#cabinet of american illustration

[sassafrasmoonshine]

Jessie Willcox Smith (American, 1863–1935). Oh, Don't Hurt Me! Cried Tom. I Only Want to Look at You; You Are So Handsome • 1916 •Published in Charles Kingsley The Water Babies • 1916 • Charcoal, watercolor, and oil. Gift of the artist, 1935. Cabinet of American Illustration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Welcome to the flamboyantly colorful home of creative consultant Max Hurd. It's a redone London Victorian terrace home. Just look at this entrance hall. It's a contemporary take on a country home that Max did in collaboration with designer Benedict Foley.

The drawing room adjoins the library at the front of the house.

When Max bought this house, it was painted entirely in white.

From the library is a clear sight line thru to the kitchen.

The carved table is Burmese and I'm not sure if it was originally red or if Max & Benedict painted it.

Max kept the original kitchen, but may redo it in the future. Don't the tops of the cabinets look like a castle?

I wonder if this would look tacky if you gave it a castle theme.

The vintage chintz fabric on the banquette was found in remnants on Ebay and they've been intentionally placed not to match.

A guest powder room.

Circus-like painted doors to the bedrooms on the 2nd level.

The plaster shell holding the fabric above the bed came from Italy and the headboard was found on Ebay.

The wallpaper pattern is called "Tented Stripe" and gives a nod to the circus theme out in the hall.

The classic style toilet was found on Ebay.

Max's housemate's room has an American 19th century quilt on the bed. Another, damaged quilt, covers the headboard.

From Hugh's room the purple stairs to the attic are visible.

This rooms color scheme was inspired by a staff swimming pool in Hamburg.

And this is the owner, Max, sitting with his cat, Count Vronsky.

[opera-ghosts]

OTD in Music History: Legendary 19th Century singer Jenny Lind (1820 - 1887) dies in England. Nicknamed "The Swedish Nightingale," Lind was one of the most fabulously successful musical superstars of her era. After making her big break in a performance of Carl Maria von Weber's (1786 - 1826) "Der Freischutz" in Stockholm in 1838, Lind embarked upon an extended European tour during the 1840's before turning her eyes to the ultimate financial prize: North America. In 1850, Lind traveled to America at the "invitation" of P.T. Barnum (1810 - 1891), who promised to "endlessly promote her" and make her "fabulously wealthy." He kept his word on both counts; indeed, his constant over-the-top marketing campaign eventually wore on Lind's nerves, and after performing 93 large-scale concerts for Barnum she actually invoked a termination clause in her contract and then continued the rest of the tour under own management, ultimately earning more than $350,000 (equivalent to ~$13,000,000 in 2024-adjusted dollars) for her efforts. (NB: This tour was a major plot point in the 2017 Hollywood movie "The Greatest Showman," which portrays Lind as a fame- and money-hungry seductress with romantic designs on Barnum. In reality, Lind was a devoutly-religious married woman who did not care for Barnum's larger-than-life personality, and she ultimately ended up donating the vast bulk of her income to a variety of charities.) After returning to Europe in 1852, Lind went into semi-retirement and focused most of her time on raising her three children, only occasionally emerging to give charity concerts. From 1855 onward she lived in Britain, where she was venerated by an adoring public. PICTURED: A relic from Lind's famous American tour — an original program that was handed out to attendees at one of her Boston appearances (c. 1850 - 1851). Featuring several hand-colored illustrations, printed lyrics to her various concert selections, and plenty of press reviews (including a glowing multi-page biography), this program itself was quite a production for its time! Also shown is a later-printed (c. 1890s/1900s) copy of a cabinet photo showing Lind (c. 1850s).

[nerdygaymormon]

There are two parts of this podcast episode that really struck me.

The first is why the different generations of Americans are reacting differently to the Israeli war against Hamas, which I'll summarize below.

The second part is Rabbi Sharon Brous sharing an ancient Israeli practice that beautifully illustrates mourning with those who mourn and seeing each other's humanity. Go to the 53:00 mark of the episode to hear it.

—————————————————————  

There's the older generation of Americans who saw Israel when it was small and weak and in danger of being eliminated by its neighbors. They have a sense of Israel's impossibility and its vulnerabilities from the dangerous neighborhood where its located. There was the 6-day war in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Next is a generation that only ever knew a strong Israel backed by the United States' military and political support. This generation also knows Israel as an occupying force imposing its will on Palestinians. But this Israel also had a strong peace movement trying lead Israel to be a more humane and moral nation by reaching peace with the Palestinians.

That peace movement collapsed due to the Second Intifada and suicide bombings. This caused Israeli politics to move further and further right. Israel sought security through subjugation. Extremists from the margins become Cabinet members. Settlers in the West Bank, with government backing, annex more and more territory, making the possibility of a two-state solution less and less possible. Israel walled up Gaza and left the residents to the control of Hamas and to misery. That's what the generation of younger Americans knows of Israel.

—————————————————————  

SHARON BROUS: So there is a Mishnah, an ancient rabbinic text in the code of law that was codified 2,000 years ago, that tells the story of what would happen when the people used to go up to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And imagine Mecca, like hundreds of thousands of people coming at once on a kind of sacred pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They would ascend the steps to the Temple Mount, and then they would go through this arched entryway. And they would turn to the right, and they would circle around the perimeter of this courtyard.

And then they would exit essentially right where they had come in. Except, the Mishnah says, for someone who’s broken hearted. That person would go up to Jerusalem. They would ascend the steps, walk through the arched entryway, but they would turn to the left. And every single person who would pass them coming from the right would have to stop and ask this simple question, [HEBREW], what happened to you? And then the person would say, I’m brokenhearted. My loved one just died. I’m worried sick about my kid. I found a lump.

And the people who are walking from right to left would have to stop and offer a blessing before they could continue on their pilgrimage. And I just want to think about how profound the insight is in this ancient ritual because if you spend your whole life dreaming of going up on this sacred pilgrimage to the holiest site, the holiest place on the holiest days, and doing your circle around the courtyard, the last thing in the world you want to do is stop and ask the poor guy who’s coming toward you, are you OK? What’s your story? What’s going on with you?

And yet central to your religious obligation, in fact, the only religious obligation you have that day, is precisely to see this other person in their suffering, to ask them what their story is, and then to give them a blessing. And if you’re broken, shattered, the last thing you want to do is show up in this space with all of these people and go against the current in such a public and visible way. And yet, you’re obligated to do that.

And so I think the rabbis kind of captured this very sacred and profound, psychological and spiritual tool for us, which is to say when we are suffering and when we’re hurting, we need to be seen by other people. We need somebody to say, tell me about your pain. Help me understand what’s going on for you. And we need to be blessed.

And that’s why the loneliness of this moment feels so profound for so many Jews because we feel like, wait, we often ask people, tell me about your pain. Tell me about your suffering. How can I be a good ally? How can I stand with you in solidarity? Why aren’t people asking us? And it’s a reminder for us that we have to reinforce our commitment to living in a world in which we can see each other in our pain.

And when we’re walking from right to left, because we’re OK that day, not to turn our eyes away and our hearts away from the poor person who’s walking toward us who’s broken that day. Otherwise, our humanity is lost to us. And it doesn’t only hurt the person who’s broken. It hurts the whole society. It, frankly, hurts our democracy. It endangers our democracy when we’re unable to actually engage one another’s pain because we feel that our cause is so righteous. Our work is so holy, so important that we’re going to keep circling from the right, even though there are all these people who are quietly walking in the other direction, saying, please, please see me. I’m hurting right now, and I need you to help me in this moment of my pain. I need you to help me by bearing sacred witness to my heartache in this moment.

[attheexactlyrighttimeandplace]

I am so angry and tired of people on Twitter claiming that the dismantling of the zionist war cabinet means victory for Hamas, allegedly because the resistance outlasted the war cabinet that was formed after October 7 to end the armed group.

The eradication of Hamas remains one of the main war objectives of the zionists whether the ceasefire plan fails or not. The war cabinet was dissolved because some of its members, including some ministers, resigned at the request of the US. One of Netanyahu's main opponents, Benny Gantz, supported by the families of the hostages and soldiers and fully controlled by the State Department, issued an ultimatum to the government that ended on June 8. He was supposed to represent the “moderates” branch of the regime. After his departure, the “warmongering” zionist leaders took total control of the occupation government, and the only way out of the conflict is military now.

How can this be a victory when Palestinian civilians will pay the price? This means that Rafah will suffer what the rest of Gaza suffered: total extermination. What we have seen so far is nothing compared to what is to come.

Netanyahu is tiptoeing around this situation because he fears what will happen to him once he ends the genocide in Gaza. Will the United States replace him with a military, capable leader with the tactical expertise and strategic vision needed to fight a regional war?

Considering that the extension of the conflict is confirmed by all, and that its scale will concern all the armed groups included in the Axis of Resistance (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi Resistance, AnsarAllah + Syria and possibly Iran) and oppose them to almost all Gulf Arab countries + the Kurdish people + ISIS and its affiliated groups who are now mercenaries controlled by the United States; he has reason to fear that his time is over even though there is very little chance that he will end up in the cells of the International Criminal Court.

It is true that the United States acts in a very unpredictable and harsher manner. Biden told a jewish reporter at a White House party in april that he had made it clear to Netanyahu what he wanted, and that if Netanyahu doesn't do what he's been told, something will happen.

Obviously, the only reason why the president of the first military power in the world, who leads a military alliance of 32 countries (NATO), not counting their partners, and who has enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the entire planet, made such a vague statement, is because the threat he made was very serious, politically deadly for Netanyahu but perhaps also for the zionist entity, not the kind you can publicly disclose if you intend to violate any agreements you have signed.

There is no doubt that Biden pressured the zionist politicians to commit and take full responsibility for the genocide they wanted to do anyway, motivated them to stay focused and energetic when they were overwhelmed by the number of victims among their soldiers, the opposition of the families of the hostages and soldiers, and the fact that they have become a pariah state within the international community, with a growing minority of international opinion wishing to dismantle Israel to make a way for a Palestinian state, despite the zionist propaganda that wants to make Hamas a terrorist group.

