Flunking Crisis Management 101

I've mentioned here that I sometimes used to work in corporate contingency planning, both as a planner and part of a crisis response. A regional utility that I worked for at the time had a near-catastrophe when it failed to recognize that the 1994 Northridge earthquake had severely damaged its facilities. I was one of the people pulled off a desk job to carry a wrench and give the impression of restoring service, a last-minute move by the company that saved its reputation. So I have some experience in how these things ought to be done.

So far, both Budweiser and Target have earned at least D grades in crisis management, but I think in those cases, there are mitigating factors where the public mood over transsexualism has been changing quickly, and other factors like failing national leadership are also coming into play. The one company so far that's earning a complete F is the Los Angeles Dodgers. In fact, my undergraduate institution had a grade beyond F called "flagrant neglect", which may well apply to the Dodgers here. It was informally called a "flag", and it was sometimes issued. I never got a flag, but a roommate did. No matter, he went on to work for a whole career as a reporter at the New York Times.

Let's just take a 30,000 foot view of the Dodgers' performance over the past two weeks, which warrants not just an F but a flag. It managed to take a potential net positive -- after listening to a reasonable explanation of why the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence could be offensive to a large segment of its fan base, including Latins, other Catholics, and other Christians -- it elected to disinvite them from its Pride Night, itself a questionable event. If, as Budweiser also neglected to do, it had given a moment's thought to its customer base, this wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Then, after angry responses from LGBTQ+ groups and behind-the-scenes pressure from local leftist politicians and the local teachers' union, they wussed out, rescinded their disinvite, and even issued a formal apology to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence:

After much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Los Angeles Dodgers would like to offer our sincerest apologies to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, members of the LGBTQ+ community and their friends and families.

Not only did this put Dodgers management in a position of looking weak, indecisive, and unprincipled, but it managed to do something that no athletic team, and not even a Hollywood studio, had managed to do in over 60 years, get crosswise with the Catholic Church. So far, the Roman Catholic Archdioseses of Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as the Diocese of Orange, have opposed the Dodgers' move. The Diocese of Orange's opposition is especially important, because when the Dodgers originally disinvited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Angels, which call themselves a Los Angeles team although they play in Anaheim in Orange County, appeared to offer to host the "sisters" at its own pride night.

Anaheim Mayor Ashleigh Aitken tweeted Saturday that she was among those upset by the Dodgers’ decision and invited the Sisters to the Angels’ Pride Night on June 7.

“Pride should be inclusive and like many, I was disappointed in the Dodgers decision,” she posted on Twitter, using the hashtag #CityofKindness.

As the LA Times commented, this position wasn't exactly clear, and it looks as though the mayor belatedly realized she'd stepped in it:

It wasn’t immediately clear if she issued an official invitation to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence beyond the tweet or if the group would be honored in any way at Angels’ Pride Night. A spokesperson for Aitken declined to answer questions, saying there were no updates available.

The Sisters also didn’t immediately respond to questions about the Angels’ invitation Monday. A spokesperson for the Angels declined to comment.

Clearly the Angels know they're opening themselves to an equivalent backlash if they follow through on the offer, and remarks by the Bishop of Orange have them on notice.

Statement re: Mayor of Anaheim's invitation to Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as her special guest to Angels Pride Night: pic.twitter.com/VdczRGF5G3

— Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange (@OrangeDiocese) May 22, 2023

By late yesterday, there were signs that the Dodgers were slowly beginning to realize that, rather than averting a corporate crisis, they'd made things much worse for themselves. Naturally, their reponse was timid and utterly inadequate:

Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw announced on Friday the team would relaunch its Christian Faith and Family Day, just days after the organization re-invited the radical anti-Christian transgender group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, to its tenth annual Pride Night event.

. . . In the replies to Kershaw’s tweet announcing Christian Faith and Family Day, social media users called on Kershaw, a vocal Christian, to denounce the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and his team’s decision to re-invite them to Pride Night.

