YEAH, PRETTY MUCH THIS:

DISPATCHES FROM CERULEAN BLUE STATES: Will Anna Wintour survive the Galliano debacle?

This has not gone well. A source told Page Six that “Anna singlehandedly thought she could willfully get [Galliano] back in [fashion]. She’s been at it a long time, and she really misjudged it, and she made him vulnerable while doing that… she’s not reading the fucking room… she really overplayed her hand. They really need to take a beat, take a year off, because people don’t have time for this shit right now.”

Wintour’s loyalty to Galliano was first demonstrated in 2013 – a mere two years after he was fired from Dior for the aforementioned comments – when she wangled him a residency with Oscar de la Renta, and then again the following year when she was instrumental in his becoming creative director of Maison Margiela, a role that he held for a decade. Wintour specifically asked, in 2014, for Galliano to present her with the award for Outstanding Achievement at the British Fashion Awards, and wore a Margiela by John Galliano design to receive it.

Vanessa Friedman wrote on the New York Times’s “On The Runway” blog at the time that “as fashion world blessings go, it was about as unambiguous as anything I’ve seen.” Wintour, it seems, was uninterested in Galliano’s private life or personal wrongdoings. For her, it was about the fashion.

Now, it seems as if the savviest woman in the industry might have made a misstep – and embarrassed the Met in the process. Wintour would have been aware of the unfortunate precedent being set – no Met honoree has had to quit before and no exhibition of this stature has been canceled – and the humiliation that all this involves. She will doubtless have bristled at an admonitory statement put out by Zohran Mamdani’s office: “John Galliano’s repeated use of anti-Semitic language is vile. The Mamdani administration recognizes that the Met’s decision to honor him has caused pain and anger among many Jewish New Yorkers. The Met is an independent institution and its decisions – and how it responds to the many Jewish New Yorkers appalled by this choice – are ultimately its own. But independence does not mean insulation from criticism.”

When even the anti-Israel Mamdani administration is hesitant about mainstreaming an (alleged) antisemite, attempting to rehabilitate Galliano may have been a step too far for someone whose magazine previously referred to Mrs. Bashar al-Assad as a “Rose in the Desert:”

Screenshot

SAD, BUT HANS IS PROBABLY CORRECT:

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Let’s Talk About the REAL ’80s.

I come not to praise the ’80s, but to bury Ryan Reynolds’ stupid, ignorant, and frankly Canadian complaints about the most awesome decade ever.

Talking to Variety to promote Mayday — a watch-it-once-and-forget-it flick — Reynolds didn’t just diss the ’80s; he went off. And he was just so wrong.

“The ’80s was a brutal, brutal time for people,” Reynolds whined. “It was a f***ing mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. Top Gun. Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”

Gentle reader, this effrontery will not stand.

So much more at the link.

BAD NEWS:  A few weeks ago, the California Legislature voted to put a new referendum aimed at gutting Proposition 209 on the ballot.  I am obviously going to have to fight these blasted things for the rest of my life.  The only good thing is that it won’t be on the ballot until November of 2028.  Read about it in my Daily Wire essay.

I’ll write more about it here soon.  Right now I have to finish up another project–a lawsuit–that I hope will be better news.

Plus my book is coming out soon … more on that later too.

MEMORY-HOLED:

FINALLY, A “WE ONLY HAVE FIVE YEARS TO SAVE THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT” WARNING THAT MIGHT ACTUALLY COME TRUE:

NOT GETTING MY HOPES UP, BUT IT’S GOOD TO PLAN: Why We Must Prepare for the Chinese Communist Party’s Collapse.

The international consequences would be enormous.

China is not merely another authoritarian country. It possesses nuclear weapons, the world’s largest standing military by personnel, enormous security and intelligence organizations, advanced biological laboratories, vast state enterprises, major financial institutions and supply chains embedded throughout the world economy.

The collapse of central authority could therefore create simultaneous military, financial, humanitarian, political and proliferation crises.

Who controls the nuclear arsenal? Who commands the People’s Liberation Army? What becomes of the People’s Armed Police, the militia, the Ministry of State Security and the vast domestic surveillance apparatus? Who secures dangerous biological facilities? Who prevents provincial military commanders or security chiefs from becoming warlords? What happens to the renminbi, China’s banks, sovereign obligations, state enterprises, foreign reserves and trillions of dollars of domestic assets?

From there, things get dicey.

WELL, HE’S RIGHT.

NOVEMBER PREVIEW:

EVERYTHING FROM THE LEFT IS FAKE:

Related:

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

THESE ARE THE CRAZY YEARS: