Back To The Center Of Attention

Via The Washington Examiner,

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer turned transgender activist Lia Thomas is back at the center of attention after the national champion was seen on social media appearing to embrace the "Trantifa" movement.

Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, was seen on Instagram sporting an all-black outfit that included a BDSM leather harness and shirt reading "Antifa Super Soldier."

The image of Thomas was reportedly shared by the activist's partner Gwen Weiskopf, who purportedly identifies as transgender.

So who is Gwen Weiskopf? A quick web search brought up this photo and a writeup:

At the link:

[D]etails on Lia Thomas and Gwen Weiskopf’s relationship timeline & their dating history still need to be published in the public domain.

However, sources believe the couple is still together despite Lia’s name beginning to trend over the internet after participating in female swinging despite being transgender.

So by the accounts of the female swimmers on the Penn swim team, Lia is an intact biological male who claims to be "transgender", whatever that means, but is also conventionally attracted to women, and Ms Weiskopf appears to be an intact biological female, at least judging by facial features and the proportion of her hands. So I'm wondering if the whole Lia saga has been nothing more than an elaborate windup in the UK sense, an extended joke. If Ms Weiskopf claims to be "transgender" as well, then they amount to a conventionally cisgender couple who are just appropriating trans status for attention and privilege.

But this brought me to another question, now that notionally "trans" figures like Dylan Mulvaney and Sam Brinton have been in the public eye: can you make a career out of being trans? It looks like Lia is trying to rebrand himself as being more generally "transgressive", as opposed to just transsexual, posing as an “Antifa Super Solder” in bondage-style leather gear.

Sam Brinton has also been back in the news:

Sticky-fingered former Department of Energy employee Sam Brinton was on a taxpayer-funded work trip when they snatched a woman’s suitcase from a Las Vegas airport, documents obtained by The Post show.

Federal funds paid for non-binary Brinton, who uses they/them pronouns, to head to the city as a representative for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy in July 2022, according to internal expense reports provided to The Post by the federal watchdog Functional Government Initiative (FGI).

Although Brinton has a master's degree in the nuclear waste field, he built his working career largely on gay and trans activism within scientific fields, which culminated in his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, which lasted fully six months until his arrests for stealing luggage from airport carousels. During this period, he also had a side gig hosting spanking seminars at kink conferences, and it would appear that if his guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges for two prior thefts won't end his nuclear career, which requires a security clearance, pending felony charges for a third theft almost certainly will, and his future prospects are likely to involve headining kink conferences.

But this brings me to my favorite question: what problem are Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney trying to solve? They present themselves as trans activists, but they also stand for a principle that goes beyond just the problem of sexual preference -- and at least in the case of Lia Thomas, his day-to-day sexual preference is simply irrelevant. He identifies as trans even if he's apparently in a conventional long-term relationship with a woman and dates other women as well. This piece by radical feminist author Angela Saini explains the real issue:

I think the fight for transgender rights and non-binary rights is an anti-patriarchal fight, because gendered oppression flattens people and expects you to follow certain rules, which disadvantages everybody who doesn’t conform to that system. So we have to see it all as intrinsic. The anti-transgender movement in the US mainly is associated with religious conservatives, and that’s true in many other parts of the world, like Eastern Europe for example.

I find it bizarre that, in the UK, it’s associated with a certain section of feminists. I don’t know how that has happened. I really hope that we can reach a point at which we understand and accommodate the fact that we cannot wish people away. What happens at the administrative level and institutional level is a problem we have created because we’ve created our institutions in such a binary way. If we hadn’t created them in such a binary way we wouldn’t be in as much of a mess as we’re in right now. What you have to ultimately accept is that space needs to be made for everyone. We need to make everyone feel comfortable and safe in society – and surely that’s something we can all get behind.

The problem is that guys wearing lipstick and dresses or swimming on the women's team turn out to be just a totem for the bigger issue, which is the need to eliminate "certain rules" that "flatten people". The rules extend beyond conventional gender roles to questions like traditional respect for the rule of law, the role of logic and grammar in clear expression, or even the use of mathematics as a broad tool for understanding the everyday environment. Eliminating principles like these, which basically comprise "natural law", is the object of "smashing the patriarchy".

