As some of us (OK, me) were saying on the Second Sunday Zoom call with paying subscribers, this year’s 9/11 anniversary commemorations just hit a bit different, surprisingly so. Could have been residual shock over the murder of Fifdom’s beloved Andrew Wimsatt, could have been a lingering suspicion that the profound shittiness of our contemporary politics is downwind from those awful explosions, or maybe it’s the numerological magic of silver anniversaries.

Whatever the source, there’s a lot more snarl this year, which brings me to the late Tom Petty. As mentioned on Episode #574, I had a distinct memory of our laconic Florida Man of Song delivering a days-after fundraising-telethon version of “I Won’t Back Down” that appeared as if he hadn’t slept since the attacks & was ready to choke out Osama bin Laden on stage. Moynihan corrected me that it came in October, but no, that was the Paul McCartney-organized Concert for New York City of Oct. 20; Petty was part of the Sept. 21 A Tribute to Heroes. The more important point being, my memory of the performance was totally correct:

* Last Monday, or about a thousand years ago, I sat in the hosting chair for The Reason Roundtable, talking about 9/11, but also the collapse of government-run K-12, Che-D Vance’s proposal to subsidize stay-at-home mothering, and whether failures on RFK-jay’s watch mean that the FDA is important after all:

* Bill Maher was in a grumpy mood on the 25^th anniversary, and many (fine) people (on both sides) are here for it:

* It’s funny; Maher mentioned there, with appropriate good humor, how Politically Incorrect was cancelled because of his post-9/11 statements about the hijackers not being “cowards.” As it happens, when I was forcing myself to read my not-infrequently cringeworthy post-9/11 output, both professionally and on my (*wretches*) warblog, I came across my second-ever published piece for Reason, headlined “Censorship Gravy Train,” that took a scornful view of Maher, his defenders, and anyone claiming that there was a significant post-9/11 crackdown on dissent. I think I was right (if maybe too flip) about the ridiculousness of pre-emptive free speech martyrdom, but the column also vibrates with a certain chip-on-shoulder professional envy that advertises some of the obscurity I whined like a cur about in my self-published Aug. 22, 2021 rant (also referenced on #574), “Astonishingly Bad Career Management.”

I am not proud of these pieces, at all, but include them to encourage those many of you have written us over the years, asking about stalled-out writing aspirations, rude professional setbacks, or even mid-career shifts into journalism and media. I won’t tell you that it gets better, but that it can get better. After all, as I snuck into the very lede of that Reason piece,

After September 11, editors who had spiked exactly zero of my previous 152 columns and articles about politics and the media suddenly refused to publish five out of 11 about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath.

Yeah, I fucking counted. But I also didn’t lose my sense of proportion. Some doors close, new ones open (Reason, the National Post, Tech Central Station, which I had forgotten about until this moment). In a way that might sound weird to 99% of you, especially knowing me now, those unfathomably rough weeks after Sept. 11 is when I chose, at long bloody last, to be the type of American who lives in and tries to have at least some tiny influence on America. You can sort of see that happening in real time, over the course of three days in the spring of 2002, when I A) went see the Angels on Opening Day (of what would be their championship season!), and then B) learned about the 9/11 murder of my childhood neighbor, Chris Newton.

* Kmele & the Tanglers also took on 9/11 this week:

* Those of you are not paying subscribers missed out on some of the excellent, informed conversation in Members Only #343 with New York Times DoJ reporter Devlin Barrett about his valuable new book, The Department of Revenge: How Trump Took Control of American Justice. Fortunately, you can watch this clip about how Stephen Miller has assumed a historically unprecedented role in steering the federal government’s law enforcement apparatus:

* The Moynihan Report this past week made it a solid 3-for-3 in reboot awesomeness by landing Penelope Spheeris, director of the stop-what-you’re-doing-and-go-watch Decline in Western Civilization series. “[W]e talk about the lost movie she made with a cocaine-addled Richard Pryor; how she ended up directing big Hollywood films like Wayne’s World and Black Sheep; her...errrrr...unvarnished feelings about Tina Fey, Brittney Spears and Jennifer Aniston; and how the ratbag Weinstein brothers precipitated her retreat from Hollywood.”

* In last week’s Firehose, as dutifully flagged by Busty Wimsatt, I neglected to include two clips of Kmele on CNN that Andrew had posted to the Paloma Media page. Here they are, beginning with Sept. 3:

Then Sept. 5:

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Before SNL, before Kentucky Fried Movie, there was The Groove Tube, a 1974 spoof on TV news, commercials, sitcoms, and culture writ large that I was shocked to learn that the hosts of your favorite media-criticism-kinda podcast have not seen. It’s 10 pounds of sketch comedy & set pieces in a 5-pound bag, replete with gratuitous nudity, Richard Belzer in blackface, and Chevy Chase. It’s not all gold, but worth sifting through for the TV news segment with reporting from the front lines of Suk Muk Dik, Koko the Clown reading erotica for the kids at home, a ‘70s cop show from the POV of the drug dealers, and Director Ken Shapiro dancing through the streets of Manhattan performing “Just You, Just Me” to the befuddlement of New Yorkers, maybe one of the most joyful scenes ever put to film. Rent on Amazon Prime, buy the Blu-Ray; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week goes to Andrew Wimsatt:

This latest Firehose reminds me of what Kmele said In FC Episode 193. Here’s the transcript:

“And it’s hard for me to believe that the progress of the South, broadly speaking today, is not stunted, stultified, by the egregious crime of slavery, and the subsequent energies that were expended brutalizing black people and systematically discriminating against them. Everyone in the South is a victim of slavery, everyone, black, white, and otherwise, all of them. The culture is perhaps tainted by it in some insidious way that is somehow not known. The ones who are perhaps the worst, most victimized by it are probably like white people who still harbor all kinds of bizarre racial resentment they’ve been taught and been passed down generation to generation, and it is explicit, and it holds them back and makes them unable to operate in polite society. They’re victims of systematic racism to the extent that it’s a thing. And quite frankly the entirety of the United States’ history, I imagine, if it never had slavery, the entire country would be more prosperous, and it’s certainly true that the South would be more prosperous. I think of all of the brilliant Africans who were imported to this country by force and pressed into service, and their progeny, which must have included a couple of Einsteins, that were effectively never allowed to achieve anything. They were robbed of opportunity. They lost, and yes, their progeny perhaps led a less wonderful life because of it, but it’s hard to say, But it’s certainly true that all of us lost, and that sensibility is part of why I feel like,you know, the Juneteenths - I wish that was something that we could celebrate together universally, because both overcoming slavery and recognizing the awfulness of slavery, like the injury is all of ours, It is collective, it belongs to the country, and in the same respect the victory belongs to all of us as well, and I don’t think it’s a mistake to call it a victory. And I’ll talk about the obscenity of reparations another day, but I said enough.”

