I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN NEW YORK TIMES STAFFERS MELTED DOWN OVER SENDING THE TROOPS IN: Gov. Gavin Newsom calls in CHP, National Guard to help combat San Francisco’s ongoing fentanyl crisis.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
April 22, 2023
JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Reuters photos of young kids at Indiana NRA event slammed as ‘set-up’ by parents who say they never gave consent.
WAIT, DIDN’T EVERYBODY DIE AFTER NET NEUTRALITY? ‘People are Going to Die:’ The Great Twitter Meltdown Over the Loss of Legacy Checkmarks.
IT’S EARTH DAY. AGAIN. CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT:
Even the left finds the day more than a little glum just now though that’s because the world hasn’t ended yet. Remember—end-of-the-world doomsday scenarios make environmentalists happy, so when the end of the world fails to arrive on schedule, they get the sads.
Like The New Republic, which asks this week:
Remember When Earth Day Used to Be Cool?
A person could be forgiven for being cynical about Earth Day in 2022. Even ExxonMobil celebrates the holiday. . . ExxonMobil doing Earth Day is a lot like arms and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin co-opting International Women’s Day—a holiday which began as a protest of capitalism and war. . .
Many contemporary defenders of the planet despise Earth Day. In fact, at this point the hatred is an annual ritual, observed with headlines like “I’m an Environmental Scientist and I Hate Earth Day,” “I’m an Environmental Journalist and I Hate Earth Day,” and “I’m an Environmentalist and I Hate Earth Day.”
The author’s answer? More “mass protest.” Cue Greta Thunberg.
ExxonMobil “celebrating” “Earth Day” is a classic example of big business learning in the 1990s “that it’s pretty easy being green,” as Katherine Mangu-Ward of Reason wrote in 2006:
Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. “When we meet the regulators, it’s kind of nice,” says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald’s Corporation. “We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it’s because they’re giving us an award.”
* * * * * * * *
The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.
But in the late ’90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing.
So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it’s pretty easy being green.
All the way up to Obama’s crony corporatism and beyond.
Related: Earth Day predictions of 1970. The reason you shouldn’t believe Earth Day predictions of [2023].
53 years on, to paraphrase the late Kathy Shaidle on Trump as Hitler, I’m already on (at least) my fourth apocalypse:
Flashbacks:
- “Earth Day” Turns 50. Half a century later, a look back at the forecasters who got the future wrong—and one who got it right.
- “Earth Day” Founder And Notorious “Unicorn Killer” Ira Einhorn Has Died In Prison At Age 79.
- On the eve of 2011’s “Earth Day,” NBC stumbled into this headline and subhead to describe Einhorn: Earth Day co-founder killed, composted girlfriend. Ira Einhorn preached against Vietnam War and violence, but had dark side.
UNEXPECTEDLY! Bud Light’s marketing leadership undergoes shakeup after Dylan Mulvaney controversy. Alissa Heinerscheid, who has led the brand since June, takes leave of absence and is replaced by Budweiser global marketing VP Todd Allen.
Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed marketing leadership for Bud Light in the wake of controversy over the brand sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her face on it.
Alissa Heinerscheid, marketing VP for the brand since June 2022, has taken a leave of absence, the brewer confirmed, and will be replaced by Todd Allen, who was most recently global marketing VP for Budweiser.
Heinerscheid did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
As Charles Cooke wrote last Thursday: Bud Light’s Not-So-‘Inclusive’ Marketing.
In explaining her mandate as Bud Light’s VP of marketing last month, Alissa Heinerscheid made sure to hit all of the requisite buzzwords. “If we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand,” Heinerscheid warned, “there will be no future for Bud Light.” “What I brought to that” endeavor, she continued, “was a belief in, okay, what does ‘evolve and elevate’ mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men.” “Representation,” Heinerscheid concluded, “is sort of the heart of evolution.”
As a non-native speaker of this peculiar form of English, I feel obliged to ask what all of this actually means. Evidently, Alissa Heinerscheid believes that these unusual strings of words provided a comprehensible answer to the question she was being asked. To me, they merely invite more inquiries. Heinerscheid took over in July of 2022. Are we to conclude that, before that point, Bud Light was uninclusive, heavy, and dark? That there were large numbers of Americans who suspected that Bud Light was quietly bigoted? That the country’s bars were chock full of anguished “young drinkers” worrying audibly about the presumptive social trustworthiness of Corona versus Allagash White? And if they were, are we to believe that they’ve been assuaged by the company’s mystifying decision to place the face of a performing minstrel atop its brand?