My question about people like Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney is how they can support themselves under the general principles of natural law -- they have to live out a normal lifespan and earn a living that will keep them comfortable. Leaving everything else aside, they're going to get old, and they're going to fade quickly from media. Can they cancel out that rule? I'm sure they'd like to. But things like Lia Thomas's phony claims of "trans" privilege are transparent. You can't cancel natural law, and to the extent that "patriarchy" is a reference to millennia of human experience about how the world runs, you can't smash it.

Kamala Goes There

There's been a minor flurry over Vice President Harris's latest blurt:

The shocking gaffe happened as the 58-year-old vice president delivered remarks at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md., on the need to build a “clean energy economy.”

“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” Harris said, eliciting applause from the audience.

While according to the link, the White House said she meant to say "pollution" instead of "population", it's hard not to think this was more than a Freudian slip, and she could arguably have meant what she said. A web search on "climate change population reduction" produces 185,000,000 hits, including many sites at the most respectable NGOs expressing quite radical proposals in ways that make them seem like bromides. Just this past May, an article in Scientific American by Stephanie Feldstein, the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, argues

While many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy, researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055, but a per capita income increase of 10 percent.

Lower fertility rates also typically signal an increase in gender equality. Better-educated women tend to have fewer children, later in life. This slows population growth and helps reduce carbon emissions. And when women are in leadership roles, they’re more likely than men to advance initiatives to fight climate change and protect nature. These outcomes are side effects of policies that are necessary regardless of their impact on population.

. . . Population decline is only a threat to an economy based on growth. Shifting to a model based on degrowth and equity alongside lower fertility rates will help fight climate change and increase wealth and well-being.

But at least for now, world population is still increasing, not declining. The link suggests it's projected to peak at around 10.4 billion in 2086, but this is just a projection, and people like Ms Feldstein are concerned that we're losing biodiversity now. In addition, this review of the traditional "population control" theory suggests it was originally driven by Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb. but

Population control finally met its formal end in 1994 at a ­UN-­sponsored conference in Cairo. In what is now called the “Cairo Consensus,” 162 states rejected the use of population targets as well as the incentives and disincentives used to reach them[.]

Nevertheless,

enthusiasm for the old ideas hasn't died. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, a leader of the campaign to “make poverty history” and combat global warming by implementing a crash program to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, has cited “population control” as a model, calling it “one of the great success stories of modern times.” Sachs says he favors purely voluntary methods, but he and his allies are playing with a dangerous formula. Declaring a “global crisis” can attract media attention and don­ors.

And the link is talking exclusively about the 20th century Malthusian link between population and world poverty; it has nothing to say about the renewed movement that links not just "population control" but "population decline" with new concepts like "biodiversity" and "equity". The Wikipedia link on Sustainable population summarizes current views from this movement on the optimal world population level:

Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on. Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population tend to put forward much lower numbers, between 2 and 4 billion. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion. Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices. Other estimates of a sustainable global population also come in at considerably less than the current population of 8 billion.

But given the typical climate-change predictions we see now that claim the polar ice caps will melt and Miami will be under water within the next ten years, how much time do we have to fix things? Will electric cars be enough? The link above suggests the 20th century efforts at population control via voluntary sterilization and mass birth control were ineffective, and here we are at eight billion heading for ten. So how do we get back to ten or 20 percent of that before we all drown? It sounds to me as though even the world envisioned by Kurt Vonnegut would be insufficient to solve this problem: the government runs ethical suicide parlors

and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. . . . The government also suppresses the population's sexual desire with a drug that numbs them from the waist down (but does not render them infertile, as that is seen as unethical and in violation of the religious principles of many).

In fact, the pioneering efforts of the National Socialists at a point-based Final Solution would be laughably inadequate to reduce the world population to just two or three billion before the planet burns up. But this in turn raises the question of just who needs to be culled if we undertake a project at this scale -- after all, it's white people who got us into this mess. Maybe the National Socialists had a point, huh? But we'd need to take their efforts much farther.