Even the pathetic failure of their communication to cover up their crimes, I mean the unconvincing denial of the American authorities of all the violations committed by the zionist army as reported by their own Human Rights departments, international NGOs, UN institutions, journalists, ICJ lawyers, judicial institutions, which illustrates in a spectacular way that they have really lost control of the narrative as Blinken said, does not change the military reality: Hamas cannot stop the famine, and even the extension of the conflict will not be able to protect Palestinian civilians from a continuation and amplification of the genocide.

I also had illusions about Biden's ceasefire plan as to his willingness to favor a negotiated political solution, but it is obvious, at this point where US officials have responded coldly to Hamas' counter-offers, that the United States feels in such a dominant position that it does not feel the need to make any effort and believes it has shown enough patience. They really didn't mean it when they said that, in their plans, negotiations would be an important tool to find a solution.

If they fail to achieve the full surrender they want, they will kill every human being in Gaza and order the zionists to annex the entire West Bank.

[mariacallous]

Since these political recipes were Buzz’s idea, it always his responsibility to find one each month. This time around, he decided to approach it by thinking, “What famous politicians probably really liked to eat?” Taft was too easy, so he settled on Warren Harding, a president well known now as a man of strong appetites.

So he searched the Web for recipes associated with President Harding, and he found a digitzed gem—The Stag Cook Book from 1922, “written for men by men.” And it is really quite an impressive collection, with recipe submitted by politicians, judges, entertainers, intellectuals, writers, and diplomats. Poets, short story writers, and illustrators provided recipes in their respective genres. William Jennings Bryan apparently really liked onion rings, and Harold Lloyd likes cakes with lemon filling. Warren Harding’s recipe is for waffles, one of two waffle recipes in the book. (Harding recommends topping his waffles with a cream gravy made from chipped beef.)

However, Harding’s recipe is not the first one from the book that we eventually decided to make. Instead, we chose the Chicken Pilau contributed by a member of Harding’s cabinet, Will Hays, the postmaster general. Prior to the election of 1920, Hays had headed the Republican National Committee and managed Harding’s presidential campaign. As postmaster general, he oversaw the postal service at a time when it was significantly expanding its volume and parcel shipping options. Yet Hays left the position after less than a year, to take the job that made his name famous: censoring the film industry.

By the time The Stag Cook Book came out, Hays had taken over as the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. He gave his named to the Hays Code, which ended all nudity, suggestive dances, ridicule of religion, venereal disease, and sympathetic adultery (among many other things) in mainstream American film for decades. In Hays’ memory, the remainder of this post will be written in accordance with the United States Motion Picture Production Code of 1930, and so will contain no kisses lasting more than three seconds.

It will, however, contain a lot of chicken and rice.

that's right ladies, gaydies, theydies, and y'alldies - a retro recipe that comes from the man who brought us that moralizing mandate that has yet to die!

[rickyreeves1980]

Frogger is a 1981 arcade action game developed by Konami and manufactured by Sega. In North America, it was released by Sega/Gremlin. The object of the game is to direct a series of frogs to their homes by crossing a busy road and a hazardous river.

The objective of the game is to guide a frog to each of the empty homes at the top of the screen. The game starts with three, five, or seven frogs, depending on the machine's settings. Losing all frogs is game over. The player uses the 4-direction joystick to hop the frog once. Frogger is either single-player or two players alternating turns.

The frog starts at the bottom of the screen, which contains a horizontal road occupied by speeding cars, trucks, and bulldozers. The player must guide the frog between opposing lanes of traffic to avoid becoming roadkill and losing a life. After the road, a median strip separates the two major parts of the screen. The upper part consists of a river with logs, alligators, and turtles, all moving horizontally across the screen. By jumping on swiftly moving logs and the backs of turtles and alligators, the player can guide the frog to safety. The player must avoid snakes, otters, and the open mouths of alligators. A brightly colored female frog is sometimes on a log and may be carried for bonus points. The top of the screen contains five "frog homes". These sometimes contain bonus insects or deadly alligators.

The opening tune is the first verse of a Japanese children's song called "Inu No Omawarisan" ("The Dog Policeman"). Other Japanese tunes include the themes to the anime series Hana no Ko Lunlun and Rascal the Raccoon. The American release has the same opening song plus "Yankee Doodle".

In 1982, Softline stated that "Frogger has earned the ominous distinction of being 'the arcade game with the most ways to die'." There are many different ways to lose a life (illustrated by a skull and crossbones symbol where the frog was), including being hit by the driver of a road vehicle; jumping into the river; running into snakes, otters, or an alligator's jaws; staying on top of a diving turtle; riding a log, alligator, or turtle off the side of the screen; jumping into a home already occupied by a frog; jumping into the side of a home or the bush; or running out of time.

When all five frogs are in their homes, the game progresses to the next level with increased difficulty. After five levels, the difficulty briefly eases and yet again progressively increases after each level. The timer gives 30 seconds to guide each frog into one of the homes, and resets whenever a life is lost or a frog reaches home safely.

Scoring

Every forward step scores 10 points, and every frog arriving safely home scores 50 points. 10 points are also awarded per each unused ½ second of time. Guiding a lady frog home or eating a fly scores 200 points each, and when all 5 frogs reach home to end the level the player earns 1,000 points. A single bonus frog is 20,000 points. 99,990 points is the maximum high score that can be achieved on an original arcade cabinet. Players may exceed this score, but the game only keeps the last 5 digits.

The game was developed by Konami. On July 22, 1981, Sega gained the exclusive rights to manufacture the game worldwide.

North America

Sega/Gremlin was skeptical about Frogger's earning potential in North America. This was because no other company licensed the game. Also, an earlier game called Frogs that was developed there had flopped. It was believed that Eliminator would be the company's next big hit. Elizabeth Falconer, a market researcher at Sega/Gremlin, was tasked by Gremlin founder Frank Fogleman to check Gremlin's library of video presentations to see if there was anything worth licensing, and she stumbled across Frogger.

Thinking the game deserved a chance though being "cute", she requested a licensing window for playtesting. She reminded executives who denigrated Frogger as a "women and kids game" by reminding them of Pac-Man. Sega/Gremlin agreed to pay Konami $3,500 per day for a 60-day licensing window. A prototype was playtested in a San Diego bar and was so successful that distributors agreed to resell the game based on the test alone.

Wanting to broaden the player base demographics, Jack Gordon, the director of video game sales at Sega/Gremlin, noted that women shied away from the "shoot em' ups" on the market and that games like Frogger "filled the void".

Frogger was positively received as one of the greatest video games ever made and followed by several clones and sequels. By 2005, 20 million copies of its various home video game incarnations had been sold worldwide. It entered popular culture, including television and music.

Frogger was ported to many contemporary home systems. Several platforms such as the Commodore 64 support both ROM cartridges and magnetic media, so they received multiple versions of the game.

Sierra On-Line gained the magnetic media rights and sublicensed them to developers who published for systems not normally supported by Sierra. Cornsoft published the official TRS-80/Dragon 32, Timex Sinclair 1000, and Timex Sinclair 2068 ports. Because of that, even the Atari 2600 received multiple releases: a standard cartridge and a cassette for the Starpath Supercharger. Sierra released disk or tape versions for the Commodore 64, Apple II, original Macintosh, IBM PC, and Supercharger-equipped 2600, and cartridge versions for the TRS-80 Color Computer
Parker Brothers received the license from Sega for cartridge versions which it released for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Atari 5200, ColecoVision, Atari 8-bit family, TI-99/4A, VIC-20, and Commodore 64. Parker Brothers spent $10 million on advertising Frogger.

The Atari 2600 version was programmed by Ed English.

Coleco released stand-alone Mini-Arcade tabletop versions of Frogger, which, along with Pac-Man, Galaxian, and Donkey Kong, had three million sales combined.

The game was ported to systems such as the PC-6001 and Game Boy (with two separate releases for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color in 1998). Frogger is one of the 6 launch games for the 1983 Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy.

Any memories of this game anyone would like to share?

[synchronicobjects]

William Skilling (American, 1862-1964) Tromp l'Oeil Cabinet with Shells and Illustrations oil on canvas signed (lower right) 48 x 36 inches.

(via)

[scurvyoaks]

A Rare and Important Boston Federal Inlaid Mahogany Pedimented Tambour Desk, circa 1800, one of only three known, and the only example in private hands, attributed to the shop of John and Thomas Seymour, the three section desk in highly figured mahogany, the pedimented top section with hinged fall front surrounded by an inlaid plinth and urn finial, the tambours finely inlaid with bellflower chains and opening to reveal a blue green fitted interior, fitted with its original baize lined writing surface, the case sides with original brass carrying handles, the lower section with hinged lid with inlaid edge opening to the original blue baize lined writing surface, over three graduated doors each fitted with exceptionally rare original cobalt blue enameled pulls, on inlaid legs with pierced and carved knee returns, 66 x 37-1/2 x 27-1/2 in. Exhibited: Concord Antiquarian Society; The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 1958-1984

Literature: illustrated in Vernon Stoneman, John and Thomas Seymour Cabinet Makers in Boston 1974-1816, pages 88 and 89.

Note: Only two other examples of this remarkable pedimented tambour desk form are known to survive from Federal America, and to our knowledge this is the only example still in private hands. The first is in the collections of The White House (see attached). The other example descended in the Proctor family and sold at Sotheby's in 1972 and the famous Lansdale Christie's sale, and subsequently to the collection of George and Linda Kaufman. (See Flanigan, American Furniture from the Kaufman Collection, plate 84). Examples without the pediment include a labeled Seymour example at the Winterthur Museum (frontis of Mongomery’s book on Federal Furniture at Winterthur, scan attached). The example offered here is distinguished by its dramatic and rare cobalt blue enameled drawer pulls, which are original to the desk. Extensive research including microscopic finish analysis executed by Susan Buck subsequent to the sale have clarified that the pediment is also from the Seymour shop. Copies of the examination report and the finish analysis results accompany the desk.

