Archive for 2023

June 24, 2023

SO NOW THERE’S A DEAL?

I have questions, and I’m not the only one:

UPDATE: Now the Kremlin has weighed in. “The outlines of a deal that appeared to defuse a rapidly evolving Russian security crisis began to come into focus late Saturday, as the Kremlin announced that a Russian mercenary leader, who for nearly 24 hours led an armed uprising against the country’s military leadership, would flee to Belarus and his fighters would escape repercussions. The announcement capped one of the most tumultuous days in President Vladimir V. Putin’s more than 23-year rule in Russia and followed an apparent intervention by the leader of neighboring Belarus, who stepped in to negotiate a solution to the crisis directly with the head of the Wagner private military company, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who was leading the revolt.”

Well, better for Putin than having Prigozhin seize Moscow and declare himself Czar, but still not a good look, having your domestic problems negotiated by Belarus.

Related: Is the Ukraine war over? Update: Coup-us interruptus? Update: Prigozhin exiled?

MORE: What The Hell Was That?

Posted at 5:15 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jun 24th, 2023

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Why Pride lost the public.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women.

This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.

Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why?

In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”

“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”

“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”

Maybe don’t get on video shouting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children,” then.

Flashback: Sullivan on “The Queers Versus The Homosexuals:”

No one held a news conference and announced that from 2015 on, after Obergefell, the gay rights movement had changed its entire rationale. But they sure gave hints. The Human Rights Campaign, once a relatively moderate group, replaced “gay” and “lesbian” with the acronym “LGBTQ+” and expanded the word “queer” to describe anyone gay, lesbian, transgender, or even straight who defied heteronormativity. They changed the flag from a simple rainbow, to one that included some races (only black and brown — no Asians or whites) and transgender ideology. Their building in DC is festooned with a massive banner declaring their mission: “Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter.” Their new head is a woman who calls herself “queer,” not lesbian.

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

Gay hook-up apps now include biological women seeking gay men and straight men looking for chicks with dicks. “NO MEN” some profiles now say — on what was once a gay man’s app. There are fewer and fewer exclusively gay male spaces left. Lesbian bars? Almost gone entirely. Lesbians themselves? On their way out. Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant. (Compare and contrast with disco icon Sylvester’s view of gay liberation: “I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones.” We are going backward, not forward.)

Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.

The Weimar Republic called and said that the American left might want to dial it back a notch or 20.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2023

HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.

Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”

* * * * * * * *

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”

And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.

“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.

The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.

—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.

How it’s going: City Hall bought $50K worth of plane tickets to ship migrants from NYC to Texas, Florida: report.

Mayor Eric Adams administration purchased plane tickets to send migrants back to Florida and Texas — the very states he has focused his ire on for shipping the asylum seekers here, records show.

The documents — obtained by Politico’s New York bureau — show that City Hall shelled out roughly $50,000 between April 2022 and April 2023 to resettle 114 of the recent arrivals outside of the five boroughs, including some who went back to South America and China.

The Post previously revealed that City Hall was paying companies to provide “re-ticketing” services to migrants, allowing them to leave New York and continue on to their final destination.

The two most common destinations for those resettlements were the Sunshine and Lone Star states.

Roughly a quarter of those resettled — 28 — opted for Florida; while another 14 picked Texas, according to Politico’s analysis. Several more opted to return back to South America, with four picking Colombia, two heading to Peru and one person opted for China, records show.

—The New York Post, yesterday.

This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.

Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.

The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.

It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.

Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.

These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.

Why, it’s as if: Democrats Discover Only The Federal Government Can Solve The Border Crisis.

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2023

IF ONLY SOMEONE HAD SEEN THIS COMING: After College: The Coming Collapse of American Higher Education.

The far-flung empire of some 3,000 US colleges and universities surely faces a severe trial. But what follows is less data analysis than it is cultural observation. I am an anthropologist most interested in the ways that people shape and are shaped by primary institutions, such as the family and education.

We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.

Given what’s happened to them, that’s probably for the best.

Posted at 12:17 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jun 24th, 2023

THE MEANING OF ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER:

The platform for Schwarzenegger’s final act was set when he wed Maria Shriver, an accomplished journalist and a member of the formidable Kennedy clan. His acceptance by the Kennedy family gave him a leg up in terms of pursuing a political career, but he would need to pick his opportunities carefully. Recognizing the baggage he carried from a host of past sexual indiscretions, which he openly acknowledges in the documentary, Schwarzenegger, in his words, recognized the need for a European-style “short election” to secure a higher office.

