Attention! Tickets for our May 19th show at Washington DC’s Miracle Theater are now on sale!

Join us at DC’s oldest movie theater (just a few blocks from Eastern Market) for a night of communal catharsis, rhetorical revelry, and maybe even a special guest!

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-David French returns to the Fifth Column

-SCOTUS drops of a few ruling

-Free speech wins 9-0 (First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Davenport)

-The Voting Rights Act gets another trim (Louisiana v. Callais)

-Racial gerrymanders vs. political gerrymanders

-Smart racists, dumb racists, and Louisiana maps

-Kmele has some questions about race-conscious law

-Preclearance, New York City, and old civil-rights math

-David Duke, Tim Scott, and Southern political memory

-Affirmative action, Harvard, and disparate impact

-Is David French still a conservative?

-Classical liberalism and the old conservative bargain

-What changed after adopting his daughter

-Matt’s foundational racism story

-The limits of legal remedies

-Why David endorsed Kamala Harris

-Brown shirts, red shirts, and horseshoe politics

-Political violence and partisan rumor mills

-The SPLC and Christian conservatives

-The Comey indictment (v2) and 86-gate

-”Black” hair, “black” beauty, and racial identity

-Life inside the Grey Lady

-Evangelicals, Trump, and the prophecy bubble

-David’s faith, doubt, and a story of healing

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

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It’s that time when Never Fly Coachers reap the rewards of their premium membership and get a 24 hour head start on tickets to our live events starting right now!

Paid subscribers get the next crack at them before general ticket sales open to all on Thursday at 10am. If you don’t want to risk the wait, subscribe!

NFC presale code is below the fold!

Tip: if you’re looking to avoid the ticket fees, you can pick up tickets in person from the Union Stage box office at Pearl Street Warehouse (33 Pearl St SW, Washington, DC). The box office is open Wednesday 10 AM to 6 PM, Thursday 10 AM to 5 PM, and Friday 10 AM to 6 PM.

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-Matt’s 15-year Werner Herzog hangover workshop

-judging the newest failed killer manifesto

-America’s stupidest assassination d…

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Looks like I picked an excellent year to keep alive my unbroken streak of never coming close to attending the White House Correspondents Dinner. I just can’t stand to witness that kind of violence, by which I obviously mean Michael Tracey squaring off with Jim Acosta.

Detained shooter/sprinter Cole Allen, a CalTech-graduating videogame developer and “Teacher of the Month” tutorer from that radicalizing hellscape of Torrance, California, had the good manners in his coherent if morally idiotic manifesto to apologize to his students (and parents, and co-workers), though mostly because he lied to them about why he skipped town, not because he, you know, was planning to mass-murder the administration “from highest-ranking to lowest,” though excluding Kash Patel for some reason. (Maybe Cole’s a hockey fan?) More manifestoage:

I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. […]

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that. […]

The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

Allen’s thwarted ultra-violence capped off an exquisitely dumb week in which the chattering classes had been cheerfully debating the pros and cons of shoplifting and political murder. As we have long maintained on this podcast and in other fora, the political violence will continue until a preponderance of people in politics act like political violence is a problem.

* In cheerier news from our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE),

We’re thrilled to announce that The Fifth Column / Podcast is coming to Soapbox for a special LIVE recording!

Hosted by journalists Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, The Fifth Column has challenged orthodoxy from every side since 2016.

What better place for them to deliver their weekly rhetorical assault on the news cycle than a conference dedicated to defending their right to do so?

We can’t wait to host them at Soapbox. Secure your spot now!

* November 4-6, 2026

* Philadelphia, PA

* https://soapbox.fire.org/

Use the discount code FIFTH to save $50 on conference tickets. As mentioned previously in this space, other past Fif’ guests appearing at this Semiquincentennialtastic event include Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, Members Only #251), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276), Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and I’m sure others.

OTHER IMPORTANT LIVE-SHOW DATE-SETTING: For those of you within reasonable distance of Washington, D.C., please mark May 19 on your calendars….

* Speaking of live shows, didja enjoy the long-awaited Fifth Column appearance from Ryan Long? Those of you who are not paying subscribers can watch his full special from last year gratis:

* Here’s another free tease from our popular M.O. #314 convo w/ legal beagle Sarah Isgur, this time about how Congress doesn’t do its job:

* Kmele and the Tanglers this week talked about Trump’s declining popularity, gerrymandering shenanigans, and Kash Patel’s lawsuit against The Atlantic:

* On the Reason Roundtable last Monday, we talked about Zohran Mamdani’s Tax Day billionaire-baiting, Trump’s liberalization of drug research, and Palantir’s 20-sided die of a 22-point Twitter manifesto. The latter included a call for National Service, which, as always, is bait:

* Moar Reason: The inimitable Andrew Heaton landed a can’t-miss interview with … Afroman:

* Time for … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap ad swap….)