Republicans really need to pursue this, particularly because Ms Harris would be incapable of handling any questions about this issue overall in a debate, or even in an apostrophe from someone like Tucker Carlson. Even a blanket assertion that she'd simply meant to say "pollution" instead of "population" would be damaging enough.

This Explains Elizabeth Holmes, Alissa Heinerscheid, And Stockton Rush

I found this piece via Instapundit, Why Match School And Student Rank? which echoes my own views on Ivy admissions, which were formed by my own experience as an undergraduate and the views of Ferdinand Lundberg in books like The Rich and the Super-Rich, which in my view is up there with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and Milton's prose in both style and intent.

His thesis is this:

Elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege.

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

. . . People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

The South African true crime writer Nick van der Leek has recently followed the Titan submersible story on his True Crime Rocket Science YouTube channel, which carries the implication that OceanGate is a true crime story, and Stockton Rush was a crook. How could this be? This story, published after the Titan went missing but before its fate was reported, refers to him in the present tense:

Richard Stockton Rush III, 61, better known as Stockton Rush, is the CEO and founder of submersible company OceanGate Inc. as well as a descendant of both the Rush and Davies families, SFGATE reported. Among his ancestors are Benjamin Rush and Richard Stockton, both of whom signed the Declaration of Independence, according to The New York Times.

He is related to millionaire Ralph K. Davies, who started as a 15-year-old office boy at Standard Oil of California in the 1910s before becoming the company’s youngest-ever director and eventually launching his own oil business, SFGATE and the Times reported.

. . . Stockton Rush's father, also named Stockton Rush, was from Philadelphia and also attended Princeton University.

The prestige of his own aerospace engineering degree from Princeton drove his ultimate success as OceanGate's promoter despite an uneven start to his career, and he was able to use that to counter the questions about the Titan's design and construction that were raised from the start.

But this goes to my own experience as an Ivy undergraduate. Once I arrived, I was surprised at how un-challenging the course work was and how mediocre my classmates generally were. It became almost immediately clear that to flunk out (or as they put it, to be "separated from the College") took real application. I coasted, as did most of my friends. Now and then I've mentioned that within weeks of my arrival as a freshman, I went to the dean of freshmen and told him my admission had been a terrible mistake, although my reasons were inchoate.

He was sympathetic, but he convinced me to see it through, and he and I maintained a friendly ongoing relationship throughout my four years. Unfortunately, a heavy smoker, he died of a heart attack not long after I graduated, or I might have corresponded with him after that as well.

The dean, Albert I Dickerson, had been admissions director there earlier in his career, and in fact, in that role, he claimed that he and his immediate predecessor at Dartmouth had been the ones to invent the Ivy selective admissions formula that the link above outlines. He did this in an article, "Enter Ye in by the Narrow Gate. . .", that appeared in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine for October 1947, reprinted in Albert Inskip Dickerson: Selected Writings (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1974).

Having invented the Ivy system, or at least co-invented it, he explained it in nutshell: it was based on Scholarship, Personality, and Groups to Which Preference Is Given, i.e., the usual suspects, and there you had the deal that's existed since the 1940s: some are admitted on merit, some are admitted because they have preference, and nobody is supposed to know the difference -- except that as a somewhat confused 17-year-old, I seem to have realized from the start that something was hinky. I think this is why the dean and I got along so well, he thought I was a bright kid indeed.

What strikes me is that there's been a change, which I began to outline in this post, whereby famous crooks, con artists, and corporate frauds are starting to come from wealthy backgrounds with Ivy degrees, when they'd previously been middle class at best. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, an illegal immigrant from Germany, may have pioneered this trend in the 1980s and 1990s, when as a career con artist who incidentally murdered a California couple in 1985, he adopted a succession of upscale aliases until, as "Clark Rockefeller", he married a high-earning McKinsey senior executive and maintained the fiction that he was wealthy and upper-class.

