- The Kardashian Dating Playbook: How Kylie Jenner And Timothée Chalamet Appear A Carefully Planned Couple Forbes
- Timothée Chalamet Fans Are ‘Distressed & Devastated’ By The Video Of Him Kissing Kylie Jenner YourTango
- Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet’s Relationship Timeline PEOPLE
- Timothée Chalamet enters ‘Kardashian vortex’ with Kylie Jenner PDA at Beyonce concert The Mercury News
- Who is Timothée Chalamet dating? Here’s everyone he’s been with My Imperfect Life
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Playbook
Studios Respond To WGA’s “Calculated Disinformation”, “Tired Playbook” Remarks; “Rhetoric Is Unfortunate,” AMPTP Says Ahead Of Friday Meeting – Update – Deadline
- Studios Respond To WGA’s “Calculated Disinformation”, “Tired Playbook” Remarks; “Rhetoric Is Unfortunate,” AMPTP Says Ahead Of Friday Meeting – Update Deadline
- Writers strike reaches 3-month mark as talks set to resume ABC News
- Striking Hollywood screenwriters to meet with studios TeleSUR English
- Writers Guild Tells Members That Studios May Not Be Serious About Restarting Talks to Make a Deal Hollywood Reporter
- Dispatches From The Picket Lines: Striking Writers & Actors Discuss Restart Of WGA Talks With Skepticism But Some Optimism Deadline
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Trump Is Already Plotting Against DeSantis. Here’s His Playbook So Far – Rolling Stone
Former President Donald Trump and his allies have already started charting out possible plans of attack against likely 2024 rival and Florida governor Ron DeSantis, according to three people familiar with the matter.
“This is where…Trump kicks him in the nuts,” one person close to the ex-president says.
The former president’s determination to obliterate his ascendent rival underscores just how unwilling Trump is to pass the torch and surrender his stewardship of the GOP — even if it shreds the party. As Trump and his ideological heir DeSantis vie for control of the Republican Party, the victor in that power struggle will help determine the precise kind of extreme politics that modern conservatives see as their future: the authoritarian personality cult of a Trump, or the more disciplined MAGAism of a DeSantis.
With everyone on Team Trump expecting DeSantis to challenge the former president in the upcoming GOP presidential primary, Trump and his advisers are plotting a new scorched-earth campaign against DeSantis as soon as he declares his 2024 candidacy.
In the past two months, Trump has talked to political allies about effective ways to pummel DeSantis on both personal issues — recurring concerns about his “likeability” and supposed charisma deficit — and on policy matters such as DeSantis’ hawkish foreign policy, trade stances, COVID-19 posturing, closeness to the party’s “establishment,” and the past votes to slash the social safety net, sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone.
Trump has participated in a handful of discussions on this topic so far, but campaign advisers are trying to keep the finer details of their oppo blitz under wraps for now. Still, that hasn’t stemmed Trump’s enthusiasm for going after DeSantis — his former MAGA-friendly ally — whom the former president now sees as his greatest intra-party foe. In recent weeks, Trump has repeatedly quizzed some of those close to him: “What else do we have on [Ron]?” he has asked, according to two sources who’ve heard his query.
On a host of issues, Trump and his lieutenants are itching to portray DeSantis as the “establishment” figure — the one who is preferred by the supposedly squishy party bigwigs like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. One of Trump’s biggest impacts on the GOP was largely shelving the budget-slashing austerity economics of former Speaker Ryan and ushering in a free-spending, debt-ballooning era that combined tax cuts for the rich, with a rhetorical cease-fire on threats to the bennies of the masses — ranging from Social Security to Medicare.
One area in which Trump and his allies smell that kind of weakness in DeSantis is on Social Security (even though President Trump himself displayed an openness toward eventual significant cuts to popular entitlement programs).
“In a Republican primary, only Donald Trump could effectively go after Ron DeSantis for wanting to cut Social Security,”a Republican close to the 2024 Trump campaign tells Rolling Stone. “Trump has a track record of saying the right things on this issue both when it comes to a general election and also Republican voters in a primary. DeSantis’ record in the House [on this topic] is very much of the Paul Ryan, privatize Social Security platform, which is just not where our voters are now.”
For Trump, DeSantis may be easy to paint as a heartless budget-slasher. During his stint in the House from 2013 to 2018, DeSantis was a founding member of Freedom Caucus — the hardest of the hardline members of the GOP conference. “He was part of the team,” Freedom Caucus founder and former Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon tells Rolling Stone. Salmon further praises DeSantis as “one of the most principled people I ever got a chance to work with.”
At the time before the rise of Trumpism in 2015 and 2016, those principles were all about constraining government spending by repealing Obamacare and pursuing “entitlement reform.” In 2013, during DeSantis’ first year in office, he voted for a far-right budget resolution that sought to balance the federal budget in just four years — twice as fast as a competing measure by Ryan that got the Republican budget wonk lampooned as a “zombie-eyed granny starver.”
The draconian cuts DeSantis voted for would have raised the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare to 70. It would have weakened Medicare by offering seniors “premium support” instead of comprehensive health coverage. And it would have eroded Social Security by giving recipients miserly annual adjustments for inflation. Taken together, the two measures would have cut these bedrock safety-net programs for seniors by more than $250 billion over a decade.