“Glad this is coming back but you gotta speak out against @SFSisters openly mocking Christ,” one user replied. “This Christian event, which has no involvement prior to the game or during, will not fix the wrongs your team has done.”

Bp Barron himself responded,

Not enough, @Dodgers. If you really want to reach out to Christians, don’t celebrate anti-Christian hate groups. https://t.co/Ne7RNWr2DF

— Bishop Robert Barron (@BishopBarron) May 26, 2023

Here's the kind of basic advice you get in Crisis Management 101, for instance:

If your company is in the wrong, admit it as soon as possible. The public is much more forgiving if a company accepts responsibility for its actions early on rather than if a company backtracks down the road or gets caught trying to cover up a mistake. Equally as important, do not make definitive statements without having all of the information, but don’t let that prevent you from communicating.

. . . In a time of crisis, keeping messaging consistent is critical – this includes consistency in who is delivering the messaging. The entire communications team and stakeholders should not deliver comments to anyone unless explicitly specified. All inquiries should be directed to the approved spokesperson.

. . . Immediately addressing the problem and presenting a solution during a crisis is a great idea, but the company must ensure that the messaging is consistent and actionable. Presenting a solution that will never see the light of day isn’t helpful to anyone and media can see through the insincere response. Be sure to update the press with transparent and attainable messaging.

So, how have the Dodgers been handling this? They've been waffling. First, they disinvited the "sisters", although it was a bad decision to have invited them in the first place. Then they un-disinvited them and apologized for disinviting them. This means that their only choices now are refusing to un-disinvite them or re-disinvite them, neither of which will convey the impression that they're addressing the problem. This means that at this point, they can't convey a consistent and actionable message, since they've created the impression that any apology they issue will just be rescinded with a counter-apology a few days later.

Not only that, but nobody from Dodgers management is responding, they're just trotting out a player to say he's excited about a Christian day. This violates the rule that there needs to be a single, approved spokesman who delivers a transparent message.

The moment I saw the apology to the "sisters" on Monday, even before Bp Barron announced the boycott on Thursday, I realized the Dodgers CEO will have to be fired, and even then, the team owners will have to do a real scramble to preserve the brand. As of now, especially given Bp Barron's immediate tweet responding to the half-hearted announcement of a Christian night of some sort, I'm getting the impression that Bp Barron is consulting and coordinating with Mr Burch and other Catholic laity. As I noted yesterday, here is Mr Burch's position:

Here are my terms: 1) We get a complete public apology from the Dodgers, 2) the Dodgers pledge never to host or honor an anti-Catholic hate group again, 3) the people responsible for this stunt are fired, and 4) The Dodgers agree to make a gift from their foundation to a group of religious sisters that perform real charity.

I get the impression that Bp Barron is on board with this, though he is letting Mr Burch be the lead. When the dust settles, the Dodgers CEO will almost certainly have been fired, and there may well be a realignment in the team's ownership.

Uh-Oh Again

When I first saw the clips from Trump's CNN town hall on YouTube the morning after the event, I instinctively said "uh-oh" before I said anything else. What I was thinking was probably along the line that Trump is back, but he's not just back, he's back like John Wick or Jason Bourne. And I wasn't the only one; Christiane Amanpour, who must be the doyenne of unassailably correct opinion, called the event an "earthquake". Yesterday afternoon, when I heard that Bp Baron had called for a boycott of the LA Dodgers, I had the same gut uh-oh reaction. I need to parse this out.

First, Bp Barron is hardly a fire-breathing conservative. Abp Cordileone of San Francisco was much more explicit in his reaction this past Tuesday to the Dodgers reversing their earlier decision to disinvite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence from their Pride Night, enjoining his audience to "Gird your loins". Bp Barron had in fact earlier drawn criticism for appearing to condemn the Covington, KY Catholic schoolboy Nicholas Sandmann for systemic racism even after that story had been generally debunked.