Somehow this presaged the new trend whereby wealthy Ivy legacies can hitchhike on the prestige of their schoolmates who were admitted on merit and build careers in crime, or in the case of Alissa Heinerscheid, disastrous incompetence. The impostor syndrome may play a part in this, where people who are deeply conscious of their own lack of real qualifications nevertheless seem to function effortlessly among the elite. But why are they only now turning to serious white-collar crime?

This is new. I still wish I could have kept up a correspondence with Dean Dickerson about it. He probably understood more than anyone thought.

The Other Suspect

Here's a news flash I picked up from my portal on the dark web that connects with the alternate universe:

WASHINGTON (AP) The FBI announced this morning that C Throckmorton "Buddy" Hollingsworth III, a Washington Post editor, has been identified as the person whose fingerprints were found on the plastic baggie of cocaine that was discovered by the Secret Service near the White House Situation Room on the evening of July 2. Mr Hollingsworth was arrested at his Dupont Circle home before dawn on felony charges of cocaine possession on federal property, as well as. . .

But here's a thought experiment. What if this had hit the news just the other day in our own universe. Do you think there would be one iota less speculation about the identity of the real culprit, and poor Buddy Hollingsworth would just be taking the fall for someone else? I can't speak to whether the FBI or the Secret Service has better credibility over there than over here -- remember that in that universe, the US has the Nixon dollar -- but over here, conspiracy theories would still rage, no matter how ironclad the case against Buddy Hollingsworth.

Thus on Breitbart yesterday morning, we saw:

Officials at the White House know who brought cocaine into the White House and have confirmed that finding via fingerprint analysis, according to a report which contradicts a statement released by the Secret Service.

A security source told Soldier of Fortune magazine, “We know who handled it… We’ve known since last week.”

So far, this hasn't gone anywhere, but the story did make a worthwhile point farther down, which appears to have been deleted from the current version. But per an earlier report from last August:

President Joe Biden on Wednesday named Kim Cheatle, a veteran Secret Service official, to be the agency’s next director as it faces controversy over missing text messages around the time thousands of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol.

. . . Cheatle had served on Biden’s protective detail when he was vice president. During that time, Biden “came to trust” her judgment and counsel, he said in a statement.

Biden said that her [sic] and first lady Jill Biden “know firsthand Kim’s commitment to her job and to the Secret Service’s people and mission.”

But recall that it was reported at the time when Joe was vice president (and Hunter was also a protectee):

“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude," writes author Ronald Kessler, as quoted by the New York Daily News. "Female Secret Service agents find that offensive.”

But they can't take their eyes off him for a second, so allegedly must watch their boss let it all hang out while he floats to and fro. This "lack of consideration," Kessler writes, means that "being assigned to his detail is considered the second worst assignment in the Secret Service." The least popular detail, he claims, is Hillary Clinton's. (No word on her skinny dipping habits.)

And Kim Cheatle was the Secret Service agent who enabled all this and made it the second worst detail in the agency. So Joe, purely by coincidence, brought her back from the private sector and put her in charge of the whole show, Hunter and all. It would be interesting, though, to hear what the agents on the Kamala Harris detail think of that job, which brings me to the second person of interest in the Sit Room baggie case:

The drugs were actually found in a highly secure area of the White House "near the Situation Room," a place where "average people just can't get in" that also happens to be "where the vice president's vehicle is parked."

The cocaine's proximity to Vice President Kamala Harris's vehicle raises some troubling questions in light of her history prosecuting drug cases as San Francisco district attorney.

. . . Harris has a problematic history when it comes to cocaine. She occasionally cackles like a cokehead. The drugs were found near her vehicle. Coincidence?

But any idea that a cocaine scandal or anything like it wouid push Kamala off the ticket or even bring about an Agnew-style resignation is pure wishful thinking. The Washington Examiner toys with the idea but puts it down again:

“How do you solve a problem like Kamala? The sense is she doesn’t fit in. The sense is she’s not an asset to the administration,” said Democratic pollster John Zogby.

“So what do you do with Vice President Kamala Harris when you’re running a tight reelection race?” he said in an online “riff” with his son and fellow pollster Jeremy Zogby.

