-JD Vance, Tucker, and the anti-Israel right

-The Iran deal, Rubio’s silence, and Trump’s trial balloon

-What Batya got wrong about the war

-Could Trump have sold the war better?

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The vibes, they are indeed elite. My view from Dimes Square last night:

Since 99% of you reading this email were not on our monthly Second Sunday Zoom call with paying subscribers, I can testify that 1) you’re missing out on a lot of cute babies!, and 2) we spilled the kind of not-for-publication tea (in direct response to listener queries) that would give you more context before mashing that “send” button on the latest complaint and/or elaborate theory about our motivations for trying out new things on a 10-year-old podcast. Not dissimilar to how actually listening to an episode makes your criticism of it smarter! Anyway, the main thing is that it was a real fine time, and remains a solid reason for upgrading from free.

* Speaking of Ana Navarro, here’s a clip from the rip-roaring Members Only #327, during which we unsuccessfully lobby the erstwhile Republican to get back in touch with her former friend Marco Rubio:

* As referenced on the aforementioned Zoom call, as well as on Episode #561, one of the surprise contributors to Good Vibes Summer has been the influx of World Cup visitors from Euro-land posting ridiculously wholesome content about the awesomeness of American football stadiums, Waffle Houses, ice dispensers, school buses, Irish cops, and junk food. The German soccer fan Freddy has so charmed us with appreciative flattery that he’s being gifted concert tickets by Ella Langley and swank hotel rooms from J.J. Watt. Scots in Boston are singing “Country Roads”; Lawrence, Kansas, has straight-up adopted Algeria. Time for a think-piece, Ethan Strauss!

There’s so much negativity out there in high culture about our nation, from our own elites and elites abroad. We’re at a current low point in Gallup’s “Are You Proud to be an American?” question, with much of the decline driven by liberals during this Trump era. That makes some sense, but let’s take a 30,000-foot view of that historic bottom:

A record-low 58% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely” (41%) or “very” (17%) proud to be an American, down nine percentage points from last year and five points below the prior low from 2020.

This means that a solid majority of Americans are still “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American. Where in the national news can they find feel-good stories that channel this sentiment? If you’re looking for smaller anecdotes, it’s not especially novel to see Murica-love voiced by a flag-waving Texan. It’s more fun to witness such positivity from the vantage of a cosplaying World Cup Brit.

In conclusion, yes, there might be an aspect of contrivance to the current praise of our country from this influx of visitors. There’s also a real, mostly unmet yearning for that kind of admiration. Perhaps Buc-ee’s isn’t really the best we have to offer. But our country offers a whole lot to a great many, and there’s something glorious about the size and color of the American mundane.

* Taking the more sourpussy route (as also reffed on 2^nd Sun) was the legion of lefties and elected Dems who reacted to the world-beating initial public offering of SpaceX not with appreciation for having a globally envied capital markets system that both gooses and rewards insane experiments in innovation, but rather with economically illiterate, historically fantastical, punitive and confiscatory lust. With the caveat that social media was a mistake, the single best online source for swatting away at the nonsense has been the guest on our seventh-ever episode, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke.

* Those of you who enjoyed The Revolutionaries miniseries-within-the-pod will have a great time with the July issue of Reason, illustrated by the same insane gal who brought you the flag-meat-boots image at the top of this post, Swedish-born American patriot and Moynihan-ex Joanna Andreasson. This past week two pieces of note from that special edition were published; the first by past Revolutionaries guest Charles C. Mann, about how “the mental landscape of the Revolution, from its originating conflicts to its military tactics to the Founders’ ideas about freedom and the role of government, was also shaped by the continent’s original inhabitants.” Many interesting passages! Here’s one:

The first European ventures into North America occurred as Enlightenment figures such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire were questioning Europe’s absolute monarchies, state religions, and rigid class rules. All of these thinkers were fascinated by the recently revealed existence of Native Americans—living, breathing products of societies with wholly different social, political, and spiritual traditions. All of them made Indians central to their work.

None of these thinkers were ethnographers in the modern sense. The “natives” featured in their work mainly are foils—convenient human illustrations for ideas. […]

At the same time, other Europeans actually were interested in native life—and drew lessons from it. Again and again, foreign visitors to New England and Quebec described their inhabitants as having vastly more personal liberty and autonomy than Europeans. “They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to anyone whatsoever,” wrote Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary in France’s Canadian colony from 1632 to 1649. “They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains [nobles and kings], while they laugh at and make sport of theirs.”

Unlike Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Le Jeune had a conception of native life that was basically accurate. As he reported, native rulers had little formal authority; they had to persuade others to follow their ideas. The Haudenosaunee, for example, have a tadadaho, who presides over the Grand Council, which itself was comprised of male leaders of the league’s six member nations. Tadadaho is traditionally a lifetime appointment, like a king, but the role is more like today’s speaker of the House—someone who shapes the agenda but must marshal the support of the other representatives to make anything happen. Even if the tadadaho won the Grand Council’s backing, he could not act without the approval of a second, all-female council, traditionally formed of clan mothers.

Unlike European kings and nobles, Haudenosaunee leaders could be deposed if their people lost faith in them (although this was relatively uncommon). They had to have the consent of the governed and worked hard to keep it. Were the colonists who rebelled against King George and established a republic inspired by this? Surely not directly. But it seems clear that the colonists on the Atlantic seaboard were imbued with views about freedom that were strikingly different from those of their ancestors, and that they identified those views with native people.

The second piece of possible interest came from me—”Disillusioned Revolutionaries: Many Founders Died in Despair About the American Experiment.” Here’s a chunk from the intro; make sure to read all the way to the 1970 Beatles comparison at the end!

Founder disgruntlement was the rule, not the exception (and the exception to that rule was James Madison). “Those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought,” wrote the historian Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution. “Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned.”

Added the historian Dennis C. Rasmussen in Fears of a Setting Sun, about the only book-length treatment of the subject: “Most of the other leading founders—including figures such as Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush—fell in the same camp.”

Some of the sources of their souring were one-offs: 18th century conditions that could not be replicated now, such as Napoleon marching through Europe, or just the concentrated creativity of the Founding itself. Others, though, resonate with the political anxieties of today.

* The aforementioned Charles Mann and long-ago Fifth guest Virginia Postrel have a brand new podcast, called Everyday Abundance, that “explores the hidden histories behind everyday activities and the technologies we don’t even know are technologies.” On of their first episodes is on … brushing your teeth.

* Let’s get some more video. Here’s Kmele & the Tanglers talking about A.I., and “one of the biggest challenges facing modern democracy: misinformation.”

