor that would prove that US assessments were off the mark would be a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Crimea, which as far as we can tell is now on indefinite hold, likely because Zelensky doesn't think he can afford the casualties this would generate. But let's recall that this was his selling point to NATO last year: you provide the weapons, we provide the bodies. But on second thought, now we can't afford the bodies.

This is the current context of Trump's remarks at the CNN town hall last week:

“I want everybody to stop dying. They’re dying. Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying,” Trump said at CNN’s town hall moderated by “CNN This Morning” anchor Kaitlan Collins. “And I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

Trump, who would not say whether he wants Ukraine to successfully deter Russia when pressed by Collins, told the audience gathered at Saint Anselm College that he doesn’t “think in terms of winning and losing.”

What he's sayhing is that the war is stalemated, and for whatever reason, Ukraine hasn't been in a position to resume the successful counteroffensives of last year. It looks like for now, both Ukraine and Russia have fought each other to exhaustion, while the West is depleting its stocks of ammunition with smaller and smaller returns. So it's time to face reality and negotiate a settlement for however long it lasts, because under last year's deal Zelensky offered, a quick and cheap dismantling of the Russian empire with Ukraine making all the sacrifices isn't going to happen.

I was skeptical of Trump on Ukraine last year. I'm starting to think he's been right all along.

So Far, The Comer Committee Is Missing The Point

On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released a report on Biden family business dealings.

In total, Biden family members and business associates designed a web of over 20 companies, many of which were formed during Joe Biden’s vice presidency, the committee revealed. In total, the Biden family, business associates, and companies received over $10 million from foreign nationals’ companies, the committee found.

The story doesn't have a whole lot of detail, but from what I can gather, the payments totaling $10 millian trickled in via shell corporations over a period between 2014 and 2017, and they were paid to nine Biden family members who were named in the report, as well as mostly unnamed family associates, who would have included figures like Robinson Walker, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin. If we divide $10 million by nine family members plus associates over a period of maybe three years, this comes to an average of well under a million bucks a year for each.

You and I might be more than satisfied with, say, half a million bucks a year, but let's keep in mind that all of these people have extravagant lifestyles, and several of those named, including Hunter; Beau's widow, Hallie; and Joe's niece Caroline; are addicts. Ten million bucks over a period of years simply will not sustain this group. Something's out of whack.

If they're living on payouts, there have to be sources for amounts far in excess of what we're seeing here. Many of them do in fact also have sinecures and no-show jobs with family-allied non-profits and such, but again, even if they're each making a couple hundred thousand a year at those, that won't pay their bills, and it doesn't explain where the money comes from to pay those non-job salaries. There's some sort of financial dark matter here that hasn't yet been explained.

The next problem is that Hunter is so far being portrayed as the kingpin of the family grift -- for example,, from the link above, Hunter managed payments from a Romanian businessman, Gabriel Popoviciu:

Hunter Biden began working for Popoviciu in the spring of 2015. According to Hunter Biden’s calendar, he met with Joe Biden three times from July 2015 to March 2016 about helping Popoviciu with a “conviction stemming from his purchase of a 550-acre parcel of government-owned land for a steep discount,” the New York Post reported.

But let's look at the context here. In May, 2015, just as Hunter started working for Popoviciu, his brother Beau died of brain cancer, which immediately precipitated Hunter's years-long cocaine bender that included his affair with Hallie and her sister, his divorce from Kathleen Buhle, weeks on end of debauchery in Hollywood luxury hotels, expensive cars, and trips to luxury rehab in centers around the country. From July 2015 to March 2016, Hunter would never have been in a position to handle money or manage anything like a business, even a shady one.

Let's recall as well that anything Hunter undertook from his college days at Georgetown onward to Yale Law and his brief stints as an investment banker were due entirely to the fact that he was the son of a US senator. His ex-wife Kathleen recounted in her memoir that he had been in and out of rehab and living far beyond their means even before Joe became vice president; for much of that time, she just wasn't paying attention. Other discussions of Hunter's time from the 2000s onward indicate that his business deals were seldom successful.