The Dispatch: Journalism Without the Circus

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***

* Fox News host and Brian Kilmeade made his debut appearance on M.O. #316; here’s a free tease of the history buff talking about his relationship with Trump:

* News derived from our recent discussion with Mark Harmon keeps percolating, in TV Insider, People magazine (appropriately!), Hello! magazine, Primetimer, and elsewhere.

* Who wants to read 16,500 words about my journalism career? Me neither! Except, they were written by one-in-a-billion Internet personality Luke Ford, and were eviscerating enough to be genuinely intriguing in places. You, the beloved Fifth Column audience, were invoked a time or four, so here’s a relevant taste:

The Fifth Column format embodies the myth at its purest. Three men with different political starting points sit around microphones and work through contested questions by talking. The show’s premise is that careful dialogue across difference produces clarity. The audience pays for this performance. What the performance actually delivers is coalition maintenance for a specific subculture: heterodox liberals, drifting libertarians, anti-woke moderates. The three hosts do not arrive at clarity through dialogue. They arrive at the positions their shared coalition already holds. The dialogue is the theater. The coalition is the structure.

The heterodox positioning that sustains Welch’s career depends on the misunderstanding myth in a sharper way. The whole premise of heterodox media is that partisans on left and right are trapped in coalition confusion, and only the heterodox see clearly. Pinsof denies the premise. Neither side is confused. Both pursue their coalition interests with adequate self-knowledge. The heterodox media class is its own coalition with its own interests, its own donors, its own audience, its own status hierarchy. Its members pretend to occupy a view from nowhere. The pretense is the product.

The irony tone reinforces the myth. Welch’s characteristic exasperated amusement assumes the audience recognizes what he is pointing out. The affect says: can you believe these people are doing this? The question presumes the viewer shares his frame and is not the target of the critique. The tone is a coalition filter. Outsiders hear smugness. Insiders hear the pleasure of shared recognition. The work signals membership in a coalition that flatters itself on seeing through the confusions of lesser coalitions, while remaining unable to see its own position as a coalition at all.

What does Welch gets from holding the myth? Welch gets a career. He gets the Fifth Column audience. He gets Reason’s continued patronage. He gets the adjacent heterodox network. He gets the sense of himself as a man who sees what others miss. All of this rests on the premise that careful communication across coalition lines matters. Abandon the premise and the career has no justification.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

It’s a rare feat for a film to be overtly referential yet completely transformative, but Roman Coppola’s 2001 feature debut CQ manages to pull off exactly this. A love letter to the sexy, stylized films produced by Dino De Laurentiis in the 1960s, CQ draws inspiration from both Danger: Diabolik and David Holzman’s Diary, producing a unique tale of a young American filmmaker in Paris tasked with salvaging a sci-fi flick after the firing of its psychotic director (Gerard Depardieu), while also trying to manage the relationship with his French girlfriend and staving off his own existential crisis. The film within the film is Codename: Dragonfly, and centers on an alluring freelance super spy (played by Angela Lindvall) who is hired to put the kibosh on Mr. E (Billy Zane), leader of an anarchist cult based on the Moon. Both this meta film and the period piece that encapsulates it benefit from Roman’s dad’s favorite production designer, Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Outsiders). It is a highly clever, tightly scripted, visually stunning movie about the movies that naturally … was a huge flop. Rent on Prime; watch free (with ads) on Tubi; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Frank Scardino:

Kilmeade seems like a nice guy, but he embodies what I think Jonah Goldberg (or someone else at the Dispatch) calls taking Trump “hypothetically” as opposed to “seriously” or “literally.” Such a person takes one of Trump’s crazy positions, gives it the most favorable spin possible, saying something like: (1) I think Trump’s bat shit behavior is not the bizarre product of a disordered personality, but, rather, a unique effort to obtain some reasonable policy goal, (2) this bat shit behavior will likely be successful in obtaining this reasonable result, and (3) to the extent this future result is achieved, Trump is a genius.

For example, Kilmeade’s position on Trump’s tariffs. He said that Trump’s underlying goal was just to get new trade deals done, and once that happens, everyone will be better off. Obviously completely ignoring the fact that Trump just likes tariffs, Trump tariffed countries where the US had a trade surplus, and that Trump is otherwise ignoring the trade deals that are currently in place...

But I guess you have to play this game in the cable news business.