Second, it's been many years since any Catholic bishop has called for a boycott. The only even mildly equivalent case I've found so far is the Roman Catholic Bishop of Albany, NY, who in 1957 called for Catholics to boycott Albany's Strand Theatre over the film Baby Doll. According to Wikipedia,

Filmed in Mississippi in late 1955, Baby Doll was released in December 1956. It provoked significant controversy, largely due to its implied sexual themes. An effort to ban the film was carried out by the Roman Catholic advocacy group National Legion of Decency, but responses to the group's condemnation of the film were varied among Catholic laity and other religious institutions.

This is so long ago that it predates the Second Vatican Council, and it's hard to avoid thinking Catholic bishops gradually lost their enthusiasm for bans and boycotts over subsequent years. For instance, the National Legion of Decency

was a Catholic group founded in 1934 by Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences. Members were asked to pledge to patronize only those motion pictures which did not "offend decency and Christian morality".

. . . Professor James Skinner wrote that by the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s, the Legion was beginning to lose its influence both within Hollywood and within the Catholic Church. Skinner noted that in some cases, young Catholics throughout the country saw a “C” rating as a reason to see a particular film. He argued that as a result of the Church’s liberalization after the Second Vatican Council, and a decline in the initial enthusiasm for the Legion, the Legion ceased to exist by the mid 1960s.

It's worth noting that Bp Barron has frequently pointed out that he is a full supporter of the Second Council (and as I've said here, I'm aligned with Bp Barron). He's also remarked that some think he isn't a Pope Francis guy, but after all, Pope Francis has made him a bishop twice. I can't avoid thinking that Bp Barron is minding his career, although likely not for his own aggrandizement.

So on one hand, for Bp Barron to call on Catholics to boycott the Dodgers is a departure from over 60 years of Catholic bishops' strategy. On the other, several days elapsed between the Dodgers' decision to un-disinvite the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, announced on Monday, May 22, and Bp Barron's call for a boycott yesterday, May 25. This suggests to me that his decision wasn't impulsive, and it must have been made in consultation with other bishops and lay organizations like CatholicVote.

I would assume the bishops he consulted would have included, at minimum, Abps Cordileone and Gomez, and others in national leadership. I would also assume those bishops were on board with him taking a national leadership posture on the matter. I simply can't imagine Bp Barron freelancing on this issue, so I'm also beginning to think this marks the start of an overall change in attitude among US bishops.

Nor can I ignore the factor that's clearly driving Bp Barron's move, which is the unprecedented populist revolt embodied in the boycott of Bud Light. Here's the overall objective, of which Bp Barron must be aware, expressed in an e-mail from Bob Burch, President of CatholicVote, which had been a major factor in the original campaign to get the Dodgers to disinvite the "sisters" :

Here are my terms: 1) We get a complete public apology from the Dodgers, 2) the Dodgers pledge never to host or honor an anti-Catholic hate group again, 3) the people responsible for this stunt are fired, and 4) The Dodgers agree to make a gift from their foundation to a group of religious sisters that perform real charity.

We'll have to see how this plays out. But one thing that strikes me is that under the old Legion of Decency, Catholics were expected simply to do what their bishops told them to do. In this case, it looks like the bishops are supporting the laity once the laity had gotten the ball rolling.

In any case, the Dodgers have now got to be aware that they've gotten crosswise with the Catholic Church. Major league baseball teams have typically marketed themselves as institutions that represent the best of community values. If nothing else, the Dodgers have a corporate crisis on their hands comparable to Bud Light or Target.

Tuck Friendly?

People keep missing the point. A YouTuber named Prime Time Stein had the brilliant idea to find out for himself what one of those "tuck friendly" Target women's bathing suits was like; he went into a Target, took one off the rack, went into the changing room, and tried it on. The results are visible in the screen shot above (click on the image for a clearer view). Whatever they claim to have done, it doesn't seem to make much difference.

I get the impression that to be nice, he actually paid for it, but if it were me, I'd turn around and file a civil claim for false advertising, except I've got to question the judgment of any guy who'd go out and buy a women's bathing suit intended for men on the basis that it would somehow make it look like he wasn't a guy.

