How NOT to Cheat on Your Wife with a DEI Executive

Democracy cries on podcast

Remember Hillary Clinton, the scorned wife who almost won the presidency?

Journalists: The silent casualties of Donald Trump’s near-assassination.

Former Obama speechwriter (Yale ‘08) discovers human decency at age 38.

Stacey Abrams returns. Plus, a thoughtful reflection on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

It's Friday, July 18, 2025

Wanna feel old? This week marked the ninth anniversary of Hillary Clinton's cringeworthy attempt (one of many) to approximate a normal human being at a campaign rally in Virginia. "I don't know who created Pokémon Go," she quipped in her infamously charismatic monotone. "But I'm trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokémon go to the polls." It's a conundrum for the ages why she didn't win.

On the subject of awkward anniversaries, tech CEO Andy Byron probably won't be celebrating with his wife (or kids) this year after he was unceremoniously outed for liking Coldplay (and banging his HR chief Kristin Cabot). The happy home wreckers were enjoying the British boy band's concert at Gillette Stadium in Boston until the jumbotron's kiss cam found them cuddling up together, beaming blissfully as Byron held Cabot tightly across the breasts.

They weren't smiling for long. Upon seeing themselves on the big screen, their panicked reaction left no room for alternative explanations. "Uh oh, what?" Coldplay frontman Chris Martin said after watching the clandestine lovers duck for cover. "Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy." But let's not jump to conclusions.

Byron is the CEO of Astronomer, the fake-sounding tech firm behind Astro, the "industry-leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow." They specialize in the accelerated development of "reliable data products that unlock insights, unleash AI value, and power data-driven applications." His entire resume sounds made up: VeriCenter, BladeLogic, Aveska, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones, acquired by 8x8). Astronomer is valued at more than $1 billion after raising almost $400 million since 2022.

Cabot, who is also married, joined the company last year after stints at Razorfish Global, DigitasLBi, and Neo4j. She describes herself as a "fearless change-agent," which is certainly apt in this case. She excels at winning the trust of employees "at all levels" and is known for her ability to "attract top talent." She is a huge fan of DEI and believes it should "always be top of mind with hiring." In a statement announcing her hiring, Byron praised the HR chief for her "deep expertise" in "employee engagement," while Cabot gushed about how "energized" she felt after discussing "people strategy" with her new boss.

Seems like they'll have plenty more to discuss in the days ahead.

Democracy cries on podcast: CBS News justice correspondent Scott MacFarlane revealed this week that he was diagnosed with PTSD last year and put on "trauma leave" after witnessing the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pa. "For those of us there, it was such a horror," MacFarlane said on former NBC News anchor Chuck Todd's podcast.

That sounds pretty reasonable, until you realize that the "horror" and "trauma" MacFarlane is referring to had nothing to do with the gunman who almost killed Trump. It was "the reaction of the people" in the audience that was so distressing for him and his fellow journalists. "You saw it in the eyes," he said. "They were coming for us! If he didn't jump up with his fist, they were going to come kill us!"

Todd sympathized, of course. He's the guy who claimed (contrary to the available evidence) that the attempted cover-up of Biden's dementia was "not a media scandal." (It was.)

Crucial context: MacFarlane, a former local news reporter in Washington, D.C., earned his job at CBS in 2021 thanks to his relentless and borderline obsessive coverage of the January 6th prosecutions.

Bottom line: Never underestimate the media's ability to make anything and everything about themselves.

What they're saying: "So buy a tote bag, fatass," social media commentator John Ekdahl wrote in response to one of CNN reporter Brian Stelter's shrieking laments about the GOP efforts to defund PBS and NPR. Stelter, who took a huge pay cut to return to the failing network that fired him in 2022, is sometimes referred to as "Humpty Dumpty" or "Mr. Potato Head."

Journalists are the worst: A senior Biden aide said the White House "could not believe" that so many mainstream journalists bought their absurd spin about the "cheap fake" videos of Joe Biden wandering around like an escaped nursing home patient. They shouldn't have been so incredulous. Another thing that should never be underestimated is a journalist's eagerness to write whatever a Democrat tells them to.

