Alissa Heinerscheid, Dylan Mulvaney, And The Helter Skelter Strategy

In the middle of last night, it was revealed to me in a dream that Alissa Heinerscheid, the independently wealthy Harvard legacy who achieved her 15 minutes of fame when she made Dylan Mulvaney the spokestrans for Bud Ligfht a year ago, is actually the social theorist behind the current wave of campus pogroms -- and this despite her own Jewish heritage -- with maybe a little bit of help from Charles Manson.

Hear me out. I began to puzzle this through when I mentioned in a recent post that unlike 1968, when campus unrest was paralleled by riots in the ghettos, there's so far been no equivalence between student grievances and those of the African-American community. If fact, Al Sharpton has expressed deep skepticism of the pro-Palestine protests. There's no intersectional resonance. Instead, over the weeend, we had these stories:

President Joe Biden has been dogged for months by pro-Palestinian protesters calling him “Genocide Joe” — but some of the groups behind the demonstrations receive financial backing from philanthropists pushing hard for his reelection.

The donors include some of the biggest names in Democratic circles: Soros, Rockefeller and Pritzker, according to a POLITICO analysis.

Two of the organizers supporting the protests at Columbia University and on other campuses are Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both are supported by the Tides Foundation, which is seeded by Democratic megadonor George Soros[.]

. . . . Another notable Democratic donor whose philanthropy has helped fund the protest movement is David Rockefeller Jr., who sits on the board of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 2022, the fund gave $300,000 to the Tides Foundation; according to nonprofit tax forms, Tides has given nearly $500,000 over the past five years to Jewish Voice for Peace, which explicitly describes itself as anti-Zionist.

Several other groups involved in pro-Palestinian protests are backed by a foundation funded by Susan and Nick Pritzker, heir to the Hyatt Hotel empire — and supporters of Biden and numerous Democratic campaigns, including $6,600 to the Biden Victory Fund a few months ago and more than $300,000 during the 2020 campaign.

But this isn't the same thing as radical chic, a 1970s phenomenon:

The phrase "radical chic" originated in a 1970 New York article by Tom Wolfe, titled "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's". . . . In the essay, Wolfe used the term to satirize composer Leonard Bernstein and his friends for their absurdity in hosting a fundraising party for the Black Panthers—an organization whose members, activities, and goals were clearly incongruous with those of Bernstein's elite circle. Wolfe's concept of radical chic was intended to lampoon individuals (particularly social elites like the jet set) who endorsed leftist radicalism merely to affect worldliness, assuage white guilt, or garner prestige, rather than to affirm genuine political convictions.

The current wave of campus pogroms is different. So far, none of the Pritzkers or Rockefellers has appeared in a keffiyeh to express public solidarity with the Gazans. This isn't about affectation -- these people are working assiduously behind the scenes. According to the Wall Street Journal,

[T]he political tactics underlying some of the demonstrations were the result of months of training, planning and encouragement by longtime activists and left-wing groups.

Breitbart News continues,

National Students for Justice in Palestine (NJSP), which is involved in the encampments, has been receiving funding from a group in New York called Wespac:

Wespac denied being involved in the encampments or coordinating in any way with the participants in the campus protests.

However, NGO Monitor also listed Wespac among the non-governmental organizations involved in “orchestrating” the protests: “WESPAC Foundation, a Westchester, New York-based organization registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, serves as the fiscal sponsor for National SJP.”

. . . WESPAC serves as fiscal sponsor for some of the NGOs responsible for antisemitism on campuses, including Students for Justice in Palestine and Within Our Lifetime. WESPAC also fulfills this role for U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), Adalah-NY, and the Palestinian Youth Movement USA.

WESPAC’s sources of income are mostly unknown. Public records reveal a handful of foundational donors, including from large donor-advised charities that further obscure the original donors.

We may also infer that the Pritzkers and similarly aligned well-known donors like Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, are advocating the Biden administration's current policy of discouraging Israel from conducting an effective campaign against Hamas, as well as the new proposal to resettle Palestinians from Gaza into the US, which will simply create an additional militant interest group that will further roil domestic politics.

Of course, some of these donors, like George Soros, the Pritzkers, and Mark Zuckerberg, are of Jewish heritage, although they don't appear to be observant. Alissa Heinerscheid went one step farther and became an Episcopalian, also of the less observant sort. None appears to have any particular reason to support Israel, which leads me to what I think is the social theory behind their current geopolitical alignment, the Helter Skelter scenario,

an apocalyptic vision that was supposedly embraced by Charles Manson and members of his so-called Family.

. . . Manson prophesied what he called Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war that would arise from racial tensions between black and white people.  