Sendoff: There were just too many people in 1970s entertainment with names like the recently departed Dave Mason. Was he the drummer in Pink Floyd? No, not quite. Smooth-voiced soft-rocker? Close, but no cigar. Unpleasant actor/comedian? No, this Dave, this Mason, was a co-founder of Traffic, part of the whole Delaney & Bonnie problem, and a session man for Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison. The song of his you probably know best is “Feelin’ Alright?”, made most famous by Joe Cocker. This is the song of his I couldn’t banish out of my head when it came out, despite never ever wanting to hear another goddamned song on the radio about adult couples breaking up:

We’ve also got a brand new embroidered cap:

And if you like that Johnny Ryan design, but don’t want to offend your neighbors down at the food co-op, we’ve made an indoor-version of his epic design in the form of heavyweight 17x22” posters!

Consume!

And any of these items are out of stock, blame yourself–paying subscribers of The Fifth Column get first dibs on merch. So…

Subscribe now

-Iran is a disaster from basically every possible angle

-you don’t go to war with this president

-maybe just crawl back to a worse JCPOA and call it historic

-Venezuela “worked,” which is exactly why it made the next disaster easier

-take the oil, burn the soft power, call it realism

-Europe gets lectured, Saudi gets flattered, Denmark gets threatened

-Tucker can’t admit the anti-Trump people were right, so enter the Jews

-Bill Buckley tried to quarantine this stuff. Good luck with that now

-James Fishback is polling at 4 percent and somehow still surfing a real youth wave

-anti-antisemitism becomes its own weird recruitment tool

-anti-Zionism in the classroom, speech codes, and the thrill of saying the forbidden thing

-Graham Platner and that tattoo

-aka Agro Bernie and the appeal of a guy who sounds like he might actually hit someone

-the answer to “what is a woman?” was sitting there the whole time

-Dave Chappelle fell into the trap, then realized who was using the trap

-Democrats got twisted into knots on trans issues and normal language vanished

-Jesse Singal, JK Rowling, and the punishment machine for saying the wrong thing in the wrong tone

-is Trump a fascist, or are we just arguing over which very bad word to use

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

After 10 years, we’ve finally found a sponsor we actually like. Ground News pulls coverage of the same story into one place so you can compare headlines across sources and see how framing changes depending on the outlet.

Subscribe for 40% off our Vantage plan using our unique link https://groundnews.com/fifth

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifth
Instagram: @we.the.fifth
X: @wethefifth
TikTok: @wethefifth
Facebook: @thefifthcolumn

-10 years later, the grievance ledger is still very much active

-Brett Weinstein cannot think his way back from the moon

-Andrew Schulz proves the real mistake was le…

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-up at 2:30am, in by 4am, then 6 straight on-air hours before the fill-in shift even starts

-Glenn Beck saved 5pm and accidentally birthed The Five

-Fox News finally discovered the internet

-2020 was insane and everyone got dumber

-if the facts change every ten minutes, your monologue pro…

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First things third: As advertised, our traditional Second Sunday Zoom call with paying customers, having been displaced last week due to acute Live-show-itis, is back with a vengeance tonight at 8 p.m. ET. No such thing as FOMO when you don’t MO….

* Well, we did it. Finally got Sarah Isgur on, that is, after years of righteous listener lobbying. Sarah’s book is a legit banger, cheerfully demystifying an important institution while also offering some deep interpretative analysis that will make you a smarter consumer of judicially related news. She made the rounds this week, on NPR, The View, The New York Times, the Deseret News; and in The Free Press, Rolling Stone, and ScotusBlog.

As the house-ad above underscores, there are advantages to being a paying subscriber to The Fifth Column, such as having access to entire Members Only episodes. But, because we know you like sweet taste, here’s a clip for all freebooters to enjoy, about how Isgur actually likes all nine of those robe-wearin’ weirdos:

* Another popular recent Members Only episode was #289 with Andy Mills, in which he talked about the terrific Longview miniseries on Artificial Intelligence, The Last Invention. Well, lookie here:

Back in January, I had a conversation with someone named Daniel Moreno-Gama. He was a 19-year-old Texan with a part-time job, taking classes at a community college. He was worried about AI, and what he saw to be the impending extinction of humanity.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because this week he was charged with attempting to kill OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Here’s the interview:

* In Episode #531, liberal-of-Fox-News Jessica Tarlov confessed that she sometimes has a hard time with criticism over the sound of her voice. So in a magnanimous gesture Thursday, President Donald Trump … oh, ha ha, no, what are we even doing here….

I am watching one of the Least Attractive and Talented People on all of Television, Jessica Tarlov. Her voice is so grating and terrible, I had to “turn her off!” Her Democrat soundbites are FAKE. She makes up “Poll Numbers,” and nobody challenges her, because she is so boring. I have among the best Poll Numbers I have ever had, and why shouldn’t I, ALL THE COUNTRY DOES IS WIN. CNN had me at 100%, saying they never saw that before. GET HER OFF THE AIR, SHE IS BAD FOR OUR COUNTRY!

