That’s what I call a very stable genius.
Late night tantrum:
I know this sounds like one of those Tom Friedman taxicab stories, but I swear it’s true. I was visiting a rural Walmart not too long ago and overheard a group standing around talking politics. And one of them said about Biden, “we’ve got to get rid of that idiot in the White House. All he ever does is whine and brag…”
You think they don’t live in Bizarro World?
I don’t know what to think about this story but it might be the weirdest tale I’ve heard in a long time. According to the Washington Post, the trove of classified documents that were recently discovered on the Discord social media platform were posted by a young man who works in a military facility for a bunch of teenagers for no discernible reason other than to show off for them. It’s truly bizarre.
Here’s a brief rundown by CNN.
The person behind a massive leak of classified US military documents worked on a military base and posted sensitive national security secrets in an online group of acquaintances, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
The Post reporting, which CNN could not independently verify, covers new ground in identifying the supposed leaker of highly classified documents – including some that paint a pessimistic US view of the war in Ukraine – and provides the first known details about who may be behind a major national security breach that has rocked Washington in recent days.
The leaker, described in the Post story as a lonely young man and gun enthusiast, was part of a chatroom of about two dozen people on Discord – a social media platform popular with video gamers – that shared a love of guns and military gear, The Post reported, citing an interview with the leaker’s friend who was also part of the group.
The friend told the Post he would not reveal the identity of the alleged leaker or their location to authorities.
The leaker, going by the moniker “OG,” began posting messages to the Discord chatroom last year that referenced military jargon, The Post reported. In the months that followed, the leaker posted messages in which he appeared to transcribe classified information from US documents, according to the report.
“They were, he recalled, what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that OG indicated he had brought home from his job on a ‘military base,’ which the member declined to identify,” the Post reported, referring to messages posted by the anonymous user.
“OG claimed he spent at least some of his day inside a secure facility that prohibited cellphones and other electronic devices, which could be used to document the secret information housed on government computer networks or spooling out from printers,” according to the Post.
The report went on to describe the Discord server apparently controlled by “OG,” where recently leaked classified documents were posted, as a “pandemic refuge, particularly for teen gamers locked in their houses and cut off from their real-world friends.”
A Discord spokesperson told CNN on Sunday that the company is cooperating with law enforcement on the investigation but declined further comment. CNN has reached out to Discord following The Washington Post reporting.
“He wanted to ‘keep us in the loop,’” the group member told the Post. And “OG” “seemed to think that his insider knowledge would offer the others protection from the troubled world around them,” according to the Post report.
“If you could think it, it was in those documents,” the friend and member of OG’s Discord group told the Post.
The Discord chatroom, or “server,” disappeared from online after news of the leaks broke last week, according to a CNN review of Discord servers. Some of the documents were subsequently posted by Discord users to another invitation-only server. Some Discord users thought the documents were fake because they didn’t think anyone would be brazen enough to post them online, according to a CNN review of messages on the platform.
Bellingcat, an investigative outlet, first reported on the connection between the leaked documents and the two Discord servers.
WTH???
Somehow he managed to transcribe some of the documents and then photograph some others. The teenager who spoke with the Post hasn’t been approached by the FBI, which is also very curious. He and another member of the group are refusing to give the man’s name but if this story is true then I would expect we will see an arrest very soon.
The Post also reported:
In a video seen by The Post, the man who the member said is OG stands at a shooting range, wearing safety glasses and ear coverings and holding a large rifle. He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target.
The teenager explains to the Post that the government is bad and the only reason it would keep intelligence like this a secret is because they have something to hide.
Okayyyy.
Stay tuned. There’s got to be more to this story.
Update: Bellingcat had some other details on this story. This was interesting:
This server was not especially geopolitical in nature, although its users had a staunchly conservative stance on several issues, members told Bellingcat. Racial slurs and racist memes were shared widely.
Update II:
What???:
The leader of a small online gaming chat group where a trove of classified U.S. intelligence documents leaked over the last few months is a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The national guardsman, whose name is Jack Teixeira, oversaw a private online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.
Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak of the government documents to the private online group. One official said Airman Teixeira might have information relevant to the investigation.