Furthermore, two people who’ve spoken to Trump in the past couple of months about how DeSantis is the “establishment” candidate — a claim Trump likes to hurl, even though Trump is the literal leader and standard-bearer of his own party — say that the ex-president has brought up foreign policy as a means to differentiate himself from the Florida Republican. During at least one dinner late last year, the former president told a longtime associate that DeSantis was fine with “endless wars,” according to a source with direct knowledge of the exchange.
On foreign policy, Trump represented a partial break with the interventionist neoconservative foreign policy that had defined the GOP since the George W. Bush era. Trump trashed GOP hawks like John McCain, hectored NATO allies to cough up more cash for their own defense, played footsie with Vladimir Putin, regularly lambasted U.S. commitments in Afghanistan and Syria (even as he’d escalate military involvement abroad), and forged an open bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
DeSantis has a far more conventional Republican profile. That starts with his decorated military service — during the Global War on Terror he served as a JAG officer at Guantanamo, and deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, as the top legal adviser to SEAL Team One.
MAGA politicians are frequently Russia apologists, seeing Putin as an avatar of the kind of authoritarian Christian nationalism they’d prefer to install in the United States. But on Russia, in particular, DeSantis sounds like a throwback, McCain-style hawk, blasting Putin as an “authoritarian gas station attendant… with some legacy nuclear weapons.”
And when it comes to other aspects of his international and domestic platform, the former president has been using a familiar playbook, and appears to be sticking to it. In a throwback to 2016, he’s described DeSantis in several private conversations in recent weeks as: “Bad on trade.”
True to his belligerent brand of politics, Trump made trade wars a centerpiece of his administration. In a display of executive power, Trump slapped tariffs on everything from solar panels to washing machines to steel — offending geopolitical foes (China), frenemies (India), and allies (Canada) in equal measure. For Trump, hiking taxes on cheap imports became a politically potent — if economically incoherent — display of economic nationalism.
Quietly, DeSantis is far more mainstream on trade. While taking rhetorical swings at “Communist” China, DeSantis has been solicitous of top U.S. trade partners as Florida’s governor, recently hosting a trade conference with Japan in Orlando.
In recent huddles with longtime confidants, Trump has signaled his intention to cudgel DeSantis for the former congressman’s role in advancing a Pacific-rim free trade pact called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). In a 2015 vote, DeSantis voted to give president Obama “fast track” authority to pursue that trade deal with dozens of Asian nations. He joined an unusual bipartisan coalition with some far-left Democrats — including former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Rep. Earl Blumenaur, who represents Portland, Oregon. In Trump’s words, this makes DeSantis somehow “pro-Obama” on trade policy.
Whatever the policy merits of the trade deal, it was bad politics amid rising economic nationalism. Public opinion broke so sharply against TPP that even Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton ran against it in her 2016 presidential bid, and Trump spiked U.S. participation shortly on his first full day in office, having crusaded against it as a “bad, bad deal for American businesses, for workers, for taxpayers.”
But in perhaps his most brazen effort to brand himself as Trumpier than Trump, DeSantis has for months tried to fully ingratiate himself to the anti-vaccine factions of the GOP. It’s a move that Trump — as he told at least one Republican strategist late last year — sees as completely “phony,” given how DeSantis has tried to have it both ways on the coronavirus shots. Several people currently working to get Trump reelected tell Rolling Stone that Trump and his campaign fully intend to troll this hypocrisy in a primary.
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, DeSantis’ approach to controlling the spread of the deadly disease was not much different from governors in blue states, including a move to quarantine visitors from states like Louisiana. And in 2020, he praised then-President Trump for the administration’s determination to cut through red tape to speed the development of vaccines. In May 2021, DeSantis encouraged citizens to get their jabs, telling the public: “The vaccines protect you. Get vaccinated and then live your life.”
But DeSantis has since flip-flopped to cater to the kind of hyper-partisan vaccine rejection that has been championed by many in the MAGA base and in conservative influencer communities. By Jan. 2022, he refused to even say whether he’d received a COVID booster shot (a stance Trump called “gutless”) while insisting vaccination was a “personal decision.”
DeSantis also appointed a prominent vaccine skeptic as surgeon general, who infamously advised young men not to get mRNA vaccines. These days, instead of barnstorming Florida to get the state’s vulnerable population vaccinated, DeSantis holds himself out as crusader against health mandates. This week, he introduced a “Prescribe Freedom” package of legislation to permanently ban mask mandates in schools and businesses, and prohibit “employers from hiring or firing based on mRNA jabs.”
On DeSantis’ end, the MAGA-molded governor has become a star among influential conservative media for delivering a “red wave” in the 2022 election, swaying many top Republican donors and conservative voters who are open to moving on from Trump’s excesses and baggage. Though DeSantis has refused to respond directly to Trump’s ongoing jabs, the governor has occasionally stressed the contrasts between himself and Trump, typically by attempting to get to Trump’s right on select issues, such as pandemic restrictions. However, DeSantis has declined to name Trump when doing so, and has falsely claimed that there’s no tension or feud between him and the ex-president.
“Strategically, I would say DeSantis is probably well inoculated on some of these attacks from Trump,” says David Kochel, who served as a chief strategist in 2016 for Jeb Bush, who of course fell to Trump. “On the pandemic, DeSantis can say,‘You kept Dr. Fauci around, I would have fired him; you locked us down, I opened Florida back up,’” Kochel says. The strategist adds that attacking DeSantis on substance doesn’t play to the former president’s strong suit. “Trump is never at his best when he’s talking about policy; he’s at his best when he’s going after people about culture wars, which DeSantis has kind of perfect pitch on.”