That crash-out came 10 days after the president had Truth-Socialed, “For Fox executives only, take Jessica Tarlov off the air. She is, from her voice, to her lies, and everything else about her, one of the worst ‘personalities’ on television, a real loser! People cannot stand watching her.” Ten days before that, the Commander in Chief had called into The Five when Tarlov wasn’t there, telling co-host Jesse Watters, “I watch Jessica, and I’m not a fan.”

Tarlov tweeted back on Thursday: “Guess I’ll take this opportunity to mention that my numbers are far from fake - Trump really is that unpopular. And you can pre order my book I Disagree as of today!! https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803493/i-disagree-by-jessica-tarlov/.”

* The proximate cause for the Trump-on-Tarlov violence has been the persistent unpopularity and sporadic bafflingness of the Iran War and its aftermath. Some of which was the subject of this week’s Tangling, w/ Kmele & co.:

* Iran was the lead topic on this week’s Reason Roundtable. Secondary was a topic I’m already at this point sick of, but: what the wipeout electoral loss of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán means for the AmeriCons who invested so much in (and/or received investment from) Orbánism. I ranted about this cadre on Monday, before they had further slathered themselves in inglory:

* Furthering that theme this week was Jonah Goldberg, which is the traditional cue for … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap ad swap….)

The Dispatch: Journalism Without the Circus

The internet rewards the loudest take. We reward the most honest one. If you’re tired of outrage dressed up as analysis, join The Dispatch.

Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes launched TheDispatch in 2019 because serious journalism was drowning in partisan noise. No clickbait outrage, no team-sport punditry, no hot takes masquerading as reporting—just rigorous analysis and honest commentary that treats you like an adult.

Join half a million readers who’ve already found a better way to stay informed.

Firehose Readers: Try The Dispatch for 7 days for $1.

***

Cleansing Peter Meijer content, via one of the better Chat threads:

* Speaking of baseball and bad life choices, what a glorious time we had at Yankee Stadium Thursday afternoon, when beloved listeners Jaye, MAGA Mary, Nancy Rommelmann and I played hooky in the boozy sunshine to watch the Angels body-slam the Bombers. It struck me then as now that as a general proposition, all “businessman’s specials,” as weekday day-games used to be called, should be de facto Fifdom meetup situations all over this great land. I’m sure you people have a baseball WhatsApp group or whatever; figure it out. And invite me.

* One of two people who couldn’t get it together to join us at the stadium was Craig Mahoney, though in C.M.’s partial defense, he was putting the finishing touches on his self-published/painted children’s book about a dog, The Mickiest Mickey, available at a Substack near you. I am a proud owner of Craig’s art, and so can you!

* Moar sportsball: Don’t make the mistake of skipping over M.O. #315 w/ hunky former UCLA quarterback and son-of-a-Heisman-winner Mark Harmon, who has also had some acting successes. Here’s a freeloader clip in which he (or actually, Moynihan) talks about that whole Sexiest-Man-Alive thing, as well as the insanity of his showbiz family. Can you believe we didn’t even mention that his other sister was married to John DeLorean?

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Having completely missed his nearly two-decade run on NCIS, when Mark Harmon entered the studio earlier this week, all I could think was, “Mr. Shoop!” As the lead in Carl Reiner’s Summer School, Harmon was the teacher you dreamed of having: a misfit who didn’t want to be there either, but who wound up educating you the most. Does the premise of a high school gym teacher being blackmailed to teach summer school because he is up for tenure make any sense? It does not. Were you expecting a campy comedy to call for makeup effects by monster maker Rick Baker? Unlikely! Is it weird he lets a 16-year-old student (played by Courtney Thorne-Smith) move in with him? It was a different time. Buy the Blu-Ray; watch for free (with ads) on YouTube; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Archibald.:

I hereby issue a Massive and total apology for posting that I would skip this episode. Absolutely fascinating. I can listen to this twice.

Sendoff. Imagine moving to Nashville at age 20 with $80 in your pocket, then sell your first tune, at age 23, to Kenny Rogers, and it’s “The Gambler”…. The wonderfully named Don Schlitz used to tell audiences that they may not know who he is, but they damn sure knew his songs: 25 #1 country hits, 50 in the Top 10, “Forever and Ever, Amen,” “When You Say Nothing at All,” and suchlike. He also wrote the songs for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer musical, which I now kinda wanna see…. Anyway, here’s Schlitz’s catch-in-your-throat recording of a ditty made famous by Garth Brooks:

Greetings programs! Below find the link for this month’s Second Third Sunday, taking place LIVE on Zoom (only) at 8pm EST. We will not be releasing a recording of the session, so this is a “be there or be square” kind of event.