Heinerscheid’s bid for “inclusivity” has certainly succeeded — check out the enormous ratio of comments to retweets on Bud Light’s last communication so far on Twitter:
Meanwhile, in attempt to put a Band-Aid on its self-inflicted bullet wound, Budweiser is reduced to running an ad built around all of its old cliches: John Nolte: Patronizing Budweiser Ad Laughed off Internet After Dylan Mulvaney Debacle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTMZKlkXP_k
The ad reeks of 1) desperation and 2) an ad campaign where someone wrote the following phrases on a whiteboard—heart of America, hope in tomorrow, American spirit—and then smugly walked off in the certainty we RedStateTards would forget all about the transvestite who prances around like an astonished reindeer.
These scenes look like they were generated by AI prompts.
“Two firefighter bros, one black and one white, doing a shake-hands-hug.”
“Two trucker-looking bros sharing a Bud on a porch in the country.”
“A Keith Olbermann look-alike wearing a shoulder patch that says “LAND OF THE FREE” raising an American flag (but don’t show the full flag).”
The ad’s Twitter “ratio” is hilarious…
“Hey @Budweiser. What’s next on your agenda after mocking women? Are you going to ridicule disabled veterans? Demand to defund police? Maybe dabble in a little bit of antisemitism?” asked one.
“My favorite advertisement by a mile was the Clydesdales after 9/11. It was absolute perfection. After your embrace of the trans agenda, glorifying a man looking for his 15 mins of fame by mocking women. I will never buy, drink or serve your beer again. #BoycottAnheuserBusch,” said another.
“Transgender rights and inclusion are issues that are proving deeply polarizing,” a Newsweek scribe who refers to Dylan Mulvaney as “her” notes. “A survey by the Pew Research Center last year found that 38 percent of Americans believed that society had gone too far in accepting transgender people, while 36 percent said it had not gone far enough.
So why go there with your beer marketing? Say what you will about Don Draper, at least he knew how to move product.
April 20, 2023
UPDATE: Land Rover Name Won’t Die amid JLR’s Rebranding, Despite Reports. “Reports circulating online about Land Rover’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. After news surfaced earlier today that the storied brand was dead, Car and Driver reached out directly to Jaguar Land Rover (now officially called JLR), who confirmed the beloved Land Rover name will live on. ‘We are not losing the Land Rover name; its spirit is—and will continue to be—a crucial part of our DNA,’ the company said in a written statement.”
(Updated and bumped.)
THIS WILL END WELL, I’M SURE: Pentagon Moves Troops To Prepare For Possible Sudan Embassy Evacuation.
PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! John Fetterman ‘Wasn’t Functional’ When Wife Went On Media Blitz, Became Firefighter After Senate Election.
Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman recently opened up about how he “wasn’t functional” after his November Senate election, as his wife Gisele embarked on a lengthy media tour and even became a volunteer firefighter.
Fetterman opened up about his struggles with depression in an interview published Wednesday by People Magazine. “I literally stopped eating and drinking and I wasn’t functional,” Fetterman said about his depression following his November victory against Republican opponent Mehmet Oz. Fetterman struggled with words in an October 2022 debate with Oz, who made Fetterman’s health a focal point of his campaign. (RELATED: ‘I Stopped Leaving My Bed’: Sen. John Fetterman Opens Up About Depression)
He’s still not looking very functional today:
JEFF DUNETZ: Maybe It’s Time To Fess Up, We Jews DO Run The World.
The banks? No one really believes that silly thing about Jewish bankers in New York controlling all the stupid money! Sure, they’re all Jewish, but they come from Lithuania, not New York. We run the world’s monetary system from the EU central office. Our man there is named Harvey Cohn. And Harvey runs a tight ship.
I spoke to Harvey today; he agrees it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. But there is one thing he would like to do first. Much of the world’s “antisemitism” is part of the plot to perpetuate the myth that we do not run the world. Harvey even has Louis Farrakhan on the payroll (please don’t tell anyone it’s bad for his image).
You know that famous picture of Bigfoot walking through the forest? I hate to disappoint people but it was a Jew in a costume. He was on the way to the international convention of the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy (WWJC) and put on an Ape costume so people wouldn’t know about the convention.
Heh,indeed. Read the whole thing.™
MICKEY HAS A SAD: Disney Is Set to Eliminate Thousands of Jobs Starting Next Week.
Walt Disney Co. plans to cut thousands of jobs next week, including about 15% of the staff in its entertainment division, according to people familiar with the plans.
The cuts will span TV, film, theme parks and corporate teams, affecting every region where Disney operates, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t yet public. Some affected workers will be notified as early as April 24.
These include: ESPN Layoffs To Start Next Week.
There’s been speculation, including from Stephen A. Smith, that no one is safe from incoming layoffs.
We disagree. There’s a list of personalities we can confidently say are, in fact, safe.