Similarly, Kochel says Trump will have a hard time casting DeSantis as a tool of the establishment. “It’s going to be tricky [because] Trump is the establishment now. He’s the one who ran an administration, recruited a bunch of candidates to look and sound like him. The way Trump went after Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, I do not believe that’s going to work against Ron DeSantis.”
Assessing the odds of Trump’s strategy to take down DeSantis, Kochel simply says: “It will be tough.”
James Toback is accused of sexual misconduct by THIRTY-EIGHT women used a ’12-step playbook’
Thirty-eight women have come together to file a joint lawsuit alleging director James Toback is a ‘serial sexual predator.’
In a lengthy court document stretching to 90 pages, the women allege the director ‘used his reputation, power and influence in the entertainment industry’ to ‘lure young women through fraud, coercion, force, and intimidation into compromising situations where he falsely imprisoned, sexually abused, assaulted, and/or battered them.’
The alleged abuse spans a period of 38 years, dating back to 1984.
The victims say they are only now finding the courage to speak out due to Toback’s ‘explicit and implicit threats of blacklisting them in the industry, physically harming them, and/or even killing them if they did not comply with and remain silent about the sexual abuse they endured.’
Director James Toback, 78, ‘prowled’ New York City to lure women using his status in the industry, according to a new lawsuit claims brought by 38 women. He is pictured in 2013
The director is also alleged to have told several victims that he had murdered people in the past including a therapist at Harvard and that he ‘had killed someone with a fork’ – and had contacts with the mob, in order to scare off any would-be whistleblowers.
Toback also threatened to ruin women’s careers if they ever told anyone about the alleged assaults.
One woman identified as Jane Doe 5 in the suit alleged that he told her ‘she could never say anything to anyone ever’ and that if she did, ‘she would never have a career in Hollywood.’
The suit states how Toback, 78, would make the women ‘act provocatively’ and then goad them into performing sexual acts on him all under the guise ‘to see if they were right for the alleged role’ – which usually did not exist.
The claims of sexual abuse date back to 1984 and allege Toback ‘blacklisted, physically harmed or threatened to kill’ women if they did not comply. He is pictured in 2017
Toback, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991 for the film Bugsy, ‘prowled the streets of New York City’ in search of young women ‘to abuse who were or wanted to be involved in the entertainment industry,’ the 90-page suit alleges.
The suit lays out details of what his accusers say was a 12-step playbook Toback used as a ploy to ensnare them and potentially target hundreds of victims.
Once Toback set the bait, he ‘deceitfully gained their trust and acquiescence to meet with him by touting his influence as a movie director and screenwriter, and friendship and work with famous actors,’ according to the lawsuit.
‘Defendant Toback targeted young women using the same ruse over and over again with hundreds of victims, often using the same lines, enablers, and locations where he was able to perpetrate his abuse upon unsuspecting young women, including Plaintiffs, for decades,’ the lawsuit claims.
The suit comes five years after the majority of the women first made the allegations public during a series of interviews with the Los Angeles Times at the height of the #MeToo movement when accusations against film mogul Harvey Weinstein also came out.
Suit also names Harvard Club, pictured, claiming the director used the facility to attack some women
In addition to Toback, the women are suing the swanky Harvard Club of New York City for allegedly being complicit and allowing ‘Toback’s abuse to continue unchecked.’
Toback graduated from Harvard in 1966 which gave him a lifetime membership to the exclusive private members club.
‘Toback repeatedly used his membership and affiliation with the Harvard Club of New York City to facilitate and carry out his abuse, luring his victims to the Harvard Club for meals and drinks and attacking them in the Harvard Club’s dining room, stairwells, bathrooms and hotel rooms,’ the court documents claim.
Toback was ‘allowed unfettered access in and around the Harvard Club’ and ‘repeatedly used the prestige and privacy’ despite several women reporting the director.
The club is alleged to have done nothing about his behavior and the suit accuses the club of gross negligence for allowing Toback to maintain his membership and use its facilities.
The suit details how in 2018, five women reported their personal accounts of sexual abuse by Toback to the Harvard Club.
One woman alleged the director ‘hunted us on the streets of New York City’ and ‘conned us with the promise of auditions at the Harvard Club,’ using the club’s ‘name as bait to prey on young women.’
‘He exploited the dreams and vulnerabilities of hundreds of young women,’ the woman further alleged noting how the club ‘continually catered to Toback’s needs, providing him a safe haven for his reprehensible and criminal acts.’
Toback’s membership was finally terminated in 2017 according to a club spokesperson.
‘The Harvard Club does not comment on pending litigation,’ Irene Reidy, the club’s head of communications stated.
When Toback wasn’t using the club he is alleged to have assaulted his victims at various other locations around New York including his editing studio, apartment, hotel rooms, public parks, and even his mother’s house.
Toback previously told Rolling Stone anyone who accused him of sexual harassment was a ‘lying c*********r or c*** or both.’
Actress Selma Blair once revealed how Toback threatened to gouge her eyes out and kill her if she said that he sexually assaulted her
One plaintiff Sarah MacKay accuses Toback of sexually assaulting her around 2004 and 2005. At the time, she was about 21 years old.