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-Steve McQueen and a Mini Cooper

-what Carl Reiner was really like, and why Summer School still rules

-growing up with Tom Harmon: Heisman winner, broadcaster, fighter pilot, legend

-the war story Mark on…

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-California’s governor race is a freak show (Fang Fang rides again)

-Bring Kevin Spacey to the table?

-Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, and different standards

-The anti-gambling jihad

-Talks about talks about talks

-The good ‘ole days of Lebanon, Libya, Valerie Plame, Bob Novak

-Dr. Jesus

-Trump versus the Pope

-From melting pot to rancid salad bowl

-Indians dancing at the World War II memorial

-CPAC Hungary, paid for by whomst?

-Péter Magyar ruins the mood

-The price of Marco Rubio in power

-NATO and Trump’s foreign policy

-Betting against Bronny

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

After 10 years, we’ve finally found a sponsor we actually like. Ground News pulls coverage of the same story into one place so you can compare headlines across sources and see how framing changes depending on the outlet.

Subscribe for 40% off our Vantage plan using our unique link https://groundnews.com/fifth

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifth
Instagram: @we.the.fifth
X: @wethefifth
TikTok: @wethefifth
Facebook: @thefifthcolumn

-The Ted Lasso version of the Supreme Court

-The Supreme Court is not the 6-3 cartoon people think it is

-RBG thought Roe was built on weak foundations

-The Court decides legal questions, not good policy vs. bad policy

-Congress is now mostly bookers, comms staff, and 535 Inst…

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Quick bit o’ housekeeping: Because our 10^th-anniversary show tomorrow at the Village Underground in NYC falls on the second Sunday of April, the monthly Second Sunday Zoom call for paying subscribers will now take place on the Third Sunday, April 19, at a time to be determined. TYFYATTM.

* Been a while since we featured Fifdom fave Kyle Dunnigan around these parts, so here’s a fresh new track of topical import:

* Hungarians go to the polls this weekend, as we’ve been yammering about here and there. Normally, this would rank pretty low on the who-gives-a-rip meter, except for that the president of the United States has gone to unprecedented lengths to campaign for a (politically flagging) politician in an allied democracy, including a last-ditch promise to “use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy.” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could really use that economic help, since his 16 years of anti-liberal rule have driven the once-trailblazing Hungarian economy to near the back of the post-communist line. Friend and past guest Johan Norberg (Episode #419) published two recent pieces detailing at length Orbán’s crappy record—“How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets,” for the Cato Institute, and, for the Washington Post, “Hungary Is a Laboratory for Illiberal Nationalism. The Results Are in.”

Economic historian Phil Magness this week published an interesting essay on where Orbán fits into the post-liberal project. I wrote a somewhat crabby piece about J.D. Vance’s disgraceful campaign visit to the country, titled “Viktor Orbán and His American Apologists All Deserve To Lose.” Excerpt:

There has understandably sprouted a whole journalistic cottage mini-industry to explain the inexplicable: Why has this administration shredded all precedent by going whole-hog campaign mode for the fading autocrat of a country whose GDP ranks somewhere between Greece and Uzbekistan? While I appreciate and learn from these efforts (and have contributed my share), there is, I think, a far more pressing issue for those Americans who may or may not give a rat’s ass about Magyarország: Regardless of motivation, U.S. politicians are telling on themselves, and advertising their own potentially appalling behavior, by shilling for a proven anti-liberal failure. […]

It will be morbidly fascinating to see how Vance, Trump, and Rubio will react if Orbán loses the election but then engages in legal chicanery to dispute or overturn the results. He has, after all, expanded and packed the Hungarian Supreme Court; embedded his political party’s control over whole swaths of the country’s commercial, media, and civic institutions; and spent the past few weeks making increasingly lurid accusations of Ukrainian election interference. Trump, no stranger to fantastical election-contestations of his own, has put more personal investment in this one faraway election than any American president has in any foreign election in history, while touting a National Security Strategy that openly backs “patriotic European parties” and cultivates “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” The incentives going in are a mess. […]

American postliberal conservatives know Viktor Orbán’s voluminous track record of steering his country downward on virtually every comparative international ranking of freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law. They know that he has serially expropriated private pensions, seized private property from foreigners, regulated whole private industries out of business, and taken government stakes in hundreds of previously private companies. They don’t care. In fact, they see it as aspirational.

* Also nonplussed with Vance’s trip was Jonah Goldberg (#182), which is a fine lead-in for a new Firehose featurette called … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap ad swap….)

The Dispatch: Journalism Without the Circus

The internet rewards the loudest take. We reward the most honest one. If you’re tired of outrage dressed up as analysis, join The Dispatch.

Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes launched TheDispatch in 2019 because serious journalism was drowning in partisan noise. No clickbait outrage, no team-sport punditry, no hot takes masquerading as reporting—just rigorous analysis and honest commentary that treats you like an adult.