Jeremy Zogby, the managing partner of John Zogby Strategies, was even harder on Harris.

“She’s a major problem,” he said. “She’s not a good communicator. She can barely communicate a complicated idea. There’s a lot of cackling, there’s a lot of avoiding answering questions directly, there’s a lot of theatrics,” he added.

The duo suggested that Biden push her into another job, such as United Nations ambassador, to make way for another vice presidential pick that might help him in the reelection campaign — or make it easier for Biden to step aside and let a rising Democratic star such as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) get the nomination.

But that notion runs into the obstacle I've already been discussing, there are no "rising Democratic stars" who can get the nomination away from Joe, while as the piece puts it, the "first-ever female and black vice president is worth more on the ticket than off". But we're also back to the Barack Obama conundrum: like Obama, Harris has a certain minimal presence of melanin in her skin cells, but she isn't a descendant of African slaves, and she's married, more or less, to a rich white guy. This is the sort of black candidate the Democrats will put up for a national election, and so far, the population authentically descended from African slaves hasn't pushed back on this.

So for now, this isn't an issue and won't be unless the Republicans nominate an actual descendant of African slaves for either spot in 2024. Instead, we have a Secret Service head who has a demonstrated ability to keep potential scandals in the presidential and vice presidential families quiet, and who was almost certainly selected for that reason. Remember that in at least 2015 and 2016, while Joe was vice president and Hunter was a protectee, numerous e-mails on the laptop show Hunter setting up deals to buy cocaine on the street in Wilmington, and in October of that year,

Hunter arranged to go to rehab in Sedona, Arizona. During a layover in Los Angeles, he realized he left his wallet on the plane. While waiting for his wallet in LA, he went to Pershing Square and asked a homeless man where he could buy crack.

He bought crack several times that week, The New Yorker reported. After days of not sleeping, on Oct. 28, Hunter was driving on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs and eventually lost control of the car.

He returned the car to Hertz, where he had rented it under a false name. Nevertheless, according to a contemporary Prescott, AZ police report, the Secret Service got involved and among other things confirmed to Hertz that the renter was Hunter Biden. So basically the Secret Service appears to have been monitoring Hunter throughout this episode, if it wasn't escorting him directly, and as far as we can tell was fully aware that he was buying cocaine on the street, and they worked to keep the whole matter quiet.

All the evidence we have is that the Secret Service has been enabling cocaine use -- and no doubt other illicit activity -- by protectees for quite some time, at least since Joe's vice presidency, and they'll continue to cover it up. That's why Kim Cheatle is director now. If either Hunter or Kamala was responsible for the Sit Room baggie, that fix is in.

I've got to assume Speaker McCarthy, Chairman Comer, and Sen Grassley, among others, are fully aware of this. I'm wondering if they have a case for the Secret Service enabling or covering for protectees as they commit federal felonies. Shouldn't this be an issue?

The Deep State Doubles Down

What a surprise!

Con-law professor Jonathan Turley angrily — well, angrily for Turley — ripped FBI director Christopher Wray for his prevarications to Congress as his agency and the Department of Justice stumble through a series of scandals. Wray offered only a “false appearance of contrition and substance” in a “maddening” performance, dodging questions about Hunter Biden, the censorship regime in which the FBI played a central role, and more.

“He could have answered some of these questions,” Turley told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade. “He just chose not to”.

I could have saved Prof Turley the trouble, I knew that was going to be Wray's take from the start -- and I also knew the Secret Service was going to be at a total loss over whose cocaine was left near the Sit Room. This is a pretty clear signal of how the deep state sees 2024: they're behind Biden, and they're doubling down. So far, Conservative Inc isn't getting the point. Ryan Saavedra writes at the Daily Wire this morning:

Top Democrats are reportedly reaching out to rising stars in the party and are telling them that President Joe Biden is not running for re-election.

CNN reported that the “top Democrats and donors” have reached out to “possible replacements” for Biden and had conversations about them getting in the race as Biden struggles in the White House.