MacKay alleges she met at Tobak’s mother’s apartment whereupon he asked her to take off her clothes. He then ‘pinned her arms to the chair she was sitting in and grinded his penis against her leg until he ejaculated in his pants.’
It’s not the first time Toback has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. There have been claims by as many as 400 women over the course of his life. Each and every time he has denied all such allegations.
They include actresses Julianne Moore and Rachel McAdams were also among those accusing Toback of sexual harassment or assault in 2018.
McAdams said she was 21 and ‘in the middle of theater school’ when she went to audition with Toback.
After a promising audition, the 44-year-old said the director complimented her and told her she was talented and that he would like to workshop the piece with her.
He lured her to his hotel that night, she said, then told her he had ‘masturbated countless times’ over her since her audition.
She said she hoped those remarks were a ‘test’, but after he returned from a bathroom break to tell her he had just masturbated over the thought of her and asked to see her pubic hair, she made her excuses and left.
‘This has been such a source of shame for me – that I didn’t have the wherewithal to get up and leave,’ she said.
‘I was very lucky that I left and that he didn’t actually physically assault me in any way.’
Actress Selma Blair also revealed how Toback once threatened to gouge her eyes out and kill her if she said that he sexually assaulted her.
‘I’ve literally been afraid for 17 years of James Toback who threatened to murder me and, you know, put cement shoes on and gouge my eyes out with a Bic pen if I ever told anybody,’ she told The Talk in January 2018.
Blair, 50, said she was a ‘budding actress’ when Toback arranged to meet her in a hotel restaurant – after first trying to get her to meet in his hotel room.
Once at the restaurant, she claimed, a waitress said he was unable to make it down and that she should meet him in his hotel room – which she did, against her own ‘better judgment’.
She said that once there, their conversation turned to her estranged father, and Toback told her: ‘I could have him killed. I do it all the time, I know people.’
After another 40 minutes, she said, he told her to get naked – even though the role she was reading was a lawyer in a courtroom – saying he needed to see ‘how her body moved’.
Blair said she took off her top, which made her feel ashamed, and then Toback told her that she had to have sex with him: ‘You have to do this for me,’ he allegedly said. ‘You cannot leave until I have release.’
When she refused again, she said, he told her to touch her nipples while he masturbated.
‘I thought, “Well, if I can get out of here without being raped…'” she said.
When she tried to look away, ashamed, he grabbed her head and made her maintain eye contact with him, she alleged.
And once he was done, she said, he threatened to have her killed if she ‘went against him’.
‘I have people who will pull up in a car, kidnap her, and throw her in the Hudson River with cement blocks on her feet. You understand what I’m talking about, right?’ he is alleged to have said.
Actresses Julianne Moore, left, and Rachel McAdams, were also among those accusing Toback of sexual harassment or assault in 2018
In April 2018 the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office decided not to prosecute Toback due to the statute of limitations but now this new lawsuit arises after The Adult Survivor’s Act came into effect in New York State.
It allows for victims of sexual abuse to come forward regardless of when the alleged crime was committed.
‘I think that as people read this and learn more about what happened, our hope is that women will find out that they weren’t alone,’ Bradley Beckworth, an attorney for the women, told Insider.
‘When when abuse like this happens, it can be very isolating, depressing, scary, and a lot of things go with that.’
While never becoming a major player in Hollywood, Toback managed to have a moderately successful career in film that has lasted more than 40 years.
Movies he wrote and directed include Harvey Keitel’s ‘Fingers,’ the loosely autobiographical ‘The Pick-up Artist,’ which starred Robert Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald, and ‘Two Girls and a Guy,’ also with Downey Jr. and Heather Graham.
Many of his accusers said he touted his friendship with Downey in trying to show his importance as he pressured them into sex.
Toback’s movies include The Gambler (1974), The Pick-Up Artist (1987), Bugsy, which was nominated for an Oscar (1991), Two Girls and a Guy (1997) and more recently The Private Life of a Modern Woman (2017).
Two shocking deaths are right out of Putin’s assassination playbook
Last weekend, Russians were shocked by a car bomb that instantly killed the daughter of one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, the ultra-nationalist political theorist Aleksandr Dugin. Images showed Daria Dugina’s Toyota Land Cruiser blazing in the dark, as her father — also known as Putin’s brain — stood just feet away in shock, grabbing his head with his hands.
Dugina’s death outside Moscow follows another bizarre event just one week earlier in Washington, DC. A Soviet-born Putin critic living in exile in the United States “jumped” to his death from his high-rise apartment building in an upscale neighborhood of the capital. The jumper was Dan Rapoport, a businessman who had strongly criticized Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Both deaths sound like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. But the world of Russian espionage is even more bizarre than fiction.
While the DC police didn’t deem Rapoport’s death suspicious, it is right out of Putin’s playbook. Russia has been behind scores of targeted assassinations since the Soviet era. Shots in the back of the head, poisonings, forced suicides and other intricate forms of violent death are all part of the doctrine known as “wet affairs” — or the spilling of blood.
It is entirely too early to conclusively say who is responsible for the death of Dugina, a Kremlin propagandist. While the FSB, Russia’s spy agency, blamed Ukraine for the attack, Ukraine said Russia’s anti-war resistance force was responsible. But some think that Putin and his henchmen could have been behind the hit, arguing that martyring the only child of a great ally offers an excellent pretext for escalating even harsher attacks against Ukraine, with the war at a stalemate six months in.