The list includes the stars: Stephen A. Smith, Joe Buck, Troy Aikman, Adam Schefter, Mike Greenberg, Scott Van Pelt, and Kirk Herbstreit.
And those with the race card firmly in their back pocket: Mark Jones, Bomani Jones, Mina Kimes, the mentally unstable Stanley Verrett, Kendrick Perkins, Ryan Clark, and Domonique Foxworth.
#Privilege.
Also, reported at the end of last month: ABC News Undergoes Round Of Layoffs And Realignment Of Leadership Team.
ABC News underwent a round of staff reductions on Thursday, as the division is impacted by parent Walt Disney Co.’s companywide cuts.
The phased rollout of the job reductions will impact about 50 people total, a figure that includes eliminated open positions, according to a network source.
Related: Coal miners being taught HTML coding as a second career.
—ABC News, May 7th, 2018.
GOODER AND HARDER, PORTLAND: Portland’s first Shake Shack hasn’t even opened yet, and it’s already been smashed up.
As Andy Ngo notes, “Portland businesses are regularly targeted by #Antifa & leftists who believe that window smashing challenges capitalism.“
BUZZFEED NEWS SHUTTERING OPERATIONS, SHARES PLUNGE:
According to a Twitter post by CNN’s Oliver Darcy, BuzzFeed’s CEO Jonah Peretti told employees via a memo that the company will be reducing headcount by 15% across all departments and shuttering BuzzFeed News.
Related: Should You Learn To Code?
—BuzzFeed, February 10th, 2014.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Hasbro Introduces New ‘Transition Me Elmo’ Doll.
NEW YORK, NY — The creative minds behind the long-running children’s television show Sesame Street have partnered with Hasbro to come up with what they believe will be this year’s hot new toy: the Transition Me Elmo doll.
“This is the perfect toy to give to children of any age!” said Samantha Maltin, Chief Marketing & Brand Officer at Sesame Workshop. “No matter the stage of your child’s development, there’s no wrong time to introduce them to the exciting new world of gender reassignment! Transition Me Elmo will have your youngster questioning their identity in no time!”
Don’t give them any ideas, fellas!
BUT WHAT IS A WOMAN?
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) highlights the vital work that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is doing to ensure that "female dummies" are used in vehicle crash testing "to fight the gender inequity among…crash victims." pic.twitter.com/sZj5TqWrnp
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) April 20, 2023
April 19, 2023
SOME PROTESTS ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS: Footage shows police planning arrests of protesters at 2020 ReOpen NC event.
Footage posted online by an independent journalist shows police in Raleigh discussing tactics for arresting ReOpen NC protesters in [April] 2020 as well as joking about COVID-19 PPE use to “support” the idea the protest was a “public health hazard.”
Independent journalist Stephen Horn tweeted out a video containing clips of police interactions prior to the arrest of a single protester, Monica Ussery.
Horn’s tweet contained a link to a longer video where two unidentified law enforcement officers are seen joking around about how ReOpen NC protesters told Raleigh Police Captain Dedric Bond to “go pound sand” after Bond had told protesters they would be arrested if they didn’t disperse.
“They basically told him [Bond] to go pound sand,” an unidentified female officer says in the video. “So we’re going to go arrest some motherf**kers. Alright, let’s go.”
Just a few months before mass protests were good again: ‘Did I miss the memo?’: Hospital workers in full PPE applaud George Floyd protesters as they march past.
PUTTIN’ ON THE RITZ! John Fetterman’s First Subcommittee Hearing: A Train Wreck in Slow Motion.
MR. KISS KISS FANG FANG GENERATES BANG BANGS: Marjorie Taylor Greene Nails Eric Swalwell in Hearing, Mass Outrage Ensues.
April 18, 2023
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Bud Light: from Spuds MacKenzie to Dylan Mulvaney.
[Anheuser-Busch’s Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid:] “It’s like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. What does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity,” she opined. “It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different. And appeals to women and to men. And representation, isn’t it the heart of evolution?”
She went on: “We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
This corporate jabber and diversity talk might wow the sisters and woke crowd. It makes many of her actual beer drinkers want to barf.
Born into a high-powered lawyer family with connections extending from Texas to Southern California and the East, she attended Groton, Harvard and then Wharton. Alissa is the ultimate brand manager and Prep-Woke Girlboss.
Alissa talks in fluent psychobabble: the trendy drivel of her finding emotional safe spaces to process her feelings, the listening and empathy, the journey and trials. In this self-scripted narrative, she overcomes uncertainty, hardship and suffering to be the best in her field, catnip for aspiring female managers. She professes to be a beacon, “bringing women along with me and inspiring the next generation of female leaders to keep moving forward and pursue careers in male-dominated industries.”
But does Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president for marketing Bud Light, by far the nation’s biggest beer brand, know her product or her customers? Does she even like them? At least she could pretend.