* From Monday’s Reason Roundtable, here’s an edited clip of me shitting on California voters:

* And just because I’ve been meaning to watch the whole thing, here’s the the long-awaited completion ceremony for Sagrada Familia, featuring the very greatest of all American Popes:

* Over at The Dispatch, our business partner Jonathan Farber (sometimes referred to on the podcast as “Fucking Jonathan”) wrote up a fascinating new study he helped bring to life about political bias in academia:

The typical politically active professor teaching at Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and America’s other leading universities sits in the same ideological neighborhood as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the three most progressive members of Congress. The bigger issue, however, is that many campuses lack the intellectual range for anyone to seriously challenge those professors’ views. That is the central finding of a new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and conducted by University of Rochester political scientist David Primo. […]

Primo’s study adds that new dimension to our understanding of faculty ideological diversity. It draws on a database built by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica that tracks more than 850 million political contributions since 1979 and places every donor (and every politician they fund) on a single continuous left-right scale. Donors to Susan Collins occupy a different ideological position than donors to Ted Cruz, even though both give only to Republicans. The same logic separates Manchin from Warren donors. The result is a number on the same scale used for every member of Congress, placing faculty directly alongside the people who write America’s laws. […]

The national political discourse has widened over the last 30 years, while the university’s ideological makeup has instead bunched dramatically in this single highly progressive spot on the spectrum.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

In the first few minutes of this month’s Second Sunday, while waiting for Kmele and Michael to join, Matt and I somehow got on the topic of Bob Roberts, which led to Tanner ‘88, which led to my favorite political mini-series: K Street. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, it’s an ambitious, experimental 10-episode series starring James Carville and Mary Matalin as themselves, playing in largely improvised scenes against Jon Slattery (Mad Men), Roger Guenveur Smith (Malcolm X), and Mary McCormack (The West Wing), with the mysterious “Bergstrom” played by Elliott Gould manipulating them all from New York. Is that anti-Semetic? A little! The production team shot each episode on handheld video cameras over a three-day period and then had just two days in edit before handing them over to HBO for air that week, then doing it all over again. I once ran into Soderbergh and mentioned how much I loved the show, to which he said, “You are the second person who has ever said that to me,” before recounting what a grind it was to make, and vowing to never do something on that schedule again. But what they made was a super weird, voyeuristic, highly compelling, conspiratorial, hot mess that’s worth the watch. Keep your eyes out for cameos from Howard Dean, Paul Begala, Orrin Hatch, Bill Kristol, Tucker Carlson, Chuck Grassley, Donna Brazile (“it’s still Chocolate City, despite all these vanillas that keep dropping in”), and … Howard Kurtz. Get the DVD; watch for free on YouTube; here’s the (terrible, George Clooney-heavy) trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Gordon Bombay:

Chris Murphy is like if not having a sense of proportion were a person

Sendoff: I am the first to confess I wasn’t familiar with the stylings of the visionary if vision-less James Blood Ulmer, the experimental guitarist who died June 3 at the age of 86. But that’s why I love familiarizing myself with & trying to honor the recently deceased! Imagine if Camper Van Beethoven was a mostly instrumental, kinda jazz-punk-blues percussive and stabby thing, complete with violin…. Clash put it like this: “His music was tagged free funk, and his skills termed as harmolodics, but in truth he was a complete one-off.” Sure! Dude played with Art Blakey, Ornette Coleman (who he reminds me of most), and then just made dozens of records. I have spent most of this afternoon with his new-to-me stuff on shuffle, and greatly enjoyed it. As for my pick of song? It’s also his most popular, I swear:

Greetings programs! Below find the link for this month’s Second Sunday, taking place LIVE on Zoom (only) at 11AM EST.

Paid subscribers get the link below the fold.

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-Valid destruction or peaceful rioting?

-A brief detour through America’s dumbest college mascots

-Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis give Moynihan a perfect Comedy Cellar night

-Kmele roots for the Spurs, but only to punish Knicks fans

-Spike Lee has been on the court long enough

-Which celebrity row courtsider gets booed?

-Mamdani gets into the affordable soccer jersey business

-The World Cup comes to New Jersey by boat

-Introducing Midterm Madness

-LA’s mayoral race and the Spencer Pratt stolen-election fantasy

-California’s governor’s race and the strange usefulness of market signals

-The race to watch

-Platner’s character problem is not going away

-Jodi Kantor explains when MeToo does and does not count

-Bill Pulte gets pulled, Jay Clayton gets nominated

-A fully fledged disgusting party on a federal level

-UFC 250 comes to the White House because this is who we are now

-Bullshit, postmodern Trumpism, and the infinite lies

Follow The Fifth Column

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

-The White House press corps just takes it

-Kristen Welker gets the Trump treatment (and would Trump have tried that with Tim Russert?)

-Ana Navarro is here, from one of them Mexican countries

-Charles…

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Fair warning, this one’s long….

Since the three of us signed off Tuesday on our not-very-charitable-to-journalo-heroes analysis of the 60 Minutes kerf(l)uffle, Simpsons character and Bari Weiss murder-accuser Scott Pelley was fired, then alleged in a second post-firing statement that the new management had “instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story,” and then sat down with recent Fifth Column live-show panelist Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the post-game New York Times interview, at which those “falsehoods” were revealed to be unheeded notes from Weiss asking that a segment on the Minnesota ICE conflict show more aggressive protest footage while describing Renee Good’s car as driving toward the ICE officer who shot her. There is no shortage of other recent news about a weekly news program that, as frenemy of the pod Jon Levine has noted, is being covered “like [it’s] the Yalta Conference.”

On the “Overtime” segment of Real Time w/ Bill Maher Friday, recent Fif guest Sen. Chris Murphy (D – Ct.) warned that “you’re watching a censorship state be created,” at which the host expressed skepticism that 60 Minutes has perceptibly changed at all, adding: “I don’t feel like Scott Pelley was a national treasure.”

I don’t have much to contribute to the current controversy, aside from reiterating that the Trump administration’s pressure on media companies has been godawful, that I think (my friend) Bari’s attempt to manage what is perceived to be a hostile takeover of a deeply entrenched media institution is a (very lucrative!) mistake, and that there are fewer Derangement Syndromes more potent than BDS. But, I’ve had some brush-ups over the years with 60 Minutes, CBS, and pompous media celebrities that this whole episode shook loose from the cobwebs.

From 1994:

Lesley Stahl of CBS’ 60 Minutes was more persistent [in pushing the journalistic narrative that Young Americans in Prague were there because they were disappointed in the United States]. She came to Prague around April or May of 1992, a few months after the landmark Chuck Powers story in the Los Angeles Times gave the YAP phenomenon the stamp of credibility, triggering a media stampede that has yet to cease. Never mind that Powers had trouble spelling people’s names correctly or getting their ages right or attributing his quotes to the individuals who spoke them -- this was one of the largest circulation dailies in America identifying a new trend. Every news organization worth its salt had to cough up plane tickets and match the story.