While it’s extremely unlikely that Putin would kill the child of a Mother-Russia nationalist compatriot, striking at the heart of the very ideology that underpins his war on Ukraine, he has used unthinkable tactics on his own people before. Many believe he ordered FSB officials to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow, killing between 200 and 300 residents in 1999, in order to blame Chechen terrorists for the attacks and give Russia a reason to unleash war on Chechnya. Putin’s popularity as prime minister rose as a result, helping him win the Russian presidency in March 2000.
These dirty deeds — or “special tasks” — are carried out by Russian military intelligence operatives and include killings, kidnappings, poisonings, “forced suicides,” and other acts of intimidation and murder. Throwing a victim out of a window or making the victim jump is a very common tactic, along with staging car explosions and other tragic accidents.
The forces behind these “special tasks” are highly trained to leave no trace of foul play. According to a 1993 CIA document, even “in cases where the Soviet hand is obvious, investigation often produces only fragmentary information, due to the KGB ability to camouflage its trail.”
In 2002, Putin, a former KGB operative, started ratcheting up the practice of “wet affairs” and “special tasks” by approving a federal law, “On Countering Extreme Activity.” The law authorizes targeted assassinations for “extremist activity,” which includes “crimes” such as “diminishing national dignity” and “publicly expressing slander or false accusation of persons who hold Russian government positions.”
Many Russian journalists and political opponents have fallen afoul of this law. After journalist Anna Politkovskaya reported on the atrocities committed by her country’s forces during the Second Chechen War (1999–2009), she was shot and killed in her apartment elevator on Putin’s birthday in October 2006. Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and ardent Putin critic, was shot on a bridge near the Kremlin in February 2015.
Then there’s Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former FSB intelligence officer who defected to England and did contract work for British intelligence. In 2006, Litvinenko was murdered by two Russian GRU operatives who met with him in a luxury London hotel and served him a cup of tea laced with the radioactive agent polonium.
A handful of unconfirmed cases have even happened to people on US soil.
In November 2015, Mikhail Lesin, a former Russian media executive and Putin advisor, was found dead in an upscale Washington, DC, hotel. Lesin’s death happened a day before he was due to be interviewed by the Justice Department about the Kremlin-funded media company, RT, which he had founded. In October 2016, his death was deemed “accidental” by the US Attorney’s Office for Washington and the Metropolitan Police Department. But an official at the Chief Medical Examiner’s office revealed that Lesin’s neck bone was fractured in a way that is “commonly associated with hanging or manual strangulation.”
In US intelligence circles, it is believed that Lesin was a victim of a Russian hit job.
In March 2007, another Kremlin critic, former CIA officer Paul Joyal, survived a brutal attack near his home in Maryland. Joyal was shot in the groin four days after he implied during a Dateline NBC broadcast that Putin and the Kremlin were behind the killing of Litvinenko. Although the FBI initially investigated the attack, they dropped the case and the criminals have never been found. Joyal believes he was the victim of another Russian hit job.
It is doubtful that DC law enforcement will devote the necessary time and resources to investigate this month’s “suicide” of Rapoport either. It took British investigators more than 10 years to conclude that Russian intelligence operatives were responsible for the murder of Litvinenko on UK soil.
And it could be true that some of Putin’s critics have intentionally jumped off high rises to their deaths. But usually they have helpers.
Rebekah Koffler is the president of Doctrine & Strategy Consulting, a former DIA intelligence officer, and the author of “Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America.”
DC Movies Will Follow the Marvel Playbook Going Forward – The Hollywood Reporter
Just two days after Warner Bros. Discovery made the stunning move to cancel the HBO Max film Batgirl, an unapologetic CEO David Zaslav sought to reassure Wall Street there is a cohesive plan for the future of DC.
“You look at Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman — these are brands that are known everywhere in the world,” Zaslav said during an earnings call Thursday. “We have done a reset. We’ve restructured the business where we are going to focus, where there is going to be a team with a 10-year plan focusing just on DC. We believe we can build a much more sustainable business.”
DC has long wished to emulate the success of the Disney-owned Marvel Studios, which Kevin Feige has built into the highest-grossing film franchise in history. Zaslav recently brought Feige’s former boss, retired Disney film chief Alan Horn, on as an adviser. During the earnings call, Zaslav suggested DC would try to emulate the Marvel playbook.
“It’s very similar to the structure Alan Horn, [former Disney CEO] Bob Iger and Kevin Feige put together very effectively at Disney. We think we can build a much stronger, sustainable growth business out of DC,” said Zaslav. “As part of that, we are going to focus on quality. We are not going to release any film before it’s ready. … DC is something we can make better.”
DC has proceeded in stops and starts following the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s defining Dark Knight trilogy concluded a decade ago. The studio initially tapped Zack Snyder to oversee its planned universe, which the filmmaker launched in 2013 with Man of Steel. However, Snyder lost the confidence of studio executives after the divisive 2016 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and some of the films in an ambitious 10-project slate announced in 2014 never came to fruition, including Justice League 2. Executive Walter Hamada took the reins of DC Films in 2018 and has been plotting out a number of films — including several for HBO Max to meet the mandate of then-WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar. Now those plans are changing once again.