Federal investigators have been searching for days for the person who leaked the top secret documents online but have not identified Airman Teixeira or anyone else as a suspect. The F.B.I. declined to comment…
The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.
The Times also has established, through social media posts and military records, that Airman Teixeira is enlisted in the 102nd Intelligence Wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Posts on the unit’s official Facebook page congratulated Airman Teixeira and colleagues for being promoted to Airman First Class in July 2022…
It was not immediately clear if a young Air National Guardsman in his position could have had access to such highly sensitive briefings. Officials within the U.S. government with security clearance often receive such documents through daily emails, one official told The Times, and those emails might then be automatically forwarded to other people.
Airman Teixeira’s mother, Dawn, speaking outside her home in Massachusetts on Thursday, confirmed that her son was a member of the Air National Guard and said he had recently been working overnight shifts at a base on Cape Cod. In the last few days, he had changed his phone number, she said.
A 21 year old, right wing National Guardsman has access to top secret documents? Really?
Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Int’l Airport (FLL) is closed. It’s just a minor, 1-in-1,000 year rainfall event in South Florida:
Between 14 and 20 inches of rain have drenched the greater Fort Lauderdale metro area since Wednesday afternoon, according to a Thursday morning update from the National Weather Service office in Miami.
“This amount of rain in a 24-hour period is incredibly rare for South Florida,” said meteorologist Ana Torres-Vazquez from the weather service’s Miami forecast office.
Rainfall of 20 to 25 inches is similar to what the area can receive with a high-end hurricane over more than a day, Torres-Vazquez explained.
When you’re already soaked through, what the hell?
Speaking of miners, go ahead and burn a few more West Virginia mountains, Joe Manchin. At 1,654 ft. mean elevation, coastal flooding is someone else’s problem.
A gyrating guitar player from Tupelo and four lads from Liverpool were part of a Communist conspiracy to poison the minds of twentieth-century youth. Or that’s how conservatives saw it then and perceive how culture works now.
Greg Sargent points to a thread by Seth Cotlar on the right’s perception that “woke elites” are “orchestrating liberal cultural change.” Cotlar proposes that the right’s mantra that “politics is downstream of culture” has roots in the paranoid style of politics that sees sinister forces behind prosaic cultural changes.
“Antisemitic logic,” writes the Willamette University professor of history, drives the conservative mind to postulate such notions that “((Hollywood))) secretly controls American culture and politics.”
“It’s the genealogical descendent of the idea from the 1960s that the anti-christian (((Communists))) must be the force behind this rock and roll music that is poisoning the minds of white children and making them sympathetic to the civil rights movement.” Cotlar tweets.
It’s similar to the most recent freakout over Bud Light advertising to LGBTQ people. As if somehow Budweiser corporation is responsible for there being trans people in the world, rather than Budweiser responding to cultural changes in order to, you know, sell beer.
Authoritarian leaders and followers (and evangelicals — same thing?) are predisposed to believing cultural change is not organic, but engineered by someone(s). By the Devil. By Communists. By the international Jewish conspiracy. They view events as driven from the top down. Their counterrevolution, naturally, involves top-down responses.
The right’s grievously inaccurate diagnosis of how culture works, like any inaccurate diagnosis, will lead them to devise “cures” that won’t work. Like, if you think you’re tired because 5G waves are weakening your brain and you wrap your house in tin foil…it won’t work.
So if you think “young people seem to really like John Oliver and Trevor Noah and so we’ll just bankroll Steven Crowder and that’ll bring the youths into the GOP!” then you’re mostly just enabling Crowder to get rich off your credulity.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ crude cultural crackdown against “wokeness” in Florida, for example. The political debacle last week precipitated by Tennessee GOP legislators’ attempts to quash gun-control protests. Both are prime examples of thinking culture can be controlled, even dictated, from above. Everything from “from insanely broad book bans to shockingly harsh proposed punishments for abortion to anti-transgender crackdowns” flow from this “Fortress MAGA” mentality, writes Sargent, and has a way of blowing up in reactionaries’ faces:
If the adage was “all politics is local,” we can now say that “all local politics is in danger of going viral.” And the more onerous the use of state power in these situations, the more attention it gets.