Condition

accompanied by an extensive condition examination report from Robert Mussey Associates, March, 1998 (attached) as well as microscopic finish analysis by Susan Buck. The knee brackets are replacements, there is warping correction to the fall board on the pediment, finial is replaced and there have been typical scattered veneer patches and repairs and other minor repairs. Mussey notes that in keeping with other works by John and Thomas Seymour, the pediment may have been added 10 to 15 years after the desk was made. He notes that “I have examined approximately eight pieces of furniture, all originally two part secretaries made in the Seymour shop, but which have third sections added on the finished mahogany uppercase tops.... Their construction and details of veneer, inlay and construction are also clearly the product of the Seymour shop.”

Brunk Auctions. Collection of Jean and Jim Barrow.

I saw this piece at the Barrows' house when they lived in Dallas. It is absolutely stunning.

[t4t4t]

Fowler was the second publisher of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1856. The Wikipedia page for LoG doesn't list Fowler's name next to the 1856 edition for some reason but mentions it on the page for Fowler, but miscredits him as publishing the original not the second there. Here's a quote about it:

"Walt Whitman's interest in phrenology led him on 16 July 1849 to the Phrenological Cabinet of Fowlers and Wells in New York City's Clinton Hall, where he sat for a phrenological examination. The Fowler brothers from Cohocton, New York, were practitioners of the science of mind which held that mental faculties are indicated by the skull's conformation and can be analyzed and improved. The Phrenological Depot established by O.S. and L.N. Fowler in 1842 offered casts of skulls, phrenological busts, and books, as well as phrenological examinations. With the admission of their brother-in-law, Samuel R. Wells, in 1844 the firm was restyled Fowlers and Wells. 

Whitman's examination was made by Lorenzo Fowler, a skilled practitioner, and the written analysis, followed by a listing of faculties with their sizes, made a strong impression upon the subject. It was a perceptive reading that appraised Whitman as strong in "animal will" with large Amativeness, Self-Esteem, and Individuality. Whitman quoted from the analysis and published it several times. Phrenological themes and language appeared in his poetry. 

In 1855 Fowlers and Wells advertised Leaves of Grass as for sale at their new Phrenological Depot at 308 Broadway. With the departure from the firm of Orson S. Fowler, occupied now with the octagonal house he had built in Fishkill, New York, and with his writings on phrenological subjects, the firm became Fowler and Wells. Its London agent, William Horsell, would play a part in establishing Whitman's English reputation. In October 1855 the American Phrenological Journal, published by Fowler and Wells, carried Whitman's unsigned review of Leaves of Grass. By November, Whitman became a staff writer for another Fowler and Wells periodical, Life Illustrated, his contributions including the series "New York Dissected." 

The expanded second edition of Leaves of Grass was published anonymously by Fowler and Wells in August 1856. Stamped in gold on the spine of each volume appeared, without authorization, Emerson's words, "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career." 

The book's unfavorable reception led the firm to withdraw their support of and relationship with the poet who, in turn, became disenchanted with the phrenologist-publishers. As for the Fowler brothers, through lectures, publications, and phrenological examinations during the decades that followed, each continued to popularize the belief that self-knowledge through phrenological analysis could lead to self-improvement. This they did without reference to Walt Whitman, the poet they had once perceptively analyzed and published without an imprimatur."

https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_82.html

[frxstguardian]

An overemphasis on parental rights is a red flag, but I do want to discuss this in relation to Brackeen v. Haaland, an upcoming Supreme Court case seeking to overturn the Indian Child Welfare Act. Brackeen v. Haaland illustrates how parental (and familial) rights are essential to tribal sovereignty and the continuation of Native cultures. In this context, we should not be so eager to dismiss the idea of parental rights. (I understand OP is referencing completely different issues, but it's still relevant due to current events.)

ICWA is a 1978 law that protects Native American children from forced removal from their families and tribes. Before ICWA was enacted, 25%–35% of all Native children were being removed, with 85% placed outside of their families and communities, even when fit and willing relatives were available. State governments, the federal government, and private adoption agencies deliberately did this to force assimilation and deprive tribes of future generations. It was claimed to be in the "best interests of the child" because their parents were unfit guardians, often simply due to poverty.

OP never argues for this, but someone in the notes genuinely said “Parents exclusive privileges of control over their children should be totally abolished children should be raised by their whole communities and their individual rights recognized from the very start." which to me is a terrifying ignorance of history and what that could look like in practice for marginalized communities.

In custody cases of an Indian child involving foster care, adoption, or termination of parental rights, ICWA requires that the parents and tribe must be notified and have a right to intervention, including transferring the case from state court to tribal court. If there is conflict between possible adoptive parents, ICWA prioritizes placement with the child's extended family, followed by other members of their tribe, then any other tribe, before placement in a non-Native home.

ICWA opponents argue that the law is racial discrimination, despite Morton v. Mancari (1974) already affirming that the legal designations of "Indian" and "tribes" are political, not racial, classifications based on tribal membership and parentage that are necessary to uphold tribal self-governance and aligned with the Constitution's recognition of tribes as separate sovereigns.

ICWA is challenged by Texas and three non-Native couples. ICWA is defended by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (appointed by Biden as the first Native American cabinet secretary), Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians, and the Quinault Indian Nation. A decision is expected this summer.

"Parent's rights" is as much of a red flag to me as "Family values". When you examine what people actually mean by these terms it always boils down to the usual "the family is a system of domination and many parents want even more control and violence within it".

[p4557]

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THE MEDIA ISSUE | THE FRIDAY READ

The Most Feared and Least Known Political Operative in America

Susie Wiles helped dismantle Ron DeSantis and salvaged Donald Trump’s campaign. Is she a MAGA hero or an enemy of democracy?

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk for POLITICO

By MICHAEL KRUSE

04/26/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.

WEST PALM BEACH — Susie Wiles, the people who know her the best believe, is a force more sensed than seen. Her influence on political events, to many who know what they’re watching, is as obvious as it is invisible. The prints leave not so much as a smudge. It’s a shock when she shows up in pictures. Even then it is almost always in the background. She speaks on the record hardly ever, and she speaks about herself even less. Last month, though, on the afternoon of the day of the Republican primary in Florida, here Wiles was — sitting outside a Starbucks, at a table with an umbrella she picked for protection from the glare, wearing sensible flats and a cream-colored top and the sunglasses she likes with the lenses like mirrors, not far from the campaign headquarters of Donald J. Trump.

Wiles is not just one of Trump’s senior advisers. She’s his most important adviser. She’s his de facto campaign manager. She has been in essence his chief of staff for the last more than three years. She’s one of the reasons Trump is the GOP’s presumptive nominee and Ron DeSantis is not. She’s one of the reasons Trump’s current operation has been getting credit for being more professional than its fractious, seat-of-the-pants antecedents. And she’s a leading reason Trump has every chance to get elected again — even after his loss of 2020, the insurrection of 2021, his party’s defeats in the midterms of 2022, the criminal indictments of 2023 and the trial (or trials) of 2024. The former president is potentially a future president. And that’s because of him. But it’s also because of her. Trump, of course, is Trump — he can be irritable, he can be impulsive — and this campaign is facing unprecedented stressors and snags. It’s a long six-plus months till Election Day. For now, though, nobody around him is so influential, and nobody around him has been so influential for so long.

“There is nobody, I think, that has the wealth of information that she does. Nobody in our orbit. Nobody,” top Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio told me. “She touches everything.”

“Certainly,” said former Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, “she’s one of the most consequential people in American politics right now.”

“And nobody,” said veteran Florida lobbyist Ronnie Book, “even knows who she is.”

Susie Wiles disembarks from Trump Force One at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport on Oct. 23, 2023, in Londonderry, N.H. She’s a leading reason Trump has every chance to get elected again. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

She’s a mother. She’s a grandmother — she turns 67 next month. She’s worked in politics for more than 40 years — for presidents, for mayors, for governors, for members of Congress. She’s a soft-spoken Episcopalian. She’s a self-described moderate. Over the last few months, I’ve talked about Wiles with more than 100 people, people who have worked with her, around her, for her and against her, and there is a surprisingly bipartisan consensus: She’s good at what she does. She’s a savvy operator, a capable manager, a spotter and cultivator of up-and-coming talent, a maker and keeper of relationships with reporters, and a sly, subtle shaper of stories that help frame the political currents that can determine the difference between a win and a loss. She’s helmed signature statewide campaigns in 2010, 2016, 2018 and 2020 — Rick Scott, Trump, DeSantis, Trump again — all of which could have been defeats but were not. “She was already the most successful, well-respected Republican operative in Florida by a long mile, and she’s now cementing that brand,” said Ashley Walker, a Democratic strategist who twice ran Barack Obama’s Florida campaigns and has worked in lobbying with Wiles. “She is,” said Joe Gruters, a former chair of the Florida Republican Party, current state senator and longtime Trump ally, “the most valuable political adviser in the country.”

But coursing, too, through my conversations were not just questions I had for these scores of people but questions these people had for me — earnest inquiries from types who are perhaps not so accustomed to such doubt. Why is she working for him? And why does it seem to be working so well? Republicans and Democrats alike who know her and respect her and respect her work — they struggle to explain it. People who have considered themselves confidants and friends — they talk and they text, not so much with her as with each other, perplexed. In her usually calm disposition, in what most of them consider her general good sense, some of them find some small solace — at least he, they say, is listening to her. For others, though, it’s that placid mien and level head that’s in some sense precisely the source of the confusion. Liberals and even anti-Trump conservatives sketch analogies to the most odious authoritarians and see Wiles therefore by extension as the kind of associate who’s smart enough and sane enough to know better — and without whom any would-be dictator would be unable to get or wield such potentially destructive power. They see her as an accomplice.

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Birds chirped on the Starbucks patio. Wiles sipped her single-Splenda latte. She was on her way to Mar-a-Lago to mark another victory in a state in which she had delivered big for her boss before. Wiles is no Trump puppeteer, but his successes, which are in no small measure also successes of hers, have engendered a level of condemnation and even just befuddlement that almost demands the kind of public accounting and self-reflection in which she’s never engaged. Wiles, after all, used to work and work hard for Republicans who say they’ve never voted for Trump and never will.