Heck, back when I was single, even at that time (I lived in LA, after all), the advice was always just to be a little extra careful and check a "woman's" wrists or Adam's apple to be sure you aren't getting yourself into a surprise situation. "Tuck friendly" was never the only issue.

So who are they trying to kid? If anything, they're selling a fantasy that if you buy their Pride collection, you can actually fool somebody into thinking you're a woman. But if you can never really do that, what on earth are you trying to prove otherwise?

This extends to the level of corporate gaslighting Target has undertaken to cover for its campaign, much like Bud Light's almost two months ago. NPR carries the officially approved line:

Reuters reported that the company is removing from stores and its website products created by the LGBTQ brand Abprallen, which offers some products featuring spooky, gothic imagery, such as skulls and Satan, in pastels colors.

Conservative activists and media have also bashed Target in recent days for selling "tuck-friendly" women's swimsuits that allow some trans women to hide their genitalia, the Associated Press reported.

Target has only been selling tuck-friendly swimsuits made for adults — and not, contrary to false online rumors, for kids or in kid sizes, the AP also found.

But I picked this photo right off the web; it appears to be a trans boy of an age where his anatomy is quite a bit easier to tuck away -- maybe 13 at the oldest.

Prime Time Stein's stunt shows that "tuck friendly" just doesn't work for a mature male's anatomy; they couldn't use a 21-year-old for that shot. This does raise troubling questions of just whom they're trying to sell these bathing suits to. Well, hebephilia is the term used to describe a preferential sexual interest in pubescent (i.e. early adolescent) individuals, rather than adult partners.

Elsewhere, reporters have taken a closer look at the Target Pride displays:

[S]ome children’s items feature a label overtly pushing the transgender agenda, reading, “Thoughtfully Fit on Multiple Body Types and Gender Expressions.”

Even the Associated Press has admitted this fact, noting that a Target store in New York City featured kids’ black swimskirts for sale with a tag that states, “Thoughtfully Fit on Multiple Body Types and Gender Expressions.” This description can be seen directly on the Target website as well with a little girl modeling that particular piece of clothing. Further, the “pride” section still offers an array of pride-themed swimwear for children as well, which is confirmed on Target’s online store as well.

A teal and lime green pride-themed children’s swimsuit, for example, is adorned with pride tags, one of which states that it is “designed for comfort & confidence.” It also contains a tag reading “Thoughtfully Fit on Multiple Body Types and Gender Expressions.”

A corporate statement from Target issued yesterday basically blames the customers:

For more than a decade, Target has offered an assortment of products aimed at celebrating Pride Month. Since introducing this year's collection, we've experienced threats impacting our team members' sense of safety and well-being while at work. Given these volatile circumstances, we are making adjustments to our plans, including removing items that have been at the center of the most significant confrontational behavior.

The Philadelphia Inquirer repeated this line:

Several videos showed people destroying stores’ cardboard Pride displays or making scenes about Pride products. The company confirmed it has moved its Pride displays from the front of the stores to the back in some Southern locations.

Actually, the videos I've seen include a TikTok in which a woman asks store staff, "Where's the straight section?" with the staff remaining uncomfortably silent, or the guy in the screen shot at the top of this post showing just how ridiculous an idea "tuck friendly" is for a normal adult male and proposing a "tuck you" campaign against Target. None of this is either violent or threatening to Target employees -- but their corporate masters have in fact put them in embarrassing predicaments.

This is gaslight culture. So far, it's feeding the boycotts.

Bud Light Isn't The Issue

I noted this story just yesterday in the New York Post:

Many Target locations across the country feature massive June Pride month displays on an annual basis, with items this year ranging from “tuck friendly” bathing suits for transgender people to mugs that say “gender fluid.”

. . . A Target insider told Fox News Digital that many locations, mostly in rural areas of the South, have relocated Pride sections to avoid the kind of backlash Bud Light has received in recent weeks after using a transgender influencer in a promotional campaign.

A Target insider said there were “emergency” calls on Friday and some managers and district senior directors were told to tamp down the Pride sections immediately.