Zaslav touted a number of DC films coming up, including Black Adam and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and addressed rumors that some of those films could shift dates without confirming or denying any specifics.
“We are very excited about them. We’ve seen them. We think they are terrific, and we think we can make them even better,” Zaslav said in terms of marketing and distributing the upcoming films, which also include The Flash, starring controversial actor Ezra Miller.
Miller was accused of choking a fan in Iceland in April 2020, and Business Insider published a report Thursday featuring a lengthy interview with the parents of an 18-year-old who say the actor had groomed their child since they were 12. Warners’ plans for The Flash, which has a June 2023 release date, have been closely watched.
The executive also revealed that while he is focused on theatrical releases, “a number of movies will be released with shorter windows … and with different marketing campaigns. But we’ll always be agile, and the focus will be on theatrical.”
Before the pandemic, theater owners could demand an exclusive theatrical window of 74 days to 90 days. Now, a film opening to $50 million or less domestically can be made available in the home as soon as two to three weeks after its theatrical release (Universal was the first major Hollywood studio to strike such terms.).
Zaslav’s comments come at a fraught time for DC. On Tuesday, Warners announced the news that it was shelving its $90 million Batgirl movie, which was deep into postproduction ahead of a planned HBO Max release. Multiple sources noted that Warner Media Discovery was opting to use losses from the film as a tax write-down rather than release it. The move has sparked jitters that other films could follow, with Blue Beetle filmmaker Angel Manuel Soto liking tweets asking Warners to protect his DC film, which was initially developed for HBO Max before being upgraded to theatrical.
Zaslav said that expensive films for streaming did not make economic sense.
“The objective is to grow the DC brand. To grow the DC characters. But also, our job is to protect the DC brand, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Putin’s “annexation playbook” in Ukraine could leave no path to peace
If the Kremlin follows through with its purported plans to annex large swaths of southern and eastern Ukraine, as the White House expects, it could fundamentally shift the stakes of the war and make a negotiated settlement all but impossible.
Why it matters: Kyiv and its western backers hope an influx of NATO-caliber weaponry will allow Ukraine to reverse Russia’s gains. But if Russia follows the “playbook” the White House laid out this week, Moscow will claim that fighting is now taking place on Russian soil.
Driving the news: White House spokesperson John Kirby said Tuesday that the U.S. has intelligence indicating the Kremlin is “reviewing detailed plans” to annex four Ukrainian oblasts, or regions: Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk.
- A senior German official tells Axios they share the U.S. assessment about planned annexations.
From Vladimir Putin’s perspective, annexing the four regions dramatically raises the stakes of defending them — and potentially the tools he’s willing to use to do so.
- Western countries would never recognize such annexations, but the move could scramble the risk-reward calculus for providing arms and political support.
- For Ukraine, the threat is more existential: partition, long-term destabilization and the demise of any possible peace deal. It also increases the incentive to counterattack now, before Russia can put any annexation plans into practice.
The big picture: The four oblasts are contiguous and would link Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, to Russia.
- Russian forces took Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine in the early days of the war. Then, after failing to capture Kyiv, they launched a massive offensive in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
- Putin claimed full control of Luhansk earlier this month and is now turning his attention to Donetsk.
- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov acknowledged Wednesday that Russia’s military ambitions extend beyond the Donbas, to Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and “a number of other territories” — including potentially Ukrainian-held territory to the West.
Zoom in: In Russian-held Kherson, Russia has installed a puppet government, restricted the internet, mandated the use of the ruble and started issuing Russian passports.
- Kirby said the U.S. believes the next steps of the “annexation playbook” will include a fraudulent referendum on joining Russia, perhaps in mid-September to align with regional elections in Russia.
- Kirby vowed the U.S. and its allies would respond with stiff sanctions and added, “We would remind Mr. Putin that over time he may prove unable to hold this territory.”
Such an audacious move would actually be a “logical next step” for Putin, contends Alexander Gabuev, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment.
- Knowing that Ukraine seeks to retake these territories, Putin could up the ante by immediately bringing them under the Russian nuclear umbrella and responding to any Ukrainian counteroffensive with the threat of a tactical nuclear strike, Gabuev says.
- “I think the calculation is that this will be the defining moment where the Western leaders will get very cautious and the goals will shift from retaking all of the pre-Feb. 24 possessions to keeping what [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky has right now,” Gabuev says.
The other side: By declaring a massive chunk of Ukraine to be part of Russia, Putin would effectively be committing to a large, sustained military presence inside Ukraine and risking embarrassment if Ukrainian counterattacks prove successful.
- But it could also further his objectives of keeping Ukraine divided and weak and placing wedges between Kyiv and its Western backers — and between those backers themselves.
- That’s a bet Putin may be willing to make. “The risk appetite of this guy is very different from the risk appetite of Joe Biden,” Gabuev says.
The annexation threat comes during a “transitional phase” of the war, says Michael Kofman, a leading expert on Russia’s military at CNA.
State of play: Russia has been utilizing its artillery advantage over the last three months to make gradual progress in the Donbas.
- CIA director Bill Burns said Wednesday that perhaps 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and 45,000 wounded in the war. While Burns says Kyiv’s losses are likely “a little less than that,” they include some of Ukraine’s best-trained troops.
- But Ukraine is now hitting back with longer-range artillery of its own. The Russian offensive doesn’t seem to be over, Kofman says, but it hasn’t yielded any clear progress over the past two weeks.