Tennessee illustrates the point: If Republicans hadn’t sought to expel the Tennessee 3, you might never have heard of them. As commentator Charlie Sykes puts it, Republicans both “look horrible” and have turned the Tennessee 3 into national “superstars.”
But hand it to Republican Jim Jordan (Ohio-reactionary). Unchastened by Republicans’ faceplant in Nashville, he expects to steer the national narrative by staging a Trumpish sideshow in Manhattan built “around the overriding goal of generating content for Fox News,” Sargent writes this morning:
Now, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is set to chair a Judiciary Committee hearing in New York City on Monday that will target Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former president Donald Trump. But the emerging details are already shining a harsh light on what you might call the “governing by Fox News” problem, in which Republicans use committee hearings to create right-wing media boomlets but ultimately run into the buzz saw of outside scrutiny.
Jordan’s hearing will purportedly highlight “victims of violent crime in Manhattan.” This is meant to serve as the next chapter in Jordan’s attempt to weaponize his committee against Bragg’s prosecution of Trump by dramatizing the GOP talking point that the district attorney is illegitimately prosecuting Trump while letting countless “real” criminals walk free.
While Jordan is swinging a bat at woke beer, Democrats on the committee will use his venue market their message that the daily slaughter of gun violence must stop to an audience that actually wants to buy.
Thomas Edsall has a long piece on the radicalization of the GOP. This is the point most people don;t want to admit:
Theda Skocpol, a professor of political science and sociology at Harvard, contended that many of the developments in states controlled by Republicans are a result of careful, long-term planning by conservative strategists, particularly those in the Federalist Society, who are developing tools to build what she called “minority authoritarianism” within the context of a nominally democratic system of government.
Skocpol outlined her thinking in an email:
The first-movers who figured out how to configure this new “laboratory of democratic constriction” were legal eagles in the Federalist Society and beyond, because the key structural dynamic in the current G.O.P. gallop toward minority authoritarianism is the mutual interlock between post-2010 Republican control, often supermajority control, of dozens of state legislatures and the SCOTUS decision in 2019 to allow even the most extreme and bizarre forms of partisan gerrymandering.
These organized, richly resourced actors, she wrote,
have figured out how to rig the current U.S. system of federalism and divided branches, given generational and geographic realities on the ground, and the in many ways fluky 2016 presidential election gave them what they needed to put the interlock in place. They are stoking and using the fears and resentments of about half or so of the G.O.P. popular base to undo American democracy and enhance their own power and privileges. They are doing it because they can, and they believe in what they are doing. They are America’s G.O.P. Leninists.
Skocpol did not pull her punches:
This situation, locked in place by a corruptly installed Supreme Court majority and by many rotten-borough judicial districts like the one in Amarillo, means that minority authoritarians, behind a bare facade of “constitutionalism,” can render majority-elected officials, including the president and many governors, officials in name only. The great thing from the minority authoritarian point of view is that those visible chief executives (and urban mayors and district attorneys) can still be blamed for government nonfunction and societal problems, but they cannot address them with even broadly supported measures (such as simple background checks for having military assault weapons).
There are a number of factors that confirm Skocpol’s analysis.
First and foremost, the Republican Party’s commitment to democratic values and procedures has been steadily eroding over the past two decades — and the momentum has accelerated. The brakes on extremism are failing, with Donald Trump gaining strength in his bid for renomination and the continuing shift to the right in states like Tennessee and Ohio.
Second, in bright-red states, the embrace of far-right positions on such issues as abortion, guns, immigration and election denial is now a requirement rather than a choice for candidates seeking office. At the same time, in purple states like Arizona and Pennsylvania, a hard-right posture may be a liability in the general election, even as it is often mandatory in a primary contest.
The 2024 presidential election, if it is close, will test the viability of a mainstay of Republicans’ current antidemocratic strategy: a drive to empower state legislatures to overturn election results. In August 2021, ABC News reported that eight states (Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and Kentucky) have enacted legislation shifting power over determining election results to legislatures or partisan boards.