So just looking at the overall proportions involved in the family dealings, which appear to have been largely under Hunter's aegis, not enough was coming in to sustain their lifestyles or their drug habits, and of what was coming in, Hunter probably stole the lion's share. Something doesn't fit.

Let's look at another astute analysis, made following Wednesday's report from the Comer committee:

Normally, a sitting vice president might think about running for the top job as the boss hit the two-term limit. But Biden knew he could not oppose Hillary Clinton’s historic campaign to become the first female president.

So Biden — perhaps under some pressure from profligate relatives like Hunter — decided, finally, to cash out. He set up what D.C. insiders call a “government relations” business, profiting from his name and contacts.

In “government relations,” there does not need to be a specific quid pro quo. The clients are paying for the relationship, in the hope that it leads to other introductions and opportunities. It is not necessarily illegal.

. . . The calculus changed once Trump actually defeated Clinton. Suddenly, there was a path back to politics for Biden. That presented a huge windfall for the Biden family’s clients, though it contained new risks of exposure.

So Biden finds himself a victim of calculations he made when he thought his career was over, but even those calculations were out of kilter -- chief among them, he appears to have relied on Hunter to manage his affairs, especially during his last couple of years as vice president. But recall that as late as 2014, Joe had to try to wangle a sinecure for Hunter as a public affairs officer in the Navy, which lasted only until he failed his first drug test. Apparently whatever the Navy would pay Hunter was important, even though Hunter's debts at the time must have been exponential multiples of his Navy salary. This just doesn't fit.

Chairman Comer comes a little bit closer to the point as of this past Friday:

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) suggested Friday that former President Barack Obama knew of the Biden family’s foreign deals with adversaries of the United States.

. . . “He knew his son [Hunter Biden] was no good, and he knew this was nothing but a political liability not just for our country, not just for the democrat party, but for Obama’s legacy,” Comer added. “Because a lot of this happened during the Obama administration.”

Comer also believes Obama’s knowledge of the family’s business informed his opposition to Joe Biden’s 2020 candidacy.

Heck, I would imagine Obama heard about Hunter's failed drug test before Hunter himself did; indeed, I wouldn't rule out that Obama arranged for it in the first place. But the question isn't the Biden family's business dealings, which were clumsy and often unsuccessful. The real question is the Biden family debts, not the payments. Recall just this one data item:

{Hunter] Biden "has incurred substantial personal loans to which he is indebted and subject to repayment for attorneys’ fees he has incurred," said his attorney. The disclosure of personal loans follows reports this week that the president’s son is considering launching a legal defense fund to raise money to pay his lawyers, a plan that has reportedly sparked ethics concerns at the White House.

To whom does he owe this money? Is it directly, say, to Abbe Lowell, or is someone else paying Abbe Lowell who then holds the paper on the loan? We've also had hints, but little more than hints, that Joe has been paying for Hunter's living expenses for years -- even as far back as 2018, Joe was footing the bill for Huntrer's trips to rehab and his settlement with his ex-wife, as well as his overdue credit card balances. Hunter's living expenses, as well as payments on years of debt, must amount to far more than the $400,000 annual salary Joe earns.

Where is this money coming from? On one hand, people are being allowed to think the family's lifestyles are coming from Romanian or Chinese businessmen, but whatever they've paid now and then, as far as I can see, hasn't been remotely enough to cover the Biden family's lifestyles. What do they owe, and to whom do they owe it? I'll betcha Obama knows quite a bit, and I'm sure others do as well. It's just people like you and me who are in the dark.