Join half a million readers who’ve already found a better way to stay informed.

Firehose Readers: Try The Dispatch for 7 days for $1.

***

I like how they capitalized the “R”….

* Our Members Only #311 conversation with Democratic presidential thinking-about-it Rahm Emanuel has been ping-ponging around, especially this bit:

Follow-on coverage in The Hill, Fox News, New York Post, The Washington Times, Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Rocky Mountain Voice, The Daily Caller, 930 WFMD Chicago, and Hot Air, among others.

* M.O. #313, for those of you in the cheap seats, was the first Mailbag episode in a coon’s age, so you could hear us take the usual flak & fun from the faithful. We also predicted, as of Monday night, that “there’s no chance he’s gonna do all the war crimes on Tuesday evening.”

* If you want to get your Kmele fix, here’s him & the Tanglers talking more about Iran:

* Moar Kmele: Non-paying subscribers who couldn’t get past the paywall-jump in our M.O. #312 conversation with Cuba specialist Ted Henken missed this classic exchange on Latin America racial notions vs. America’s “demented” hangups:

* Speaking of demented racial hangups, pal Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412, #442) used his blowtorch on Ibram X. Kendi’s new book this week; here’s the video version:

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Space is back, baby! With Americans riding high on the successful Artemis II mission and audiences flocking to theaters to see Project Hail Mary, it’s almost like we’ve remembered that there is an entire rest of the fucking universe to explore. So before we get distracted by some terrestrial drama, let’s fire up Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary, For All Mankind. Reinert combines incredible footage from the Apollo missions with the voices of the 24 astronauts that have visited the moon, but what takes the doc to another level is the evocative score by Brian Eno. What Reinert gives us is no history lesson—there are no particulars about individual missions, or even who is speaking at any given time. It is instead a synthesis of man’s past journeys to the moon presented as the monomyth. You’ll walk away with a new appreciation for these heroes’ journeys, and have a whole lotta feels along the way. Buy the Blu-Ray, watch on HBO Max; enjoy this excerpt of astronauts fucking around on the moon:

* Comment of the Week comes from Brad:

It was fun to imagine that this guest was actually Gary Oldman working out a character performance.

Sendoff: Three musical/personal topics we have oft chewed over the past (*gulp*) decade—the nonsense of “cultural appropriation,” the freedom to self-reinvent, and the question of which beloved artist will be cancelled in death—combined this week with the demise at age 67 of hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. The New York Times hed is kinda perfect on that latter point: “‘His Legacy Is Complex’: Grappling With Afrika Bambaataa.” The complexities chiefly included … four accusations of sexual molestation, one of which led to a settlement. The reinvention came when this Bronx River Projects kid named Jared Taylor, son of immigrants from Jamaica and the Barbados, re-christened himself and ending up founding thd Universal Zulu Nation. And the vanguard cultural mixing and innovation we celebrate here today was a song and moment that Moynihan has mentioned often: Transforming Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” into “Planet Rock.”

-Everyone loves our ad spots

-Iran’s deranged peace menu

-Ceasefire, with extra missiles

-The joint Hormuz tollbooth fantasy

-What Iran lost, even if nobody can sell it

-Regime change, but not the fun version

-Vanceworld (probably) leaks to the Times

-Trump threatens apocalypse, then shrugs

-Pakistan, Vance, and easier marks

-Groypers and other forms of loser energy

-The anti-Jewish right stops pretending

-Sovereignty for me, not for thee

-When the right starts sounding like the left

-Israel’s image problem, and America’s deeper one

-RFK Jr. enters the podcast economy

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

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-The Easter Bunny claps for the Iran rescue

-Lie long enough and eventually your conscience taps out

-about that Rahm moment

-who remembers Jazz Hands?

-maybe woke actually is over

-Bret Weinstein, vindication for the Evergreen psychos

-Helen Keller and her commie ventriloqu…

Read more

One would need a heart made of steel-reinforced concrete to be unmoved at the sight of this weekend’s physically daring and mathematically near-impossible retrievals turning a potentially heartbreaking L into a huge W. I’m also talking about the rescue of that downed Air Force weapons officer inside Iran….

Because yin also requires yang, the president of the United States of America was not going to let this unalloyed piece of fantastic & inspiring news pass without pooping on a paper plate:

Typical weekend peace negotiations/war-crimes threats from #47, here on week six of a war at the outset of which he “always thought it was a four-to-five-week deal.” As mentioned on this past week’s Reason Roundtable, I am of the old-fashioned belief that American presidents shouldn’t threaten to do war crimes, which is a hilarious reason to get called a homosexual on Twitter:

* More recently (like, today recently), Nadav Eyal (veteran of episodes #382 & #510) went on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast to take seriously Trump’s latest ultimatum (currently scheduled for 8:00 p.m. Tuesday ET), and “to break down what comes next: a widening war, a strategic endgame, or something in between.”