(Audio clip here:

Sendoff could be no other:

As discussed at the top of Episode #574, Andrew Wimsatt, beloved cornerstone of The Fifth Column community, was brutally murdered on Labor Day in a sunny Austin park by a cowardly knife-wielding lunatic who snuck up behind him and attacked, utterly unprovoked. The crime is all the more shocking for the profound gentleness and decency of the victim.

We come here to remember and celebrate and express gratitude toward our friend Andrew, whose name will be etched permanently on our under-construction sixth floor recording studio, probably within the area where Never Fly Coachers will be invited to watch us podcast live. Busty, after all, probably witnessed us recording more than any other fan—coming to all the live shows except one, raising his hand on every damned Second Sunday, pouring drinks around the (very!) Stupid Table for Special Dispatch #34, post-gaming an episode or three back when we recorded at the DIY Paloma Media studio.

Andrew first buzzed across my radar in December 2013 when, over the course of a few days, three things happened for the first time: 1) The Independents television show, starring MTV’s Kennedy, Kmele, and myself, debuted on the Fox Business Network; 2) Wimsatt started following me on Twitter, and 3) he gave a four-figure donation to the Reason Foundation during our annual Webathon. It makes sense that these were related: Andrew l-o-v-e-d music, he adored the anarchic energy of Fox’s legendary late-nite show Red Eye (his pinned tweet for the past decade has been a celebration/compilation of Greg Gutfeld’s chosen outro music on The Five), and he was long attracted to the no-nonsense, structural-engineering ethos of Reason Foundation transportation-policy stalwart Bob Poole, whose annual highway report Andrew suggested improvements for.

We hung out for the first time in Austin back in September 2018, after which he started doing what Andrew Wimsatt does, which is send us (or just tweet out) clips of all us + others in the extended Fifth Column/Red Eye multiverse whenever we’d appear on other media. He was famously much quicker on the draw publicizing a new Fifth Column episode than any of the drunk co-hosts, and at some early point we just gave him the keys to our Facebook page. And oh yeah, did I know he actually saved most of the entire run of The Independents? (You can watch a few over at the Paloma Media YouTube page, which was chiefly the fruit of his labors.) When we started doing Patreon in November 2019, and created what we thought was an absurd, no-one-will-ever-go-there level of $50-a-month subscriptions, Andrew became one of the first few to Never Fly Coach. He would come to New York several times a year, including the last couple during our annual sojourns to the Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Cooperstown. I took calling him “Busty,” for the very stupid reason that a funny British friend of mine back in the ‘90s would always refer to Kate Winslet as “Busty Winslet,” and this very accomplished transportation engineer not only took it in stride, he kind of beamed a bit when the nickname caught on in the community.

That’s the fan/Fifdom side of Andrew Wimsatt. But he was so much more than that. Let’s now hand the mic over to one of his Austin pals, who pseudonymously tweets under the handle Austin Justice. This terrific obit gives you a much fuller picture of the man:

Andrew Wimsatt spent his life figuring out how to make things last longer.

Roads, bridges, tunnels, pavement, friendships.

He held three civil engineering degrees from the University of Texas at Austin, spent 18 years at TxDOT, ten of them as Fort Worth District Pavement Engineer, and in 2006 joined the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, where he eventually ran the Materials and Pavements Division and its $9 million annual research program. He worked on ground-penetrating radar, nondestructive testing, asset management.

Describing the work once, he said the real challenge wasn’t building new things; it was making what we already have last longer.

Andrew made what we already have last longer.

He was an obsessive live-music fan who would fly across the country to see a band. He loved Slowdive. In 2023 he was recommending “Souvlaki” and “everything is alive” to anyone who’d listen, singled out their cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair,” and admitted that when he heard them play it at FYF in 2014, he teared up. In 2016, when bad weather killed Levitation and Slowdive threw together a surprise show at the Scoot Inn, Andrew happened to be sitting at his computer and grabbed two $7.50 tickets in the roughly two minutes before it sold out. Then he recorded the entire set on his iPhone for a friend.

He made music too. He’d been in bands with Karl Rehn since high school, engineered their home cassette recordings in the early 1980s, and in 1990 released “Reflections” under the name the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, cut at Sixth Street Studio. He and Rehn made music videos that ran for years on Austin’s ACTV, and contributed to the score of a 1994 documentary about Barton Springs.

Then there was the archiving, which is maybe the most Andrew thing about him. He clipped television. Constantly, expertly, for free, for people he admired. The Fifth Column crew (@wethefifth) called him “Busty Wimsatt” and, in their newsletters, “ever-alert,” “indefatigable,” and at least once “American hero.” @MattWelch called him their most devoted cliphawker. Andrew painstakingly uploaded old episodes of “The Independents” so they wouldn’t disappear. He clipped @KatTimpf‘s Fox appearances for her Locals community. He sent @walterkirn clips of Kirn’s own jokes.

“Boy did I feel special,” Kirn wrote today. “Not many strangers will go out of their way to give another that kind of encouragement.”

He was not, for the record, employed by any of these people. He contributed old photographs to @iowahawkblog‘s Dave’s Car ID Service. He was a fixture in Austin’s science fiction community and once drove Howard Waldrop home from Worldcon. He was an executive producer of Penn Jillette and Adam Rifkin’s “Director’s Cut,” and appears in it, briefly, as “Greeting Cop.” He hosted a regular libertarian beer gathering at the Johnny Cash-themed bar Mean Eyed Cat. He was, per @JTLonsdale, one of University of Austin’s (@uaustinorg) original small donors. He bought a camouflage “No Step on Snek” hat at a Texas gun show this summer and his friends heard about it.

The man lived.

He lived in Cambridge Towers, a 1965 midcentury modern building near the Capitol. Punk rock, pop surrealism, midcentury furniture, a gentle Southern manner. He loved salt to a degree his friends used as a unit of measurement.

He was, by every single account, one of the kindest people anyone had met.

@greggutfeld: supremely gentle, willing to do just about anything for another person.

@PlanetTyrus: always positive, physically slight, with a monster laugh.

@NancyRomm says he once gave her the jacket off his back when she was getting hypothermic.

A friend of 13 years and dozens of concerts tells me he never once heard Andrew say an unpleasant thing about anyone.

Both his parents were English professors. His father, James, was a Chaucer scholar at UT Austin who died in 2023 at 96. His mother, Mary, took her doctorate at Duke, ran the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, held an endowed chair as McClintock Professor of Southern Letters at South Carolina, wrote the first full-length study of a nineteenth-century novelist almost nobody remembered, and spent five years on a public radio project designed to get ordinary people reading Faulkner and Welty.

His parents spent their careers recovering things other people had stopped reading. They taught their son to make things last longer.