I'm Still Reacting To Trump's CNN Town Hall

As I noted yesterday, my gut reaction to the first reports I saw on the Trump CNN town hall was uh-oh. If I could parse it out into sentences, it would be that his opponents had nothing new, Trump was simply bypassing the nothing-new with his charisma, and the audience was loving it. They loved it even more when Kaitlan Collins's head kept exploding and, as one commentator put it, she kept acting like everyone's ex-wife.

What I began to notice Thursday was that Trump's town hall performance simply overwhelmed the rest of the news, even though the rest of the news -- the deep state ignoring congressional subpoenas, the Comer committee releasing details of Biden family money laundering, and the border chaos -- was on balance poison for the Biden administration. Never mind that, everyone wanted to talk about Trump.

Six months ago, I was convinced that Trump had misread Ukraine, he'd proved disastrously weak against Fauci and Birx, his vaccine program was a failure, and DeSantis had displayed greater foresight over COVID and was pursuing more credible current policies over corporate wokery and transsexualism. Nevertheless, since then, DeSantis has failed to gain traction and is unlikely to eclipse Trump as the primary season gets under way.

With Wednesday’s CNN town hall behind him, former President Donald Trump remains both the prohibitive GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination and a man who was found liable this week in a civil case for sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.

While we cannot yet know what effect that verdict will have on the race for the Republican nomination, Trump built his large polling advantage with this civil trial in the news and after being indicted earlier this spring in a separate criminal case related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. (Trump has denied all wrongdoing.)

Trump’s edge in surveys of Republican voters and in endorsements from elected officials at this stage is among the strongest for a nonincumbent in the modern presidential primary era.

I think the answer to the puzzle here is that the public is discounting all the courtroom kabuki over Trump and understands there's nothing new there. Charges that Trump was delusional about the 2020 election are slowly losing credibility as information emerges about efforts by current Secretary of State Blinken and CIA insiders to recruit other deep staters to discredit the Hunter laptop as Russian disinformation.

During the debate on Oct. 22, 2020, in response to Trump's taunts of "it's the laptop from hell, the laptop from hell," Mr. Biden pushed back, "There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what this — he's accusing me of is a Russian plan — they have said that this has all the characteristics — four — five former heads of the CIA — both parties, say what he's saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him. . . and his good friend Rudy Giuliani."

The interim report accuses the Biden campaign of taking "active measures to discredit the allegations about Hunter Biden by exploiting the national security credentials of former intelligence officials" and also said the "Biden campaign coordinated dissemination of the statement to members of the media."

There are two strategies operating here. One is the congressional strategy, keep investigating, keep attacking on individual points, like deep state coordination of the Biden electoral strategy, deep state refusal to respond to congressional subpoenas, and the Biden family finances. We might add to this the DeSantis point strategy of attacking specific issues of corporate wokery, porn in school libraries, or drag queen story hour for third graders.

The problem is that these are all small ball and as point strategies are vulnerable to point attacks. DeSantis thinks drag queen story hours are grooming, his opponents say he's a bigot, nothing moves forward. Trump is a different case entirely. Trump has an almost magical ability with body language and facial expression to characterize his accusers as everyman's ex-wife. He sweeps the point strategies, both offense and defense, away with a wave of his hand.

This comes from his ability to read the room, figuratively speaking, which his opponents simply don't have. The remarkable Dylan Mulvaney fiasco in particular is a sign of the current public mood, but Dylan Mulvaney as a symbol represents far more than just individual point issues of drag queen story hour, men in women's sports, or men in ladies' rooms. Trump understands this to the point that he doesn't even need to mention Mulvaney to convince his supporters that he understands the underlying issues.

Allegations of grabbing body parts and January 6 so far are all Trump's opponents have, and the public has already discounted them. The CNN town hall illustrated this plainly, which is what made it something of a revelation. Every indictment from now on will do nothing but feed the beast, which Trump's oppenents so far haven't figured out. But what else can they come up with? Even if they can take him out in one way or another in the next 18 months, another Republican will step up and claim his mantle.

