Kevin Morris Reemerges

It's been a few weeks since Kevin Morris has been in the news. According to Breitbart,

As the husband of Gabrielle Morgerman, “one of the most powerful women in the entertainment industry,” Morris is a legal heavyweight with tentacles in nearly every aspect of Hunter Biden’s professional life.

In 2022, news reports surfaced that Hunter Biden retained Morris to oversee his public relations and media strategies. In turn, Morris reportedly paid Hunter’s over two-million-dollar IRS tax delinquency and bankrolled his $30,000-a-month apartment in Malibu, California.

This link gives more background on the power couple:

Gabrielle Morgerman, a 1981 Huntington High School graduate, is senior vice-president and head of the talent department at the prestigious William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills, CA. She earned an undergraduate degree at Smith College.

In Dec. 1991, Ms. Morgerman, known as Gaby, married Patrick [Kevin] Morris, who obtained an undergraduate degree at Cornell Univ. and a law degree at New York University. He is a founding partner in what today is one of America’s top entertainment law firms, which is based in Los Angeles. He has represented clients ranging from Matthew McConaughey, Minnie Driver, Mike Judge (voiceovers and animator Beavis and Butt-head, Spy Kids, creator of Beavis and Butthead, Spy Kids, King of the Hill, etc.) and Mike Newell (director, producer of numerous hit movies) to the creators of “South Park.” At the time of the couple’s wedding, Ms. Morgerman was in the agent in training program at the William Morris Agency.

Ms Morgerman's position may explain the publication of Mr Morris's first (but apparently still only) collection of short stories in 2014, White Man's Problems. According to this review, it's "A superb literary gallery of men who can’t understand why life has given them what they want."

Morris, an entertainment lawyer, producer and journalist, knows his characters and their worlds like the back of his hand. . . . “Jim Mulligan stood in boxers and a T-shirt in the refrigerator light, beer bottle in hand, in the same spot as countless American men before and since, at once living the whiteness and watching it, a picture within a picture, hoping for a miracle snack.” . . . The result is a cleareyed, finely wrought and mordantly funny take on a modern predicament by a new writer with loads of talent.

Well, sounds like the same world that's inhabited by David Brooks's Patio Man, huh?

I don’t know if you've ever noticed the expression of a man who is about to buy a first-class barbecue grill. He walks into a Home Depot or Lowe's or one of the other mega hardware complexes and his eyes are glistening with a faraway visionary zeal, like one of those old prophets gazing into the promised land.

. . . The man approaches the barbecue grills and his face bears a trance-like expression, suggesting that he has cast aside all the pains and imperfections of this world and is approaching the gateway to a higher dimension. In front of him are a number of massive steel-coated reactors with names like Broilmaster P3, The Thermidor, and the Weber Genesis, because in America it seems perfectly normal to name a backyard barbecue grill after a book of the Bible.

This is a world where you can gain literary acclaim by making fun of middle-class, specifically white Republicans, although the real problem is that Jim Mulligan and Patio Man were both Democrats a generation earlier. But this, as far as I can tell, is just part of the whole rich and intricate context of the Hunter Biden boondoggle, in which Kevin Morris plays a supporting role. Most recently,

Hunter Biden cried poverty at his Arkansas child-support hearing earlier this month — despite flying to and from the courthouse aboard a luxury private jet owned by his close friend Kevin Morris.

The $6 million jet took off from Los Angeles on April 30 just after 7 a.m, according to flight records reviewed by The Post.

. . . The 7,326-mile round trip likely cost between $55,000 to $117,000 all in — or the value of up to six months in child-support payments to Hunter Biden’s baby mama, aviation experts told The Post.

Here we have yet another illustration of the Hunter conundrum that for me won't go away. Hunter has been working -- some might call it masterminding -- the Biden family grift since before Joe was elected vice president in 2008: in September of that year, likely foreseeing the election result, he founded Seneca Global Advisors; the next year, he, Devon Archer, and Christopher Heinz founded Rosemont Seneca Partners. So basically, Hunter has been at this particular line of business, collecting influence payments based on his relationship to the big guy, for 15 years.

The problem that keeps coming up for me, as it has now and then for others, is that over this 15-year period, marked by all sorts of frenzied meetings with B-list Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and whatever else businessmen, wannabes, and fixers, so few of these supposed deals paid off. We have lots of meetings, trips on Air Force Two, and optimistic talk, but then whoever is involved seems to disappear, get sent to prison, or just fall off the map, and nothing else comes of it.