. . . In the vision's logic, black men would thus be deprived of the white women whom the political changes of the 1960s had made sexually available to them; they would lash out in violent crimes against whites. . . . When frightened whites, according to Watkins and Tex Watson, would retaliate with a murderous rampage, militant blacks would exploit it to provoke a war of near-extermination between racist and non-racist whites over the treatment of blacks. In the wake of that, black militants would arise to finish off the few white survivors and to kill off all non-blacks.

. . . In this holocaust, . . the members of the enlarged [Manson] Family would have little to fear; they would wait out the war in a secret city underneath Death Valley, a city they'd reach through a hole in the ground. Upon the war's conclusion, they would be the only remaining whites. Emerging from underground, they would rule the blacks, who, having "completed the white man's karma", would want no longer to kill.

Although the current pro-Hamas encampments are notionally made up of wealthy and entitled Ivy Leaguers, these people are useful idiots who've been set up by trained organizers, and the inchoate goal of the super-wealthy elite who are funding the effort is to replace the US middle class (which is far too Jewish) with a new proletariat imported from the Third World and bring down the structure of Western society, at which point Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, the Pritzkers, Soros pere et fils, Jeff Bezos, the Rockefellers, the Kennedys (sans RFK Jr) and Alissa Heinerscheid will emerge from their secret city underneath Death Valley as the only remaining whites, and they'll be able to rule the people of color, who will become a docile underclass that no longer harbors revolutionary aspirations.

I'm really trying to figure out where I've gone wrong here, but I'm wondering if this may have something to do with the lack of enthusiasm for the current campus unrest among African-Americans.

If You Needed Proof The Lizard People Are Nervous

I've mentioned here several times Nate Silver's advice to the Biden campaign last Febsruary

Biden can still win. But he's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong or that voters look at the race differently when they have more time to focus on it. Neither is so implausible and it is likely to be a close race. But even the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him.

The single biggest problem Silver saw is Biden's age, and the campaign needed to do something:

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

His solution to the problem was a careful balance of appearances that would maximize Joe's ability to look mentally sharp while minimizing the risk that he would self-destruct in yet another gaffe. I can't help thinking of those books that tell you how to beat the odds playing the slots in Vegas, which boil down to saying just get lucky. Two months after Silver gave his advice, all we can point to is Uncle Bosey.

It's starting to look as though last week's polls showing Trump widening his lead were a wake-up call to the lizard people, in other words, the big-money Democrat oligarchs, Laurene Powell Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and so forth. If the Biden campaign was taking some version of Nate Silver lite, it's now backed off from even that, according to NBC:

As President Joe Biden ramps up his re-election effort, his campaign is also scaling back how much he says on the trail, part of a larger new strategy to hone a sharper message he’ll take into the general election, according to Biden aides.

. . . The approach also has the appearance of a strategy aimed at minimizing the potential for Biden to make mistakes in a razor-close election. Some of Biden’s verbal missteps have occurred when he’s talking at length, veers off the prepared text or answers a reporter’s question when that wasn’t part of the plan.

. . . Some of Biden’s advisers have been pushing for him to go even further in attempts to sharpen his public appearances. They’ve argued for the president to replace prepared campaign remarks entirely, in favor of less scripted retail stops and punchier, digital content where he speaks directly to the camera.

The implication in the story is that this change in strategy has already been under way:

The president has in recent weeks made notable efforts at brevity, in both official and campaign events. Biden’s remarks this past week on the campus protests over the war in the Gaza Strip were just four minutes long. His high-profile speech on abortion rights in Florida last week was just 14 minutes long. And his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner lasted just 10 minutes — half as long as the year before.

I assume this is part of the line they're giving the lizard people, or the lizard people's reps, when they call -- don't worry, we're on top of it. Uncle Bosey was two weeks ago. But the problem is that the emperor is the emperor:

Still, the effort appears to be a work in progress. At an infrastructure event in North Carolina on Thursday, Biden often deviated from the script in the teleprompter to add some political flourishes and spoke for more than 20 minutes.

Current and former Biden officials have long noted that the president sees value in delivering longer speeches, citing his interest in communicating comprehensively with Americans on policy matters. And aides said in the weeks ahead Biden will, at strategic moments, deliver some longer, issue-specific speeches aimed at drawing a contrast with his Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump. Most recently he gave an economic policy speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that lasted about a half-hour.

Except that the economic policy speech in Scranton was the one where he talked about Uncle Bosey and giving the dirty pictures that ladies sent him to the Secret Service. And even if you cut that stuff out, you're still going to get the slurring, the hypercorrection, the random pauses, the mumbling, and the malapropisms. And they want him in smaller venues in large part because they don't want the constant visuals of the big guy wandering off the stage or shaking hands with people who aren't there.