The Dylan Mulvaney Paradigm

The photo at the top is of Kaitlan Collins, the 31 year old CNN former chief White House Correspondent whose disastrous performance at Wednesday's Trump town hall caused rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. The photo below her is Dylan Mulvaney, the trans female whose disastrous performance as a Bud Light surrogate six weeks ago has continued to cause rending of garments and gnashing of teeth in elite circles. I'm surprised at how few commentators have pointed out how much they look like each other.

Maybe if that light bulb had gone on over the head of someone like Mr Licht at CNN, the outcome of the town hall would have been different. As it is, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the sort of gadfly the Democrats need right now, characteried Donald Trump as a result of Wednesday night's performance as "the most devastating debater, probably, since Abraham Lincoln".

I didn't watch the CNN town hall Wednesday night; it was only when I saw excerpts on YouTube yesterday morning that I sat up and said uh-oh. My big takeaway was that the consensus strategy against Trump, which has been the same since 2016, isn't working. The Access Hollywood tape about grabbing body parts didn't work then, and the E Jean Carroll verdict didn't work Wednesday. Two successive impeachments on trivial charges didn't work after he was elected, and whatever indictments on trivial charges political hack DAs are able to bring against him won't work now. They'll only feed the beast.

On the heels of the Carroll verdict, the New Hampshire audience greeted Trump's entry with a standing ovation. He turned references to classified documents or January 6 into laugh lines, and the town hall loved it. Clearly both CNN and Ms Collins completely misread the national mood, but the rest of corporate media was taken by surprise as well. Don Surber reviews the universal editorial shock, with the most apoplectic at Vanity Fair:

Vanity Fair’s review began, “CNN’s decision to host a prime-time town hall with Donald Trump already looked like a terrible idea going into Wednesday night, and now it looks like, well, whatever is German for ‘letting an insurrection-inciting sociopath take a [redacted] in your collective mouth on live TV—and get applause for it.’”

This simply echoes the consternation in corporate circles over the completely unexpected public reaction to the Bud Light Dylan Mulvaney not-a-formal-campaign:

Bud Light’s controversial marketing deal with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney has ignited speculation that top executives at corporate parent Anheuser-Busch may have been blindsided by the tie-up when it was revealed.

. . . “Some low-level marketing staffer who helps manage the hundreds of influencer engagements they do must have thought it was no big deal,” according to an unnamed source cited by the Daily Wire.

“Obviously it was, and it’s a shame because they have a well-earned reputation for just being America’s beer — not a political company.”

The deal was, of course, the brainchild of a well-regarded marketing VP with degrees from Harvard and the Wharton School who'd already telegraphed her intentions to remake the Bud Light brand on social media. She clearly felt she had at least the tacit endorsement of the higher-ups, and her boss took the fall with her when the Mulvaney deal went south. This was no corporate whoopsie, this was a high-level, high-stakes and disastrous misreading of the US Public.

By the same token, CNN's peers are blaming CNN for a similar misreading of how Trump would handle the town hall. Various commentators have pointed out the contradictions in their format: it was the first event in the 2024 Republican primary season, but it featured only Trump, and the idea was that Trump was there to debate Ms Collins, who was thought to represent all bien pensant opinion, not other Republicans. But it was with an audience that had been selected deliberately to represent Republican or undecided voters. My surmise is that CNN expected the foreordained outcome to be a win for the Nurse Ratched team, who'd then go on to scold the Republican audience as a bunch of Neanderthals.

Instead, Trump played to the audience CNN gave him, which he clearly understood much better than CNN did, and he debated a woman whose public persona actually wasn't too far afield from Dylan Mulvaney -- look at the insipid smirk on her face in the photo above. The nicest characterization of their encounter was that he wiped the floor with her, but Vanity Fair's suggestion that he took a [redacted] in her mouth is closer.

Dylan Mulvaney is becoming a paradigm for the current public mood, and the corporate elites are continuing to misread it.