Of course, award-winning journalists know how to hunt for an original angle, and so Stahl decided, well in advance of her visit, that YAPs were basically chasing the Sixties legacy but lacking that generation’s moral commitment. She spent most of her session in the Prognosis office trying to goad all of us -- without success -- into bashing America and praising the Sixties.

Then, with a surreal flourish, Stahl turned the tables. “You know, I’m damn proud to be an American,” she challenged our bewildered staff. “You know, my generation cared enough about America to do something about it, we didn’t just run away!”

After clearly disappointing Stahl with my own inability to articulately criticize America’s faults in a one-on-one interview, I invited her to come see the band I was playing with at the time on the Charles Bridge. “Oh yeah!” she said. “You’ll have to play me a Sixties song!”

I explained to her that about the only cover we played was the very Seventies “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” Then the conversation shifted to a nostalgic look back at Watergate, that high-water mark of the American free press, when the young Stahl cut her journalistic teeth. As we parted, she vowed to come to the bridge:

“I can’t wait to hear you play me a Sixties song!”

The 60 Minutes crew came out a few days later and filmed one of our two-hour sets in its entirety. We were careful to omit even “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” so they would have to show us playing either originals or nothing at all.

Afterwards the producer came up to us and said, “Wow, that was really great, really great. Now we were wondering if you could play us just one Sixties song.”

* From a 2004 piece titled “Song for Dan Rather”:

The first, cheapest, and arguably best reason to despise someone is because he is rich, famous, and powerful. Bonus points if he works in your profession and carries on like a self-important jackass. Schadenfreude is a dish best served daily, and if America is rich enough to give around $7 million a year to not one but three different humans who have a job the Brits accurately call “newsreader,” then certainly we have more than paid for the right to laugh like pitiless hyenas at the sight of the great Dan Rather slinking away from his enviable post in half-shame, like an armadillo leaving an ant nest after mistakenly pissing on it.

The battle over Diamond Dan’s obit continues to be waged elsewhere. My own two cents has nothing to do with fonts, pajamas, liberal bias, or the name “Kenneth.” What irked me about Rather was that he was one of journalism’s all-time great self-flagellators, always eager to confess blame for the declining standards of the trade, always making sure to spread that blame out nice and thick on the rest of us…and always showing up on time to collect his seven-figure paycheck.

“In the constant scratching and scrambling for ever-better ratings and money and the boss’ praise and a better job, it is worth pausing to ask—how goes the real war, the really important battle of our professional lives?” Rather once asked in a noted speech in front of the Radio and Television News Directors Association, worth quoting at length. “How goes the battle for quality, for truth, and justice, for programs worthy of the best within ourselves and the audience?… “The answer, we know, is, ‘Not very well.’ […]

That speech was delivered in 1993. Since then, Rather has pocketed well over $50 million from CBS. Yet his we’re-all-not-worthy song has remained very much the same.

* Sorry, that was a lot of words. Here’s some video, from our Members Only #326 episode with Noah Rothman about political violence:

We also talked with Rothman about political violence in 2018, and here’s a January 2020 episode w/ him that must be fascinating to revisit: “The Case for F*cking Iran Right Up.”

* On The Reason Roundtable this week, I was asked/baited to respond to Mike Pence‘s recent assertion that Republicans have “lost our way” but Democrats “have lost their minds.” My edited answer, as you can imagine, included heapings of both Platner and Paxton:

* Speaking of Maine’s favorite oyster farmer, it’s been like three whole weeks days since The New York Times came out with an article about how three women who had dated him described “volatile and ‘toxic’ relationships” that “in at least one case, [was] even physically threatening.” He was also portrayed as drinking heavily, shagging everybody, and – contra to his repeated, not believable claims – so aware of the Naziness of his tattoo that he called it “my Totenkopf.” One of the ex-girlfriends, a professional conservative named Lyndsey Fifield, has plausibly accused the Times of misrepresenting the paper’s intentions and softening her testimony.

I find myself nodding in mostly vigorous agreement with David French (#191, #325, #365, #555):

It’s not just the evidence of assault.

It’s not just the Nazi tattoo

It’s not just lying about the Nazi tattoo

It’s not just the Kik account

It’s not just the adulterous sexting

It’s not just the deranged posting

It’s all of it (and the more that may emerge).

This is the guy you want to burn your moral credibility for to beat ... Susan Collins?

* Kmele & the Tanglers this week talked about Spencer Pratt and screwworms:

* A week ago, our pal Kat Rosenfield (#448) reacted thusly to a Twitter discussion about how people process those who went bananas during Peak Woke but are now just kinda pretending it was a minor temporary fever: “As a liberal who was unpersoned during peak woke for dissenting from the orthodoxy on things like cultural appropriation, my measured opinion is that the people who perpetuated that culture simply should never have power again; they clearly can’t be trusted with it.” This led The Bulwark’s Tim Miller to snark: “’unpersoned’ but still posting. The great awokenings very own Lazurus.” Cathy Young seconded that it was “pretty over-the-top hyperbole,” adding: “I agree that illiberal leftism shouldn’t be minimized. But there are plenty of people who were canceled far worse than Kat who haven’t gone Trump apologists.”

This would mostly be a not-worth-mentioning example of why opinion journalists and commentators should have their phones taken away, except that it produced a very recommendable Rosenfield essay titled “On Being Canceled Before it Was Cool. I got better, but being a newt actually did kind of suck.” This Firehose is already too long, but sometime soon I will compile a bunch of our past episodes with people who have been cancelled and/or were pushed out of media properties they either created or were star talents at.

* Another recent essay of note that I’m placing here largely to avoid it being posted to the Chat for a 17^th time comes from Sam Harris: “Why I Won’t Debate Critics of Israel.”

* Yet another good written piece that was republished by Persuasion this past week comes from Vice washout Harry Cheadle: “The Digital Media Era Is Definitively Dead: A requiem for a more optimistic time.” Semi-conclusion:

[O]ur collective dream is gone. We were supposed to build… what? I’m still not sure what the end goal of the digital media era was. A more populist vision of journalism, where reporters and editors were accountable to their audiences? A shared cultural and political vocabulary that would cross borders and define a generation? A forum for frustrations with the “establishment,” whatever that might mean? Just a platform for a lot of young media talents?

Whatever we were trying to do, it failed. The money is gone. The jobs are gone. The websites we made are atrophying into junk floating around in cyberspace. I don’t know if anyone will believe me, but man, it was fun while it lasted.

(Never forget our episode on “The End of Vice”!)