When the opportunity arose in 2003 with the recall of unpopular California Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, the Republican-aligned Schwarzenegger seized it. The structure of the recall, comprising a yes-or-no question about the recall and another to choose a successor, was an ideal springboard for a renowned yet politically untried entity like Schwarzenegger. Despite a late-breaking scandal involving several women he had inappropriately touched, Schwarzenegger, who quickly if vaguely apologized for these misdeeds, managed to capture nearly half the vote against a multitude of opponents.

While the documentary sees Schwarzenegger attributing his Republican leanings to Ronald Reagan, in his autobiography, he references the 1968 presidential campaign that was unfolding when he arrived in the U.S. He felt Hubert Humphrey echoed the sentiments of big-government Austrian politicians, while Richard Nixon advocated free enterprise and tax cuts. Combined with a strong anti-communism sentiment, instilled in him by his proximity to communist Hungary during his formative years, these elements shaped Schwarzenegger’s minimalist political philosophy. The rest of it could be characterized as mere “will to power.” Schwarzenegger quotes Nietzsche approvingly in the documentary. In perhaps the most honest moment of the entire film, Schwarzenegger candidly explains how he exploited the artifice of politics: “Sometimes you make a deal behind the scenes, and then you go out and attack each other in front of the press. … It’s bulls***, right? But that’s politics.”

It certainly was “bulls***:”

Everything about America seemed so big to me, so open, so possible.

I finally arrived here in 1968. What a special day it was. I remember I arrived here with empty pockets but full of dreams, full of determination, full of desire.

The presidential campaign was in full swing. I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left.

But then I heard Nixon speak. Then I heard Nixon speak. He was talking about free enterprise, getting the government off your back, lowering the taxes and strengthening the military.

Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air.

I said to my friend, I said, “What party is he?”

My friend said, “He’s a Republican.”

I said, “Then I am a Republican.”

And I have been a Republican ever since. And trust me — and trust me — in my wife’s family, that’s no small achievement.

But I am proud to be with the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of Teddy Roosevelt, the party of Ronald Reagan, and the party of George W. Bush.

—Excerpt from then Gov. Schwarzenegger’s speech at the 2004 Republican Convention.

I’m so old, I remember when Schwarzenegger’s critics accused him of not being a very good actor.

And from 2021: Schwarzenegger to anti-maskers: ‘Screw your freedom.’

To paraphrase Mark Steyn, you can take the man out of Austria, but you can’t take the Austria out of the man.

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2023

STEVE GREEN ON BUD LIGHT’S NEW AD: ‘Please Drink Our Beer Again, You Oafish Hicks.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg7iiVKJ2CU

You see, when you’re trying to get back in your customers’ good graces, a charming way to do that is to make gentle fun of yourselves. Instead, Bud Light chose to make gentle fun of their customers.

The new ad might have worked in some other context. But when customers have been given the impression that Belgium-based AB-InBev already sees their customers as hapless hicks, this is not the time to portray their customers as hapless hicks.

Bud Light stepped in it so deep that they might be in a black hole of marketing, where no matter what they do — even remaining silent — will be read negatively. But it didn’t have to be that way, and today’s new ad won’t make anything, anywhere “easy to enjoy” for the brand’s hapless management.

They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing — it was making fun of their customers that got them in the hole they’re in, and they’re still digging. As Ed Morrissey wrote last month:

[T]he problem here isn’t so much Mulvaney as it is Alissa Heinerscheid and the execs at Bud and A-B. If not for her derogatory comments about Bud Light’s consumer base, the one-off can for Mulvaney may have passed with only a mild and short-lived impact. Other brands have gone farther in choosing trans endorsers; David wrote yesterday about Smirnoff and its massive parent Diageo, for instance, and Nike actually paid Mulvaney to endorse its line of sports bras with a ridiculous video that all but mocked the athleticism and skills of legitimate female athletes. Why didn’t those brands take the same kind of damage, at least thus far?

Because their execs didn’t go out of their way to insult the people who buy their product. This one-minute clip will likely get at least five lectures in the Death of Bud Light Harvard Business case study. In sixty-four seconds, Heinerscheid demolishes her career at A-B as well as any impression that the beermaker knows or cares anything about the people who buy its industrial-level lagers:

It’s a terrible ad, and it’s earned an impressive ratio on Twitter:

Unless the goal was to do something so spectacularly bad, social media would be talking about the latest ad, instead of their outreach to Dylan Mulvaney. But in any case, this ad doesn’t look like it’s going to shift much beer.

Related: found via Ace of Spades:

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Maybe they need to bring in some 50 year old white guys on this.

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll on Jun 24th, 2023
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