But smaller-form events are of little help. The scene below, at a coffee store in Emmaus, PA, shows Joe closely convoyed by handlers and Secret Service, his manner, insofar as anyone can see it, wooden and detached:

Notice how the line from both Nate Silver in February and NBC now is that it's going to be a "close race" or "razor thin". But this is whistling past the graveyard, these efforts to portray the emperor as mentally sharp and in charge haven't been working, even though his handlers have been fully aware of the situation all along -- indeed, at least since 2020, although Obama and his people likely knew the score well before then. My money is still on the likelihood that after this year's election, there will be leaks from insiders that the problem all along was Joe's alcohol consumption, and this was never anything new.

But the lizard people are clearly getting nervous.

The Past Week's Polls

As of mid-April, the conventional wisdom had been that Biden was closing the gap with Trump. But as of this past Sunday, things changed, first with CNN:

Donald Trump continues to hold an advantage over President Joe Biden as the campaign – and the former president’s criminal trial – move forward, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. And in the coming rematch, opinions about the first term of each man vying for a second four years in the White House now appear to work in Trump’s favor, with most Americans saying that, looking back, Trump’s term as president was a success, while a broad majority says Biden’s has so far been a failure.

Trump’s support in the poll among registered voters holds steady at 49% in a head-to-head matchup against Biden, the same as in CNN’s last national poll on the race in January, while Biden’s stands at 43%, not significantly different from January’s 45%.

This, of course, is a six-point lead, although this is in a theoretical national popular vote match, which doesn't take place in the real world. However. this has turned out to be the low point for Trump in the week's resuilts. As of yesterday,

Despite being on trial in New York City, former President Donald Trump has widened his lead over President Joe Biden during the past month.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, in a three-way contest between Biden, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 46% of Likely U.S. Voters would choose Trump, 36% would vote for Biden and nine percent (9%) would vote for Kennedy. In April, Trump led by 6 points, 44% to 38% for Biden, with RFK Jr. at 10%.

The Washington Examiner provides some analysis:

While the [Rasmussen] analysis does not mention why Trump is surging, the results come during a week when he has used a New York City hush money trial against him to give daily press conferences outside the court that the media, especially left-leaning TV outlets such as CNN, cover. What’s more, he has been more focused on his second term agenda and telling MAGA what he wants to do should he return to the White House.

Biden, meanwhile, has been rocked by the economy, inflation, and the public’s anger over paying high prices. He has also been hurt politically by the raging campus protests in response to his Middle East policies.

The big point this take misses is that the campus pogroms are unique. A writer named Michael A Cohen (not the former Trump lawyer) points out on MSNBC,:

the increasingly omnipresent talk about how the pro-Palestinian anti-war protests roiling American college campuses today bear similarity to those protests 56 years ago opposing the war in Vietnam. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., even suggested that the war in Gaza “may be Biden’s Vietnam.”

. . . Not only is the war in Gaza not a primary issue of concern for voters; it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Indeed, according to the recent Harvard poll of voters aged 18-29, Israel/Palestine ranked 15th out of 16 on their list of the most important issues facing America. (Oddly the only issue that ranked lower was student debt.)

. . . As CNN’s polling guru Harry Enten recently pointed out, Biden’s declining support among young voters predates the war in Gaza — and the war has had practically no effect on 2024 presidential polling.

This suggests a basic tone-deafness in the Biden campaign. which seems to want to triangulate over Gaza and Israel in hope of keeping pro-Palestine voters on board, where this doesn't really make a difference. The MSNBC piece continues, "Perhaps Biden will pay a price with Arab voters in the crucial swing state of Michigan." But another poll from this past week makes that issue moot:

Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden by 15 points in Michigan six months before the presidential election, one poll has shown.

According to a Kaplan Strategies survey of 804 people, the former president is leading the incumbent by 51 percent to 36 percent in the key battleground state. The margin of error for the survey was 3.5 percentage points.

Most other polls show a closer race, although few of them show Biden ahead, and as of today, the Real Clear Politics average shows him ahead by 1.2 points.

It seems to me that comparisons among the 1968 urban and college riots, the 2020 George Floyd riots, and the 2024 college pogroms all miss an important point. There were diosorders over the Viet Nam war in 1968, both on campuses and in Chicago at the Democrat convention, but there were also urban riots following the King assassination in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, and Kansas City.

In other words, there was an important race and class component to the general unrest, and it was an early manifestation of the alliance between the urban underclass and the Ivy League upper crust -- keep in mind that many in the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society had at minimum prosperous backgrounds, but Thomas Ayers's father was the wealthy CEO of Commonwealth Edison.

The 2020 George Floyd riots mirrored this alliance, with upper middle class students declaring protest zones in cities like Seattle in alliance with African-American protesters, and Black Livea Matter lawn posters appeared in many prosperous suburban neighborhoods.