* I wrote a thing at the beginning of this past week about how the reasons we are justifiably nostalgic about the Bicentennial do not have much to do with the desires of top-down planners (particularly on the federal level), and in fact had a lot more to do with kitschy commercialism, local goofballs, and Rocky. The kicker:

We cannot, and should not want to, replicate an era when the government constriction of choice corralled most of us into consuming the same or similar media content. But for that vast, vast majority who do not view patriotism as problematic and who love this big and wonderful and horrible country for exactly what it is, there’s a bicentennial lesson just laying there: make it local, embrace the commercial, chortle through the pain, and stop giving the president of the United States even one flying fuck.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Cannibal Holocaust, like The Fifth Column, is not for everyone. Its selection here is not a recommendation that you see this film—in fact, there are parts of it that I wish I hadn’t. But with Scott Pelley and the 60 Minutes sanctimony on the brain, I started trying to think of films in which journalists are the bad guys, and though The Green Berets gets an honorable mention, Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 banned-in-a-zillion-countries shockfest takes the cake. In the first act, we learn of a documentary film crew working in the Amazon to capture exclusive footage of an indigenous cannibal tribe that has gone missing. An on-camera reporter explains that NYU and the “Pan American Broadcast System” are sending a noted anthropologist in after them to solve the mystery, because, well, enquiring minds want to know. Long story short, the good professor finds them, or at least their remains—and their FOOTAGE. As you can imagine, the network is hot on seeing a quick turn of this tragic documentary, making clear they have few qualms with the director’s history of staging scenes. The professor (reluctantly?) dives into the raw footage and witnesses the crew graphically mutilating a giant turtle (no special effects here, folks), massacring villagers, and pitting tribes against each other. Eventually, the good professor has had enough. “This so-called documentary footage is offensive, it is dishonest, and above all it is inhuman,” he screams at the news execs. Their defense? “What you saw is a rough cut!” But the professor has an ace up his sleeve, telling the suits that they haven’t seen the material that their editors didn’t have the stomach to string together. They all file into a screening room and that’s when it gets much, much worse. It is one of the most aggressive media critiques in film history. Is it a bit over the top? A touch. But it helps balance out the cinematic impact of All the President’s Men. Stream on Shudder; buy the BluRay; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Ameya A:

Can I suggest another experiment? Listener questions for guests! Tyler Cowen does it and sometimes gets some good ones. You’d have to ruin the surprise by telling us who you’ve booked but you could limit it to paid subscribers (or NFC-only, sorry economy-plus subscribers) with <24 hours notice.

Good idea!

Sendoff: “You know she ate a pizza / dancing to the beat…” Among the many wondrous discoveries I made four decades ago during freshman year – Newspapers! Ladies! The Replacements! –was an economics lesson in unfashionability. Which is to say, the cheapest clothes, art, and records one could find at the many nearby thrift stores in 1986/87 were anything redolent of the disco-era 1970s. You could get entire, good-condition, mustard-colored polyester leisure-suit combos (including vests with barrel-tassel buttons!) for a buck or two; fat-era Elvis posters for peanuts, and for the princely sum of one quarter literally every single once-gigantic, then-embarrassing album: The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, pink-leather Rod Stewart, anything by Barry Manilow. By this fantastic arbitrage opportunity I quickly amassed what must have been one of the largest disco collections in these United States. Combined with a change of roommates, and the equally important economic discovery of $3.99 cases of Schaefer, this made our apartment a bedraggled, punk-hippy Isla Vista version of Studio 54 for about six spectacularly degenerate months of 1987. Fitting for an era full of mullets, the nightly soundtracks were business in the front (R.E.M., Stones, Sex Pistols), party in the back (so … many … K-TEL records!). At first, people assumed the Isaac Hayes and K.C. & the Sunshine Band stuff was ironic, and would dance along as a goof, but before long everyone realized that A) dancing is fun! (also incompatible with college rock), and B) holy shit, some of these records are great.

Probably a top-10 dancefloor song of that era, on vinyl I still own (sadly, an entire Mustang full of my collection was thieved in 1988 & never restored), was the #1 smash “Boogie Fever” by The Sylvers, who were sort of the West Coast version of the Jackson 5—huge family act (9 of 10 siblings from Watts), huger afros, and an adorable young’un destined for solo stardom. That cute boy was Foster Sylvers, who died this week at age 64 from pancreatic cancer. Sylvers put out a solo album at age 11 even before officially joining the band, and ended up playing bass with his siblings. As foreshadowed, disco collapsed, and with it many artists associated with the genre, including The Sylvers. Foster kicked around the music biz for a while, and eventually kicked around … the sex offender registry, upon a 1994 conviction for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman. (We do warts-and-all around here!) Here’s his biggest hit, going all the way to #22 on the pop charts … “Misdemeanor.”

-A book squarely in the TFC wheelhouse

-The teens, the twenties, the sixties, the seventies, and now

-The forgotten history of left-wing violence

-Italian anarchists and “propaganda of the deed”

-Is Noah handwavi…

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-Bernie Sanders wants to collectivize AI

-The boys bask in the warmth of collectivism

-Never trust a politician giving something back to “the people”

-The centrist Democrat goes missing

-It’s still a Nazi tattoo, goddammit

-Character is out. Winning is in

-Andy the Ogre Ogles has thoughts on the gays and Ted Cruz answers the question and keeps walking

-A few more problems for the Oyster Man from Maine

-Welch was the victim of a French flag hate crime

-Speaking of Nazis, let’s talk about Bari Weiss

-Scott Pelley defends democracy from the new guy and privileged peacocking at CBS

-Ali Velshi feels weird about America’s birthday

-Defending America through the Bob Crane story

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TikTok: @wethefifth
Facebook: @thefifthcolumn

-Murphy opens his book by dunking on his son’s NHL prospects

-Pitching the common good

-Trump is not the disease. He’s the symptom

-Buy more stuff, feel worse, repeat until democracy collapses

-Kids, phones and the algorithmic hell machine

-Congress wants to regulate tech. Congress may want to log on first

-Can In…

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Most every year around this time (annual subscription renewal season), I give a lil’ State o’ the Podcast pep-talk in this space, and forecast what’s coming next for you, our most beloved and foundational of customers. So much has changed around here over the past eight months that it can be hard to even remember how things looked like in May 2025. Since I read every email and comment, and have a Rain Man-style tendency to count numbers, *I* certainly remember … everything.

Twelve months ago, these were the four biggest complaints from subscribers: 1) the audio quality too often sucked; 2) we didn’t exist on video (nor in any shareable sense on social media; 3) no merch (a long-running joke at that point); and, 4) hard as it may be to believe after our recent run, not enough guests, particularly those we disagreed with. From Dec. 13, 2024, to March 14, 2025, for example, we had exactly … one guest. Stretch it all the way out to Sept. 12, 2025, and we’re talking 9 months of 72 episodes with just 15 guests, only 4 of whom were making their debut. Not only did you tell us we were in a rut, some of you voted with your feet: After years of consistent growth, our paying subs over that exact timespan trended perceptibly downward.