But as of the Post story yesterday, this was limited just to the places where the most bigoted rednecks lived and shopped:

Fox News Digital has confirmed rural Target stores in South Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia are among the locations to move the Pride sections. Most rank-and-file employees were left in the dark, with many not knowing the Pride sections would be moved until they noticed it themselves.

Pride merchandise remains prominently displayed at other locations and on the Target website.

But by later in the day, it wasn't just Target insiders saying things to Fox News Digital, it was the corporate spokesperson talking officially to Reuters, and the line was different:

Target has been celebrating Pride Month for more than a decade. But this year's collection has led to an increase in confrontations between customers and employees and incidents of Pride merchandise being thrown on the floor, Target spokesperson Kayla Castaneda said.

The products Target is withdrawing are being removed from all its U.S. stores and from its website, Castaneda said.

The products that have immnediately been purged are only those associated with a UK stanist designer, but others are "under review":

For example, a swimsuit sold in the women's section has come under scrutiny for the way its fit was described, as "tuck friendly," highlighted its ability to supposedly tuck male genitalia.

Predictably, California Gov Newsom weighed in:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Tuesday slammed Target’s chief executive for pulling LGBTQ and Pride Month merchandise from store shelves after facing backlash and threats of violence from some customers.

“CEO of Target Brian Cornell selling out the LGBTQ+ community to extremists is a real profile in courage. This isn’t just a couple stores in the South. There is a systematic attack on the gay community happening across the country,” Newsom wrote in a tweet Tuesday night.

Indeed, it's in Los Angeles, but it isn't "a systematic attack on the gay community". Instead, it's beginning to look like a spontaneous popular movement that radical pansexualists have brought on themselves. Their major error has been to open this phase of their campaign with a target people can pick, freeze, personalize, and polarize, figures like Dylan Mulvaney and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

San Francisco Abp Cordileone tweeted, "So we now know what gods the Dodger admin worships. Open desecration & anti-Catholicism is not disqualifying. Disappointing but not surprising. Gird your loins." In other words, this is shaping up to be a battle, but so far, it looks like the forces of pansexualism have chosen the wrong battlefield.

They're tying themselves to corporate brands, for the products of which other choices are easily available, while the brands themselves are so visible that they can't easily back out of the controversies, nor the taint their ill-considered positions, however equivocal, put on the brands themselves. This will damage the brands even if, like the Dodgers, they try to flip-flop or gaslight over what their positions actually were.

This is completely new.

Epstein Update

Yesterday I ran into a data item that validates the contrarian theory of Epstein's business model that I outlined two weeks ago. On May 7, I said,

Let's say Epstein was running honey traps. Let's take two examples of public figures who may have rubbed up against the Epstein operation the wrong way, Bill Gates and Alan Dershowitz. Let's say there were cameras secretly filming every last indiscretion, whatever may or may not have been alleged. Dershowitz fought his own allegation and was able to make it go away. Gates wound up divorcing his wife after a photo emerged of him and Epstein with a few other people, fully clothed, at a dinner.

Gates maintained that's as far as anything went, and no secret camera footage emerged to contradict him. Yeah, his wife divorced him, but it appears there was evidence he was propositioning female subordinates completely independent of anything Epstein may or may not have had on tape. I doubt if anything he may or may not have done under Epstein's auspices had much of anything to do with the divorce. In any case, Gates is as rich as he ever was.

From the New York Post -- although this story's been everywhere from the Guardian to the Hindustan Times:

Jeffrey Epstein threatened to expose an affair Bill Gates allegedly had with a Russian bridge player after the Microsoft co-founder declined to join his philanthropic venture, according to a report on Sunday.

The disgraced pedophile, who killed himself in 2019, appeared to threaten Gates over the alleged affair with Russian card whiz Mila Antonova in a 2017 email, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

, , , Epstein . . . met Antonova while she was looking for financial backers for a bridge academy and later paid for her to attend software coding school, according to the report.

In the 2017 email, Epstein called on Gates to reimburse him for the cost of investing in Antonova’s coding education, the Journal reported.