What's unique about the 2024 campus pro-Palestine riots is that urban African-American support has been minimal. Notably.

MSNBC host Al Sharpton compared anti-Israel protests to the events of Jan. 6 on Thursday and said Democrats were losing the “moral high ground” by not calling out the demonstrations on college campuses.

. . . “ How do the Democrats, how do all of us on that side say Jan. 6th was wrong if you can have the same pictures going on on college campuses, you lose the moral high ground,” Sharpton said.

This is turning out to be a boutique issue that isn't uniting the left. The big subtext in 1968 was the draft, which affected young men across the board, who didn't want to be conscripted for cannon fodder. As it happened, upper middle class college students were most aggrieved, as it offended their sense of entitlement, but working-class whites and African-Americans were just as much affected. Nixon quickly defused the problem by winding down the war and instituting the draft lottery.

But in 2024, there isn't the equivalent class alliance, and as the polling above suggests, Gaza and Palestine aren't issues on which many in the electorate are basing their decisions.

Instead, there are two big factors. One hasn't been acknowledged as much as it should be: the more Trump goes to court, the higher he rises in the polls. It's beginning to emerge that with rthe New York criminal trial, he isn't just holding his own against Biden with a lead of a few points, he's starting to widen the gap. As Jonathan Turley put it in a different context, Alvin Bragg is Trump's best lawyer.

The second issue is that the public has now grown plenty familiar -- indeed, overfamiliar -- with Joe Biden. The electorate is tired of the stumbles, the slurring, the malapropisms, the repeated embroidered stories of Uncle Bosey and such. The investigations of the Biden family grift haven't revealed bombshells, but the overwhelming impression on the public has been that he's shallow, venal, weak, vindictive, and lazy. I doon't see how he can turn this around. He is what he is, and that's all his handlers have to work with.

Back To The Trump Wiretap

BREAKING – EXPOSING THE CIA: “So the agencies kind of, like, all got together and said, we’re not gonna tell Trump…Director of the CIA would keep [information from Trump]…” A project manager working in Cyber Operations for the @CIA and an @NSAGov contractor with top-secret… pic.twitter.com/TXq8ZjJEBq

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) May 1, 2024

In a story even the alt media has either ignored or quickly passed over, James O'Keefe released undercover video of a CIA contractor saying agency bigwigs withheld information from Trump and spied on him. The video showed Amjad Fseisi, a project manager working in Cyber Operations for the CIA with top-secret clearance:

Amjad reveals to OMG’s Undercover American Swiper that intel agencies not only kept intelligence information from a sitting United States President and Commander-In-Chief, they also used FISA to spy on President Trump and his team and are still monitoring President Trump according to Amjad who says, “We monitor everything.” Amjad adds “we also have people that monitor his ex-wife. He likes to use burner phones” – information only an insider with access to highly sensitive information would state.

“We steal it [information]” and “We hack other countries just like that,” Amjad, who states he currently works on the CIA’s China Mission Center, explains how intel agencies obtain information. He also describes a broken intelligence system where “We don’t share information across agencies” because the CIA is “very reluctant” to share information with the “careless” NSA.

I would note, as someone who's had top secret clearance in some jobs, that the clearance itself means very little -- basically, anyone who works in a facility where material at any level of classification is handled gets "top secret" clearance in case they inadvertently see something. But even with the clearance, you still have to have further clearance for any specific project, so it's not as though you have a license to just snoop around, and it certainly doesn't mean Fseisi got any privileged information just because he had the general clearance.

It appears that Fseisi's contract with the CIA was immediately terminated when the video was released. Watching it, it's plain that the guy is listening to himself talk and doing all he can to impress the female undercover reporter, so we should factor this in -- but what interests me nevertheless is that this story seems consistent with previous allegations that the deep state had been spying on Trump. The Gateway Pundit quotes O'Keefe at the link:

O’Keefe Media Group’s bombshell undercover footage supports earlier reports by investigative journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag that revealed how the American intelligence community illegally ran a spy operation against then-candidate Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and illegally acquired intelligence that was later used to justify the Federal Bureau of Investigation (@FBI) official probe, “Crossfire Hurricane,” which in turn led to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that ultimately did not find evidence of Russia collusion by the 2016 Trump campaign.

This in turn takes me back to the allegation that the intelligence community "wiretapped" Trump Tower during the 2016 campaign. There's even a Wikipedia entry for this episode:

On March 4, 2017, Donald Trump wrote a series of posts on his Twitter account that falsely accused former President Barack Obama's administration of wiretapping his "wires" at Trump Tower late in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump called for a congressional investigation into the matter, and the Trump administration cited news reports to defend these accusations. His initial claims appeared to have been based on a Breitbart News article he had been given which repeated speculations made by conspiracy theorist Louise Mensch or on a Bret Baier interview, both of which occurred the day prior to his Tweets. By June 2020, no evidence had surfaced to support Trump's claim, which had been refuted by the Justice Department (DOJ).