The stories that now emerge from the Comer committee involve a million here, ten million there, coming in over a period of years and getting split among nine, a dozen, maybe more, Bidens and their cronies, of whom Ashley, Caroline, Hallie, and Hunter himself are cocaine addicts, while the rest have extravagant lifestyles. At least by the end of Hunter's career as a family fixer, his expenses for drugs, luxury rehab, girlfriends, hookers, cars, and five-star hotels far exceeeded anything he was bringing in, and apparently Joe was making up the difference.

And again, if Hunter was bringing in the big bucks on Biden family deals, why did Joe need to get him side gigs like the Amtrak board or the short-lived Navy job as a no-show PR flack -- which Hunter was dumb enough to lose with his first drug test? If Joe actually thinks Hunter is the smartest guy he knows, what on earth does that say about Joe?

This is the recurrng conundrum: how can anyone smart enough to make serious money have taken Hunter as anything but a con artist? I've got to think the various B-list Chinese, Romanian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and whatever else businessmen, wannabes, and fixers who put money into Hunter's schemes were marks, and if they were dumb enough to give Hunter money, they were also dumb enough to get rubbed out, sent to prison for corruption, liqudated, and whatever else, which seems to be what happened to many of them.

I would guess that many of Hunter's other deals fell through because the foreign marks were phonies themselves and never came up with the money they promised. By 2014, Christopher Heinz, who'd been a partner in Rosemont Seneca and by far Hunter's most prestigious associate, cut his ties with him, presumably on the basis that he risked too much by working with Hunter compared to any potential reward.

So this brings me back to Kevin Morris. Just in paying Hunter's $2 million IRS debt, we know that Morris has sunk multimillions into the Hunter black hole, but it also appears that he's funding Hunter's legal expenses, both for his child support case and his pending federal indictments, at the level of millions more. He's apparently paid for Hunter's Malibu rental. Six-figure costs for flying him back and forth from Washington to Arkansas are just incidentals.

What on earth is Kevin expecting to get from this? I'm actually starting to wonder if he and his wife (who must be aware of the spending) are just marks themselves. Poor Kevin writes stories about white guys who can't understand how they've gotten where they are in life. At least in the photo at the top of this post, he doesn't look all that bright himself. Well, as they say in creative writing class, write about what you know.

The Divide Comes Into Closer Focus

Bien pensant opinion has been at best bemused at the Bud Light boycott, and it's taken more than a month for the pro-trans forces to form an organized response. But as of this past week, it's begun to take shape.

The nation's largest LGBTQ advocacy group is taking action against Anheuser-Busch over its handling of the conservative backlash to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, accusing the multinational beer company of caving to political pressure.

In a May 9 letter shared exclusively with USA TODAY, the Human Rights Campaign informed the Bud Light maker that it has suspended its Corporate Equality Index score – a tool that scores companies on their policies for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer employees.

. . . Anheuser-Busch, which had a score of 100, has 90 days to respond or the organization will consider docking its score, the Human Rights Campaign told the company in the letter.

According to the New York Post,

At stake is their Corporate Equality Index — or CEI — score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world.

HRC, which has received millions from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation among others, issues report cards for America’s biggest corporations via the CEI: awarding or subtracting points for how well companies adhere to what HRC calls its “rating criteria.”

Businesses that attain the maximum 100 total points earn the coveted title “Best Place To Work For LGBTQ Equality.” Fifteen of the top 20 Fortune-ranked companies received 100% ratings last year, according to HRC data.

Andrew Sullivan, a traditionally same-sex attracted commentator who is deeply skeptical of the trans movement, had this to say yesterday:

The Human Rights Campaign, once a relatively moderate group, replaced “gay” and “lesbian” with the acronym “LGBTQ+” and expanded the word “queer” to describe anyone gay, lesbian, transgender, or even straight who defied heteronormativity. They changed the flag from a simple rainbow, to one that included some races (only black and brown — no Asians or whites) and transgender ideology. Their building in DC is festooned with a massive banner declaring their mission: “Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.” Their new head is a woman who calls herself “queer,” not lesbian.