The ability of state legislatures to determine the winners and losers of elections now hangs on the outcome of a pending Supreme Court case, Moore v. Harper, which will determine the constitutionality of a fringe legal theory promulgated by the right, the so-called independent state legislature doctrine.
What’s at stake?
In a 2021 essay, “Trump Is Planning a Much More Respectable Coup Next Time,” Richard Hasen, an election expert who is a law professor at U.C.L.A., wrote:
A state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply meet and declare that local administrators or courts have deviated from the legislature’s own rules, and therefore the legislature will take matters into its own hands and choose its own slate of electors.
Put another way, according to Hasen:
The Jan. 6 insurrection, and Trump’s actions trying to change the Electoral College votes in five states, was an attempted coup built on the Big Lie of voter fraud. But the potential coup next time will come in neatly filed legal briefs and arguments quoting Thomas Jefferson and wrapped in ancient precedents and purported constitutional textualism. It will be no less pernicious.
Great, just great.
By the way, this is from 1997:
Norquist had to wait the better part of a decade for the Republicans to retake Congress. He spent the interim years in a constant state of readiness. Norquist assumed a revolutionary persona, eschewing bourgeois conventions like a wife and family, table manners, even personal relationships. When I asked Norquist which of his friends could tell me what he is like as a person, he suggested I speak to “anyone in leadership, House or Senate.” No, I said, I mean the names of people with whom he talks about something other than Movement politics. “I don’t have any friends like that,” he replied. This is true, it seems. “There might be a couple of family members Norquist keeps in touch with in spite of ideology,” says a former employee. Otherwise, “his relationships are exclusively based on philosophy.” “Grover’s a Leninist,” says one longtime acquaintance.
Norquist’s great philosophical relationship, forged during his years in the wilderness, is with another Leninist of the New Right, Newt Gingrich. Norquist says he sensed in their first meeting that Gingrich possessed the revolutionary spirit. “It was pretty obvious to me that this was a guy who wanted to change this town,” he says. Since then, the two have kept in close, usually weekly, contact—a fact that is instantly clear to anyone who picks up Norquist’s résumé, which begins with a footnoted quote from Gingrich hailing Norquist as a man who has “truly changed American history.”
That was written by Tucker Carlson. It’s been a long time coming.
This is the most exciting time in the history of vaccines. It took many, momentous, sequential discoveries over at least 3-4 decades to get here. That we were able to get Covid vaccines in 10 months from sequencing the virus with over 70,000 participants in randomized trials and 95% efficacy vs symptomatic infections (and hospitalizations and deaths) is all too often taken for granted. I had never thought that would have been possible, but now I understand how it was achieved. It has been exhilarating to see all the work from many labs around the world culminate in such a rapid succession of success stories, with many more to come.
That’s fantastic news. Unfortunately, there is a large movement gaining steam in America to ban vaccines. The proponents are ignorant and delusional but they have powerful friends. Imagine what could happen if the new rule that the federal judge in Texas just pulled out of his hat in the abortion pill case stands. It would mean that courts could decide that vaccines are dangerous and … ban them. Don’t think it couldn’t happen. Trump and McConnell packed the courts with zealots and freaks and I think we know that counting on the Supreme Court to be rational is much too optimistic.
A growing number of prominent Republicans are rallying around the idea that to solve the fentanyl crisis, America must bomb it away.
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has discussed sending “special forces” and using “cyber warfare” to target cartel leaders if he’s reelected president and, per Rolling Stone, asked for “battle plans” to strike Mexico. Reps. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) introduced a bill seeking authorization for the use of military force to “put us at war with the cartels.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said he is open to sending U.S. troops into Mexico to target drug lords even without that nation’s permission. And lawmakers in both chambers have filed legislation to label some cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, a move supported by GOP presidential aspirants.
“We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” Waltz, a former Green Beret, said in a short interview.
Not all Republican leaders are behind this approach. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security adviser who’s weighing his own presidential run, said unilateral military operations “are not going to solve the problem.” And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul (R-Texas), for example, is “still evaluating” the AUMF proposal “but has concerns about the immigration implications and the bilateral relationship with Mexico,” per a Republican staff member on the panel.