The original story, which appears to have been assiduously scrubbed, was that National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers met with Trump after the election to inform him that Trump Tower wasn't secure, and as a consequence, Trump moved his transition headquarters to his Bedminster, NJ golf club. The record does reflect that a meeting between Trump and Rogers did take place in mid November, 2016:

And a lot of people have been paying Donald Trump a visit at Trump Tower in New York City, mostly people being considered for jobs in the new administration. But one meeting stands out. Navy Admiral Mike Rogers sat down with Trump. He is head of the National Security Agency. He's in the military chain of command. And it appears he never told the current commander in chief he was doing this.

And Trump did in fact move his transition headquarters from Trump Tower to Bedminster on November 16:

President-elect Donald Trump is moving the transition meetings Friday from Trump Tower in New York to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, said transition team officials.

The transition team did not provide details of who Mr. Trump will meet with at the exclusive private golf club about 35 miles west of Manhattan.

There was no mention in any of the reports about what Rogers discussed with Trump in the meeting, nor why the move to Bedminster took place. Exactly what kind of surveillance was involved, on whom, and who ordered it has never been clear, but the Wikipedia entry linked above is full of weasel wording:

On September 18, 2017, CNN reported that the FBI wiretapped Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, from as early as 2014 through an unspecified time before the 2016 election, and also after the election through early 2017, pursuant to two separate FISA court orders. It has not been confirmed whether Trump's conversations with Manafort were intercepted as part of this surveillance. CNN acknowledged that prior to this disclosure, "speculation has run rampant about whether Manafort or others associated with Trump were under surveillance". The CNN report noted that it was unclear if Manafort was under FBI surveillance while he resided in Trump Tower.

. . . David A. Graham of The Atlantic responded to claims that the Manafort wiretap report vindicated Trump's March 2017 tweets: "This is not true—Trump claimed he had been the subject of Obama-ordered, politically motivated surveillance, for which there remains no evidence." While acknowledging that "it does make for a more complicated picture than previously known"[.]

Wikipedia concludes,

Trump's wiretap claim dominated TV news coverage in March 2017 for several weeks, overshadowing every other discussion about Trump's policy agenda. Late night talk show hosts Trevor Noah, James Corden and Stephen Colbert all made fun of President Trump for his wiretap accusations.

. . .The "wiretap" tweets are included on multiple lists of Trump's most controversial tweets. In 2020, commentator Eli Lake called it the "most consequential tweet of his presidency".

As with many other things Trump, this is looking better for the orange guy in retrospect. What we have with the Amjad Fseisi undercover video is a contractor for the deep state talking big about how the deep state spies on Trump on its own initiative, without the need for any authority to approve it. This would deflect from statements made in 2017 that Obama or his staff knew nothing about it, or that at least there wasn't evidence that they did -- the deep state would have been doing this on its own.

I suspect this matter will be on Trump's agenda in a second term.

The Stages Of Democrat Grief

I've remarked here on how early in this campaign cycle we've seen Democrat insiders sounding alarms about Joe's campaign, especially in comparison to earlier epic defeats for McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis. and Kerry.

In 1972, especially after the Eagleton fiasco, there was never any serious expectation that McGovern could beat Nixon, so that election is an outlier -- but even then, the real pessimism didn't even take hold until McGovern was nominated. In the 2024 cycle, we're seeing gnashing of teeth and rending of garments a full year before the election.

There was a brief surge of optimism in the middle of last month, when prognosticators like Sean Trende and Nate Silver thought they saw Joe closing the gap on Trump, but oddly, a single poll from CNN over the past weekend seems to have ended those fantasies. But something seems to be replacing the previous pattern of unattrributed insider discomfort we used to see during the summers before the election: now we're looking at much clearer auguries of disaster, still months before the ones we used to see. Even Sean Trende, backing off his earlier sanguine view, had this to say on Tuesday after that single CNN poll:

The problem is that the political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.

. . . We can repeat “It’s a long time until Election Day,” and that’s true in a sense. But Election Day is also fast approaching; we’re almost in May, and people start voting in September in some states. If voters still have a favorable view of Trump’s presidency in a few months and think the incumbent president is a failure, the situation will quickly turn critical for Biden and the Democratic Party.

We know the stereotypcal stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, with the implication that people progress from one to the other in the process. I'm starting to think that something like this is happening with elite opinion, although the stages aren't the same. What we had beginning last fall was the usual unattributed concerns about Bidenomics, Joe's age, and to a lesser degree Hunter and the family business deals -- except again, these were a full year before the election. But worse, big names like David Axelrod and James Carville began to attach themselves to the warnings.