“Yes, I come from a very traditional background,” she told me. “In my early career things like manners mattered and there was an expected level of decorum. And so I get it that the GOP of today is different. There are changes we must live with in order to get done the things we’re trying to do. I haven’t, and likely won’t, fully adapt. I don’t curse. I’m polite. It’s not who I am. But people either know that I’m a solid person, and I hope many do, or they don’t and judge me by my work for President Trump. I don’t always know which way people will come at it …”

I told her at least some people come at it by likening her to history’s most notorious aiders and abettors of totalitarian leaders. “What should you tell them,” I said, “or should you tell them anything?”

“I would turn my back and walk away. I wouldn’t answer it. Because it’s vile. It doesn’t deserve a response. They don’t know the inner workings of Trump world. They don’t know. And so they don’t have a right to judge in that way, in my opinion, and I’m not going to dignify it. I’m not,” she said.

“People that would say something like that, they don’t know me. Or if they think they do, they don’t,” she said. “They don’t know why I do it. They don’t ask, ‘Why do you do this?’”

“Why do you do this?” I asked.

Former President Ronald Reagan in his office in Century City, California, with Susie Wiles and her daughters, Katie Wiles, 14, and Caroline Wiles, 11, in March 1998. Wiles worked for Reagan during his campaign, White House years and post-presidency. | Courtesy of Susie Wiles

‘Otherworldly political instincts’

She wanted to be needed.

She worked in the 1990s and 2000s for a pair of two-term, generally centrist mayors of Jacksonville — first John Delaney, then John Peyton. She was by then certainly no novice. She’d been on Capitol Hill as an entry-level staffer for Jack Kemp, on the campaign and in the White House as a scheduler for Ronald Reagan, and in Northeast Florida as the district director for congressmember Tillie Fowler — after she’d gotten married to Reagan advance man Lanny Wiles and they’d moved south to Ponte Vedra Beach. She was Delaney’s director of communications and intergovernmental affairs, then his deputy chief of staff, then his chief of staff — the city’s very first female chief of staff. Delaney at the time called her “essential to what we are doing.” He described her as “a soulmate.” Peyton, for his part, hired her as his chief of special initiatives and communications — even after she worked for an opponent of his in the primary. It was a sign of respect, but something like unease as well — it was safer, he decided, to have her inside and not outside City Hall, working for him and not against him.

Jacksonville can feel like a small Southern town, but it has a big, consolidated government with a sprawling city council and a complicated mix of interests, and Wiles was at the forefront of building and selling many of the mayors’ most important endeavors — a $2.2-billion and tax-raising infrastructure-improvement project for Delaney, early education and anti-crime efforts for Peyton, land preservation and river restoration for both. “I’ve described her as a political savant — just otherworldly sort of political instincts,” Delaney told me. “She led our most defining public policy initiatives,” Peyton told me. “Susie is a brilliant tactician, an enabler, who helps her boss to set and achieve their priorities,” Steve Diebenow, a Peyton chief of staff, told me. Sam Mousa, a top adviser for a series of mayors in Jacksonville, called Wiles “the most intelligent person I’ve ever worked with,” and “the best I’d ever seen at strategy, planning and execution.”

Her most interesting, most revealing work, though, in the recollection of many who worked with her, was not what she did as a public face. It was what she did or what they thought she did behind the scenes. She sought to make herself indispensable. She tried to be indispensable to the mayors, they believed, by being not just good at the nuts and bolts of her job but also by trying to make herself indispensable to others. Lawyers, lobbyists, local and even Washington movers and shakers — “she had relationships on a much larger network than John would’ve had,” said Paul Harden, one such lawyer and lobbyist and a prominent pal to Delaney. “Her tentacles were everywhere,” said Mike Miller, a local talk radio host at the time.

She made herself indispensable to the mayors by making herself indispensable to the people who covered them — by making herself indispensable to the press. “She was absolutely one of my best sources,” said Mike Tolbert, who put together a faxed Jacksonville politics newsletter called Inside Source. “She was my main conduit,” said Tom Nord, who was on the City Hall beat for the Florida Times-Union in the early Delaney days. “She always had information that I needed, and she would share sometimes things that she probably shouldn’t have shared, because she knows that’s how to draw you in,” said former Times-Union columnist Ron Littlepage. “It was not beyond her,” added Tolbert, “to tell me information about some of the people around her.” She was such a good source, he said, he once brought back for her from a vacation a gift of a Waterford crystal elephant figurine. “The reporters,” Delaney told me, “many, I think, would kind of consider her a friend.”

At the outset of the Delaney administration, she had positioned herself as its voice. Department heads, for instance, weren’t supposed to talk to reporters — reporters had to “direct that call to me,” she said at the time. “Staying ‘on message,’” she told a Times-Union reporter, “is critically important.” But some of her colleagues came to think it was more than that. The Wiles M.O. — some started to see it during the Delaney administration, and more started to see it when Peyton was mayor — was and remains hard for these people to describe. It’s even harder for these people to prove. It wasn’t something they could track or touch. It was just something they started to feel. She wasn’t simply controlling the message. She was consolidating power.

Wiles is easy to talk to. She has a nonthreatening and accessible air. She tells people things, and people tell her things, too. The leveraging of relationships and information is of course not something only Wiles does — on the contrary — but some who worked around her in Jacksonville came to consider her an unusually clever and committed plier of the craft. Information was power. Power to help. Or power to hurt. With information, she could solve problems, and she could cause problems, and she even, people who watched and worked with Wiles began to suspect, could try to cause problems she could then solve — little fires she could start and then let burn or put out.

Top; vice presidential hopeful Jack Kemp points to his running mate, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole. Bottom right; Nobel Peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, right, receives a key to the city on Jan. 7, 2003, from Jacksonville Mayor John Delaney. Bottom left; Jacksonville mayoral candidate John Peyton responds to the applause of the crowd. | Stephan Savoia/AP; Oscar Sosa/AP; Bob Self/The Florida Times-Union/AP

She leaked, they thought, in an effort to be both of singular value to the principal and also to the press. It’s tempting to cite specific examples, but they couldn’t prove it was her with absolute certainty then, and they still can’t now, and so neither can I — but something popped up in the pages of the press, and who but her could have known? What is definite, though, is that people thought she was doing this — first a few people, then more people, and across administrations. And sometimes she was not lurking between the lines but right smack in the text — defending the mayor by dinging a fellow high-level staffer. “This is Sam Mousa start to finish,” Wiles told a reporter for the area alt-weekly for a story in 1997 about a behind-schedule and over-budget project — Mousa, the aide who considered her the “best” and “most intelligent” colleague he’d ever worked with. “Something clearly went very wrong here,” Wiles told the reporter at the time. (“I took those comments from Susie as deflecting away from John,” Mousa told me. “I don’t hold any grudges.”)

Her engine, people who worked with her closely came to believe, wasn’t ideology. It wasn’t even necessarily strategy. It was psychology.

“She can’t help it,” one person who worked with her at the time in City Hall told me on the condition of anonymity on account of the power Wiles has now and the even greater power she might have if Trump wins later this year.

“It’s not a desire. It’s a need,” said another person who agreed to talk to me on the same terms and for the same reasons — a “need to be needed,” as this person put it, a need to be “the most important person to the most important person.”

She was the chief of staff for Delaney for three years — from November 1997 to November 2000. And then she wasn’t. “To be able to do the job effectively, the mayor and chief of staff have to have complete trust in each other, and we have that trust,” her replacement, Audrey McKibbin Moran, told the Times-Union at the time. She was never the chief of staff for Peyton, but he named a new one in early 2008, and it wasn’t her. Four months later she resigned. “It’s just time,” she told the Times-Union. “I think,” she said to the Jacksonville Business Journal, “you’ll see me around again.”

It took nearly two years, though, before her next big post in politics. In 2008, she was the Duval County co-chair for John McCain’s presidential campaign. In 2009, she was a regular panelist on a local talk show on Jacksonville TV. In 2010, in March, she gave $500 to establishment GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum — five and a half weeks before she signed on to manage the longshot campaign of a businessperson and political outsider. Rick Scott stuck in his bid to a catch phrase — “Let’s get to work” — and steadfastly refused to meet with editorial boards at newspapers around the state. “Why?” he was asked. “I’ll have to ask Susie,” he answered.

In 2011, instead of joining Scott in Tallahassee, Wiles joined lobbyist Brian Ballard’s Florida-based firm to open an office in Jacksonville. “I really needed somebody in Jacksonville,” Ballard told me, “and she had great reach across the board.” She was a brief, ill-fated campaign manager for Jon Huntsman’s brief, ill-fated presidential campaign — a faltering, frustrating few months that spring, others involved remember, in which she clashed with the chief strategist and cried in the office. As an ex-head of an in-cycle campaign, she was for reporters on the presidential beat an at-the-ready quote — criticizing businessperson Herman Cain (“the possibility that he is a philanderer and an abuser”), praising in the National Journal more moderate New Jersey governor Chris Christie (“the best foil” for Barack Obama) and eventually endorsing former Massachusetts governor and private equity investor Mitt Romney (“the stability, intellect and integrity that Republicans are looking for in their standard bearer,” she said). In 2012, she advised one of the losing candidates in a seven-candidate congressional primary running from Jacksonville down toward Daytona Beach — the winner of which was a newcomer named DeSantis. In 2014, she gave money to then-South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. And in 2015 — in August, a month in which she gave money to Jeb Bush — she went to New York, to Trump Tower, to meet with Donald Trump.

She came home and told Delaney she was impressed. She told Ballard she “saw something” in him. She told her friend Rick Mullaney, an adviser to Delaney and Peyton, she thought he was going to be the next president. And she told her friend Paul McCormick, a longtime Jacksonville political consultant and P.R. man, a story.

“She said she went in to sit for her interview,” McCormick told me. She said the chair that had been set up for her was some 20 feet from where Trump was, and Trump started talking, and Wiles found it awkward.