But the eagerness of some Republicans to openly legislate or embrace the use of the military in Mexico suggests that the idea is taking firmer root inside the party. And it illustrates the ways in which frustration with immigration, drug overdose deaths and antipathy towards China are defining the GOP’s larger foreign policy.
Nearly 71,000 Americans died in 2021 from synthetic-opioid overdoses — namely fentanyl — far higher than the 58,220 U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam War. And the Drug Enforcement Agency assessed in December that “most” of the fentanyl distributed by two cartels “is being mass-produced at secret factories in Mexico with chemicals sourced largely from China.”
WTF??? These people are crazy. But I suppose that they’ve been inspired by their hero Vladimir Putin (and George W. Bush.) Invasions are all the rage these days.
What does everyone else think about this? Politico has an interesting way of describing it:
Democrats, meanwhile, are allergic to the Republican proposals. President Joe Biden doesn’t want to launch an invasion and has rejected the terrorist label for cartels. His team argues that two issued executive orders already expanded law-enforcement authorities to target transnational organizations.
“The administration is not considering military action in Mexico,” National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said. “Designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations would not grant us any additional authorities that we don’t already have.” Instead, Watson said the administration hopes to work with Congress on modernizing the Customs and Border Protection’s technologies and making fentanyl a Schedule I drug, which would impose the strictest regulations on its production and distribution.
Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs chair, told Defense One in an interview last month that invading Mexico was a bad idea. “I wouldn’t recommend anything be done without Mexico’s support,” he said, insisting that tackling the cartel-fueled drug trade is a law enforcement issue.
But should a Republican defeat Biden in 2024, those ideas could become policy, especially if Trump — the GOP frontrunner — reclaims the Oval Office.
As president, Trump considered placing cartels on the State Department’s terrorist blacklist. He also asked about using missiles to take out drug labs and cartels in Mexico, according to former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, who wrote in his memoir that he rejected the idea at the time.
Wait to see how all the born again wingnut isolationists react to this. There’s no doubt that it’s been in the back of their minds as they have been justifying their Putin support by calling it a “border dispute” and suggesting that the real “war” is on America’s border.
In one policy video released by his campaign, Trump said that if reelected, he would “order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare, and other overt and covert actions to inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership, infrastructure and operations.”
And during a recent presidential rally speech in Waco, Texas, Trump compared the number of deaths from fentanyl overdoses to a kind of military attack.
“People talk about the people that are pouring in,” Trump said. “But the drugs that are pouring into our country, killing everybody, killing so many people — there’s no army that could ever do damage to us like that still.”
Other 2024 candidates side with Trump. Using military force on cartels without Mexico’s permission “would not be the preferred option, but we would absolutely be willing to do it,” entrepreneur and conservative activist Vivek Ramaswamy said in an interview. What the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States, he added.
Ramaswamy also said he backs an authorization for the use of military force for “specific” groups: “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the U.S. president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is openly against any U.S. military involvement in his country to take on the cartels. “In addition to being irresponsible, it is an offense to the people of Mexico,” he said in March.
Yes, I think it would be. The US sending the military into Mexico would be quite offensive.
But current and former U.S. foreign policy and military officials, including Republicans, say there are glaring problems with the military proposals. “If you thought Iraq was a bad situation, wait until you invade a country on our border,” a House Republican congressional aide said. “Our grandchildren will be dealing with this.”
They cite two main concerns.
The first is that U.S. Northern Command assesses that 30 to 35 percent of Mexican territory is ungoverned, giving space for the drug cartels to roam free. Should the U.S. launch military operations in Mexico, a crush of people would find their way to U.S. ports of entry seeking asylum and their claims would be stronger by fleeing an active war zone involving U.S.-labeled terrorists.
“You’ve just legitimately made it harder to send thousands of people back,” the House GOP staffer said.
The second issue is that while using force against drug cartels might impact the supply side of the fentanyl crisis, it doesn’t address demand. And past examples of the U.S. military working with a nation to combat drug groups, like in Colombia, were successful, in part, because the host country was committed to the fight and conducted the operations.
Trump and his cultists (and some non-cultist warmongers)are champing at the bit to do this. They are not pacifists. They just don’t want to fight their wars against white authoritarians with whom they identify. Invading Mexico would give them a monumental thrill.