His mother now has Alzheimer’s and lives in a nursing home in Round Rock. Andrew helped care for his father at the end, and then her. His routine was to drive out, walk with her, and then take a second walk alone.

He photographed what he saw on his walks. His Instagram is herons -- wading, fishing, one caught mid-wingspan over the water -- plus hawks in bare branches, a squirrel wedged in a tree hollow, a snail on a brick wall, bluebonnets, and a lot of Texas sky at the second it went orange.

Two days before he died, he was at a friend’s house for movie night, watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 do “The Crawling Hand.” He spent his whole life trying to make things last longer, and he was good at it, and he was doing it right up to the end -- the second walk of the morning, until he sat on a park bench in the morning sun.

He is survived by his siblings, Alison Ross and David Joseph Wimsatt. And by his mother, who he walked with that morning, and who does not know he isn’t coming back next week.

Thank you, Austin.

Another tribute from another friend, Lawrence Person:

I first met Andrew through Karl Rehn, because Karl and I were both prog rock fans who traded tapes in college at UT. Andrew had been bandmates with Karl in high school, and roommates shortly after college. I remember playing P. D. Q. Bach’s “Prelude to Einstein on the Fritz” in their shared apartment, telling him it was the latest Philip Glass CD. When it got to the “Ko-Hosti-Tatsi” part, Andrew went “This isn’t Philip Glass.” Karl, Andrew and I were also in a band together whose entire point was to piss people off.

Being smart, geeky and well-read, Andrew naturally slipped into the orbit of my group of friends. In addition to his existing love of music, Andrew was easy to get involved in your own interests, be it science fiction, guns or politics. I sold him several books over the years, and he ended up driving Howard Waldrop and Ellen Brody back to Austin from the 2013 San Antonio Worldcon. Karl and I might have sucked him into politics equally, to the point he was doing some behind-the-scenes work for The Greg Gutfeld Show and the We the Fifth podcast. Andrew frequently flew across the country to catch a show for one of the many bands he followed, or for watching the taping of a political show. He was even an executive producer on the Penn Jillette film Director’s Cut.

Andrew loved all sorts of obscure bands I’d never heard of, but I was the one who introduced him to Slowdive. We saw three Slowdive shows in Austin, in addition to a King Crimson show and a very intense Filter/Everclear show at Liberty Lunch right after both those bands burst into prominence in the 1990s.

Andrew was a devoted son and brother, who helped care for both his ailing mother and his father James, a literary academic and occasional SDC member who died at age 96 in 2023.

Andrew spent his career as a civil engineer working for the Texas Department of Transportation and related entities. He spent stints in Fort Worth and College Station, but even then frequently drove back to Austin on weekends to see his friends.

I saw Andrew two days before he was murdered, when he came over Saturday to match movies with us, where he saw the giant collection of books someone gave me and we watched the MST3K version of The Crawling Hand.

His murder offers up several bitter ironies. He was a CHL/LTC holder who likely would have survived his assault had he been carrying that day. He owned a condo in the crime hotspot that is downtown Austin but was killed in nominally safe suburban Round Rock. Both his parents were long-lived, and Andrew, who frequently walked several miles a day, probably would have lived to a ripe old age had he not been cut down.

He was a sturdy friend, and I will miss him greatly.

Another Texas pal was the great history podcaster Jack Henneman. His remembrance, in part:

I got to know Andrew only four or five years ago. He had become a fan of the History of the Americans Podcast (of which I am … fond), and invited me to a meet-up of people he thought would be similarly-minded at the Mean Eyed Cat Bar in Austin, which happens to be a short walk from my house.

How did Andrew know they were similarly-minded? They were all fans of The Fifth Column Podcast, which you probably know is libertarian-ish, at least insofar as its hosts are intellectually consistent free market and free speech types who cannot abide the current versions of the Republicans and Democrats. Their fans are loyal, and their meet-ups, formal and informal, involve smart people who have a good sense of humor sharing ideas and laughs. That was high cotton for Andrew.

Anyway, Andrew was by no means one of my closest friends, but I had drinks with him 2-3 times a year, mostly at the MEC, and he had been over to the house a few times, and I would run into him at virtually any event in the libertarian ecosystem in Austin, whether for FIRE, Reason Weekend, or the University of Austin. People in all these organizations knew Andrew, and he was universally liked as a generous and kind fellow who never had a bad word to say about anybody. We need more of such people, and now we’ve lost one.

There will be a gathering at the Mean Eyed Cat this Monday at 7 p.m., organized by Iowahawk. Who, in his Car ID Service posting of today, writes:

It’s a melancholy day at Dave’s Car ID Service, as we bid farewell to one of our most frequent and valued contributors - Andrew Wimsatt. […]

I think our mutual friend @AnnaZ perfectly summed up Andrew as “everybody’s biggest fan.” His various fandoms include countless bands, visual artists, podcasters, @wethefifth, @reason, @uaustinorg, and @TheFIREorg. And I am humbled that one of his fandoms was Dave’s Car ID Service.

You may have noticed from reading the various tributes to him over the past few days his adjectives: kind, generous, warm, positive, never had an unkind word about anyone. All true. But he seldom spoke about himself, despite having a very distinguished career as a civil engineer in road materials research. He was far more interested in talking about you, with zero expectation of anything in return. He was the least transactional person in a hyper-transactional world.

If you were lucky enough to have Andrew as a fan he was generous with his time and support, and in my case, that support included loads of his old family photos with mystery cars. I can’t fully repay my debt to him for that.

But I’d like to dedicate this episode of Dave’s Car ID Service to him, and use those photos to illustrate the life a genuine mensch.

Our own Ileana Knollenberg expands on some of those themes:

Busty was incredibly competent, accomplished, and knowledgeable, yet in conversation he mostly asked others about themselves. He was heavily involved in raising and caring for his much younger brother, and cared for his ailing mother to the very end. He traveled all over the country to be with people whose company he enjoyed, without fanfare. In @wethefifth circles, we just expected him to be there, and he usually was. He gave his time, energy, and effort to various groups of people just because, and I don’t think he realized his contribution was unusual or extraordinary. We met in person less than a dozen times, yet he remembered details about me, and would ask about my daughters and my work as if he were personally acquainted with them. He never missed an opportunity to offer genuine appreciation, and he had a special way of making one feel important and loved instantly.

All the tributes I’m seeing from people who were tangentially connected with him make it clear that his goodness was transcendent, independent of tribal, geographical, or familial allegiances. Having met Andrew has made my, and many other people’s lives, richer. That’s a legacy to aspire to.

Is it time to embed a 2017 Andrew Wimsatt lecture on pavement design? Hell yes it is:

As importantly, here’s a video of his band, the Andrew Wimsatt Ensemble, prog-rocking their song “Solitary” in a park:

Fox News has been doing a good job remembering and honoring Andrew. Gutfeld and Kat Timpf and Tyrus and Kennedy have all tweeted tributes. As I told Timpf Thursday (and which she knew better than I!), Andrew loved her & her work so damned much.