“And long story short, wherever she was sitting, and exactly how many feet away, she moved,” said McCormick, “right up next to where he was.”

Wiles and her father, Pat Summerall, in a 1960 photo taken in their New York apartment when her father played for the New York Giants. “My children grew up without me,” he wrote. “I failed them as a father.” | Courtesy of Susie Wiles

‘My stoicism comes from him’

“Thematically, it’s all going to lead back to the beginning,” Wiles told me the first time we talked for this story. “Like every child, you are a product, in some way, sometimes good, sometimes not, of how you were raised.”

She was the oldest of three children and the only daughter of a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who stayed with him, worked to keep order around him — and ultimately got him to make changes he could not make on his own.

Her father was Pat Summerall. A native of rural Lake City, Florida, he endured a brutal childhood, as he recounts in his memoir — a club foot a doctor was able to somewhat miraculously fix, abandoned by his parents, a stepfather who beat him with a rubber hose. He played professional football, for the Lions, Cardinals and most notably the Giants in New York, an end and a kicker who booted with what had been his deformed foot one of the most important field goals in National Football League history. He got rich and he got famous, though, as a broadcaster. With a relentless work ethic and a smooth, spare speaking style, Summerall was the mellifluous voice of the Masters of golf, the U.S. Open of tennis but first and foremost the NFL — “the voice,” in the words of his longtime partner John Madden, “of football.” He was also, because of his drinking, a mostly absent parent. His daughter was born in 1957. She was followed quickly by two brothers. He had an affair for 17 years before his wife divorced him and he married his mistress. “My children grew up without me,” he wrote. “I failed them as a father.”

Her mother was the former Katharine Jacobs. Also from Lake City, she was, according to her daughter, “a fantastic gardener,” “a beautiful seamstress” and “the best cook there ever was.” She made all the meals. She set all the appointments. She bought all the Christmas gifts, one of her brothers once wrote on Facebook. She so often had to do so much on her own. And every evening around 5, in the big, tidy house in Saddle River, New Jersey, she went upstairs and took a warm bath. She coped, her observant daughter thought, with courage and with grace.

The daughter ran. She played basketball. She along with the rest of her family played tennis and played it hard and played it well. One of her brothers was deaf in one ear and needed a series of surgeries and the other had bad eyes. Her parents didn’t have to worry so much about her. All the kids had their own rooms in the house and hers was the one in the back. She couldn’t help but come to understand the importance at times of staying where she was, when out of the way was a better way to be. One year in high school at the Academy of the Holy Angels her father missed the annual father-daughter Mass. She was embarrassed and hurt. She made sure not to show it.

Fox broadcasters Summerall, left, and John Madden stand in the booth at the Louisiana Superdome before the NFL Super Bowl XXXVI football game in New Orleans. Summerall got rich and famous as a broadcaster. | Ric Field/AP

She helped him and he helped her. After going to the University of Maryland, she got her first job in part because of him — because of his friendship with Kemp, a former teammate. “I did the quintessential ‘Let your Daddy get you a job’ kind of thing,” she once said in the Times-Union. She wrote the most important letter in the intervention her mother organized that got her father to go to the Betty Ford Clinic in California to finally try for real to stop drinking. She wrote most pointedly that she sometimes felt ashamed to share his last name. It was her letter, he would say later, that “made it clear that I’d hurt them.” But her father was sick, she thought, and one doesn’t punish somebody who’s sick. She went with her mother and her brothers to visit him in treatment. She visited him in hospitals in Texas and in Jacksonville when he needed a liver transplant more than a decade after he got sober. He died in 2013. She called him “a wonderful father” and “an extraordinary man.” She said he would be “greatly missed.”

Children of alcoholics, according to experts, are all but forced to learn early on that they can’t control what they can’t control — but that they very much must control what they can. They can learn to manage around a person who can’t be managed. They can learn to make and keep a kind of order in situations that are marked by the utter lack thereof. They can learn to make themselves invaluable, or invisible — and when to be the former, and when to be the latter. They can be, and can grow up to be, quiet and competitive, persistent and resilient, achievers and survivors, and keen, intuitive readers of rooms and moods and needs. They can be compulsive pleasers of people and in particular one person — a person whose needs trump those of others and certainly their own. They can be helpers. They can be enablers. They can be both.

Wiles never remembered her father not drinking until he didn’t. “And yet it’s complicated. It is in all families. Because I learned from him good things — like, and this is my word, nobody’s ever said this about me, but I feel it sometimes, my stoicism comes from him,” she told me.

And she learned, too, from her mother. “She had to do things she wasn’t prepared to do,” she said. “I watched her progress as a person, as a mom, as a woman, just as a human being, rise to occasion after occasion after occasion,” she said. “The picture of calm through this tempest of alcoholism was my mom,” she said. “She woke up an optimist every day, and she started every day like that, and it would fall apart or it wouldn’t …”

Wiles watches as Donald Trump speaks at a caucus night party in Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 15, 2024. By early 2020, Wiles was at a personal and professional low, all the more jarring because it came hard on the heels of what was for her a new level of power, prominence and success. | Andrew Harnik/AP

‘We were a Trump team first’

They needed each other.

By early 2020, Wiles was at a personal and professional low, all the more jarring because it came hard on the heels of what was for her a new level of power, prominence and success.

She’d helped Trump win the White House by helping him win Florida in 2016, bringing state-specific, ground-game expertise along with accrued establishment cred, in a way making it more OK for more people to support Trump. She’d helped Ballard set up his lucrative, well-connected Washington office in 2017. “Even as a friend of the president who speaks frequently with the president,” Rep. Matt Gaetz told POLITICO at the time, “sometimes I have to call Susie Wiles to get my way.” And she’d helped DeSantis get elected governor by taking over his floundering campaign in late September in 2018. “What Susie’s good at is organization,” Rick Scott told FloridaPolitics.com at the time. “And Wiles is exceptional at adjusting narratives during the campaign news cycle,” A.G. Gancarski wrote. “Her great skill is seeing a calm path and getting people to take it,” veteran Tallahassee-based Republican consultant David Johnson, who was involved in the effort that fall, told me. “They were able to appeal to independents and moderates based on his opposition to Big Sugar. They focused a great deal on Andrew Gillum’s record as well — they pounded that in — but they also made the decision to use Casey DeSantis as the introducer,” he said, in telling in ads a more human story of her husband. “She’s just very even-tempered and very pragmatic and figures out a way to make things work,” said Whit Ayres, a pollster involved in the campaign. “The governor would not be the governor if it wasn’t for Susie Wiles,” a former DeSantis staffer told me.

Then-candidate for Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis kisses his wife Casey DeSantis as they attend a rally at Freedom Pharmacy on the final day of campaigning in the midterm elections on Nov. 5, 2018, in Orlando, Florida. “The governor would not be the governor if it wasn’t for Susie Wiles,” said a former DeSantis staffer. | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Then, though, she was shunted and shunned. DeSantis, his wife and his chief of staff, in the telling of people in Tallahassee who watched it play out, ousted Wiles from her role near the top of the state GOP because they thought she was taking or at least getting too much credit for his win, working less for the governor’s agenda and more for her own relationships and the president’s reelection, and also leaking to the press — feeling, it turned out, some version of the way the people in City Hall in Jacksonville once felt. But DeSantis didn’t stop at her mere dismissal, privately pressuring Ballard and Trump to publicly distance themselves from Wiles as well, according to people around Florida who heard about such calls. Wiles had gotten divorced, too, in 2017 — the records are sealed — and so now she was newly, deeply wounded, and crying on the phone to friends. She was, in the words of Mike Hightower, the retired lobbyist and Wiles supporter, feeling “betrayed” — “in her personal life,” he said, “and in her political life.”

“It was so traumatic for me. I feared for everything, from my reputation to my livelihood — my ability to have a livelihood,” Wiles told me.

“I needed,” she said, “to work.”

And Trump? He needed to win Florida. He needed to win Florida if he wanted to get reelected. He needed Wiles to do for him in 2020 what she had done for him in 2016 — definitely more than he wanted to continue to kowtow to even a seemingly ascendant DeSantis. And so he hired her. “My thinking was,” said Wiles, “I know how to do this, I think I’m well equipped to do it, he wants me to do it, and I’m going to, and we’re going to win Florida again. And we did. By a lot.” It was the only swing state Trump won in an election he lost. And after he lost, and after Jan. 6, and after his second impeachment, he asked her to come back to run his fledgling post-presidential political operation — and she started in March of 2021 as the CEO of his “Save America” PAC. The job, as Playbook put it at the time, was “to instill order.” Trump, a Trump adviser said, “tells everyone around Mar-a-Lago that Susie is now in charge.”

Chris LaCivita, Susie Wiles, Jason Miller and other campaign officials of Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump attend his caucus night watch party in Des Moines, Iowa, on Jan. 15, 2024. | Brian Snyder/REUTERS/Redux

“What product are you selling?” a reporter in Jacksonville once asked Wiles. “That’s a good question,” she said. “Strategy and planning,” she said. “Media relations,” she said. “Knowledge of people that shape opinions,” she said. “A little bit of everything,” she said. “A special project here,” she said, “and a special project there.” One of her “specialties” she listed on her LinkedIn page was “creating order from chaos” and one of her “greatest” assets was “my ability to turn situations and perceptions around.” And as 2021 became 2022 became 2023 — as Trump looked at least potentially politically precarious because of the midterms, because of the investigations, because of the indictments, and DeSantis, on the other hand, looked poised to be his Republican successor — people back in Jacksonville started to feel a familiar sensation. “I had dinner with John Peyton,” said Mike Tolbert. “I remember him saying to me, ‘I’ve got to tell you: Ron DeSantis is going to regret the date that he fired her …’” Susie Wiles had a new special project.