Who, pray tell, are the rising-star Democrats? John Edwards is 70. Gary Hart is 86. Bill Clinton is 76 and can't run again. Are there any younger, attractive white guys left? Or even a Barack Obama? The Daily Wire story lets the cat out of the bag:

The Democrat who has seemingly tried to raise their national profile in recent months as Biden stumbles, both literally and figuratively, is California Governor Gavin Newsom.

This piece at UnHerd lists two other pssibilities, who nevertheless share a "consistent record of poor governance":

This applies not only to Newsom, but to Illinois’s J.B. Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, both of whom are widely pitched by Democratic operatives as possible Biden replacements.

Both are uninspiring machine politicians who likely couldn't unify the Democrats in the face of third-party threats from both the far left and the center.

At this point, the deep state is staying with the strategy it's had since the 2016 election: use the organs of state security against Trump and assume the election will be between Trump and a minimally acceptable Not Trump, necessarily Biden, because there's no good replacement for Joe. There are three problems with this strategy. The first is that the Republican nominee might not be Trump, although potential replacements so far are faltering. The second is that leftist and centrist third-party candidates could split the Democrat vote and elect the Republican, Trump or not. The third is that irrespective of some criminal smoking gun involving Joe and Hunter, Joe is one stumble, one fall away from a major health crisis. I would put that possibility as actually more likely than a smoking gun.

At this point, I'm somewhat skeptical that the Comer committee or some other Republican investigation can uncover enough about Joe and Hunter that we don't already know from the laptop, and one thing we are in fact learning as various e-mails gradually leak out is that Hunter has been executing Joe's business plan all along, and both the Democrat establishmenmt and the deep state have always been on board with it. The deep state will continue to slow-walk and stonewall investigative efforts, which they've made even clearer in the past few days.

The big thing that would change would be a health crisis for Joe that would put Vice President Harris in office, either before or after 2024. So far, nobody is gaming this out, although they really should. I'll make a start on this tomorrow.

Now Obama Wants Biden To Step Down?

In Tuesday's post, I argued that the Democrat problem is the need to maintain an illusion that the New Deal coalition of labor, Catholics, immigrants, Jews and other ethnics, Southern segregationists, and Ivy League gentry is intact, when it has been disintegrating over the past two generations. Both parties basically need white guys to head the ticket, with the Democrats typically nominating a northern liberal for president and for vice president a southern conservative a la Roosevelt-Garner, Truman-Barkley, or Kennedy-Johnson.

This could be switched out, for example Carter-Mondale with a southern president and a northern vice president, and it was the case even with Obama-Biden, with Biden at least thought to be the southern conservative, which he had been in the Senate. It was even arguably the case with Clinton-Gore, although both of them were southerners and centrists while in office. On the other hand, they were both white guys. This at bottom maintained the comfortable fiction of a continuing New Deal coalition, and in the case of Bill Clinton, it was a deliberate contrast with the disasters of the Mondale and Dukakis candicacies.

The problem is that the comfortable fiction is harder and harder to maintain, and the reality is that the Democrat constituency has become greens, radical feminists, parlor leftists, queer theorists, race hustlers, and the urban criminal class, financed by tech and rentier wealth. It basically can't win a presidential election without a credible white guy at the top of the ticket, and that includes Barack Obama, the Ivy-educated child of a white woman and a Kenyan economist who went to an exclusive private school in Hawaii. If anything, Obama was a smoothie in whiteface.

The report now is that Obama is meeting with a cabal of young congressional Democrats:

Former President Barack Obama has hosted a handful of informal, but lengthy private meetings with groups of next-generation House Democrats this spring, I’m told by multiple attendees. The initial session featured the chamber’s new trio of leaders, but he then held subsequent conversations with a range of lawmakers.

Included were progressive members, like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), as well as more moderate lawmakers, such as Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) and Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).

The gatherings were Obama’s idea, I’m told, and were designed for the now-61-year-old former president to keep current with his party’s rising stars, more than six years after he left office.

According to RadarOnline,

Barack Obama has stabbed his former vice president Joe Biden in the back by secretly rallying congressional support for an alternate 2024 candidate — despite having publicly backed his ex- Veep for a second term.