Other tributes have come from Fifdom faves Liz Wolfe, Nancy Rommelmann, Kat Rosenfield, Greg Lukianoff, Nick Gillespie, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Peter Meijer, and no doubt countless more.

I hope that all of us, starting with me, can take from Andrew’s example inspiration to become a better and more cheerful and selfless person. There is a giant and gentle hole in our community that will never be filled, but the more we try the more we’ll remember our dearly departed friend. RIP Busty.

Greetings! Below find the link for this month’s Second Sunday, taking place LIVE on Zoom at 5PM EST (on Sunday)

Paid subscribers get the link below the fold.

Read more

-And in lighter news, it’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11

-Trump’s 9/11 story

-Why we’re called The Fifth Column

-When Matt Welch welcomed us to war

-Moynihan moved to New York on September 10, 2001

-How much of your memory of the day is actually real?

-Mary Beard and other “the US had it coming” takes

-Little Eichmanns and the root-causes Olympics

-Did we win the War on Terror?

-You get $5,000! And you get $5,000!

-Midterm Madness and the two Dan Sullivans

-Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP speedrun to zero

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 most famous person from Troy, NY?

-shut your whore mouth, Producer Jason

-we actually do have a serious guest today

-a radical re-purposing of the Justice Department

-James Comey and the seashells

-lowercase justice

-Tom Homan and the $50,000 CAVA bag

-Abscam and the lost art of government …

Read more

In our Members Only #341 episode with Semafor co-founder Ben Smith, I put forth the proposition that, with the twin collapses of the journalism industry and demand for non-national political news, the information-consumption market has devolved into basically one massive general-interest newspaper (The New York Times, though the Wall Street Journal similarly dominates biz/finance), and one premier news magazine. Which I suggested, erm, was The Atlantic.

On Tuesday night, not long after our taping of M.O. #342, Kmele went on CNN and sat next to The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill. The results did not bolster my hypothesis:

“Black Entrepreneur Humiliates Jemele Hill on CNN After She Claims Capitalism and White Supremacy Are Connected,” went the somewhat unknowing headline over at The Western Journal (the exchange was also covered by Fox News and Twitchy). Kmele’s performance was praised by Ben Shapiro, Mary Katharine Ham, Matt Taibbi, Steve Guest, Derek Hunter, Scott Jennings, Emily Jashinsky, Kennedy, Anthony Brian Logan, Stephen L. Miller, Spencer Klavan, Sage Steele, Brad Polumbo, Ian Miller, Jeff Charles, Peter Heck, Matt Vespa, The Officer Tatum, Doc Rich, Brianna Lyman, Rikki Ratliff, Yemisi Egbewole, and Drew Holden, among others. Less impressed were Marc Lamont Hill and Roland Martin (the latter of whom called our co-host a “fool”).

In a couple of Twitter follow-ups, Hill, who had been suspended from ESPN in 2017 for calling Donald Trump a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists,” elaborated on the connection between white supremacy and capitalism:

America was built on the institution of slavery. It is how America became a world economic power — the buying and selling of people being tied to the economy. That is effectively white supremacy, since it was a race-based system.

Fast forward to other economic policies that were guided by race — housing, employment, etc. There were rules that prevented Black people from equally participating in the free economy.

In fact, one of the most glaring features of American capitalism is racial inequality. The racial wealth gap exists because specific policies were put in place to suppress economic participation.

So yes, capitalism is tied to white supremacy.

And then:

I never said capitalism was racist. I said that there is a relationship between capitalism and white supremacy because of how it functions in America. You all are sticking to theory and not looking at the fact that we practice racialized capitalism in this country.

If capitalism were operating in the pure form that you want it to, then there wouldn’t be such a significant racial wealth gap. But there is a racial wealth gap because we exist under a racial construct whether you like it or not.

That does not mean that there are not individuals who are able to achieve despite this construct. But we know that the salaries and pay of white men are higher than those of Black men, Black women, and Latinos. Because in this country value is attached to race.

Don’t get mad at me. Get mad at the institutions.

Kmele, for his part, chose Tangle for the post-game:

* Hill’s contention that slavery was fundamental to the success of American capitalism has long been in vogue among the softer-headed corners of the journalistic and academic left, reaching peak visibility in The 1619 Project by The New York Times. One year before that Nikole Hannah-Jones “new origin story” for the United States, the marvelous economic historian Deirdre Nansen McCloskey published a relevant Reason piece titled “Slavery Did Not Make America Rich.” Excerpt:

[T]he economic idea implied—that exploitation made us rich—is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves. […]

[E]ach step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles. Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills. […]

Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production. […]

We need to stop using the history of slavery to bolster anti-capitalist ideology. Ingenuity, not exploitation by slavery or imperialism or finance, is the story of the modern world.

Phillip W. Magness plowed similar ground in his Reason review of the 1619 book:

[I]n the original 1619 Project[,] [Nikole-Jones’s] opening essay there declared that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” In early 2020, [New York Times Magazine Editor in Chief Jake] Silverstein begrudgingly amended the passage online to read “some of the colonists” (emphasis added) after Northwestern University historian Leslie M. Harris revealed that she had cautioned Hannah-Jones against making this claim as one of the newspaper’s fact-checkers, only to be ignored.

The ensuing litigation of this passage across editorial pages and Twitter threads unintentionally revealed an unsettling defect of the Times‘ venture. The 1619 Project was not a heterodox challenge to conventional accounts of American history, as its promotional material insinuated. An endeavor of this sort could be commendable, if executed in a scholarly fashion. Instead, the original essays by Hannah-Jones and Desmond betray a deep and pervasive unfamiliarity with their respective subject matters.

When subject-matter experts pointed out that Hannah-Jones exaggerated her arguments about the Revolution, or that Britain was not, in fact, an existential threat to American slavery in 1776 as she strongly suggested (the British Empire would take another 58 years before it emancipated its West Indian colonies), she unleashed a barrage of personally abusive derision toward the critics. Brown University’s Gordon S. Wood and other Revolutionary War experts were dismissed as “white historians” for questioning her claims. When Princeton’s James M. McPherson, widely considered the dean of living Civil War historians, chimed in, Hannah-Jones lashed out on Twitter: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.”

The 1619 Project did not simply disagree with these subject-matter experts. Its editors and writers had failed to conduct a basic literature review of the scholarship around their contentions, and subsequently stumbled their way into unsupported historical arguments. While some academic historians contributed essays on other subjects, none of The 1619 Project’s feature articles on the crucial period from 1776 to 1865 came from experts in American slavery. Journalists such as Hannah-Jones took the lead, while highly specialized topics such as the economics of slavery were assigned to nonexperts like [Princeton sociologist Matthew] Desmond, whose scholarly résumé contained no prior engagement with that subject.