It wasn’t just Wiles. Because it wasn’t just Wiles whom DeSantis had pushed out. It was also a passel of her aides. “And she’s like a den mother to all of them,” Ana Cruz, a Tampa-based Democrat, former Hillary Clinton spokesperson and former Ballard colleague of Wiles, told me. “They would walk through fire for that woman.” And now they and other so-called “Susie people” were ready to help Trump because she was helping Trump and because DeSantis had hurt her. “She’s one of the best I’ve seen at surrounding herself with loyalists,” a longtime Republican consultant and DeSantis supporter told me, “and that creates a force field around her that protects her.” And they knew — and she knew — things about DeSantis. And so they just knew what to do. They knew he was self-conscious about his height and his weight. They knew he could be awkward and odd. They knew he had strange habits including memorable specifics — like the time he ate chocolate pudding with three fingers. And they knew his wife could be the key in good ways and bad: a huge advantage if she was seen by the public as a charismatic mother and a humanizing force or exactly the opposite if she was seen as a climber and a schemer and a person out for power of her own. They knew, too, because she knew, because she knows reporters, that the press as a whole mostly was ready to shift from Trump to DeSantis. They knew — and she knew — what they needed.

“She knew,” former Florida Republican congressmember David Jolly told me, “exactly how to beat Ron DeSantis on behalf of her client.”

“She had time, motive, opportunity and skill,” longtime Florida-based operative Rick Wilson told me. “She’s one of those people that has the old rule: Fuck me? No. Fuck you,” he said. “She was working a portfolio of Ron-related stories.”

It’s hard to the point of impossible to trace with specificity any precise path from what Wiles knows to what Wiles does to what other people then think … and write.

“She knew,” former Florida Republican congressmember David Jolly said, “exactly how to beat Ron DeSantis on behalf of her client.” | Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images; Alex Wong/Getty Images

But the narrative did start to shift.

In my own experience, in the first few months of last year, as I did in retrospect some version of what Wiles knew I and other reporters would do, as I mostly moved on from Trump and prioritized DeSantis, and as I made my rounds of calls to a wide array of Florida politicos — not just Wiles people, not just Trump people, not just DeSantis people, not just Republicans — it became clear to me that the conversation about DeSantis was changing. And then so was the tenor of the stories that made up the coverage that made up the narrative surrounding him. DeSantis was no longer (as the New York Post had dubbed him) “DeFuture.” He was in the pixels of The Daily Beast eating pudding with his fingers in March, which led to a Trump-supporting PAC’s ad literally called “Pudding Fingers” in April, which seeded social media for quick video clips from Iowa and New Hampshire of DeSantis and his cringey interactions with voters and kids — a mashup in my mind of old-fashioned flack work and new-school shit-posts. There were stories about private flights. There were stories about campaign infighting. DeSantis, the thinking had gone, was supposed to be Trump but serious, Trump sans the drama — and by the time voters were ready to start voting, that was self-evidently a more difficult case to make. DeSantis, Trump advisers often insist, did this to himself, and to some extent that’s true — but that plainly is not all that was going on.

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“These are characters, not because you want to create one, but because that’s what they are — people are consuming this through media formats — and so we created a caricature of one of our opponents, and so now he’s the weird oddball in the show that nobody’s rooting for,” a Wiles associate told me. “There’s lots of ways to defeat a candidate,” this person said, “and ideology is not the only one.”

She knew. And they knew. “And we all knew,” the longtime Republican consultant and DeSantis supporter told me, “it was her.”

“She gets done what she sets out to do,” said Henry “Hank” Coxe, a Jacksonville attorney and a lifelong Democrat who is close with Wiles. “And however she does it, she does it.”

“It’s like fog,” Hightower told me. “You know it’s there, but you can’t get your hands around it.”

“And the DeSantis episode,” said a Wiles associate, “is actually just a microcosm of how she runs things.”

“The only person that could have potentially even given a challenge to Trump was DeSantis, and so killing him and killing him early and in every way possible was the best strategy,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told me. “And let’s not forget, if you look at the major reporters that started covering this” — the rise and then fall of DeSantis — “several of them had come out of Florida,” he said, naming Marc Caputo of The Bulwark (formerly of the Miami Herald and POLITICO), Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal (Tampa Bay Times) and Michael Bender of the New York Times (ditto) — all of whom have known Wiles and vice versa for the better part of a decade and a half. (I worked at the Tampa Bay Times, too, before going to POLITICO; back then, though, I wrote about politics sparingly.) “DeSantis people weren’t feeding them anything on Trump, even rumors,” Fabrizio told me. “What were they getting fed?”

The relationships Wiles fosters with reporters are legion and salient. I’ve had some suggest she seems to tend to her list as well as any of the best reporters for whom she’s a key source. Most charitably, it’s a function of mutual professional and even personal respect — an understanding and even an appreciation of the game and how to play it and how to play it in a long-arc way. Most cynically, it’s favor-trading. Most fairly, it’s both.

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“I know she talked to reporters,” a Republican consultant who knows Florida and Wiles well told me. “I also know that she knows what I know, and I know that she would sometimes direct reporters to me, because that gives her a layer, a level, of distance.”

“They had their hands on this narrative all along,” a Democratic consultant who knows Florida and Wiles well told me. “That’s what Susie does.”

I wrote a story about Casey DeSantis last May. “The Casey DeSantis Problem,” read the headline. In it I quoted a DeSantis donor by name: “She is both his biggest asset and his biggest liability.” I wrote that story because of what I’d heard in the course of my reporting. And I now think I heard what I heard in some basic way because of Wiles. “She is very good at manipulating the media,” said Littlepage, the retired columnist from Jacksonville. “Having been manipulated by her, I know.” I don’t think I was manipulated. I was hearing similar sentiments from simply too many people. And I don’t think the story about Casey DeSantis was wrong. But I also don’t think I would’ve written it had that conversation about DeSantis and his campaign not changed. The situation. The perception. The knowledge of people that shape opinions. And of course it wasn’t just me. By the fall, POLITICO Magazine had commissioned a menswear expert to analyze his boots. By January, DeSantis was done.

“I don’t know why we’d want to weigh in and wade into the back-and-forth political stuff,” DeSantis spokesperson Bryan Griffin told me. “We’re over it. And we’re out of it.” Fair enough. Others, though, marvel. “If you look at Jan. 1, 2023, and Jan. 1, 2024, and look at the political arc of Donald Trump, where he started and where he finished, and the political arc of Ron DeSantis, where he started and where he finished, it flipped upside down,” said Justin Sayfie, a former top Jeb Bush aide and Ballard lobbyist based in South Florida. “She was right there, right in the middle of where those lines intersect.”

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INSIDE THE OFF-THE-RECORD CALLS HELD BY ANTI-TRUMP LEGAL PUNDITS | BY ANKUSH KHARDORI

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THE COLLAPSE OF THE NEWS INDUSTRY IS TAKING ITS SOUL DOWN WITH IT | BY JACK SHAFER

“If you don’t shape the narrative, it shapes you,” one Wiles associate told me. “There’s an understanding by certain people, both herself and certain people around her,” this person said, “of gravity, of political gravity, and understanding that sometimes you just have to set a play in motion,” this person said. “Sometimes, you just have to get it into the water, and then let the world take over.”

“There’s knowledge that not many people had that is certainly not protected in any ethical or legal way,” said a second Wiles associate. “All we did was accelerate the magnification.”

“Grandma,” said a third, “is a ninja.”

As DeSantis readied to drop out after his failed bid, Wiles tweeted for the first time in five months. “Bye, bye,” she wrote.

“There’s a team, and we were a Trump team first, all of us, then we became a DeSantis team, and then we went back to our roots,” Wiles told me earlier this year on the phone. “A group of people are here for a reason. That reason wasn’t to destroy Ron DeSantis,” Wiles told me.

“But,” she said, and with what I heard as a hint of glee, “the opportunity presented itself.”

Trump speaks with Wiles, center, staff and reporters while flying home on his airplane, known as "Trump Force One," after speaking at a campaign event, on April 27, 2023, in Manchester, N.H. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

‘They’re just not that dissimilar’

“Why do you do this?” I had asked at the Starbucks in West Palm.

“Why are you here?” I said now.

She could have been anywhere else. She could have been back in Ponte Vedra Beach in her four-bedroom house with her garden and the garage with the double oven in which she can make her renowned pound cakes five at a time. She could have been with her two grown daughters or with her 7-year-old grandson. Katie Wiles, the older of her two daughters, took her son to South Carolina for the weekend of the primary and the victory party — to see “SuSu,” which is what her son calls her mom. “We hadn’t seen my mom in several weeks,” she told me. “She’s an incredible mother,” she said, “and she’s an incredible grandmother.”

But she’s almost always here, in her small, 12th-floor apartment, or in the campaign headquarters, or over at Mar-a-Lago, or on Trump’s plane, or in New York with him of late when he is required to be in court, or at his rallies and remarks, usually backstage, in Iowa and New Hampshire, in South Carolina and North Carolina, in Virginia and Michigan and Pennsylvania, working from early in the morning to late in the night.

Some see in Trump the possibilities of the worst dictatorial tendencies. “Susie Wiles is way too smart of a human being and way too sophisticated a political operator to not understand,” Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster and MSNBC analyst, told me. “She knows who Trump is.” And yet many who know Wiles and who were not at all glad Trump was ever the president and even less glad he might be the president again are quite glad that she at least is still at his side. “If Donald Trump is going to be president, I want Susie Wiles involved,” said Carlos Curbelo, the former Republican congressmember. “If this guy wins, and I certainly hope he doesn’t, but if he were to win again, I would hope to hell that she will play a major role,” said her friend Paul McCormick. “I’m not particularly for Trump,” said longtime Washington lobbyist Charlie Black, “but I love Susie.”

“It is impossible to manage Donald Trump … but it’s very possible to help Donald Trump. She understands that her job is to be the chief helper,” former Speaker of the House and Trump ally Newt Gingrich told me. “Trusting her with his campaign may be the greatest decision that he’s made since he came down the escalator,” said Florida GOP consultant David Johnson. “She brought order out of chaos in the Rick Scott campaign, she did the same thing for DeSantis, and now again she’s doing it for Trump,” said Florida lobbyist Ronnie Book. “He’s had much, much better management and organization than he had before.”