* Another attempt to decode the president’s Iran strategy came Friday from Kmele & the gang over at Tangle News:

* Meanwhile, in the wake of a sold-out SoFi show, Kmele is petitioning President Trump to “immediately issue an executive order pardoning Kanye West for any past or future crimes” in exchange for Ye performing “this exact set every Friday for the rest of my life.” Hope is not just a town in Arkansas, etc.

* What a glorious, feel-great time we all had at the 10-year anniversary party Wednesday night! Big ups to ride-or-dies Thor Halvorssen, Peter Meijer, Olivia Reingold, Nick Gillespie, and Nancy Rommelmann. So nice we can embed it twice:

Let’s give each of them some love: Thor for his March 28 tweet contending that “Venezuela’s political prisoners are no longer only the regime’s prisoners. The U.S. State Department is not a bystander… it is duty bound to demand their full and immediate liberation”; Meijer for polling in 4^th place in the GOP primary for U.S. Senate. (Don’t run! Don’t run!). Reingold for her livestream-discussed hit Free Press piece, “I am an October 8 Jew”; Nancy for her also livestream-discussed, Noem-husband-occasioned old piece on a small-town southern mayor who offed himself after his kinks were publicized; and Gillespie for bagging Adam Carolla:

* Tuesday’s very interesting first-but-not-last-time Fifth Column discussion with professor of Cuba stuff Ted Henken is an excuse to post two old Cuba-related pieces of mine. First was a descriptive email from the island I sent in February 1998 to pal Ken Layne, who immediately published it on the late, great Tabloid.net, thus alerting me to the goons at the Treasury Dept.’s odious Office for Foreign Assets Control. Excerpt:

This whole deal is a terrible, terrible shame, a waste of effort and once-good works from who knows when. Nobody works, everyone sits around all day, and the buildings slowly rot. I haven’t described Centro Habana, and it’s best not to. People live in unspeakable conditions and fetid decay, no clean water (if any water) anywhere, tiny rooms, narrow slivers of stenchy hallways with rats and cockroaches where there are 10 conversations at once and nothing approaching basic sanitation. Ninety percent of the buildings in Centro Habana, I am sure, would be condemned in any second- or first-world country. I can’t imagine what horror ensues when the place heats up in the summer. Good Christ.

The shops are punishingly depressing, 25 cans of the same brand of condensed milk, and maybe a used toothbrush. […]

It’s not as if I had any doubt before I came, but Dear God will I not ever be able to fathom how one single sniveling San Francisco type can complain about America’s imminent “police state” in one breath, then extol the virtues of the Cuban heroes in the next. Those people need a good clipping of the genitals.

Second was a Reason piece after my March 2016 visit there, talking about the triumph of rock (and rap, and metal) over the hardworking Castroite censors. Selection here chosen purely for Billy Joel discourse:

The Fania All-Stars in 1979 contributed to one of the more bizarre and mostly forgotten musical episodes in modern rock history: the three-day “Havana Jam“ at Karl Marx Theater, where officially sanctioned Cuban musicians, top American jazzmen (such as Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, and Jaco Pastorius), and a who’s who of late-’70s American burnouts (Stephen Stills, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joel) performed for an audience largely composed of apparatchiks and their families.

Chet Flippo’s contemporaneous account of Havana Jam for Rolling Stone is an amusing snapshot of a centrally planned–and therefore largely botched–cultural exchange, filled with such wince-inducing anecdotes as Kristofferson dedicating “Living Legend“ to “your commander in chief, Fidel”; Americans bitterly complaining that they didn’t get to jam with the natives; and the pilot on the outbound flight urging the musicians to “spit on Havana.” The audience walked out en masse at the Fania All-Stars (possibly because western salsa music was still banned, and Fania was known to consort in the U.S. with Cuban exiles such as Cruz), and non-Party Cubans rolled their eyes at their own side’s contributions. “All Cuban music is old people’s music,” one local told Flippo. “[I]t is the music of the 1950s. It is as if there is no now. Musically in this country, it is always yesterday.” […]

[E]ven with the event’s emphasis on old-people music, rock & roll finally did break through, thanks to the perhaps unlikely figure of Billy Joel. More Flippo:

[Joel] closed out the festival with a bang. When he jumped on his piano, the kids in the crowd surged past the guards and really tried to get down. If the Cuban government thought they were keeping rock & roll out of their country, Joel proved them wrong, prompting the American press to dutifully record that he had proved rock & roll can still be subversive.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Do you believe you decided to come to this theater today? That it was your own idea of your own free will? Whether we know or not we’re all manipulated. It’s becoming almost impossible to think or even act for ourselves anymore. We’re manipulated. Programmed. Brainwashed. Right from the start, right from the day we’re born. By family, by the press, by radio, by television. And more and more we know less and less of who “they” are.