A typical reaction to Trump’s daft ideas:
You can bet this guy will love Raytheon well enough when it’s deploying weapons against Mexicans.
I follow current events pretty closely but I was surprised to see that there’s a huge controversy over Bud Light beer and I had no idea what it was about. The right wingers are all up in arms and boycotting the beer and naturally, it turns out, it’s because of … hate.
The marketing plan was obviously courting controversy from the outset. Bud Light, the most popular beer in the country, was going to put together a campaign centered on a group that makes up less than 9 percent of the population of the United States? The beer brand planned ads targeting this small subgroup, despite the political overtones of doing so — despite the risk of associating the brand so closely with a lifestyle that was foreign to most Americans.
But Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, celebrated the move in a statement.
The beer brand had “deepened our commitment to the state of Texas with our ‘Brewed in Texas’ campaign,” she said in 2022, pointing to ads featuring a bull rider and a star player on Mexico’s national soccer team. This play for a specific niche wasn’t going to compel any white-collar metropolitanites to grab a bottle of the beer, but maybe it would get more Hispanic Texans to do so — enough to potentially make the push worthwhile.
After all, Bud Light’s position in the market had been sliding for years. It remains the best-selling beer in the United States, but its market share has slipped downward over the past decade.
If you can craft a marketing pitch to a lot of smaller subsets of the population, maybe you can reverse the direction of those lines. After all, Bud Light is a brand that serves as a vehicle for its parent company, AB InBev, to make money. So in recent years it has expanded its already robust marketing approach and its product line, adding seltzers and flavor blends, among other things.
Speaking on a podcast this month, Heinerscheid offered an overview of the mandate she’d been given when she started in her position.
“This brand is in decline. It’s been in decline for a really long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light,” she explained. The brand had been identified as being “fratty” with a “kind of out-of-touch humor,” she added, so her goal was to “evolve and elevate” it.
“What does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone,” she said. “It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men.”
A few days later, one facet of that shift became apparent. Dylan Mulvaney, a trans woman, posted a short video on her Instagram page touting the beer.
The play from the beer’s perspective is pretty obvious. Mulvaney has 1.8 million followers on the social media platform, many of whom may have been presented with a Bud Light ad for the first time. The spot isn’t about being trans in the way that Bud Light’s Texas ads were about being Texan, but even if it had been, some 2 percent of the country identifies as transgender or nonbinary, the Pew Research Center found last year. And to Heinerscheid’s point about young drinkers: About 5 percent of Americans under the age of 30 identify that way.
You may know what happened next. When Bud Light advertised in magazines targeting gay Americans in the late 1990s, it took religious leader Jerry Falwell to elevate it for criticism to a national audience. Now, though, the Mulvaney ad could be shared widely over the internet by both supporters and critics. And it was — with a number of those critics casting the ad as a somehow unacceptable departure for the brand.
We’ve seen similar outcry emerge with regularity over the past few years; some brand that conservative Americans consume takes an action that is viewed as unacceptably liberal and it briefly becomes a target of right-wing opprobrium or calls for boycotts. These don’t often have a measurable effect on the corporate targets.
Instead, the outbursts stem mostly from the right’s robust outrage pipelines. Decrying things as “woke” or otherwise hostile to conservative values and habits is a surefire way of getting attention. And, sure enough, Fox News and the New York Post and the Daily Mail and the other usual participants in the process have spun up their machinery to document the anti-Bud Light backlash.
The Mulvaney-Bud Light video essentially served as a jumping-off point for a different advertising campaign, one in which conservatives use Bud Light as a foil for their own demonstrations of their right-wing bona fides. Politicians like Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) offered social media posts calling for people to boycott Bud Light (though in Crenshaw’s case, he replaced it with another AB InBev brand). Musicians popular with conservative audiences spoke out against the brand; Kid Rock used an AR-15-style rifle to pepper several cases of beer with bullets.
“Grandpa’s feeling a little frisky today,” the 53-year-old musician said shortly before he pulled the trigger — which is kind of the point. The beer brand wants to expand its appeal to younger drinkers and women, seeing its market share slip as it is associated with older men like Kid Rock.