But even then, the subtext was always, "We still have time to turn things around, bad as they may look." But I think that was always with the implication that by early this year, the lizard people could sit Joe down and explain to him that he had to drop out in favor of, say, Kamala, Gavin Newsom, J B Pritzker, or Gretchen Whitmer. But as Sean Trende now says, here we are in May, Joe's still running, and none of the alternatives look like serious choices.

Beyond that, last fall, the bedwetters were pointing just to the economy and Joe's age, while now we have the border, crime, and campus pogroms as well, while the first two haven't gone away at all. Here's ther assessment in Time's cover story on what we face if the orange guy brings it off again:

Six months from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome.

Here's The Atlantic in an excerpt from behind its paywall:

“I think Gaza could matter for a number of reasons,” Michael Tesler, a political scientist at UC Irvine, told me. The war, he explained, had produced a powerful brew of political forces—all of which bode ill for Democrats.

It is a divisive issue within the party, which is home to both dedicated pro-Palestine constituencies and committed pro-Israel ones. It is prominent enough, across news platforms and social media, that people are thinking about the conflict when they focus on current affairs and politics. For many younger progressives, protesting against Israel has become part of a fight for social justice: To them, the Palestinian cause is tied up with such domestic issues as racial discrimination.

. . . The war in Gaza has also helped create a perception that Biden is hapless.

Here's Michael Moore in an interview with Kaitlan Collins on CNN:

COLLINS: There's a CNN poll that showed today 81 percent of voters, who are under the age of 35 disapprove of how President Biden has been handling this war. I mean, we're seeing it on campuses. There is a question of what we're going to see in November.

I wonder what you think he should be doing differently to change those numbers.

MOORE: Thank you for asking that question, Kaitlan.

This is why I was so, when I got the call, asking if I'd like to come on tonight. I really was coming on. I know we're speaking to millions of people. But I'd like to speak to one particular individual. And that is President Biden.

I wanted to say this on your show tonight that his chance of not being reelected, I think, at this point, is so great, because of those numbers. Because he's losing the youth vote. He's lost the Arab American vote in Michigan. So even Michelle Goldberg in a column, in The New York Times, last month, said that you lose Michigan, you lose the election.

Clearly CNN, having released its negative poll, is on board with the idea that Joe could well lose the elecion, although it seems to have no answer to the campus pogrom conundrum into which Joe has backed himself: if he denounces the elite-school anti-Semitism, he loses Michigan, but if he doesn't, he looks feckless, and by the way, he loses the Jews. Here's today's asssessment from the Washington Free Beacon:

Biden wants to blend into the curtains. In a mirror image of his approach to the Israel-Hamas war, Biden aims to straddle the unbridgeable divide between the lawless and the law abiding, the intolerant and the tolerant, the virtuous and the contemptible. "I condemn the anti-Semitic protests," he said late last month. "I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their—how they’re being… ." He didn’t finish the sentence.

. . . The president’s choice is to act in the national interest and pay a political price or to continue to hide under his desk and be forced, like Shafik, to pay the same price later—with interest.

On one hand, the campus pogroms have drawn a certain amount of attention from Trump's New York trial, which is bad for Biden, but it's starting to look like the New York trial is misfiring badly for Biden as well. If it gets back in gear, we'll be hearing from Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, and the evidence has been that every one of the Trump New York trials has been a major factor that's driven his continuing rise in the polls.

Received opinion seems to be on some sort of via dolorosa along a route through grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, or something like that. And it's been taking place,as I've observed since last fall, remarkably early in the election cycle.

The Conventional Wisdom Average

More than a week ago, I pointed out Sean Trende's blunder when he hopped on the bandwagon that "President Biden’s standing in the polls has improved". Another arbiter of the conventional wisdom, Byron York of the Washington Examiner, pointed out late yesterday,

Biden did rise a bit in the polls. According to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Trump has led Biden in head-to-head matchups since September 2023. (They were tied for one brief moment in October.) During his March-April “bump,” Biden’s deficit shrank, coming within two-tenths of a point of catching Trump. Democratic hopes rose.

“Biden’s position in the polls is improving against Trump,” declared the polling analyst Nate Silver on April 18. “It looks to me like Biden’s numbers against Trump have improved by a hair, probably to a degree that isn’t just statistical noise.” Even a slight improvement was like manna from heaven for Democrats and their allies in the media.

Alas, it didn’t last long. On Sunday came a poll from CNN that was simply devastating for the president’s reelection hopes. Remember, a poll is just a freeze frame of the race at this moment. It doesn’t mean things won’t change in the future. But it gives us an idea of where things stand right now. And the CNN poll showed Biden’s standing deteriorating before our eyes.