So, we listened. Audio was fixed, via the winning combo of recording in person and engineering with professionals (who also managed much quicker & more regular turnaround times). Video was rather decisively launched, including a clips factory that has produced multiple million-view segments. The merch chamber of secrets was finally unlocked, its wonders revealed at three live shows (including two in virgin cities), compared to the previous nine-month total of zero. And yes, we’ve had some guests … 69 of ‘em, including a whopping 52 first-timers, across 93 episodes. Were there some annoying ones here, some boring political hacks there? Absolutely, yes. And there were also: Russ Roberts, Sebastian Junger, Chris Christie, Sarah Isgur, Peter Moskos, Thor Halvorssen, Ryan Long, Steven Pinker, Robert D. Kaplan, Brace Belden, Mark Harmon (!), John Spencer, Ted Henken, Kevin O’Leary, Jason Leopold, Noam Dworman, and Charles Mann, for starters.

Given the opportunity to cross-examine newsmakers, we got 2028 Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel to cry, subjected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to housing policy arguments I’m not sure she’s ever heard, broke news that Sen. Rand Paul (R—Ky.) may have talked Donald Trump out of bombing Colombia, squeezed out some Lindsey Graham dish from Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D—Mich.), and exposed Ben Rhodes to some apparent self-contradictions he hadn’t yet thought through. We asked Megyn Kelly about Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, Lloyd Blankfein about the 2008-09 bailouts, Ana Kasparian about her infamous hand-rubbing gesture and “hatred” of Israel, and Preet Bharara about that time he had the federal government shut me up. While one always second-guesses one’s performances, as a whole, looking over every bold name mentioned above, je ne regrette rien.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t hear your 2026 complaints! Having not just solved but routed three of last year’s four main beefs, while addressing the fourth in such a way that produced truckloads of interesting new content, we nonetheless got all caddywhompus with the whole guesting mix. Our goal going forward—and concrete schedule, as sketched out through the end of next month—is to make sure we have one guestless episode each week, to rebalance the jackassery.

We like to experiment with shit, see? Including booking agencies. We convened one of our monthly Second Sunday subscriber meetings via YouTube livestream, which you absolutely hated, but that experiment allowed us to learn how to use that technology, which we employed to very fun effect on our 10^th anniversary episode, and will be doing much more often in the future. We ran our first podcast ad campaign, which many paying subscribers detested, but that impelled Substack to create a workaround excising the ad from paid feeds going forward. We experimented with a limited-run (and sadly discontinued!) sidebar historical series; brought the One-Hitter concept out of mothballs to spectacular effect, and are right now—again, in response to your feedback—mulling different ways to handle distribution when an interview subject of note turns out to be a bore.

In short, in addition to increasing the amount of content here (please do note that the 93 episodes of the past 8.5 months resoundingly eclipse the 72 that were produced the 9 months prior), we want to jack up the percentage of bangers. We will be openly imperfect along that path, but we will not be resting in any rut. In the last one of these May essays, I made this vow:

When we Pivot to Video, it will not be in coach. We eagerly look forward to the day when remote recording is mostly a bad memory, and all the bottles will be right out there on the table.

Fact-check: True, cubed. Our acting upon your mild disgruntlements of a year ago has helped lead us to all-time highs across every possible metric. This was made possible due to your patronage, for which we can’t ever express enough gratitude. Now what we’re asking you—whether the annual subscriber wavering on renewal, or the free subscriber pondering an upgrade—is to Trust the Process. We are working like bastards to improve, variegate, and vastly increase the scope of this originally weekly, originally moonlit boozefest, and that includes incorporating your feedback at every turn. If you must go, go in peace. But you’ll be missing out.

* Why was Kmele all sad on Thursday? Wasn’t just the smudged glasses; it was having to speak on national TV about all the terrible politics. Here’s a clip of all his words:

* Kmele also did his Tangle this stuff about the various kerf(l)uffles in Texas:

* For both of you who miss me hosting The Reason Roundtable, I did so this past Monday, with the great Mike Pesca (veteran of Episodes #343, #418, #467) sitting in. We talked about lessons from Iran, the anti-Spencer Pratt campaign, Project 2025 revisited, Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund, and the awesome NBA playoffs:

* Here’s a clip of me & my good buddy Preet talking more about Trump’s slushie:

* And here’s another from Members Only #324 with the beloved Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423, #445, M.O. #231):

* Wanna see Josh’s new sizzle reel for Uncomfortable Conversations? Sure ya do!

* Re: the aforementioned NBA playoffs, here’s a New York Post article about that Brooklyn pizzeria in my neighborhood that became the best sidewalk for watching the Knicks. And yes, Moynihan was dead on about the visuals:

* Another NYC tip comes care of alert listener Oliver Mosier: Apparently there’s a proper dive bar downtown called Nancy’s Whiskey Pub, featuring this beaut on the wall. I’ll be patronizing next week:

* Commie-hater and two-time guest Scott Lincicome (#479 & #499) has one of those pieces in The Dispatch that will annoy the types of people who like to be annoyed, but may well be of use to some of y’all in your 20s: “How to Eat Well on the Cheap.” More bang for your buck!

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

As noted when Josh Szeps stopped by, Australia has Asians. That fact is what drives most of the action in Romper Stomper, featuring a young Russell Crowe as the leader of a racist skinhead gang. It’s a compelling, unsettling, violent film that can’t have done much for Australian tourism. The film features a haunting original score by John Clifford White (with some cribbing of Morricone’s Giù la testa), and some really embarrassing fake racist skinhead songs (which really is a genre in its own right). Watch free (with ads) on Pluto; buy the BluRay; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from torontorunner:

Excellent interview -makes you realize how bad some other podcasts are in comparison! Two funny things: when Michael asked Ben if the Obamas have too much money and when Matt said ‘Michelle, not so much’ in relation to Ben’s comment that Obama was so positive about the country.

* Chat of the Week comes from kkmoresi:

Szeps Ep: 10/10 no notes❤️TYVM, a temporary stay of execution for my NFC status has been granted

Sendoff: What can you say about one of the greatest? Trick question, given my vast ignorance of jazz, and need to poke this Firehose out the window & let ‘er fly. RIP to the Saxophone Colossus, one of the few people to make me not resent that instrument in a rock song, deserved recipient of every accolade being tossed his way. Ladies and gentlemen, Sonny Rollins:

-90 minutes of Kmele cleaning his glasses

-Josh is on drugs now

-RIP Jack Karlson, hero of democracy manifest

-we will be referring to limp penis throughout this show

-Erect until the end

-Kmele doesn’t really know the Beach Boys

-Who is the best Australian to ever …

Read more

-Ben Rhodes, wounded ’90s Knicks fan

-Are we winning in Iran yet?