She’s involved in vice-presidential vetting, in endorsements, in spending, in media relations, in fundraising — small donors, and big donors, too. “She has given some of the donors a reason to feel better about it,” a person with knowledge of the situation recently told the Washington Post. There is little, really, in which she is not involved. She is, in the words of fellow senior adviser Chris LaCivita, “the glue that holds everything together.” The United States senators, the House members, the governors, the state lawmakers, so many others who wants a piece of Trump’s time — “she is the funnel,” said Fabrizio, “through which they all go.”

She is the most important person to the most important person.

“Are there similarities you see,” I asked, “between your father and the president?”

“Yep,” she said.

Pat Summerall was born in 1930. Donald Trump was born in 1946. Pat Summerall grew up poor in rural north-central Florida. Donald Trump grew up rich in New York City in Queens. Pat Summerall is remembered by a sports-watching populace as a voice of a kind of tranquility. Donald Trump will not be remembered like that. But Wiles’ father and the man for whom she now works both suffered from the earliest age indelible wounds.

Trump had as parents a mother who was emotionally absent and a father who was dour and domineering. Their big house in Jamaica Estates, visitors thought, was cold and staid — a house, in the recollection of a neighbor, in which Trump and his brothers and sisters “never got a hug or a kiss.”

Summerall, too, was born “into a family broken beyond repair,” he wrote in his memoir. “My parents separated while I was still in my mother’s womb, and from what I would gather later, it was just as well. They wanted no part of each other, or of me,” he said. “I had no bond with my father, George Allen Summerall, who was not much of a father even when he was around. My mother took care of me for my first three years, then announced one day that she could no longer handle the responsibility.”

He drank — “Jack Daniels when it was cold and Smirnoff Vodka when it was hot,” he said. He became “a practiced liar and a seasoned cover-up man,” he said. He “walked away from my marriage and alienated my three kids,” he said. “I was not a presence or guide for their lives,” he said. “I neglected them.” At Betty Ford, he had therapy sessions with his wife, his daughter and his sons. “In a group with my oldest son, the counselor asked me, ‘When was the last time you said you loved your son?’” he once said. “I said, ‘I can’t remember.’ Then he asked, ‘When’s the last time you hugged him?’ I thought and said, ‘When I got him out of the crib.’ He said, ‘Would you like to do it now?’ I said, ‘Yes.’”

“I think the calmness is who I am — but to read a room or read a situation, I think that’s something,” Wiles said, “you learn over many years.” | Mark Peterson/Redux

Trump of course is not an alcoholic — he in fact does not drink at all — but Trump is every bit an addict, of chaos and conflict, of attention and affirmation. And Wiles sees in Trump, as she saw in her father, a ranging, voracious intelligence, a quenchless capacity for activity, and a drive that borders on almost manic ambition. They were stars, too, both of them, of a different sort, yes, but in the same place and at the same time — not just in and around New York but even more specifically the New York of the 1970s and ’80s, which for Trump remains his most formative stretch and stage. It’s a piece of the past that they share. It’s something to Trump that matters a lot. It’s part of what makes him say Wiles has “good genes.”

“They would on paper seem dissimilar,” she told me. “But they’re just not that dissimilar.”

Wiles, like anybody and everybody else, is who and how she is for a constellation of reasons, experiences and influences. “Susie developed who she is politically under Jack Kemp. He shaped her political beliefs and her work ethic,” an “Insider” once told Mike Tolbert for his newsletter. Ronald Reagan, Wiles thought, was “a little like everyone’s grandfather,” a person whose “personal characteristics traveled through television, radio and even print,” as she once put it. From Michael Deaver, the key Reagan aide and “image-maker,” she learned “that you stick to the message until it sinks in. Say it and say it and say it, and reinforce it with actions, until it sticks.” This, she thought, leaving that White House, was what she could do and what she could be. “I have been fortunate, several times in my professional life, to work for leaders with a big personality and a strong brand, who are relentlessly driven to pursue their goals,” she told me. But she’s never been with anybody like Trump. And she’s never been with anybody at all this long.

“I think the calmness is who I am — but to read a room or read a situation, I think that’s something,” she said, “you learn over many years.”

“Susie’s primary qualification for handling Donald Trump is her training in handling her father. She is an expert in unstable, dysfunctional, famous men. She knows when she can help, and she knows when not to try to help, and for that they’re grateful,” the longtime Tallahassee operative Mac Stipanovich told me.

“She wraps herself so inextricably to her principal that she’s invaluable to them,” said a person who knows Wiles well, “and as a result of being invaluable to them, they are invaluable to her.”

She went to work for Trump in the 2016 cycle. “I said, ‘Susie, I don’t think this is who you are,’” John Delaney told the Tampa Bay Times. She was, after all, a self-identifying, “card-carrying member of the GOP establishment.” And the sexual misconduct, the conspiracy theories, the attacks on John McCain and Gold Star parents, “and on and on,” as the former Tampa reporter Adam Smith wrote at the time — “the Donald Trump that I have come to know does not behave that way,” she said. “The Donald Trump that I have come to know,” she said, “I would feel 101 percent confident in his ability to do the right thing.” And then she went to work for him again in the 2020 cycle, and then again, of course, in the still raw wake of Jan. 6 — “clearly,” I said here now outside the Starbucks, “not a breaking point for you …”

She paused.

“I didn’t love it,” she said.

“It wasn’t so …”

“I didn’t love it,” she said again.

“… odious to you …”

“Well,” Wiles said, “I didn’t think he caused it.”

What was that sound? Compartmentalization? Accommodation? Rationalization? Why is she working for him? And why does it seem to be working so well? She’s nearly nine years in. A breeze blew.

“I sort of think, maybe naively, that if everybody knew what I knew — what I know — they wouldn’t feel as some do about Donald Trump. Does that mean I think he’s perfect? There are certainly things I would do and say differently — absolutely,” she told me.

“But people don’t know what I know,” she said.

“You can’t get the Trump policies without the Trump personality. That’s not original — that comes from Lindsey Graham — but I believe it completely. And so you just sort of take the good with the bad,” she said, “with everybody.”

Gripping reads, smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun. Because even power needs a day off.

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[spiderlegsmusic]

Convicted felon Donald J. Trump, the maga moron running for president even though his last term was a failure under which more Americans died than any other president’s term—including all the war time presidents — can’t handle criticism. When a media outlet—network, newspaper, magazine, organization—says anything bad about him he sticks his fingers in his ears, closes his eyes and shouts “fake news!” over and over until he turns from orange to red and passes out.

Well, recently on his unsocial network site, Trump lies Social, he says when he becomes president, he will take away the license of CBS News. It’s just one more way that illustrates how uselessly uninformed this living tumor is. In a country in which freedom of the press is guaranteed, there are no “licenses” for news. You don’t need a license to publish a newspaper, magazine, or brochure; or to produce a news show on a news or entertainment network. CBS News has no license to take away.

Individual television and radio stations broadcasting locally have licenses but that has to do with the frequency they broadcast as, the channel. None of those networks have a license to broadcast news. They can broadcast anything they want.

So what license is Trump going to take away, exactly? If this country makes the worst mistake it has ever made by electing Trump for a second term, is he going to create licenses to disseminate news just to take them away from sources which criticize him?

Trump is an incompetent business failure, a tv gameshow host, a vindictive cunt, a stupid fool who thinks injecting bleach should have cured Covid so they should research it. In the 2020 election he insists he lost due to fraud, he forgets that his refusal to take Covid seriously, over a million people died, most of whom probably would have voted for Trump because they refused to be vaccinated. Rather than accept he killed off a large portion of his base. He claims fraud because he refuses to accept losing, when that’s all he has ever done: he has lost 6 businesses to bankruptcy because he is incompetent at running a business; he has lost the a civil case and a criminal case in court, and millions of dollars in fines and restitution; he has lost his college because he defrauded his students; he lost his privilege to do business in New York; he lost his charity because he was funneling off profits; he lost the respect and support of his entire cabinet from his first term (except for 4 individuals); he lost the 2016 election popular vote; he lost the 2020 election popular and electors; he lost every single court case he filed to overturn the election; and he has lost his mind.

No other candidate for president has shown so much incompetence and ignorance about role of president—especially after having already served a term. He is ruining personified. He wants to be king so he bought a Supreme Court to facilitate that. Of course there are puppeteers pulling his strings to whom he is beholden.

Trump projects his corruption on his opponents: first Biden then Harris. And the mass of uninformed undereducated poor white people and obscenely wealthy white people which make up his base just nod and cheer everything he says, even when he mumbles nonsense.

Trump is wrong about everything and lies about everything else. He’s a racist full of hatred who loves quoting Hitler and wants to be a dictator with unlimited power. If elected, he says his next term will be about retribution, revenge. He will start by rounding up a deporting both legal and illegal immigrants; then rounding up and detaining his critics. This is not hyperbole.

[maykl24]

How to recognize libel and misinformation in articles? The answer from U.S. intelligence

The investigation presented by Dr. Cholakian has revealed the existence of a particular force that is determined to undermine America from within. This force is responsible for the proliferation of disinformation in American media. It is crucial to understand the nature of this force and its motivations to take appropriate measures to counter its efforts.https://egonreport.org/

Therefore, it is very important to know:

How can misinformation harm each person and even an entire country and the world as a whole? 

How to protect yourself from misinformation? 

How to distinguish truth from lies? 

The video report entitled “Undeclared War: America is Under Attack,” presented by Egon Cholakian, reveals the true nature of the unseen forces that influence our thoughts. It is an essential watch for those who wish to be independent thinkers, take control of their lives, and ensure the safety of their families and country. The report urges viewers to be mindful and proactive about the information they consume and its impact on their lives.

Egon Cholakian is an intelligence educator and national security expert with an impressive background. He has worked as a federal lobbyist, registered foreign representative, and member of the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Throughout his career, Dr. Cholakian has collaborated with four U.S. Presidents, including his participation in Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet, three National Security Advisors, and a Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The results of an extensive 30-year investigation conducted by Egon Cholakian's team were presented in detail to the public. In his video he gave several examples of how disinformation is deliberately created, how it penetrates the media, how it affects people's perceptions and most importantly how one can remain vigilant and prevent itself from being negatively affected.