That’s the bombshell claim behind a new report suggesting the 61-year-old former commander-in-chief was caught red-handed hosting a series of hush-hush meetings with Democratic congressional bigwigs and former administration staffers at his Washington, D.C., office.

“Obama recognizes the gravity of the situation with Joe’s disappointing poll numbers,” said a Beltway insider.

“He had hoped that the president would have rallied and come into his own at this point, but that clearly hasn’t happened.

We don't precisely know what's behind Obama's reported loss of confidence, but we can speculate:

Cornel West’s third-party presidential campaign is stirring up unpleasant flashbacks to 2016 for members of the Democratic Party, some of whom are starting to grow anxious about the effect it could have on President Biden’s reelection.

West, a philosopher, Ivy League academic and leftist, recently announced he is newly registered with the Green Party as he seeks to challenge Biden and the eventual Republican nominee for the White House.

Or this:

Sen. Joe Manchin's planned trip to a "No Labels" event in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire has some Democrats worried he could mount a "spoiler" reminiscent of late Texas industrialist Ross Perot in 1992.

, , , The senator recently told reporters his participation at the event is not a formal indication of third-party intentions, However, he later added that he's "never ruled out anything or [ruled] in anything... this is strictly a conference we're having."

Or Robert Kennedy Jr:

Far from an exile, he is an extremely well-connected person with unparalleled access to the centers of influence in New York, Hollywood, and Washington, D.C., who either has no idea what kind of fire he’s playing with, or does and is therefore an arsonist.

. . . Lesser threats than Kennedy have played spoilers in elections before, and if he succeeds in helping burn us all to the ground, it will not be because he is an outsider, as he claims, but because of a political and media culture that has protected and encouraged and fawned over him his whole life — handing a perpetual problem child, now 69 and desperate for attention, accelerant and matches.

The problem isn't really Joe Biden, the problem is the disappearance of the New Deal coalition. Manchin represents the strain of moderate Democrat that has largely disappeared from congress and is being kicked to the curb by the new Democrats. Cornel West represents that now-dominant faction, the greens, parlor leftists, queer theorists, and race hustlers who are demanding even more influence. Kennedy represents the Ivy League gentry in the old coalition who are also now being kicked to the curb along with the old-style moderates.

Joe Biden became president in the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss, which might be characterized as Dukakis Lite -- her candicacy was a bait-and-switch, since she had been in the White House already as Mrs Clinton and apparently hoped to succeed in part under the impression she would carry forward Clinton's southern moderate posture, but nobody believed it, and she lost on the basis that she was a radical feminist member of the new Democrat club, and she couldn't cover it up.

So the party fell back on Biden, who'd been preparing to run in 2016. When Hillary lost, his behind-the-scenes argument appears to have been that he could resume the role of centrist unifier. The problem is that nobody at this late date can assume that role, since many of the groups that made up the old coalition, like Catholics, many Jews and other ethnics, labor, Southern moderates, and Kennedy-style gentry, have in some measure left it, and there are no more credible white guys who can run at the top of a Democrat ticket to keep enough of those groups on board to win a presidential election. Biden was the last one.

This is Obama's dilemma. If, per the reports, he wants to replace Biden with a winner, who's the winner? Gavin Newsom? Whom does Obama think can outperform Biden as a Democrat nominee, who needs credibly to represent anything more than the current dominant Democrat faction? I actually think Biden is the only choice. Biden could well lose, but anyone else will lose bigger.

A Bigfoot And UFO Nut Is A Key Member Of Hunter's Legal Team

Last week I posted on an incresingly unserious-looking Kevin Morris, who represents himself as Hunter Biden's lead attorney. One item I noted was that Morris has hired bigfoot and UFO expert Denver Riggleman to work on the defense team. As I outlined in that post, Riggleman, who is not an attorney, served one term as a Republican congressman from Virginia from 2019 to 2021, but he managed to get so crosswise with the Republicans in his district that they refused to renominate him for the 2020 election.