-what should the President do with Iran right now?

-Sanctions suck, mostly

-Cuba and the Obama opening

-Libya and the regime-change trap

-Kosovo worked-ish

-Responsibility to protect yourself from over-learning lessons

-Rhodes wants institutions, not impulse wars

-Is Ben Rhodes Tucker-adjacent?

-Soft power, hard questions

-Navalny didn’t want America’s money

-When Reagan said “Evil Empire”

-Reagan also change his mind

-Moynihan accuses Rhodes of America pessimism

-Ben says it’s because he loves America

-Private equity killed the vibes

-Nostalgia-nomics

-The left-populist temptation

-JD Vance talks pretty

-National identity without a monoculture

-Ben Franklin and the virtue of doubt

-Experts are annoying but sometimes useful

Read All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches

(Bookshop | Amazon)

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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-Trump 2.0 & the frictionless DoJ

-The one thing Jeff Sessions did right

-Even Bill Barr had his limits

-Why do smart lawyers follow stupid instructions?

-You don’t have to win to scare people

…

Read more

The above photo, which was taken Thursday night in Brooklyn with me just off-camera, currently has north of 10 million views on Twitter. “The city is bananas for the Knicks,” including “the phalanx of former Knicks, Frazier and Carmelo, Stoudemire and Starks, all just so damn proud of what they’re seeing on the court,” noted the photographer. The Western Conference finals ain’t no slouch, either; setting ratings records as my 11-year-old’s new alien-sized, Grasshopper-brained bilingual crush tries to dethrone the squad architected by friend o’ Fif Sam Presti. It’s OK to love basketball!

* I mentioned last week that favorite Fif’ sportsfella Ethan Strauss (veteran of episodes #185, #333, #383, Members Only #151, and #408) has been killing it lately; let’s just link to three of his latest: “Thunder Derangement Syndrome,” “The Democrats’ New SEC Strategy: Boycott College Sports,” and “Who Believes in Jalen Brunson’s New York Knicks?” And yes, Firehoses would include more commentary about the NHL playoffs if … somebody else wrote ‘em!

* Also foreshadowed last week, and learned about live on stage in D.C., was the primary thumping of former guest Rep. Thomas Massie (R – Ky.) by some Trump-approved political cipher. It was only immediately after the show that we heard about Massie’s gross concession-speech joke:

In a good-riddance editorial, National Review pointed out that Massie “made a last-minute appearance with [Cenk] Uygur for a friendly interview” before the election, which I guess helps explain why he declined multiple entreaties for some Moynihan-on-Massie action. More NR:

[He] was rabidly and obsessively anti-Israel. He not only opposed aid to Israel, which again, could be explained on libertarian grounds, but regularly accused supporters of Israel of having a nefarious influence on America and of displaying dual loyalty. A few months after the October 7 attacks, Massie posted a meme ridiculing U.S. support for Israel, accusing Congress of turning its back on American patriotism in favor of Zionism. He dismissed colleagues who supported Israel as paid puppets of the pro-Israel lobbying group, AIPAC. When the United Democracy Project, an AIPAC-affiliated group, poured millions into the campaign to defeat him, Massie made opposing AIPAC a centerpiece of his campaign. […]

The outcome demonstrates … that the mindless anti-Zionism that has become popular with podcasters is not a ticket to success in Republican primaries.

* Also touching on the state of GOP play this week were Kmele & the Tanglers:

* For those (very many!) of you who did not much care for #558 guest Rep. Maxwell Frost (D—Fla.), see the above graphic! Best I reckon, we are four-for-four in cursing congressional candidates out of office. (Our Senate record, so far, remains less carcinogenic.) I for one find that for political journalists/commentators, periodically checking in with actual elected officials serves a similar purpose as toddlers touching a lit stove.

* Segue to … Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

This week in D.C. we met Rep. Max Frost of Florida, and I somehow didn’t think to ask him if he had ever seen Wild in the Streets, a 1968 classic about a young, rabble-rousing politician named … Max Frost. Played by Christopher Jones, Frost is a charismatic, narcissistic, millionaire rock star who has surrounded himself with a team of brilliant teenage misanthropes (in looks and demeanor, the fictional Max Frost actually bears great resemblance to Rep. Max Frost’s friend from March for Our Lives, David Hogg). When senatorial candidate Johnny Fergus (Hal Holbrook), who is campaigning to reduce the voting age to 18, appeals to Frost to perform at a rally on his behalf, Frost pulls the rug out by demanding it be lowered another four years, doing so with a catchy little diddy called “14 or Fight.” What follows after the resultant drop in voting age is the lowering of age requirements for holding office. Frost then becomes president, and hilarity/dystopia ensues. The music is great throughout, including “Shape of Things to Come,” which actually hit #22 on the Billboard charts and was later covered by Slade, plus some great psychedelic numbers by Les Baxter. And what a cast! Richard Pryor as Stanley X, Shelly Winters as Frost’s completely psychotic mother, and Ed Begley senior as … the Man. While it is a film that has 1968 written all over it, there are plenty of unsettling parallels with today’s social media stars and callow policy prescriptions. Watch for free on Pluto; here’s the trailer:

* Same couch, same clothes, different guest, different reaction: Y’all seemed to quite enjoy our first chit-chat w/ Slow-borer Matthew Yglesias. Here’s a free clip about A.I. for those in the cheap seats:

In the episode, Matty Ygl talked about how playing poker with some disreputable D.C. libertarians back in the blogging days helped infect some of his policy beliefs. Turns out that on the day we taped, The Argument published a piece from Yglesias touching on some of that, as well as the prospects for an Abundance Democrat/Classical Liberal alliance, under the friends-winning headline “What Libertarians Get Wrong About Freedom: The ideology that thinks it knows everything.” For those interested in such exercises, Ilya Somin has a response.

* In the universes where Democrats actually run things, the discussions do not trend toward trans-ideological curiosity, but rather a butt-sniffing of a whole ‘nother sort, as I yakked about in this edited clip from Monday’s Reason Roundtable:

* Missed us in D.C.? Well, there is currently only one other live Fifth Column show in the being-advertised phase….

Gonna be epic! Go to https://soapbox.fire.org/ and use the discount code FIFTH to save $50 on tickets to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Nov. 4-6 Soapbox conference in patriotic Philadelphia, at which we’ll be podcasting live and enjoying the presentations from fellow speakers Sarah Isgur (M.O. #314), Noam Dworman (#549), David French (#191, #325, #365, #555) Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551), 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 Ilya Shapiro (#361).

* Comment of the Week comes from DawgInExileNC:

Some people learn economics from Scrooge McDuck cartoons, I think.