As I mentioned (coincidentally enough) at the outset of M.O. #342, fear of slave revolts in the 18^th century Caribbean and West Indies drew the other 13 colonies closer to England’s embrace. Three relevant recent paragraphs from me:

Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s 2000 book, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean, suggests an additional context [about Thomas Jefferson’s slavery hypocrisy] worth considering. There were not 13 British colonies in 1776 America, O’Shaughnessy reminds us; there were 26, including the wealthy sugar islands of the West Indies. These plantation economies had much more in common, commercially and culturally, with the American South than either did with the Northeast: huge cash crops, constant maritime exchange, and massive slave populations (90 percent in Jamaica, 60 percent in South Carolina and Georgia, 40 percent in Virginia). With the last came boundless human cruelty, widespread disease, and a thrumming fear of armed revolt.

Terror at the prospect of slave rebellions—such as Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica, which began in 1760, lasted a year and a half, and took 500 lives—helped bind the West Indies closer to the bosom of Mother England, positively begging to quarter more British troops. Partly as a result, the 13 mainland American colonies were the only ones to revolt.

We can and should look upon Jefferson’s slavery blind spot as the ultimate revolutionary failure, a sin utterly unoriginal from an otherwise extraordinary man. But we may also ask ourselves why the South nevertheless rebelled when the West Indies did not and how a man of this time and place came to pen what Frederick Douglass would call the ‘promissory note’ of true American emancipation. The world’s first abolitionist society opened its doors in 1775 Philadelphia. As with issues of democratic participation, the Founders helped create a world they were not yet ready to live in.”

* Related Comment of the Week, from Philip Pomerantz:

I would also recommend Richard Bell’s recently published The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. It is a comprehensive look at the many parts of the globe that were affected by our Revolution. The Caribbean is part of that. Jack Henneman recently interviewed him. It is worth a listen, as all of Jack’s output is.

We discussed The 1619 Project on #151, #163, Special Dispatch #12, S.D. #26, #205, S.D. #68, S.D. #94, M.O. #189, and #227. Some on-point, listener-beloved Kmele-led conversations with various special guest stars include “Linguistics, Race, Antiracism” (Dec. 2017), “On Anti-Racism” (Nov. 2018), “Unlearning Race” (Oct. 2019), “On Pandemic Racism” (April 2020), “On Anti-Racism II” (June 2020), “Racial Identity, Abolition and Reckonings” (July 2022), and “Notes on White Privilege” (Sept. 2022).

* The re-booted Moynihan Report is off to a start that’s beginning to rival John Paciorek. Here, in full, is KISS front-man Gene Simmons, a.k.a. Chaim Vitz, talking about “his mother’s survival of the Holocaust, coming to America, KISS, Bob Dylan, money, marriage, and why the music business isn’t what it used to be.”

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

“I’m an expert on tits. Tits and peanut butter.”

As briefly mentioned by Moynihan during Episode #572, British director Bruce Robinson made just a handful of films, but the ones he did left a mark. Two years after his debut, the incomparable (and autobiographical) Withnail and I, Robinson teamed up again with Richard E. Grant for a portrait of a London ad man pushed to the brink. Suffering from writer’s block while trying to create a campaign for a new pimple cream, Denis Dimbleby Bagley appears to suffer a psychotic break, one that sends him on a mission to cleanse his life of everything that is contaminated by advertising. However, he has apparently spent so much time thinking about boils that he has developed one of his own. And that boil, my friends, has a mind of its own, and some thoughts about Bagley’s newfound ethics. Get the Blu-ray, stream on the Criterion Channel; here’s the trailer:

Sendoff: The other day the (brilliant!) comedic actor/singer Michael McKean tweeted out one of those dumb little things, about how “The Beatles first single, Love Me Do, is now old enough to sing When I’m Sixty-Four.” Which, A) enough about the Beatles already! (sez the Beatles freak), and B) is a reminder that some onetime charting musicians can have been retired for literally 60 years at the time of their death. As happened just happened with country & western singer Frankie Miller, who died last week at the ripe old age of 95. I used the “& western” appellation advisedly, as I had been banally ruminating the other day whilst listening to old Gene Autry and Eddie Arnold records that we have mostly lost that once-important, even dominant strain of sound & storytelling that was always there as background noise and culture—from Cal Worthington to Bob Wills to Buddy Holly to Buck Owens (covered by the Beatles!) to Merle Haggard to Dwight Yoakum to X to the Beat Farmers to Giant Sand and on and on. Lotta schlocky bits about doggies and horses, forgettable black & white pictures, and silly if great romantic ballads, sure, but also some tough, tight, and eminently danceable honky-tonk guitar music that I will listen to any damn day. Anyhoo, Frankie Miller was an energetic if responsible Texan who “excelled at football,” made an early ‘50s run at a recording career, joined the Army & earned a Bronze Star in Korea, worked the local and regional music circuits, and finally broke through in 1959 with his self-penned standard “Black Land Farmer” (watch him perform it in 2015!). Cupla lesser hits ensued, including our chosen track, but: “His straightforward, spare, honky-tonk style was out of step with the more-produced Nashville Sound stylists that were then ascending. In addition, he reportedly lacked ambition and suffered from stage fright. Miller left the music business. He went to work at a Chrysler dealership in Arlington, Texas.” That was that. “In the 1980s, he became a cult figure, with record collectors avidly championing him as a nearly forgotten country stylist.” RIP to a great family man:

-The tractor beam of sexuality

-James B. Meigs is here

-Tucker Carlson is just asking questions. He’s less interested in the answers

-It’s 9/11 season. Call in the OG debunker

-Jet fuel didn’t have to melt steel

-Death threats for… Popular Mechanics

-Tucker finds Israel in the JFK files

-Revisiting Loose Change, 20 years later

-Conspiracy theories thrive in the ruins of journalism

-Data centers or, hear us out, server farms

-The mailbag interrogates Mr. Science Man

-Hugging Face and the AI agents chatting amongst themselves

-Midterm Madness goes to Texas

-Talarico vs. Paxton, somehow a toss-up

-Flock cameras solve crimes. They also know where you’ve been

-Nature, Jason Arday, and the death of fact-checking

-UFOs are real. The aliens remain elusive

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

Follow The Fifth Column

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

-A Caribbean anti-colonial fantasy

-A gay Lady Chatterley’s Lover… and hockey

-Oh, Milo

-Because it’s funny. It’s a joke

-Milo, the Tates, and the “it was all a bit” defense

-ICE, deportations, and discovering empathy the hard way

-He gave as good as…

Read more

Look, the kid had a big week, so he can get top billing here *one* last time. We already embedded the whole Moynihan Report re-boot episode in the show notes of Episode #572, so let’s just grab one short from the TMR YouTube page:

Will Shat FTW!