The same day, Sean Trende himself quietly backed off his earlier prognostication:

As a general rule, whenever people ask me about my thoughts on poll “x” or poll “y” my response is the same: Throw it in the poll average. Remember, not only are error margins real, but they’re intrinsic to sampling. An error margin of plus-or-minus three percent means that 95% of the time, the true population will be within three percentage points of the published “topline,” but that one time in twenty it won’t be. That’s not a pollster quality thing, that just comes with the territory of asking a fraction of the true population of interest.

So the fact that CNN’s latest poll has Trump up six points isn’t that interesting to me, in and of-itself. It’s marginally interesting that this is happening in the midst of the one criminal trial that is likely to occur before Election Day, but it’s more interesting that his standing in the poll averages has held with the trial under way.

But wait a moment. Trende himself in the piece I linked on April 19 relied on his own poll average to come up with just the conclusion he sorta-kinda now thinks was misleading:

As of today, Trump’s lead [in the RCP average] sits at just two-tenths of a percentage point.

And this was to substatiate his explicit view in the piece's title, "What To Make of Biden’s Rise in the Polls?" As of today, he's relying on his own poll average to say that well, after all, Trump has led in these since last year -- but then, of all things, he relies on the old chestnut,

Will this continue? Obviously it’s hard to say, as polls are just snapshots in time.

On April 22, still pondering that strange consensus that Trende had endorsed the previous week, I linked to this piece at The Hill, It’s time to retire the laziest cliché in election polling.

Opinion polling has no lazier cliché than “snapshot in time.”

The aphorism is intended to suggest impermanence — that polls taken weeks or months before an election have limited predictive value. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked as the 2024 presidential election race has unfolded. It will be heard many times before the campaign ends.

. . . [T]he phrase is a refuge or metaphoric shield for pollsters when their pre-election surveys misfire. In such cases, “snapshot in time” is cited in attempting to defend or rationalize polls that careen well off-target, as many of them did in the 2020 presidential election.

But it's worse for Trende, because in mid-April, he was claiming that not just an individual poll, but his own average of polls, was proving that Biden's lead was evaporating. But what's the cure? W Joseph Campbell, who denounced the "snapshot in time" cliche on which both Byron York and Sean Trende are falling back in the wake of new findings on the electorate's real-world views, offers no real remedy. He basically just says we should stop saying "snapshot in time":

[I]t may be time to retire the “snapshot in time” cliché, which polling analyst G. Elliott Morris has described as “more excuse [for pollsters] than anything else.” It’s been recognized as an irritating phrase, too: Several years ago, Politico ranked “snapshot in time” among the worst of America’s political clichés.

But doesn't this miss the point? What Prof Campbell is actually saying is that pollsters and prognosticators say a lot of dumb things that turn out not to be true. If we simply retire lame excuse A, "snapshot in time", with nothing else changing, all we'll get is lame excuse B, whatever that turns out to be, and we'll hear that one for decades until someone finally calls it out, and with no other changes, we'll just move to lame excuse C, having learned nothing.

I'm an Aristotelian, which means I look for causes. The situation where we're just permanently casting about for lame excuses for why pollsters and prognosticators are so consistently wrong says we aren't asking why this is the case. Let me propose an answer in the image of Sean Trende below:

This man is clueless, an empty suit, and a stuffed shirt. But let's see if we can tease out more about his background. Via his thumbnail at the American Enterprise Institute,

Mr. Trende has a law degree and a master’s degree in political science from Duke University and bachelor’s degree from Yale University. He is currently pursuing a PhD in political science at The Ohio State University.

Given the current state of unrest at many of the elite schools where people like Trende get their qualifications, there's been an increased tendency to question the value of the degrees they award. But this is nothing new. Looking back, I think one of the formative events in my life was arriving at an elite-school campus to begin my undergraduate studies and realizing, against everything I'd been led to believe by my parents, my friends' parents, my school counselors, the elite-school admissions staff, and all respectiable opinion, that my new schoolmates were anything but the crème de la crème.

If you got right down to it, every one of them was the soul brother or sister of the bizarrely clueless Sean Trende in the photo here, clueless empty suits and stuffed shirts in training. Within a couple of weeks, I made an appointment with the dean of freshmen to tell him I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but there had been a terrible mistake. I was in the wrong place. The dean calmed me down and convinced me to stick it out, but decades later, I basically think I was right.

Somehow our educational system is seeking out and rewarding the people who beome each generation's Sean Trendes.

Judge Cannon's Recent Releases

US District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the District of Southern Florida is overseeing the United States v Trump case regarding the mishandling of classified documents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. Beginning Monday, April 22, she has been releasing versions of documents in the case that had previously been heavily redacted.