The message came just after the tech titan declined to join the convicted sex offender’s multibillion-dollar charity he was trying to kick off with JPMorgan Chase, sources told the newspaper.

. . . “Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” a spokesperson for Gates said.

The spokesperson added that Gates never paid up over the threat and that he had “no financial dealings” with Epstein.

Gates and his wife Melinda divorced in 2021. The Micosoft board investigated him for unrelated affairs with and attempts to hit on Microsoft employees, but although he wasn't removed, he left Microsoft voluntarily in 2020. It sounds as though, even if the affair with Antonova did in fact take place, it was brief and of little consequence in comparison to all the others Gates was conducting, Epstein's threat was de minimis, and it wouldn't have been a factor that led either to his divorce or his departure from Microsoft, even if Epstein had exposed it.

I think this supports my view that Epstein wasn't making his money from honey traps. Gates simply refused to cooperate, while Alan Dershowitz successfully defended himself against accusations that he molested anyone on Epstein's island. The most serious of these was dropped last November:

Virginia Giuffre admitted she might have been wrong to accuse Alan Dershowitz of sexual abuse in a new court filing, bringing to an end a three-year legal battle between the pair.

Ms Giuffre said in a statement to The Independent that she long believed she had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Mr Dershowitz, but that she was very young at the time and had been in a stressful and traumatic environment.

“I now recognise I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr Dershowitz,” the statement, first reported by The New York Times, read.

Dershowitz hardly mentions this now; he's much more miffed that his Martha's Vineyard neighbors shun him because he defended Trump in his first impeachment than anything to do with Epstein.

It's also worth noting that the blackmail attempt against Gates was made in 2017, long after Epstein's 2008 guilty plea for soliciting an underage girl and two years after his Lolita Express 737 was mothballed. We must assume Epstein's fortunes by then were at a low ebb, and the Gates ploy was little more than a desperation move. Two years after that, he was arrested and jailed on charges of underage sex for the second time. By then, he'd run out of money for payoffs, protection, lawyers, and anything else.

This leaves open the separate question of where his money came from. I don't think blackmail was ever his main source of income; it sounds like he wasn't all that good at it. I'd bet he was mainly a con artist and embezzler who was good at ingratiating himself with rich and powerful people and used his connections with them to expand his circle of marks -- if he couldn't get money from them directly for his "philanthropies", he could, as he did with Dershowtiz, get them to do favors. Other accounts suggest he was very good at looking like he was a lot richer than he ever actually was.

And if he worked for the CIA or Mossad, that says more about the state of our intelligence agencies than it does about Epstein, but it does indirectly confirm Epstein was mainly a con artist.

This Isn't 2015

As of July 2015, the closest equivalent point to late May 2023 that I can find in a search for polling data, here's where the presidential race stood, according to CNN:

With nearly all of the expected 2016 presidential candidates formally in the race, a new CNN/ORC national poll finds two recent entrants to the GOP field on the rise, while Hillary Clinton maintains her position atop the Democratic field, though holding a slightly slimmer lead.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and businessman Donald Trump top the list of GOP presidential contenders following their back-to-back campaign launches in mid-June, and are the only two Republican candidates holding double-digit support among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

. . . Looking ahead to the general election, Clinton continues to hold significant leads over Bush (54% Clinton to 41% Bush) and Christie (56% Clinton to 37% Christie). She has also opened up wide leads over Rubio (56% Clinton to 39% Rubio) and Walker (57% Clinton to 38% Walker), as those two have slipped among independents. Clinton’s clearest advantage, however, is over Donald Trump, 59% say they would vote for Clinton if the 2016 match-up were between her and Trump, 34% say they would back Trump.

This story at the never-Trump Red State aggregator buries the lede:

The Harvard Harris poll conducted online between May 17-18 among 2,004 registered voters has some fascinating takeaways that don’t look good for Joe Biden and the Democratic narrative pushed by the liberal media.