* So does Kmele show up to his other jobs? Answer: The ones that record remotely! Here our getting-the-milk man confers with his Tangle bros about “decency in politics against the backdrop of the race for Iowa’s governorship, a New York Times poll on Sen. John Fetterman’s appeal, Sen. Darline Graham’s primary win, and Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s interview with Fox News’s Jesse Waters.”

* On Members Only #341 with Semafor honcho Ben Smith (veteran of #125, #227, #404, and #480), we asked commenters to name celebrities who could compete with the late, great Dolly Parton for universal American lovability. Your answers, ranked by my opinion of their plausibility:

Clint Eastwood

Stevie Wonder

Charles Barkley

Steve Martin

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Shaq

Snoop Dogg

Denzel Washington

Keanu Reeves

Tom Hanks

Mel Brooks

The Rock

Dick Van Dyke

Tom Selleck

Matthew McConaughey

Weird Al

Brenda Lee (did not know she was still alive, thank you!)

Mark Cuban

Luke Combs

Jeff Bridges

Emmylou Harris

Lauryn Hill

Mr. T

LeVar Burton

Corey Feldman

Not sure there’s much daylight between #3-10 on this list…. Still can’t believe I’m the only one who thinks Willie Nelson shoots near the top….

* On one of our recent episodes, Moynihan & I talked a bit about how a damning investigation of Democratic olds-spamming/scaring/soaking by the political scientist Adam Bonika was killed by The New York Times. Well, this week, Bonika dropped the other shoe, on The Bulwark. It’s … not great, Bob!

At The New York Times, publication was derailed by a cease-and-desist sent by the Democratic party committees. At The Bulwark, it was derailed by the publisher, a political consultant herself, whose comments on the locked draft rejected the premise that standard industry practices warranted scrutiny. […]

The Bulwark had been at the finish line, and I could not make sense of why it had gone cold. Then I opened the post-legal-review draft and saw a set of comments from Sarah Longwell, the paper’s publisher. […]

What arrived was an extensive rewrite, delivered as a condition of publication twelve days after the piece had cleared a third round of legal review. It took the subjects’ legal arguments and set them down in my voice, as my own conclusions. Several of those changes directly contradicted the fact-checking record, asking me to endorse claims we had already proven false while deleting, without explanation, the vetted evidence that disproved them. Elsewhere, the rewrite undermined the investigation, excusing high fundraising burn rates, recasting donor extraction as a strategic necessity, and deleting the disclosure paragraph informing readers that subjects had responded to requests for comment with legal letters and that no subject had identified a single factual error.

I emailed the editorial team to explain in detail how the rewrite introduced factual inaccuracies, removed vetted evidence, and placed vendor defenses under my byline. I offered a viable path forward: return to the legally cleared August 1 draft and work from there. The following day, I was informed the piece had been killed. […]

When I reached out to The Bulwark for comment, presenting them with a detailed outline of the timeline and factual account of the editorial process, they issued the following statement:

“After a great deal of good-faith effort, The Bulwark did not publish Adam Bonica’s article because his work did not meet professional journalistic standards. We presented him with a draft that could meet journalistic standards. He chose to publish elsewhere.”

* Time for the triumphant return of Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

A few months back, VICE co-founder Suroosh Alvi sent me this Instagram reel made by someone in India suggesting that Dhurandar was based on The VICE Guide to Karachi (which he and I made together in Pakistan–much to my mom’s chagrin–back in 2012). But, I wondered, what the hell is Dhurandar? Well, clearly I don’t speak Hindi, because it turns out that Dhurandar is the highest grossing Hindi-language film in the history of India. The film is incredibly violent, fantastically melodramatic, action-packed, and very, very long. It is, essentially, an Indian revenge fantasy set against the backdrop of real-world events (like the 2001 Indian Parliament attacks and the Lyari gang wars in Karachi), and featuring a handsome, ripped Indian secret agent with glorious hair going undercover in the slums of Karachi to infiltrate and destroy Pakistan’s terror network. Though not based on the VGTK (alas!), it does feature wonderfully cartoonish versions of some of the same characters, namely Karachi gangster Uzair Baloch, and the police superintendent best known for extrajudicial killings, Chaudhaury Aslam. How do people in Pakistan feel about all this? They do not like it. Clocking in at three hours twenty-five minutes, Dhurandar is an epic with filled with espionage, intrigue, so much slo-motion you’ll be able to refresh your drink, and some truly over-the-top torture scenes. If, like me, you find that at the end you still want more … there’s a sequel. Stream (the “Raw and Undekha” version) on Netflix; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Sean:

RIP Tim Curry. Muppet Treasure Island is one of his best. Good reason to post the quote that makes the rounds whenever he or Michael Caine are mentioned for their roles in Muppet films:

“the reason Michael Caine and Tim Curry are so good in their respective Muppet movies is that Michael Caine treats the Muppets as fellow actors, and Tim Curry treats himself as a fellow Muppet”

John Doe (love your discography!) also adds value on the same topic:

Here is the full compilation of Curry hamming it up as the soviet general for those curious. Plus pierce brosnan

Sendoff: Keeping on the above theme. Obviously, Dolly Parton’s too big for words just yet; I’ve been mourning all week. But listening in the car to some tribute tracks on my (very good) alt-ish rock local WFUV, I was reminded that Tim Curry’s singing—not unlike William Shatner’s!—has a total commitment to the bit that’s breathtaking, inspirational. Am including his most famous song here, yes, but in my defense I heard the thing every damn week growing up on Dr. Demento, and it was almost certainly the source of me first encountering the words “transvestite” and “transsexual.” Still haven’t seen the movie, though, which I understand may qualify me for The Hague.

Watch the episode, subscribe on YouTube, and sign up for Moynihan’s Substack while you’re at it.

Now, back to the Fifth:

-why you have to watch this podcast

-Sanna Marin…for the policy

-Finding Kmele Foster

-Welch returns from Montreal to report that the French lost

-life in the time of Trade War

-NPR finally solves reparations

-tariffs, hockey sticks, and remedial economics

-JD Vance is still not funny

-Polymarket bets on Canada

-Tucker discovers Christian Russia

-Clip Roulette returns

-Tim Curry, Richard E. Grant, Producer Jason’s inexplicable defense of Hudson Hawk

-Bret Weinstein solves the Charlie Kirk assassination

-Ana Kasparian keeps making new friends

-Mamdani, Muhammad and the death of secularism

-a bit more Clip-O-Rama

-Tuck and the Short King discover 107 million illegal immigrants

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

Subscribe now

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Facebook: @thefifthcolumn

You know the drill: We get more email than we know what to do with, and when the quantity of quality fills up too high, we slosh ‘em out here in a Mailbucket, with some slight editing/hyperlinking, plus tasteful, non-A.I. retorting. This month’s batch includes some shorties in addition to the usual longer value-adds, because, well, we haven’t really been doing Mailbag episodes lately, and we no longer record the Second Sunday Zoom calls for paying subscribers.