“I think they’re about to run out of steam,” MI6 director Richard Moore said Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum. “Our assessment is that the Russians will increasingly find it difficult to supply manpower and materiel over the next few weeks.”
- The Ukrainians, meanwhile, have been conducting small-scale counteroffensives, including around Kherson city.
- “It looks very clearly like a positional game in order to put themselves in place for an offensive down the line,” Kofman says, noting that Ukrainian forces are doing the same in southern Donbas and in Zaporizhzhia.
What to watch: Ukraine has a clear incentive to make its move before September to try to disrupt any Russian annexation plans.
- Russia, meanwhile, seems to be attempting to secure the boundaries of Kherson and the other oblasts it controls without pushing beyond them, Kofman says, potentially setting the stage for annexation.
- “They would be taking a huge risk trying to annex Kherson because they might lose a large part of it,” he says. Kofman thinks the Kremlin may wait until the military outlook in Kherson is clearer before announcing its next moves.
Because the U.S. wouldn’t recognize the annexations, the Biden administration’s position on the deployment of U.S.-made weaponry — which Kyiv has promised only to use on Ukrainian soil — is unlikely to change.
- But if the Kremlin sets new red lines, all sides will have to reconsider their own risk calculus.
- While Zelensky would presumably want to fight full force, Gabuev says, some European countries could feel differently with nuclear weapons on the table and Putin threatening to throttle the gas supply.
Russian annexations would certainly change the diplomatic calculus.
- Western officials have expressed hope that their arms shipments will help create a more favorable status quo, allowing Ukraine to negotiate a cease-fire from a position of strength.
- But Zelensky has vowed not to sign a deal that cedes territory to Russia — let alone nearly one-fifth of the country.
Where it stands: Lavrov said Wednesday that now is not the time for peace talks. It remains unclear whether it ever will be, as far as Putin is concerned.
- Burns noted that Putin repeats in private what he’s said in public: “Ukraine is not a real country” and “it’s his entitlement, Russia’s entitlement, to dominate Ukraine.”
The bottom line: Annexations could be one step in that direction. But they could also be one more bad bet from a Russian leader who has already made several in this war.
Jim Cramer’s playbook for investing during geopolitical uncertainty
CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday detailed his investment approach to navigating moments of geopolitical uncertainty, as conflict brews between Russia and Ukraine.
Concerns about Russia’s escalating aggression toward Ukraine have weighed on Wall Street in recent days, including Tuesday’s broad declines that saw the S&P 500 close in correction territory, which is defined as more than 10% below its most recent high.
“When you get a geopolitical-induced sell-off, you have new rules. You have to be ready to do some buying unless you think the event in question could be cataclysmic,” the “Mad Money” host said. “I don’t think it will be, and if there’s something that truly goes awry, or for heaven’s sake, if there is a nuclear war … I guarantee the last thing you’ll be worried about is your portfolio.”
Cramer said it’s hard to predict what Russian President Vladimir Putin will do next, after sending troops into breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine on Monday. It’s a horrible humanitarian situation, he stressed.
For investors, Cramer said it’s important to have predetermined price levels in mind for stocks. Then, if they fall to that point, investors can be ready to buy at the more attractive level, Cramer said.
Cramer pointed to Walmart, a stock his Charitable Trust owns, to illustrate his point. When the retail giant issued strong earnings and guidance last week, he said the stock was around $133 per share. It was lower Tuesday as part of the general weakness, but shares were still at roughly $136 apiece.
That price is “not low enough to lower our cost basis for the Trust. You always want to buy things cheaper so you can lower your basis. That’s good portfolio management,” Cramer said, explaining he believes it’s not worth being too aggressive given the significant uncertainty in the world.
“But you have to understand that you’re now getting a chance to buy some high-quality stocks well below their 52-week highs and at some levels that are genuinely cheap,” he said. “They could get even cheaper as the Ukraine situation unfolds.”
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Critics slam Spotify for using ‘Facebook playbook’ on Joe Rogan controversy
Spotify’s response to COVID-19 misinformation on Joe Rogan’s highly popular podcast has critics singing a familiar tune: Simply warning users about problematic content is not enough.
The streaming service’s decision not to remove “The Joe Rogan Experience” in the wake of false and misleading claims places it in the middle of a moderation battle that social media giants have been fighting for years.
“It’s nice to welcome Spotify to the table, but unless they come up with a policy that also has a clear enforcement mechanism for when somebody repeatedly breaks that policy. It’s not enough — it’s basically meaningless,” said Bridget Todd, director of communications at UltraViolet.
Spotify is using what Syracuse University associate professor Jennifer Grygiel called the “Facebook playbook” — distancing itself from the responsibility to moderate content it distributes.
“We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said in a statement Sunday. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”
But the streaming service’s business model is entirely different from the social media company’s, Grygiel said.
Unlike on platforms owned by Meta, including Facebook and Instagram, there are barriers to entry for content creators to appear on Spotify, which Grygiel says undermines its attempt to use the same defense as social media sites that let any user create an account and post content for free.
Critics say Spotify’s position is especially weak on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which it bought the exclusive rights to host in a deal reported to be worth more than $100 million.
“This is a massive public health challenge, and part of the reason that infection rates remain so high is because of the volume of disinformation out there — promoting false cures, undermining confidence in vaccines, undermining confidence about masks and so forth,” said Aram Sinnreich, chair of communications studies at American University.