Case in point: After the New York Times reported that Biden "did not individually approve" many of the individuals who were granted clemency (using an autopen operated by staff) in the final days of his administration, Democratic "sources" convinced some NBC News journalists they wouldn't look like idiots for writing a breathless exposé DEMOLISHING the Republican congressman investigating Biden's autopen use for... occasionally using a digital signature on official documents. No wonder these people are so easily "traumatized."

Headline of the week: "I Was One of Biden's Border Advisers. Here's How to Fix Our Immigration System." It's not satire. It was actually published in the New York Times opinion page, which has been on a roll this week. Also indistinguishable from satire was an Axios report on the record decline in border crossings since Trump took office, which included the following line: "No one knows precisely why migrant traffic along the U.S.-Mexico border has fallen so much."

Elite empathy: The Times also ran a guest essay from a former Obama speechwriter, David Litt, who graduated from Yale after preparing at the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan (annual tuition: $64,000). Litt boasted of overcoming what he felt was his "civic duty to be rude" to his wife's younger brother Matt, a lowly electrician who listened to Joe Rogan and declined to receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

"Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely," the enlightened professional explained. "My frostiness wasn’t personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?"

Litt changed his mind after taking some surfing lessons and getting hooked. His brother-in-law was the only other person he knew who surfed, so they started hanging out more and interacting like normal human beings. The Obama bro found this strange, especially since his moral and intellectual superiority were meaningless in the water, where Matt was by far the better surfer. He concludes that shunning family members over politics is dumb, but fails to consider that people like him should stop taking politics so damn seriously in the first place.

The place where dreams are booed: In other journalism news, Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey was denounced as a "soulless ghoul" and other epithets for defending the sick freaks who booed Vice President JD Vance in front of his children at Disneyland over the weekend. "People who feel bad for JD Vance’s kids as family gets booed at Disneyland. I get it, but better those kids know now what their father is about. Other kids are watching their parents get shipped off to gulags," Jeffrey wrote on Bluesky, the social media app for mentally unstable liberals who still wear face masks outdoors. She went on to suggest that if Vance didn't want to be jeered at, he shouldn't have brought his kids... to Disneyland.

Great news for Republicans: Stacey Abrams, who raised more than $150 million from fawning Democrats for her two failed gubernatorial bids in Georgia, declined to rule out running again in the future. She told NPR this week that so-called voter suppression, her favorite boogeyman, was still alive and well in America. Georgia saw record voter turnout among minorities in the 2022 election despite new voting laws that Democrats denounced as "Jim Crow 2.0." Abrams still lost.

Sorry about all that: On a related note, the Major League Baseball All-Star game returned to Atlanta this week, four years after the league pulled the contest from Georgia in response to criticism from Abrams and other Democrats aimed at the state's "racist" voting laws. It's an implicit acknowledgment that the MLB's woke freakout in the wake of George Floyd's death was horribly misguided. Meanwhile, Brian Kemp, the Republican who has served as Georgia’s governor since 2019, has an approval rating of 61 percent.

How to be a better (work) husband: We are kind of obsessed with Anthony Bernal, the top aide and "work husband" to Dr. Jill Biden, who was essentially running the country during her real husband's so-called presidency. A relentless, catty, petty, and vindictive gossip queen, some colleagues described him as "the worst person they had ever met." Bernal, who recently pleaded the Fifth in a congressional deposition regarding the cover-up of Biden's health problems, is the star of an amusing anecdote in 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost, the latest book about a truly wild campaign season. (Review forthcoming in the next edition of the Weekend Beacon newsletter.)

The authors write that Bernal tried to get the Kamala Harris campaign to reschedule her closing address on the Ellipse, within view of the White House, in which she planned to warn that a Trump victory could end democracy as we know it, because it would complicate the first lady's plans to celebrate Halloween. Jill Biden's office had "extensive" decorations to set up before the speech, and wanted to install lighting that would give the White House a spooky orange glow that would look ridiculous as a backdrop to Harris's speech.

Bernal ultimately lost the battle, forcing him to "dramatically scale back" the Halloween setup. But he deserves credit for fighting so hard on behalf of his "work wife," who clearly had bigger priorities than saving America from a fascist takeover. The speech went ahead on October 29, and the Bidens welcomed trick-or-treaters to the White House the following evening. For one last time, Joe Biden got to live out his dream of handing out candy and nibbling on children.

X: @AndrewStilesUSA

Email: stiles@freebeacon.com

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