First, let me give an example of a deliberate disinformation campaign directed against the International Public Movement ALLATRA, a volunteer organization headquartered in the United States. “ALLATRA works to combat climate change and has offices in 180 countries around the world. The work of this volunteer organization https://allatra.org/

transcends political and religious boundaries. ALLATRA's mission is to unite researchers and enthusiasts to fight the climate crisis and promote democratic principles.

So Dr. E. Cholakyan explains that a slander campaign was deliberately launched against ALLATRA 10 years ago, initiated by Russian anti-cult groups, whose methods of persecution are often compared to terrorist acts. https://allatra.org/

And then it is interesting: if the headquarters of the volunteer organization “ALLATRA” is in the United States, why did the persecution began with Russia? It turns out that the real reasons for this smear campaign go far beyond mere disinformation and are related to US national security issues. Dr. Egon Cholakian elaborates on this issue in his video report.

Everyone can view it for themselves on the ESSC platform. It is a compelling and illuminating report that every thinking person should watch.

But it begs the question: how does misinformation get past the human critical thinking barrier?  What does it threaten us with?

Egon Cholakian gave an illustrative example on America and the Americans.

According to a Bankrate analysis conducted in 2023, 60% of survey respondents believed the U.S. economy was in a recession despite quarterly solid economic growth and a thriving job market. Additionally, a Financial Times investigation revealed that many Americans, a significant proportion of them, misunderstood critical economic data. For example, 90% of respondents claimed that costs had risen faster than earnings over the past year, which was not the case. The paper also suggests that Americans are misinformed about other economic trends, such as real wages, wealth accumulation, and poverty rates.https://egonreport.org/

You may ask: Why do Americans have such misconceptions? Egon Cholakian believes that the tone of economic news is becoming increasingly negative. This leads to more pessimistic narratives being spread in the news, leading to an influx of misinformation. And all of this has led many Americans to believe, for example, that “America is in a recession” and that “the economic situation is getting worse.” As a result, people begin to believe that things are going in the wrong direction. This leads to a loss of values and fundamental qualities that America has always stood for. 

Egon Cholakian emphasized what the negative effects of misinformation are now in the U.S:

“We are witnessing a catastrophic decline in patriotism. Pride in our country has fallen to historic lows, especially among the younger generation. A significant percentage of Americans are losing faith in tomorrow, shying away from starting a family, not wanting children, experiencing a decline in spiritual and moral values, and have no desire to participate in our society.”

It is a known fact that when a nation's morale is in decline, its citizens are less motivated, unwilling to contribute to society or initiate new business ventures. Depression, crime, and substance abuse increase in a society.

Thus, misinformation can influence thinking and therefore action. It has become obvious that misinformation leads to personal decline or even the decline of an entire nation.

And today, more and more public figures, politicians and parties are using disinformation and slander to deliberately destroy the reputation of their opponents. 

Therefore, Egon Cholakian gives 5 characteristics that distinguish libelous articles:

Signature Characteristics of Defamatory Article

1. False Statements and Claims: The article makes factually incorrect claims, which are taken out of context. Additionally, it contains many disparaging labels and offensive words. For instance, it wrongly refers to ALLATRA as a “sect” or “cult,” which does not relate in any way to the organization’s activities.

2. Sensible topics are being raised: The author refers to sensitive topics that intentionally associate an organization or an individual with a negative image of another person or entity.

3. Insinuation: The article suggests that only negative qualities are associated with the individual or the organization.

4. No Proof of Truth: The damaging statements lack evidence to support their truthfulness.

5. Unverified Allegations: The article is written in an abusive tone and contains unverified accusations.

It is important to know that the perception of false information can lead a person to feelings of doubt, sadness about themselves, their loved ones and even their country. It can create negative images and attitudes in a person's mind.

Defamatory articles infringe on a person's right to good name, reputation and dignity. 

Dr. Egon Chokakyan pointed out that such misinformation is used not only to spoil someone's reputation, but also to sow the seeds of hatred in the people towards each other and towards those they are directed at.

Therefore, everyone should be able to think critically in order not to become a victim of such manipulations.

[myweeklyblog]

Exploring the Depths of "Moonlight" and the Absurdity of "Being John Malkovich"

Films depict human variety. On one side “Being John Malkovich” is a silly comedy about awareness and escape, and “Moonlight”, is a gripping drama about identity and self-discovery. Critical examination illustrates these films’ unique contributions to cinema and how their narratives and technical qualities convey essential concepts. Thus, we will evaluate both movies for technical and thematic attributes as well as examine identity and self-realization in these films.

In Barry Jenkins’ poignant “Moonlight”, gritty Miami’s African American Chiron struggles with sexuality and identity. The film shows Chiron’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Paula, Chiron’s drug-addicted mother, mistreated and ignored him. A slow pace allows the film to explore Chiron’s inner and outer difficulties. Close-ups and natural lighting emphasize each scene’s emotion, while the film’s legendary music inspires creativity, compassion, and tenacity.

Act Two sees an increase in Chiron’s sexuality and school bullying. Violence has a significant impact on Chiron’s life. Chiron transforms into a wicked person during his final stage of maturation. His new name is “Black”. After visiting his childhood friend Kevin, Chiron accepts his history. Enjoy Chiron’s journey at the film’s dreamy pace. Genuineness and emotion come from both natural light and personal perspectives. The movie “Moonlight” beautifully depicts originality, acceptance, and love.

Next, Spike Jonze’s odd comedy “Being John Malkovich” explores identity, consciousness, and creative escape. The film follows struggling puppeteer Craig Schwartz, who enters John Malkovich’s psyche. Before the NJ Turnpike, Malkovich’s eyes may last 15 minutes. Craig, Lotte, and Maxine utilize this gateway to trigger unusual occurrences.

John Cusack’s Craig as John Malkovich through the doorway is excellent. Craig discovers a hidden entrance beneath a filing cabinet in his dismal office. Craig’s tracking shots build tension. Once Malkovich enters the portal, his thoughts emerge. Craig’s surprised and excited. The dark office-gateway contrast is scary. Stunning ambient and terrifying soundscapes elevate everyday life.

Craig has Malkovich purchase bread in a café to balance his familiarity with the scene's surprise. Imagination and reality make this funny. Short clips show Craig’s discomfort and the breakdown of the encounter. Craig Cusack’s exhilaration and uncertainty exacerbate insanity. The entertaining, thought-provoking play ends with Craig’s unexpected exit from Malkovich’s awareness and landing on the road.

Its novel concept and flawless execution make the segment intriguing. It supports the film’s theme of living another’s life. First-person perspective, quick cuts, and contrasting lighting make the scenario odd and funny. The design shows how the film explores identity and how seeking pleasure outside of oneself may fail.

Thus, “Moonlight” and “Being John Malkovich" provide contrasting human viewpoints. “Being John Malkovich” explores identity and escape via humor and absurdity, whereas “Moonlight” depicts a man’s emotional journey to self-acceptance. These films’ unique narratives, technical skills, and thematic depth show cinema’s storytelling variety.

[deasbanker]

Weekend treat: explore Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, by popping in a freshwater fish aquarium, some stores specialized in geek culture, and a shopping district decorated with stained glass!

15/7/2024（on Marine Day）

With all my life in the Kanto region, I have been to Kanagawa prefecture only three times. So, I've been trying to visit major spots in Kanagawa this year; for today, I picked out Kawasaki, because it seemed to be as thriving a city as Yokohama in terms of shopping situation.

On arriving at the station, I headed over to an aquarium focusing on freshwater fish of some kind named Kawasui, which is on upper floors in the building right next to the station. It was tiny and humble compared to a typical aquarium where you can see penguins or sharks, but it was for those（including me）who prefer tropical fish or small animals mostly from the southern hemisphere to marine creatures. I learned names and characteristics of many species there and I could see what I had never seen even in pictures before.

The blue poison dart frog was one of the impressive creatures that I saw at the aquarium because of its color, which captured my attention, indeed. According to the label, vibrant color, when it comes to frogs, has the function of indicating to predators that they are poisonous. Besides this, there were several types of reptiles, such as pythons, lizards or turtles in the site. Plus, I saw children feeding and touching capybaras with excitement near the exit, feeling like this place had a really homely atmosphere.

Around noon, I moved on to the next spot: La Cittadella, a commercial facility modeled after Italy, and its well-known movie theater Cinecitta. Such a distinctive direction in retail business reminded me of Ikspiari（located next to TokyoDisney）, which is also a complex placing emphasis on an European/American atmosphere, and I always enjoy it.

Since La Cittadella was relatively empty at that time, I looked around at my own pace/to my heart's content and found that stores specialized in geek culture like Village Vanguard inside this mall were all well-organized and handled unique items. There were some old-school arcade cabinets, including Street FighterⅡ, in front of Village Vanguard, where you could get character goods, such as Super Mario, Studio Ghibli and Pokemon and Japanese manga/anime stuff. The merchandise there was displayed intentionally at random in a good way; thereby I always felt as if I went treasure hunting. As well as that, Tower Records here was so throughly organized and well-displayed compared to any other branches that I had ever been to that I was really impressed. Its stocks weren't leaning towards specific genre, and every genre appeared to be taken care of by making detailed POP displays and enthusiastic comments about artists from the clerks. How dedicated they were!

Walking down the street from Cinecitta, I came across a quintessentially Japanese shopping arcade, which had stained glass roof（regrettably, no one except me seemed to care）. I also liked in that this shopping district had a number of family-run stores and remained old-time retailers as they were. That reminded me of the Heisei era, so I couldn't help mumbling "wow" or "so nostalgic!" holding my camera.

Afterwards, I was hanging out at a mall called Lazona Kawasaki Plaza and then bought a light-blue handkerchief with such an illustration as The New Yorker printed on. The place wasn't larger than I had expected through TV programs, but I found it so open and refreshing that I would't get tired of. If I were to live in Kawasaki, I could hang out with my friends or even by myself everyday.