Then they quietly changed the meaning of the word “gay” so that it no longer referred to same-sex attraction, but to same-gender attraction; and changed the word “men” to include people with vaginas and uteruses, and the word “women” to include people with dicks and balls. Checkmate for the gays! We are all now just bigots with “genital preferences,” just like the Christianist right used to claim. Just to add to the confusion, hundreds of new “genders” were adopted — because some teens on Tumblr once invented them and queer theorists loved them.

While Mr Sullivan has a point, as I noted yesterday, calling a lobbying group for the same-sex attracted a "human rights" campaign suggests it's based on natural law, but the problem with same-sex conduct is that it violates natural law. Thus the abolitionist and civil rights argument that to deny the rights of African slaves and their descendants violates natural law, since Africans are human and can't be owned like animals, doesn't carry over to same-sex conduct. Whatever argument can be made in favor of the legal or moral standing of the same-sex attracted, it can't be based on natural law (this isn't to say that other arguments can't be made).

Mr Sullivan looks back to the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 70s and in fact buys into the idea that it was based on natural law:

It was the most speedily successful civil rights story in memory. Its case for equality was simple and clear: including us in existing institutions needn’t change anything in heterosexual life. . . . They were not some strange, alien tribe. They were just like every other human, part of our families and communities; and we cared about each other.

. . . And now? Back in culture war hell.

So what went wrong?

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body. Because heterosexuality is the overwhelming norm, and homosexuality the exception, and because society is nothing but a complex of oppression, homosexuals are defined by their rejection of heteronormativity.

I think he's unintentionally pointing out the weakness of the natural law argument in favor of normalizing same-sex attraction. Bp Robert Barron often cites St John Henry Newman on conscience: it is effectively a primitive gospel built into human nature, and it responds to natural law. I think the basic natural-law problem for same-sex attraction is that it violates conscience, whatever argument may be put forth for tolerating or normalizing it. Thus the problem over same-sex attraction is that it can never quite get over the hurdle of natural law, and to solve its problem without acknowledging this means we have to abolish natural law.

How will we do this? Well, we'll start by forcing our institutions to stop privileging it, however unconsciously they may do so. Thus the Human Rights Campaign threatens a shunning of Anheuser Busch, while two Los Angeles gay-and-trans rights organiztions have withdrawn their support for the Dodgers' Pride Night in response to their decision to disinvite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence:

"Our community is being used as political pawns in a way that I don't remember in my lifetime," said Joe Hollendoner, CEO of the Los Angeles LGBT Center. "This is why we need the Dodgers to not bend in the slightest, and in fact be strong in their allyship to us because it's not just about this once instance."

. . . In a statement issued Thursday, LA Pride said the following in response to the Dodgers' decision: "As a longstanding partner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, we are very disappointed in their decision to rescind their invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to be honored at the 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night. As a result and in solidarity with our community, LA Pride will not be participating in this year's Dodgers Pride Night event."

There's really no conflict between Mr Sullivan's retrospective, though perhaps fanciful, idea of a brief golden age of mutual tolerance between the heteronormative and the same-sex attracted and the natural-law view, which is expressed in CCC 2358:

The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.

The problem is that in a fallen world, this isn't a stable situation, because for those who are troubled by conscience over their attraction, which is a natural condition, but want to persist in same-sex conduct, they must either continue to be troubled or try to abolish the conscience and natural law that are at the basis of the problem. This is their current project.

Part of this strategy in legacy media has been to identify those behind measures like the Bud Light boycott or disinviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence fom the Dodgers' Pride Night as "conservatives" or "extremists". Over Bud Light, I think they're more accurately "populists", while in respect to the Dodgers, they're "Catholic laity", who make up about 25% of the US population. These people can't be swatted away like gnats or mosquitoes, while trying to dismiss natural law never has a good outcome.

What's Up With Sam Brinton?

It's taken more than a day for even the sketchiest details to emerge in the latest Sam Brinton episode. As of yesterday, all we knew was in this Fox report:

Sam Brinton, the embattled former senior Department of Energy (DOE) official, was arrested as a "fugitive from justice" by Maryland police late Wednesday.

According to county records reviewed by Fox News Digital, Brinton was taken into custody in Rockville. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) Police, which is the lead law enforcement agency for both Washington, D.C., area airports, said the arrest was related to the theft of airport luggage, the third such criminal case involving Brinton.

"Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Police executed a search warrant May 17 in Montgomery County, Maryland, in connection with allegations of stolen property in luggage from Reagan National Airport that was brought to the department’s attention in February 2023," James Johnson, a spokesperson for the MWAA, told Fox News Digital in an email.

However, the Daily Wire had different details yesterday:

The Daily Wire’s Luke Roziak learned exclusively that former Biden administration nuclear official, Sam Brinton, was arrested last night at his home in Rockville, Maryland. A neighbor told Roziak that four unmarked police cars went to his house at about 10:00 PM and pulled him out. On Thursday, a judge ordered Brinton extradited to Arlington, Virginia to face charges of grand larceny related to alleged luggage theft out of Dulles Airport, in connection with those fugitive from justice charges.

Although Reagan National and Dulles Airport are nominally "in" Washington, DC, they're both actually in Virginia, and they're two separate airports 23 miles apart. The Fox story implies that the airport police are interested in a luggage theft that took place at Reagan, while the Daily Wire Wire says the arrest was for a luggage theft at Dulles. Are these two separate incidents, or is one or the other outlet confused between Reagan and Dulles?

There's a somewhat later, more detailed report at the Daily Wire:

On Thursday afternoon, Brinton appeared before a judge via closed-circuit television from the Montgomery County Central Processing Unit, where Judge Victor Del Pino declined to release him and ordered him extradited to Virginia. Brinton did not have a lawyer or any supporters or press, other than The Daily Wire, at the hearing. A public defender spoke for him temporarily, despite his not being eligible for a public defender because of his income.

. . . “Mr. Brinton is a nuclear engineer, he is married,” the public defender said. “He works for GeoFission, a nuclear startup. He believes if he is released to turn himself in [to Virginia], he can keep his job… I believe the allegation is stolen luggage.”

Del Pino said “I will deny the request to turn himself in. Virginia will pick him up. Good luck in Virginia, Mr. Brinton.”

. . . In March, a Tanzanian fashion designer named Asia Odorous Khamsin appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to say that her luggage had been stolen from Reagan National Airport in 2018 on the way to a fashion show, causing catastrophe because she was unable to show her designs. Brinton was later pictured wearing one of her one-of-a-kind designs that had been in the suitcase, she said.

Although this seems to be an important story, it looks as if only the Daily Wire has shown any interest in it, but the Daily Wire seems to have mixed Reagan up with Dulles. In any case, although the accounts refer to a luggage theft that came to police attention in February 2023, which may be the one the fashion designer discussed on the Tucker Carlson show in March, at this point, we simply can't be sure. Robert Spencer, in discussing the case at PJ Media, says,

It looked as if America’s two-tier justice system was operating again, and Brinton, as a key element of the Left’s initiative to force us to accept transgender madness, would not suffer anything like the legal penalties he would have gotten if he had not been a Leftist.

Notwithstanding, no legacy media covered the court hearing yesterday, and the right-wing Daily Wire still seems confused. This suggests to me that this is a story most outlets would rather not touch. Spencer concludes.

And so the question must be asked again: is the Biden regime’s ongoing love affair with sexual deviance bringing people into government who are unfit to serve and are active risks?

Back when I worked in security, if you had to do anything related to nuclear at the US Department of Energy, you had to go through an even more stringent background check for a clearance than at the Defense Department. Even in the 1990s, when I was involved in that kind of thing, credible allegations that you were a guy who dressed in women's clothing would almost certainly have resulted in having your clearance denied.

Mr Spencer is raising a legitimate question. People might say that we've gone beyond denying security clearances just because someone's a cross-dresser, apparently due to the argument that we're no longer prejudiced against gays or whatever, and they no longer represent a threat that they might be compromised by blackmail. But they can still be a threat to the organization's credibility just because they're seriously off, and they can potentially do unpredictably sick things, as Mr Brinton keeps proving.

This is the problem with attempts by sexual deviants of all kinds to hitchhike on the natural law argument used by abolitionists and civil rights activists. On one hand, natural law says the rights of African slaves and their descendants are human rights. On the other, deviant rights are not human rights, because deviant conduct violates natural law, and as soon as you do that, you open the door to a great deal else. The Sam Brinton case is a good example of the conundrum.

As Saul Alinksy said, "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it."

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.