Sendoff: Sometimes it’s hard to pick which song should go with mention of the recently deceased. This is not such a time. Rob Base, who was 15 months older than I am, died of cancer this week, joining his partner DJ E-Z Rock in hip-hop heaven. Their “It Takes Two” has been part of the air we breathe since 1988, a time when it was decidedly not taken for granted that rap could make it on the pop charts. As Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid tweeted, “It Takes Two was pure Golden Age Hip-Hop B-Boy GOLD. Back when tracks didn’t have to be about Drugs/Money/Violence. No name checking ‘brands’. Just for the dance floor Fun Of It.” The album of the same name went Platinum; Rob’s 1989 solo album went Gold, and that was about it. Was plenty enough:

•The Curse of The Fifth

•Thomas Massie takes the L

…

Read more

-Matty finally makes it through the firewall

-What type of gay is Kmele?

-Yglesias says Welch gave him his career

-Substack’s right-wi…

Read more

-Making music is for rich kids now

-From jazz drummer to Hillary field organizer

-Sandy Hook, March for Our Lives, and the road into politics

-Florida’s felon disenfranchisement fight

-Guns, swamps, Confederate flags, and talking to people who don’t like you

-Florida’s politics are red… its ballot issues are a lot messier.

-Gaining political power is easy. Keeping it is the hard part.

-The case for going big, whether Congress likes it or not

-Housing abundance, rent hikes, and the great pet-fee wars

-Donald Trump’s extremely lucrative career in public service

-Biden’s DOJ, Brazil’s crackdown, and the problem with accountability theater

-Political violence, Trump’s rhetoric, and blaming the victim

-UAPs, Epstein files, and the bipartisan hunt for weird stuff

-Cuba, war powers, and why Frost doesn’t want another Venezuela-style adventure

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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Facebook: @thefifthcolumn.

Before we go any further, there are still tickets available to our show Tuesday in Washington, D.C., now featuring New York Times yakker Lulu Garcia-Navarro, fresh off her waves-making interviews with Graham Platner and Tucker Carlson, and at least one other special guest with fabulous hair.

* On Saturday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R—La.) became the first incumbent U.S. senator since 2017 to lose a primary election, finishing third in a top-two runoff against two Republicans preferred by Donald Trump. Cassidy was one of seven GOP senators who voted to impeach Trump in 2021; only two others remain in office: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Maine’s Susan Collins.

The president was characteristically magnanimous in victory:

Bill Cassidy, after falsely using his “relationship” with me during his political career, and winning Elections because of it, voted to impeach me on preposterous charges that were fake then, and now, are criminally insane! His disloyalty to the man who got him elected is now a part of legend, and it’s nice to see that his political career is OVER!

Coming on the heels of six (out of seven) Trump-backed primary challengers defeating Indiana State Senate incumbents who had declined the president’s suggestion to engage in mid-decade partisan redistricting, and just hours before Tuesday’s Trump-backed primary challenge against persistent side-thorner Rep. Thomas Massie (R—Ky.), the Cassidy defenestration reinforces a paradox: Precisely at the moment when Trump’s approval rating is sinking like an anvil, jeopardizing slim GOP majorities in the Senate and House before his final midterms, the president’s lock on the Republican Party is tightening to near-absolute. Even the candidates that Trump actively insults and campaigns against twist their spines into pretzels in a doomed effort to tell voters that, no really, they’re pro-Trump after all!

Take Cassidy. “If you want somebody who works well with President Trump, you vote for Bill Cassidy,” the senator lamely claimed in a radio interview last week, per the Washington Post. “He may not like me, but he had signed into law four bills that I either wrote or negotiated in the last four months.” So cowed was Cassidy that, despite being a physician passionate about childhood vaccines, he famously voted to confirm conspiratorial anti-vax crusader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services, not that the MAHA faithful ever forgave him for some mildly challenging confirmation-hearing questions.

Previous shirt-models for Trump’s electoral bootprints have also engaged in that frantic, late-campaign triangulation; akin to baseball’s “swim move,” only with less success. Past guest Dan Crenshaw (Episode #476) spent his final days as a viable Republican candidate insisting that “I’m out there defending Trump in places where Republicans are too scared to go,” and running attack ads accusing his opponent of betraying the president on immigration. Even Thomas Massie (#51) in his messaging has been far more likely to stress his opposition from AIPAC and Israel than the orange elephant in the room. Who, in addition to dumping $7 million into what is the most expensive House primary in history, has been TruthSocialing poetry like this:

Tom Massie of Kentucky, the worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman in the history of our Country, is an even bigger insult to our Nation than Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who suffered an unprecedented loss tonight by not even being allowed to run in the Republican Primary. This is the first time such a thing has ever happened to a sitting U.S. Senator! That’s what you get by voting to Impeach an innocent man, especially one who made it possible for Cassidy’s Senate win. Very disloyal, but Tom Massie, a major Sleazebag, is even worse! Kentucky, get this LOSER out of politics in Tuesday’s Election. He is nicknamed Rand Paul Jr., another real “beauty,” because of his absolutely terrible voting habits. Vote for Ed Gallrein, a successful Kentucky farmer, and American War Hero, who only ran because he thought that Massie was so disloyal and disrespectful to your President, ME!

* Cupla Reason-world defenses of Comrade Massie this past week. First, for The New York Times, boss lady Katherine Mangu-Ward (#75, #395) wrote a piece headlined “He’s One of a Dying Breed in Congress. America Needs Him Now More Than Ever.” This section has resonance to some stuff we’ve talked about on the podcast:

For years, Mr. Massie told me, he thought the Epstein files were probably “an internet conspiracy” he did not have time to investigate. Then the Trump administration released binders that seemed to him to contain nothing much at all. Why are they going to these lengths to pretend they’d released something they hadn’t? he wondered.

The question stayed with him. So did the testimony of Epstein survivors. It “was like a level of evil I hadn’t even contemplated,” he told me.

Mr. Massie reshaped his legislative priorities accordingly — and bent his considerable technical skills to a moral crusade. He and Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, pursued a discharge petition — not on a bill, he explained, but on a rule. He had served on the Rules Committee and knew the power it held.

Next, colleague Robby Soave (#332, #517) weighed in with a piece titled, “Thomas Massie’s Enemies Are Attacking Him With an Unfair Accusation: Partisan political actors have seized on a vague and unsupported ‘hush money’ allegation.”

* Jonah Goldberg (#182) for one expects Trump to retain a tight grip on GOP voters, which is our cue for … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap, ad swap…)

The Dispatch: Journalism Without the Circus

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***

* Before Trump went to (Red) China this week and gave Taiwan the equivalent of a shrug-emoji, we sat down in Members Only #320 with the great global affairs journalist, Robert D. Kaplan. Who told us in this free-for-everyone clip that that part of the world is the key to our geopolitical future, in part because “The South China Sea is the most important chokepoint.”