That’s the provocation presented in the very first moments of The Domino Principle, juxtaposed with archival footage of assassinations and IBM mainframes and the image of a 22-year-old Adam Curtis sitting in the back of the theater, furiously scribbling notes. One of the last films by director Stanley Kramer (Judgement at Nuremberg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), this paranoid procedural is by no means good, but it has a momentum worthy of its title, and once you’ve been introduced to Gene Hackman as a murderous convict named Tucker with Mickey Rooney as his nipple-hair-twisting cellmate, you just can’t look away. Tucker begins to receive visits from a well-dressed man representing a mysterious “them,” who offers him a way out of prison—in exchange for what, they won’t exactly say. Inevitably (and inevitability is the theme here), Tucker takes them up on their offer, driven by the prospect of reuniting with his wife, played by Candice Bergen. But once outside the prison walls, Tucker discovers he’s no free man. The film never attempts to unpack who’s pulling the levers of this grand conspiracy, and Tucker doesn’t seem terribly fussed about it either. Instead, we remain down in the dirt with those involved in operationalizing the master plan: the handlers (including Eli Wallach and Richard Widmark), and the blunt tools who “they” have manipulated to carry out “their” bidding.

You can buy the Blu-Ray (with The Cassandra Crossing!) at this link, or watch for free on YouTube. Trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Sandy:

Castro’s first press coordinator was an American Journalist named Jack Skelly. Years later (at the risk of dating myself) in the early ’70s I was high school classmates with his twin daughters, and my dad was his sometimes tennis doubles partner. That should qualify me as an expert on Cuba, right?

When Skelly died in 2016, I took it upon myself to get some ink for “Grandpa Jack” so I wrote a Wikipedia entry, a very short read covering how he more or less bumped into that gig. I linked that below. Also, for news junkies and historians, which I assume all TFC listeners are, the second link is to Face the Nation, January 11, 1959, from Havana. Starting with one of those cool, countdown leaders, followed by ancient, scratchy news film of the hectic studio, men with guns, reporters and techies, guys smoking cigarettes…this was so raw they weren’t even using headphones for interpretation. Skelly leans over periodically and whispers to a very young Fidel who was insisting that they were now a democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Skelly

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/fidel-castro-on-face-the-nation-in-1959/

Sendoff: Ambrosia (with Firefall as a close runner-up) is my go-to answer when the oldies station coughs a pleasantly bland mid-‘70s hit curio whose provenance I can’t quite stick. As such, I could tell you precisely nothing about the band, at least until the death Monday of its founding keyboard player. But! Here are some fun facts about the prog-turned-soft-turned-Yacht-rockers: 1) They’re from Pedro; 2) “their original name was ‘Ambergris Mite,’ but after doing some touring they discovered there was already a band using the name ‘Ambergris,’ so they turned to the dictionary and picked the name ‘Ambrosia’ because a name meaning “nectar of the gods” seemed fitting.” And 3) Founding member Joe Puerto invited the keyboard player to join on the spot after seeing him play in some dingy club: “There was a coffin with speakers in it. And at the end of the room, Chris was there, playing the organ with a bottle of wine on the top, smoking a cigarette, and there was a girl massaging his shoulders as he played, so I go, ‘We gotta get this guy in the band.’” Sho’ nuff! You don’t get to play keys in a prog rock band unless you got chops, so pour a 40 out for the late, great Christopher North:

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Has it really only been 10 years since Kmele’s “surprise fisting”? Is O.J. still innocent? Is our Manhattan enclave still decadent? These mysteries and more will be exclusively revealed on a Jewish-holiday-unfriendly YouTube livestream starting at 7 p.m. ET tonight; that is, if Producer Jason can finally figure out how YouTube works.

There won’t just be booze, there’ll be a bartender, so strap in for some slurring. (Not by Moynihan; he just gets louder & more repetitive.) There will be special guests beloved and perhaps even despised by the Fifdom universe. There will be ladies dressed nicely. And above all, there’ll be you (the non-too-observant among you, anyway), riddling us & our guests with queries about literally anything you want to talk about. As back in January, we will have the SuperChat thingie enabled, so you can pay to have your love/hate/fuck-marry-kill go straight to the front of the line.

We have pledged to two hours, though who knows what will seem prudent by 9 p.m. I hear some other codger’s supposed to talk by then? Maybe an important space-rocket launch? Hard to keep track nowadays, what with the A.I. Anyway! Come out and play with us! And thank you for letting us have anniversaries….

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