There’s an obvious parallel here. The Republican Party itself is in a similar position as Bud Light, appealing mostly to older White voters. It has occasionally talked about trying to expand its appeal, including after the 2022 election, but efforts to do so are anathema to its core base of support.
Like the Republican Party’s approach to young voters, the right-wing anger at Bud Light at times misunderstands the problem that is being addressed. The New York Post, for example, suggested that brands like Bud Light are pressured into reaching out to spokespeople like Mulvaney because they’re terrified of falling short on a third-party measure of their inclusivity.
“At stake is their Corporate Equality Index — or CEI — score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world,” the paper’s Dana Kennedy wrote Friday. She went on to note that HRC had “received millions from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.”
This is a bizarre argument, but a familiar one. It is somehow incomprehensible that Bud Light should actively be interested in courting a younger population that is sincerely more open to LGBTQ Americans. Those under age 30 are 16 percentage points more likely to say the country hasn’t gone far enough to welcome those who are transgender than they are to say we’ve gone too far, according to Pew. Those age 65 and up are 12 points more likely to say we’ve gone too far.
But since much of the outcry is coming from those who view transgender Americans with hostility, the Mulvaney spot is framed as being inexplicable outside of the context of some all-powerful report card offered by a nonprofit organization. It’s the same response we see from people like Elon Musk to the fact that younger people are more likely to vote Democratic: It must be because they are somehow indoctrinated. It can’t be that they simply have different values or beliefs than those on the right. (That so many on the right exist within an impermeable bubble of rhetorical agreement certainly reinforces this tendency.)
It remains to be seen how the Mulvaney spot will affect Bud Light’s bottom line. Perhaps the brand will see a brief dip in sales as conservatives reject it. Perhaps that will be made up for by younger people and allies of the transgender community deciding to pick up a six-pack. Maybe, as Heinerscheid hopes, that effect will linger and the brand will come to be seen not as “fratty” but as one that has evolved to reflect the views of the younger beer-buying population.
What Bud Light is trying to do is not much different from what the Republican Party wants to do: bring in new allies. And in each case, the same group — older conservative men — is pushing back against the idea. The question for Bud Light, then, is whether its base of support is less heavily dependent on that group than is the GOP.
Or whether it can simply dice up the beer market in enough ways and with enough targeted ads to reverse its downward skid in the aggregate. Perhaps it’s time for a campaign targeting California, instead.
Works for me. I’ve never been a Bud Light drinker but I might just pick up a six next time I’m in the store in solidarity. I might even drink it. Especially after watching this drivel:
Nikki Haley tonight in Iowa spoke at length about the 2015 Charleston church shooting and her push to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state Capitol — a defining moment in her governorship that she has largely avoided talking about on the campaign trail.
Haley said of her push to remove the Confederate flag: “Half of the state saw the flag as heritage and service, the other half saw it as slavery and hate. My job as governor wasn't to judge either side. My job was to bring out the best in them to get them to see a way forward.”
Haley argued after the mass shooting of nine African Americans by a white supremacist that the “national media came in, they wanted to make it about racism, they wanted to make it about gun control, they wanted to make about the death penalty.”
“The goal was, how do you hold the state together and not let that happen?…This was on the heels of Ferguson, you knew that everything was about to fall apart. And we basically, rather than falling into fear, we turned toward God and we made sure we came together as a state.”
Originally tweeted by Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) on April 12, 2023.
She is completely unqualified for any office.
The last few years have seen a new round of vigilante killings in America, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the civil rights movement. And under a new interpretation of the meaning of self-defense, many are getting away with it.
Recall a few years back when an armed man named George Zimmerman down in Florida thought a young Black kid named Trayvon Martin looked suspicious so he jumped him and when the startled teenager fought back, Zimmerman shot and killed the boy. He said he felt threatened and was only defending himself. The jury acquitted him.
More recently, a young white man named Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges in Kenosha, Wisconsin when he waded into a protest armed with an AR-15 and killed two unarmed men, wounding a third. Rittenhouse may have been the one armed with a semi-automatic rifle but he said he felt threatened by the protesters so he opened fire. The jury found that to be a reasonable reaction.