* Kaplan’s influential Balkan Ghosts, which we referenced a bit in our convo, was one of the books I recommended four years ago in a post here answering an email asking for Yugoslavia-related book tips. Here’s what I wrote there:

The one guy who did finish Black Lamb was the one who popularized it for so many of us—the international affairs writer Robert D. Kaplan, in his deeply influential, 1993 bummer of a book Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History. Ghosts, which is great to read in tandem with the far more enjoyable Danube, is a winningly Hellenophobic travel/literary exploration of what is and is not the Balkans, at times reminiscent of the wonderful BBC World Service series “From Our Own Correspondent,” where you’d get these burned-out stringers from Turkshittystan compiling one last big F-you to the hellhole they were finally swapping out for some London R&R. (Kaplan had been a longtime newspaper correspondent in Athens, and seemed very happy to burn those bridges.)

Balkan Ghosts convinced many Western elites that doing anything to stop the raging bloodshed in disintegrating Yugoslavia was hopeless, due to the aforementioned history of murderously entangled tribes/religions/empires. I think Kaplan felt bad for the book being associated with transatlantic hand-wringing in the face of slaughter, and has spent much of the rest of his career trying to make up for it by agitating for a more robust American/Western response to global awfulness. It could also well be that that interpretation is out of date.

* This Bill Maher monologue on American anti-Semitism seems to be getting a lot of traction. Of particular interest to me was how … quiet the audience was:

* Going loudly in the opposite direction was frequent Maher guest Andrew Sullivan (#139, #200 & #449), in a piece subtitled “How Israel threw its soul away.”

* Last week in this space I referenced a Washington Post article detailing some struggles over at Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire empire. That article was followed—a little too closely, turns out—by Ross Barkan over at New York magazine. Luxuriating in the fallout was one Ben Shapiro:

* Our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have been doing a “Free Speech Future” live event/panel series. Here’s one on “Knowledge Creation and A.I.,” hosted by Kmele, in an apartment that will look familiar to some Never Fly Coach subscribers:

* More Kmele here dancing his weekly Tangle-o:

* Still moar Kmele, from his May 4 appearance on CNN:

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

With The Fifth Column’s DC show coming up Tuesday, it’s only fitting to break out the American classic that is The Werewolf of Washington. Though there’s a grand Hollywood tradition of responding to the country’s political upheavals with moralizing, melodramatic Oscar-bait, this is … not that. Directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg (Coming Apart), and released in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, the movie stars Dean Stockwell in as Jack Whittier:

“I was the youngest member of the Washington press corps, its fastest rising star. One of the best and the brightest, as we used to say. Before so much blood passed under those pretty Potomac bridges.”

It’s a tale as old as time: journo having affair with the president’s daughter decides to flee to Budapest, but then gets offered the job of White House Press Secretary, but before leaving Budapest, becomes a werewolf, and proceeds to devour victims in a pentagon–shaped pattern across D.C., which the administration is then keen to cover up. Watch for free on YouTube, or for a real good time, watch it on Prime Video with Elvira hosting (replete with Sarah Palin impersonation). Trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Kevin Sullivan:

Talking about Malthus because of some Jihadis in Niger and ignoring that India has been basically fine as far as resources go is insane.

Also just casually said the US middle class is worse off and that’s just absolute BS. People might feel precarious, but that’s because of vastly higher expectations for what “middle class” should mean.

Kaplan isn’t a dumb guy but this conversation honestly feel like the vaping version of Mearshimer’s American Spirits.

PS. As far as regularizing migrants in Spain, that’s not the cause of Vox at all. It’s almost all just signaling. And this is one of those things where I have to say if you’ve never heard the word “arraigo”, you should probably stop to figure out exactly what happened. Basically it was already a process where after 2 years, an illegal migrant could get papers*. So the “regularization” was basically just moving 18-24 months of applications all at once but it’s going to take so long to process it’s basically just going to be exactly what it would have been regardless and is mostly a virtue signal thing to keep the left wing coalition together.

*I think that’s a bad policy, too but it’s been a thing forever

* Sendoff. You will do worse things with the rest of your Sunday than listen to the great-sounding first four albums by Clarence Carter, the blind and quite horny rhythm & bluesman who died Wednesday at the ripe old age of 90. Big baritone throat that he liked to strain at the top (or talk lower about sexytime). Winning late ‘60s/early ‘70s Muscle Shoals production with loud drums and danceable funk. You have heard some of his novelty horndog songs: “Back Door Santa,” “Making Love (at the Dark End of the Street),” the later-career “Strokin’” and “I Got Caught Making Love.” But don’t sleep on “Slip Away,” and this banger below:

-The social machinery behind weddings, money, and power

-How a norm starts to die once someone breaks it and gets rewarded

-Trump as the great destroyer of polite restraints

-The institutions that lost the authority to enforce trust

-How new taboos appear without anyone admitting who created them

-The spiral of silence reaches Harvard

-Pinker tries to fix academic freedom from inside the building

-The Trump administration turns a real university problem into a power grab

-Why dictatorships keep lying after everyone knows the truth

-The subversive power of a blank protest sign

-Ceaușescu discovered that crowds are not always props

-The right decides cancel culture is useful after all

-Pinker revisits the case for progress, with several ugly caveats

-Why stories can change moral imagination

-Postmodernism gets a second life in Trumpworld

-Silicon Valley goes looking for kings

-Harvard’s antisemitism debate gets very uncomfortable

-The blank slate takes another beating

-The Monty Hall problem breaks the room

Read When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… by Steven Pinker

(Bookshop | Amazon)

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

We’re pleased to announce that when we’re in DC next week at the Miracle Theater, we’ll be joined by the fabulous Lulu Garcia Navarro of the New York Times.

There are still a few “Premier” tickets available, which include an after-show meet & greet with Kmele, Michael, and Matt, and the general admission seats are moving pretty briskly, so if you’re thinking about coming out… stop thinking and pull the trigger!

Get Tickets!

Follow The Fifth Column

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X: @wethefifth
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We’re pleased to announce that when we’re in DC next week at the Miracle Theater, we’ll be joined by the fabulous Lulu Garcia Navarro of the New York Times. More about Lulu:

Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a two-time Peabody Award-winning journalist. She hosts the New York Times’s flagship franchise The Interview and is a former longtime international correspondent covering the Middle East and Latin America. She spent 17 years at NPR, most recently as host of Weekend Edition, and is an on-air contributor to CNN.

There are still a few “Premier” tickets available, which include an after-show meet & greet with Kmele, Michael, and Matt, and the general admission seats are moving pretty briskly, so if you’re thinking about coming out… stop thinking and pull the trigger!

Get Tickets!