The unredacted court filings published on April 22 revealed, among other things, the code name Plasmic Echo for the FBI investigation into those documents, and I covered this development here last Friday. In that post, I linked to a Washington Examiner story that described the release as covering "hundreds of pages of exhibits, motions, and other filings, underscored the close communication the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration had in the year before Trump was indicted".

Alt journalists have since been combining through those files. One result has been a not-fully-explicated theory that many of the documents seized by the FBI in the August 8, 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid had been removed from the White House by the General Services Administration and sent to the National Archives during the transition on January 20, 2021, placed on pallets and kept in the Archives' possession, but then sent to Mar-a-Lago prior to the FBI raid. Just this past Sunday, Matt Margolis at PJ Media reported,

Investigative journalist Julie Kelly found something interesting in the documents that could change everything. The first things [sic] is testimony from an FBI agent who testified that the General Services Administration (GSA) had been in possession of Trump's boxes in Virginia before ordering Trump's team to come get them.

. . . So, it appears that the Biden administration may have been responsible for shipping classified information to Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. This development is significant because Trump has previously blamed the GSA for packing the boxes that contained the classified documents, only to later accuse Trump of essentially stealing them and using that as pretext for sending the FBI to raid his Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.

. . . While this may not prove the Biden administration set up Trump in the classified documents case, considering the way the Biden administration has abused the legal system against Trump, no one can confidently say they wouldn't.

Even so, it still raises other legitimate questions. For example, if the GSA had been in possession of the boxes, why wasn't a review of the materials conducted before they instructed Trump's team to get them? When it comes to classified information, they wouldn't have expected Trump and his staff to be responsible for ensuring that classified documents weren't among the records. Perhaps they did review the contents of the boxes and knew classified documents were contained in them before they told Trump's people to come get them.

Yesterday, Judge Cannon authorized the release of unredacted, or less-redacted, versions of previously sealed defense motions to dismiss the United States v Trump (and others) case for vindictive or selective prosecution. The first motion released, altbough apparently others will follow, is from Trump's co-defendant Walt Nauta. According to the Washington Examiner,

Nauta’s defense attorneys said their client’s decision to exercise his Fifth Amendment rights at one point during the initial stages of the investigation had prompted the DOJ to punish Nauta by prosecuting him, when others had engaged in the “same type of conduct” that Nauta did, the attorneys wrote.

Nauta made the dismissal request in February, but it had been sealed until Friday evening. The Florida court docket shows Trump filed a similar argument that his charges should be dismissed on the grounds that they were “selective and vindictive,” but the actual filing remains sealed.

Judge Aileen Cannon has over the past week unsealed several previously nonpublic filings, and she has indicated that three of Trump’s dismissal arguments, including the selective and vindictive one, will be unsealed by May 2.

According to this site,

Vindictive prosecution occurs when the government, typically the prosecuting authority, retaliates against a defendant for exercising their legal rights. These rights may include requesting a trial , asserting the right to remain silent, or challenging the government's actions by filing a motion to suppress, filing a motion to dismiss after preliminary hearing or filing a motion to dismiss at arraignment. Vindictive prosecution undermines the integrity of the criminal justice system by discouraging defendants from exercising their rights for fear of facing additional, unwarranted charges.

While the site goes on to say that vindictive prosecuiton can be difficult to prove, a successful motion can result in dismissal of the charges or reduction in charges. The Washington Examiner story indicates that the basis for Nauta's motion is Nauta's eventual assertion of his Fifth Amendment rights, after he had been cooperating with the investigation, at which point the Justice Department prosecuted him, when it hadn't prosecuted others who had been doing similar things.

The criminal defense attorney Robert Gouveia has reviewed Nauta's now unsealed motion in detail in this YouTube presentation. This contains among other things the same allegation covered in last week's unredacted documents concerning an alleged attempt by one of Jack Smith's prosecutors, Jay Bratt, to intimidate Stanley Woodward, counsel for Mr Nauta, but it provides the additioonal detail that Nauta's attorney Woodward was asking to have a "filter" applied to data in Nauta's phones, which could contain e-mails covered by attorney-client privilege.

The attempt by Bratt is interpreted here as an effort to get Woodward to drop the request in return for the promise of a federal judicial appointment.

On one hand, it appears that various investigative journalists are still reviewing the hundreds of pages that Judge Cannon ordered unredacted last week. On the other, we still have at minimum the additional motions from Trump and another defendant that will be unsealed on Thursday. Gouveia and others are speculating that the unsealings and unredactions by Judge Cannon could be a leadup to other actions related to the defense motions to dismiss, but as Gouveia says, we'll simply have to wait and see.