Alissa seems like she’d be very comfortable kicking back a Deschutes microbrew at the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club; not so much in some godforsaken tavern off I-90 with one beer on tap, take it or leave it. Bottoms up, honeybunch!
Heinerscheid has a done a brilliant job shifting the brand’s customers overnight. I’m sure it will do fine:
And already, people are finding important alternate uses for the product!
Whoever put "for rectal use only" stickers on Bud Light…. wins the internet today. 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/WaoeGiIFNX
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) April 17, 2023
YET MORE AMERICAN INDIANS ARE CANCELLED: NY schools banned from calling teams Warriors, Chiefs, Braves, using Native American mascots.
New York follows 20 other states which have moved to restrict Indigenous-related monikers at the high school level.
Upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik blasted the ban on tribal nicknames as wokeness run amok.
In her district, this ruling would impact Native American symbols at Cambridge Central School District, Fonda-Fultonville Central School District, and Glens Falls City School.
“Upstate New York and the North Country take pride in our history and forcing them to replace these historical mascots is prioritizing the Far Left mob at the expense of our students’ education,” Stefanik said.
Flashback: Scott Ott of Scrappleface: ACLU: Effort to Marginalize Indians Succeeding.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: The Return of Paganism.
When a 28-year-old person identifying as transgender shot up a Tennessee school in March, killing three children and three adults, the usual grim afterlife of tragedy was underlined by an odd note: One by one, media outlets rushed to apologize for “misgendering” the shooter, who, they explained, had been born female but had recently begun identifying as male.
How to make sense of such a statement? And what to do when a newspaper headline tells you about a “trans woman left sobbing in JFK Airport after TSA agent hit her testicles”? Appealing to reason hardly helps, as J.K. Rowling and others learned the hard way when trying to ask simple questions such as how one might define sex if not according to the chromosomes rooted in literally every cell of our bodies. Instead, anyone wishing to find his way through the thicket of American public discourse these days should start by embracing one simple and terrifying idea: The barbarians are at the gates.
I mean this almost literally. Everywhere you turn these days, pagans are afoot, busily hacking away at the Christian and Jewish foundations of American life and replacing them with a cosmology that would have been absolutely coherent to followers of, say, Voltumna, the Etruscan earth god, or to those who worshipped the Celt tribal protector Toutatis.
If you think the above paragraph is a little bit overblown, consider the numbers. In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions. So fast-growing, in fact, that my colleague Maggie Phillips recently reported in Tablet magazine about the thriving, and officially recognized, pagan faith groups within the U.S. Army. “What’s important now,” one of its leaders, Sergeant Drake Sholar, told Phillips, “is showing religious respect and understanding across the board as Norse Pagans, or Heathens, return to a distinguishable religious practice.”
Amen, selah. But as we respect and understand those who profess paganism outright and sincerely, we should worry about those—many more of them—who go by other names and profess different affinities yet whose worldview is consistently, coherently, and crushingly pagan. There are millions more heathens who would shudder to be called such, yet who offer a vision of a perfectly pagan American future. It behooves us, then, to reckon with the paganism in our midst.
As G.K. Chesterton never actually wrote, “When a man ceases to believe in God, it’s not that he believes in nothing, it’s that he’ll believe in anything.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! UC San Diego hosts ‘Black Graduation,’ ‘Xicanx/Latinx Graduation.’
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) will host identity-specific graduation ceremonies in June 2023.
Students can participate in a “Black Graduation” with the Black Resource Center (BRC) or the Raza Resource Centro’s (RRC) “Xicanx/Latinx Graduation” before UCSD’s “All Campus Commencement.”
BRC describes its ceremony as “a pre-commencement celebration to honor Black students who have successfully completed an undergraduate or graduate/professional degree.”
“The ceremony reinforces the bonds of scholarship and extends the sense of community and belonging,” the description continues. “The intimate ceremony is representative of African and African-American culture and culminates with a Kente Stole presentation.”
I’m pretty sure Michael Graham wrote Redneck Nation as a warning, not a how-to guide.
VDH: The Biden 10-Step Plan for Global Chaos.
Why is French President Emmanuel Macron cozying up to China while trashing his oldest ally, the United States?
Why is there suddenly talk of discarding the dollar as the global currency?
Why are Japan and India shrugging that they cannot follow the United States’ lead in boycotting Russian oil?
Why is the president of Brazil traveling to China to pursue what he calls a “beautiful relationship”?
Why is Israel suddenly facing attacks from its enemies in all directions?
What happened to Turkey? Why is it threatening fellow NATO member Greece? Is it still a NATO ally, a mere neutral, or a de facto enemy?
Why are there suddenly nonstop Chinese threats toward Taiwan?
Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.