This interpretation of self-defense exists partly because the right has legalized carrying loaded firearms in public which makes any public confrontation potentially lethal. These cases are often based on “stand your ground” laws and a definition of “self-defense” that holds you can shoot someone if you merely “feel threatened,” which these incidents demonstrate. (Of course, it isn’t just a gun issue — a number of states have legalized using your car as a deadly weapon to kill protesters too. )
In America today, if you grab your loaded gun and go looking for trouble, there’s a good chance the law will be on your side rather than the person you shot. It was their poor judgment that led to their deaths by making the armed assailant feel afraid. It’s open season for vigilantes.
Naturally, Rittenhouse became a hero on the right and now appears on the wingnut grifting circuit as a spokesman for gun rights. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., even offered a bill to give him the Congressional Gold Medal, the institution’s highest honor. (She voted against giving the medal to the Capitol Police for their actions on January 6, however.) Zimmerman was also lionized, even auctioning off the gun he used in the attack allegedly for $250,000, but has also been in and out of trouble ever since it happened. Both cases were not about a deadly confrontation such as road rage or a personal beef. They were political acts.
Zimmerman was a civilian on some sort of half-baked neighborhood watch who saw a young Black kid walking down the street and assumed he was up to no good without any evidence at all. Rittenhouse drove miles from his home in a neighboring state to confront people who were protesting the police killing of an unarmed Black man. This is the real agenda of the gun proliferation fetishists: the ability to be armed at all times and shoot their enemies with impunity.
It hasn’t yet panned out across the board. The vigilante killing of jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia at the hands of three white men who chased him in a truck and shot him when he didn’t immediately comply with their order to stop ended with a guilty verdict on state murder charges and a federal conviction for a hate crime. And down in Texas, a would-be Kyle Rittenhouse named Daniel Perry was just convicted of murder for shooting a protester when he drove his car into a Black Lives Matter protest in June of 2020.
Perry, an Army sergeant and part-time Uber driver, had said on Facebook chats that he “might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex” and said that he “might go to Dallas to shoot some protesters.” He’d even discussed with a friend how one could get away with it by claiming self-defense. His friend was disturbed enough that he appeared to try to talk him down saying, “We went through the same training … Shooting after creating an event where you have to shoot, is not a good shoot.” (His friend was correct.)
When they searched his computer they also found that he’d searched “protesters in Seattle get shot” and “riot shootouts.” On July 25, he drove his car into an Austin crowd where a protester named Garrett Foster, legally carrying a semi-automatic rifle walked toward his car and told him to back off. Perry shot him five times. Witnesses testified that Foster never raised his gun. It was recovered with the safety still on and no bullet in the chamber. Foster raised the state’s strong “stand your ground” law as his defense but even a Texas jury didn’t buy it. It was obvious that Foster had driven to the protest with a mind to shoot a protester and he did it. Even that daft law doesn’t cover premeditated murder. But leave it to Texas to bring a new level of extremism to this issue.
Rather than accept the verdict based upon all the evidence and a judge’s instructions about how to apply the law, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, promised to immediately pardon Perry even before the man has been sentenced. He’s just waiting for the required high sign from his hand-picked pardon and parole board. They aren’t too busy. Abbott only pardoned two people all last year.
Vigilantism is a very old story in America and one of its prominent characteristics has been that it always seems to be most prevalent when it is encouraged or condoned by political power and law enforcement. It’s most often been used against racial minorities, particularly Black Americans during the horrific post-Reconstruction period and Jim Crow all the way up to today. The echoes of that are all over these latest incidents, whether it’s the killing of Black people or the killing of white people protesting the killing of Black people.
Donald Trump sold himself as an avenging angel back in 2016, telling his crowds that he had a concealed carry permit and acting out fantasies about gunning down someone who threatened himself on the street. He gleefully led them in chants of “Death Wish” after the 1970s vigilante movie of that name. In 2020 he celebrated Kyle Rittenhouse and encouraged people to get violent with protesters. He is the perfect avatar for the right-wing movement that claims to be for law and order while it encourages lawlessness — by a select few — at every turn.