The illustration at the top of this post is from his podcast's web site, which you can find here. On one hand, he pretty clearly believes in bigfoot and UFOs, and he also believes QAnon is a vast conspiracy. After leaving the House in January 2021, he nevertheless attached himself as an adviser to the January 6 committee and argued that the demonstrators had been guided by QAnon types.

As I said in my post last week, he's a flake and a quack. This is only confirmed by his YouTube channel, a sample episode of which you can see below:

This past Sunday, he was interviewed by Jim Acosta on CNN, who took him seriously -- and in fact, Conservative Inc took it seriously that Acosta took him seriously.

Acosta begins by noting that Riggleman worked with the January 6th committee, which apparently adds great credibility in the eyes of the host. At that point, Riggleman begins to suggest that the material on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which has been forensically authenticated by numerous news outlets (including The New York Times and The Washington Post, albeit belatedly), is actually fake. He claims to have the “data” on his side.

The link quotes from Riggleman in the Acosta interview:

What we wanted to look at first is the data that’s out there that’s purported to be Hunter Biden’s laptop. We wanted to see if there was any forensic format or if there was any forensic validity to it, and there was none. Jim, I think what surprised me is that, if you’re looking at data from 4chan or from a site like Marco Polo, you have to have forensic validity, and I am shocked that anyone anybody Congress would use that data or any journalist would even use those sources. Because what we found out, and we do have the data, we have the ones and zeros. we have the facts-based analysis based on the ones and zeros that we have, we found this the very same folks. We have videos.

His point, as far as anyone can parse it out, appears to be that what we think is Hunter's laptop -- and that includes what the FBI, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have concluded is Hunter's laptop -- is an elaborate hoax, apparently concocted with the help of AI by the same people who are behind QAnon. He claims an expertise in data analysis, "ones and zeros", that allows him to prove this. But according to Wikipedia, his educational and work background had nothing to do with this:

Riggleman earned an Associate of Arts from Rowan College at Burlington County, formerly Burlington County College, in 1996. He received an Associate of Applied Science in avionics systems from the Community College of the Air Force at Air University in 1996. In 1998, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. Riggleman received a graduate certificate in project management from Villanova University in 2007.

. . . Riggleman served in the Air Force for 15 years.[7] After initially serving as an enlisted avionics technician, he received a commission and went on to serve as an intelligence officer.

Riggleman founded NSA contractor Analytics Warehouse, LLC, in 2007, and was its CEO until 2015.

But here's my big puzzle: Kevin Morris, who represents himself as Hunter Biden's lead defense attorney -- by implication, this means he's supervising Abbe Lowell and Chris Clark -- has hired this guy to work on that same legal team on the basis that the laptop is a hoax generated by AI in the service of QAnon. But Clark in particular has repeatedly implied in public remarks that the laptop is authentic, for instance:

"I’ve seen people wave various random e-mails around. I’ve never seen it. Obviously whatever that stuff [is] has been available to everyone in the United States for many years, sadly. I don’t know how you’d feel if everyone was disseminating the contents of your stolen phone. I wouldn’t be happy about it," Clark said.

I can't imagine that Riggleman was able to get on CNN and represent himself as working on Hunter's legal team without Keven Morris allowing it to happen. For instance,

Acosta began with a softball: "Why did you decide to take on this case and work with the Hunter Biden legal team and what's your role here?"

Riggleman said he's doing the same forensic analysis for the Bidens that he did for Pelosi. . . . "I also found out, you know, as the Hunter Biden legal team reached out to me, that a lot of the people that have been pushing this are the same people that pushed the J-6 conspiracy theories."

I assume that Riggleman said these things with Kevin Morris's approval, because if he hadn't, Morris would have immediately issued a statement disassociating the legal team and Hunter from Riggleman and demanded a retraction from CNN.

But this in turn makes me start to think Kevin Morris is as big a quack as Denver Riggleman. Let's recall, though, that any potential case against Joe Biden will be inextricably linked to Hunter's cases, which will almost certainly not go away with his pending guilty plea in Delaware. But at least for now, Kevin Morris is running that show with the invaluable assistance of Denver Riggleman of bigfoot and UFO fame.

I'm still working my way through this.