But it takes quite a while to get to the main point:

The poll also shows that Biden is in deep trouble because large majorities of people think he’s not mentally fit and he’s too old. The poll also has Donald Trump beating him by 7 points and Kamala Harris by 11. Those are pretty big numbers, but people can remember that they had it much better under Trump than under Biden/Harris, and they can see what a mess Biden is now.

And so far, there's not much support for wishful thinking about DeSantis:

In the GOP primary, the poll showed Trump widening his lead on Ron DeSantis and the rest of the field. He’s at 58 percent, with DeSantis at 16 percent, and the rest still further back.

. . . DeSantis’ numbers against Biden or Harris are only even, according to the poll.

This follows the clear shock within bien pensant opinion at Trump's CNN New Hampshire town hall. Christiane Amanpour called the event an "earthquake":

More than 3 million viewers watched the town hall, which featured Trump repeating his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” and critics knocked CNN for giving Trump a prime time platform to repeat that lie and many others. Moderator Kaitlan Collins attempted to fact check Trump in real time, but cheered on by a supportive audience of Republicans, the former president spoke over Collins and refused to concede making any false statements.

Amanpour, who served as the commencement speaker at Columbia as well as accepted the Columbia Journalism Award on Wednesday, said the town hall format served Trump well, but not viewers. “I still respectfully disagree with allowing Donald Trump to appear in that particular format,” she said. “We know Trump and his tendencies, everyone does. He just seizes the stage and dominates,” no matter how determined a moderator is to hold him accountable.

The standard line here is that Trump "lied" that the 2020 election was "stolen", but even in its own fact-check of Trump's town hall, CNN was forced to acknowledge that he used the term "rigged", not "stolen".

Just minutes after the town hall began, Trump claimed the 2020 election was “rigged.”

Facts First: This is Trump’s regular lie. He lost the 2020 election to Biden fair and square, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. Biden earned more than 7 million more votes than Trump did. Trump’s own campaign and senior officials in his administration found no evidence for his claims of widespread fraud.

But the letter from 51 former intelligence officials claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation has recently been characterized by politicians other than Trump as an attempt to influence the 2020 election. The Durham Report implicates the FBI in attempts to interfere in the electoral process as well.

Legacy media, in calling the Trump town hall an "earthquake", is backhandedly acknowledging that it's been misreading the public mood -- efforts to fact-check Trump's statements at the town hall and afterward simply fell flat; the audience laughed in all the wrong places. The problem as well is that Trump has long since acquired immunity to all the usual accusations. The Access Hollywood tape and Stormy Daniels didn't work in 2016, and E Jean Carroll isn't working now.

The same thing seems to be happening with all the Russia collusion and similar stories, and this extends to January 6, and for that matter the Mar-a-Lago classified documents. There's enough in the Durham Report to feed suspicion that the Stasified FBI is behind the other things as well.

So far, Trump's opponents are going to have to come up with something new, and so far, they haven't. That which doesn't kill himn is making him stronger. The applicable narratives are neo-noir: The Dark Knight Rises, the Bourne trilogy, John Wick. There's a new political paradigm here. A writer's guide to hero archetypes brings up The Warrior:

This is exactly what it says. It's every Jason Bourne or John Wick movie, not to mention most of Tom Cruise's work in the last two decades. It's the guy (or girl, hence Salt or Black Widow) who gets knocked down but keeps getting up because America/freedom/Sparta/save the victim, etc.

In the current imaginative context, this is John Wick going against Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light, and Sam Brinton, who are effectively surrogates for Joe Biden, who in turn is disturbingly close to the Emperor Palpatine. This is not a contest.

But as a figure who plays on the public imagination, Trump is more than that. He's Till Eulenspiegel, and as I've already said, the truth-teller and the practical joker, both Holden Caulfield and Froggy Gremlin. The last strategy that'll work with someone like that will be for a Hillary Clinton, a Christiane Amanpour, a Kaitlan Collins, or a Miss Watson to frown on him disapprovingly from above. Bwetween the warrior hero and Till Eulenspiegel, he's going to be tough to beat, and his opponents are still in denial over what they're up against.

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.