“And so there’s a real direct causal line between the kind of content that Rogan puts on his podcast and the continuing toll of COVID-related deaths in the American public. And as his exclusive distributor, having paid $100 million dollars, Spotify bears some direct responsibility for that,” Sinnreich added.
A spokesperson for Spotify did not respond to a request for comment in response to the criticism.
Rogan has repeatedly made comments on his podcast questioning the efficacy and necessity of COVID-19 vaccines — and hosted guests who’ve done the same.
His episode hosting Robert Malone, a medical doctor suspended from Twitter for posting false information about the coronavirus, in particular sparked an open letter to Spotify from doctors and health care professionals urging it to “take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform.”
The backlash snowballed after musician Neil Young threatened to pull his music from Spotify if they continued to host Rogan. Ultimately, he followed through removing his catalog of music from the platform after it sided with Rogan.
Others followed, with Joni Mitchell saying she, too, would be pulling her music from Spotify. Prince HarryPrince HarryHarry, Meghan have expressed ‘concern’ to Spotify about COVID-19 misinformation, spokesperson says Prince Harry and Meghan treat Atlanta’s King Center to Black-owned food trucks for MLK Day The Hill’s Morning Report – Presented by Facebook – Democrats see victory in a voting rights defeat MORE and his wife Meghan, who also produce and host podcasts on Spotify, expressed concerns about COVID-19 misinformation to the company.
And author Brené Brown said she would not be releasing any podcasts “until further notice.”
Spotify did not specifically name Rogan, but in his statement Ek said the company would begin adding content advisories to any podcast episode that “includes a discussion about COVID-19” and link listeners to a “hub” with “data-driven facts” and “up-to-date information.”
That mirrors actions taken by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which have added links to their respective information hubs in labeled content.
Despite widespread use among tech companies, labels and links to information hubs haven’t been proven to actually curb misinformation, said Emerson Brooking, a resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab.
“It doesn’t seem to meaningfully change how many people consume content, in fact, in certain demographics it increases the number of people who consume it, because adding an advisory to content makes it edgier; it makes it more interesting. Adding links to neutral information centers also have very little effect on the number of people who consume the content,” Brooking said.
Todd, of the advocacy group UltraViolet, said Spotify needs to create a misinformation policy that is “clearly enforced and enforceable.”
“I’m not certain that every episode of Rogan’s podcast, even though I am no big fan of him, would necessarily break that policy. But starting off with a place of having a policy and then making sure that episodes of any podcast that break those policies [are] not just going to be able to stay on the platform,” she said.
Spotify on Sunday posted its platform rules for the first time publicly. They state that breaking the rules “may result in the violative content being removed from Spotify,” but don’t further detail how those decisions are made.
Rogan himself addressed the controversy in an Instagram video, saying he supports the decision to have a disclaimer ahead of a “controversial podcast,” but defending his decision to host guests accused of spreading misinformation, including Malone.
“I’m interested in finding out what the truth is. And I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions. I’m not interested in only talking to people that have one perspective,” he said.
Rogan also said he is open to having “more experts with differing opinions” on “right after I have the controversial ones.”
But his on-the-fly, conversational format “often gives equal weight to really abhorrent ideas,” Brooking said.
“And those tend to be the ones that some of his listeners run away with,” he said.
Ultimately, Brooking said, Rogan should not be on Spotify
“I think that the things that Rogan amplifies are harmful, and I think that Spotify has contributed to that harm,” he said.
Sinnreich said Rogan and Spotify’s pledges to have “more ‘balance’ in the perspectives that are represented” is not an effective way to combat misinformation, either.
“This is what media scholars refer to as a fallacious form of bias, the balance bias. The notion is that you can somehow make everything OK if you tell a dangerous lie but you also tell the truth to counterbalance it. And of course, that’s not really the way that the world works,” said Sinnreich, who published a blog post detailing his personal decision to stop using the streaming service.
While other customers may follow, and the celebrity boycotts led to a $2 billion market value los, ultimately Spotify’s business model is increasingly reliant on podcasts. Unlike music, which is expensive to license, podcasts allow Spotify to pay an upfront sum for a “massive library of content,” Sinnreich said.
If artists continue to follow in Young’s footsteps, with each protest on the platform there will be a smaller and smaller impact, he said.
“There’s a law of diminishing returns with kind of public relations-based persuasion,” he said. “Whereas the value of investing in podcasts for Spotify will only continue to grow. So over the long term there’s not a persuasive financial rationale for the company to erase disinformation content. It has to be a decision that’s made out of concern for the American people.”
Analysis: China Dusts Off Proven Playbook After Evergrande Default Warning
Evergrande, China’s most indebted developer, is embroiled in a deepening liquidity crisis that has shaken China’s real estate industry and global bond markets
The Guangdong provincial government is sending a working team to China Evergrande Group (03333.HK) after the indebted developer warned of possible cross-defaults on dollar bonds, indicating a government-coordinated effort to mitigate the company’s $300 billion debt crisis.
The government of southern China’s economic powerhouse Guangdong summoned Evergrande Chairman Hui Ka Yan late Friday after the company said it might be unable to meet $260 million of obligations under a guarantee, hinting at the risk of cross-defaults on its $19.2 billion of outstanding dollar bonds.
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