From: Jane M.

Subject: Peer Pressure (of the Beneficial Sort)

Date: 08/14/26

Gentlemen,

My first email to you guys! Long time listener, member, and, as of last year an official NFC’er Cha-ching (sic?). I saw it can be spelled with a “K” but gonna stick with how I hear/spell it as someone with some authority on the matter as my first job was as a cashier at Woolworths in downtown Philly where there were big, old school, noisy cash registers. Whether I was working in the record department, or the pet department (occasionally and accidentally losing and chasing down canaries while wearing platform heels no less and without much success in retrievals either ha), that sound was ever present. Cha-ching indeed!

Another first is that I was at the recent Zoom and had the pleasure of speaking with you, and it was pretty damn special. Only sorry Kmele wasn’t there too. I’ve logged in before but never raised my hand. Now I truly feel like a regular and will surely be back!

So, in the afterglow of such a fun experience, while watching the August 12th episode, I became entranced with the bottle of tequila and the Fresca on the table (and the jokey asides), and though I’m generally not a tequila person it piqued my interest to the point — and here is where the beneficial peer pressure comes in —that I ended up purchasing the exact-exact tequila and Fresca and am enjoying it after work tonight (no longer as a cashier, ha, but as a pharmacist and poison specialist at [redacted place of work]).

So, with an ahhh and a Cheers, thanks for all the ideas and great conversations boys!!

xo

(You misspelled “Ding ding ding!”, though no flag on the play, since I can absolutely hear that Woolworths cash register cha-chinging. Two things about our encouragement of alcoholic degeneracy: 1) It’s one of our most cherished traditions, right up there with objective pro-natalism, and there may in fact be another limited-edition partnership with another flavor/purveyor of hooch coming soon. And 2) the white-trash Paloma in particular, long championed by our pal Gustavo Arellano, just sorta became the unofficial cope-drink during Covid, to the point where when me & Nancy Rommelmann were creating a beloved if short-lived media company, the name just had to be Paloma Media (which lives on at YouTube, and in the DNA of the podcasts Ask a Jew and Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em). There are endless variations on the drink, but after years of experimentation with Squirt, Jarritos, San Pellegrino, and even those fancy fruit-juice concoctions they charge extra for at airports, the winning combo is what you see here: Fresca + your favorite tequila blanco, which in my case has been the Casamigos.)

***

From: Will B.

Subject: RFK and the Yaktroversy

Date: 07/30/26

In another episode of “Can our politicians be any weirder?”, RFK for some reason posted a video of himself fending off a yak on a hike in Bhutan. What stood out to me in his post was the admission that he “lost his guide.” Unlike most of the subjects you guys cover, this is actually in my wheelhouse, as I worked for several years as an outdoors guide. I can tell you that losing your guide isn’t like losing your car keys — not easy to do, and is one of the worst things that can happen as a guide. Thankfully this never happened to me, but had happened to a few guides, and every time was the fault of the guest. The way I see it there are three possibilities:

1. He had an exceptionally bad and irresponsible guide (unlikely but possible).

2. He’s lying (more likely).

3. Every so often you get a guest who is so narcissistic and delusional that they show up to a place they’ve never been, assume they know the lay of the land better than the local people, and decide to go on their own little adventure without telling the guide. Sometimes they’re bored and impatient with the pace of the hike — especially if it’s a group hike — or sometimes it’s an alpha statement (i.e., I spend a lot of time outdoors so why do I have to listen to this “guide?”).

Based on what we know about the guy, I’ll let you guess what scenario I think is most likely. As far as him fending off the yak, maybe murdering it with his bare hands and depositing it in a park somewhere — that I would believe.

Thanks for your attention on this important matter.

(This kind of expert testimony is precisely what Mailbucket readers have come to rely on!)

***

From: Tim C.

Subject: Fact Check: Korean Armistice

Date: 07/27/26

(By sheer dumb luck, I write on the anniversary of the ceasefire. Was catching up on episodes after some midsummer travel; please pardon the delay.)

Youse guys,

I write in response to an offhand comment Moynihan made during #566. I am sufficiently saturated with peaty scotch such that I wonder if my laptop should qualify as heavy machinery....

At the time of the episode, the Iran “ceasefire” had collapsed yet again. Youse and I both use scare quotes because the ceasefire had all the hallmarks of a TV timeout. In comparison to the Iran breather, Moynihan cited the Korean Armistice as an example of a ceasefire that held.

On the long-term: Yes, probably. Looks that way.

On the short-term (read: 15 years): Er, not so much.

There was a time that the DMZ was not fortified with some 1-3m mines and barbed wire that could reach the moon and back. In 1954, political leaders representing every country with a dick that could swing met in (where else?) Geneva to resolve the Korean political crisis. When that fell through, something of a status quo ante bellum emerged. However, per SOP, the communists maintained a low-level harassment campaign into the south, regularly sabotaging foot patrols (several hundred casualties 1954-1964) and otherwise being the obstinate pricks we know and love.

Fast forward to Vietnam. The U.S. is experiencing internal political upheaval. Our commitment to Asia seems tenuous. North Korea reads the writing on the wall and sees an opportunity to leverage unrest elsewhere to dislodge the American security presence on the Korean peninsula.

During this time, we see the Easter Ambush, amphibious sabotage on SW Korean villages, the taking of PUEBLO, and the crown jewel: the Blue House Raid. For Kim Il-Sung, 1964-1968 was a period of renewed and reinvigorated hostilities because the DPRK assessed they could ride the coattails of America’s Vietnam disillusionment into a divested peninsula. It was only because of this period of increased activity and intensified pressure that we saw the emergence of mines, fencelines, and the like. Until then, the dream of Korean reunification prevented the emplacement of tangible deterrent measures we recognize today.

P.S.: Coincidence that it’s all timed to the Tet offensive? Food for thought.

(What was I saying above about expert testimony? Absolutely 0% of this is in my wheelhouse, so I appreciate the lesson and will take your word. In general and nearly always, the things we think are and were always permanent, turn out to be not so.)

***

From: Howard P.

Subject: Pivot to Video

Date: 08/19/26

Hey Y’all

After taking an edible and walking the dogs I’d like to say I’ve been with y’all since the beginning, but I promise there’s nothing in God’s green earth that could compel me to watch a podcast.

(I reproduce this squib to make a point that should be but isn’t obvious: You don’t have to watch the video! The reason we turned the cameras on was that there is a big and important universe of podcast audience that just lives on YouTube, whether you want them to or not. Not having video was denying us access to those people. More consumers typically listen to our podcast than watch, some big viral YouTube hits notwithstanding. It’s been an adjustment for us to keep the non-viewers in mind as we record, and it’s up to y’all to tell us when we’re falling short on that end. And yes, we are now *using* the visuals to enhance that part of the experience. But you absolutely positively do not have to watch the video to enjoy this podcast! Also, DING DING DING!)

***

From: William K.

Subject: [MW Going Solo]

Date: 08/16/26

Can I just subscribe to a Matt Welch daily newsletter and leave the other two out of it?

(William, you bring up an important point! And also, HAIL nah! First of all, if I wrote a daily newsletter, in addition to the 3.5 podcasts I record per week, there would be zero time for any of the longer-form writing I need to do in order to not fling myself from the 22nd floor. Second, I have a day job! Third, I know you’re not being overly serious, while also being very nice, and thank you for it. Were I to branch out, a la the re-booted Moynihan Report, y’all will be the first (or second) to know. But most likely any extra activity will either be some bonus stuff around here (a la The Revolutionaries), or maybe I finally put together a book collection of my longer pieces.)

***

From: Jacob G.

Subject: My First Published Piece!!!

Date: 07/20/26

Gents,

Wanted to share that I had my first article ever published … and I have no idea how you are able to do this for a living. From the drafting, to the redrafting, to the back-and-forth revisions with the editors, to the anxiety of “Will it even be published” … it just about killed me. However, the sense of accomplishment seeing it posted is a cool sensation.

I wrote about the application of Agentic AI in SW development and how this should fundamentally shift the procurement strategies of the Department of War. I was able to discuss some of this briefly with Kmele after the DC show, but could not go into much detail then.

I know it is a lot to ask, but would love to get your thoughts on the piece. Should I keep my day job?... The answer of course is absolutely fucking yes!!!

“The Make-or-Buy Line has Moved”

P.S. a published piece is still only half as rewarding as hearing your letter read out on your favorite pod (53:07) and Michael telling you to go fuck yourself (in a loving way)!

(Congratu-fucking-lations! Welcome to the fraternity, now bend over! J/k. My first published article, which came out 40 years ago next month [or October], was … a review of a Santana concert at the Santa Barbara County Bowl. I didn’t really know jack about Santana — whoa, what was this “Devadip” period all about?! — but I boned up excessively at the campus library, took copious notes at the concert, and I’m sure wrote some embarrassing crap.

But! When they pulled me off the Arts desk to co-byline a news feature with my best friend, noodling about whether there was a New Generation of violent frat dicks menacing the country (we had both been in the thick of the OP Pro riots in Huntington Beach that summer), THAT was a process so arduous and so painful that A) I thought I would never write for a newspaper again, and B) after I barely survived it, have subsequently inflicted the way I was edited onto literally everyone I have ever worked with ever since. Which is to say, us two 18-year-old greenhorns from Long Beach suddenly found ourselves hunched over a VDT Online terminal not with the assigning assistant Campus Desk editor, or even someone as high as the Assistant News Editor, but rather the intimidating Editor in Chief of the whole damn possibly-best-in-the-country newspaper, who had jabbed his editing notes IN ALL CAPS after literally every sentence we had written. The notes, needless to say, were much longer than our article. It was like being punched in the nose, eyeballs, and dick, all at once. The piece eventually ran, right on the front page, and though it, too, is embarrassing, it set me on my way.

This is a long way of saying: Son, you do NOT want my editing notes. But I’m sure the class will chime in!)

***

From: Mike

Subject: Terry Moron

Date: 08/14/26

“Gentlemen,”

Been a paid subscriber for years now. Yours is the only political
punditry podcast I can stomach since the Orange Age came to be in 2016.

Terry Moran is, by far, the most insufferable guest you’ve had to date.
Vapid, self-aggrandizing, and lacking any ethical, moral, or ideological
consistency.

I was going to go into further detail, but I see no point. Just wanted
to share this opinion with you.

Seriously, holy shit, wow.

Keep doing that thing you do.

P.S.: You all (”the media”) need to stop using the phrase “out over [person’s] skis” as a metaphor for losing control of something or attempting a task beyond their capacity. When you’re skiing, you need to be over your skis. This is how you engage the majority of the skis’ edge, maintain stability at speed, and execute proper turns. It’s actually really difficult to fall by putting your weight over your skis, as the vast majority of a ski is in front of you. When someone gets behind their skis, that’s how the skis slip out from underneath them and they eat shit. I’m assuming — pure speculation — that some clueless New Yorker that had a disastrous experience at Hunter Mountain popularized this term with absolutely no skills on the slope, and other ski-clueless people parroted it because it sounded good to them. Using “out over your skis” in this way is like using the phrase “has both hands on the wheel” when making a driving metaphor for someone losing control. It makes no sense.

(Normally we don’t post emails trashing guests, even those that do it with a sense of appreciation for what we’re trying to do in those episodes. But the metaphor-policing in this P.S. is too delicious to pass up.

As an avid non-skier since age 15 or so, I guess my mental image for the phrase was someone getting too caddywhompus on a ski jump, tipping over from aerodynamic efficiency to full-on face-plant. But then, that doesn’t really jibe with the implied hubris-fueled mistake. Then after your email, I defensively imagined that maybe the aphorism makes sense in *water* skiing…. But no.

Best I can reckon after a thorough 10-minute search is that your “some clueless New Yorker that had a disastrous experience at Hunter Mountain” theory may well be the winner. Per this 2012 New York magazine piece, “[T]he phrase’s metaphorical use seems to have begun in the finance world. Its first non-skiing print usages came in the early nineties, in publications like Investment Dealers’ Digest. For instance, a 1991 article quoted a ‘market source’ describing a race between Goldman Sachs’ and Lehman Bros.’ preferred stock desk. ‘Someone said [Lehman] couldn’t get a clean legal opinion on it. They may have been out over their skis a little bit with their structure.’ It makes sense that investment bankers would let their weekend hobbies inform their workday slang. It’s still a favorite in the finance world — far more than in political spheres.”)

***

From: Don V.

Subject: [Terry Moran and National Service]

Date: 08/14/26

The Terry Moran interview was interesting and a lot of fun. However, I’m surprised that none of you, including Terry, recognized that the answer to his concerns about “solidarity” etc. is quite simple: a draft (or “national service program,” to be polite). Putting everyone who turns 18 into cohorts of randomly selected peers from every part of the country, income distribution, etc., is without doubt the best way to build solidarity, because it forces people to work together regardless of their differences, and exposes people to others as individuals.

The argument against the draft was largely carried by, of all people, Milton Friedman, and was made on the basis that an army of conscripts is far less effective as a fighting force than a professional, all-volunteer army. The fact that Vietnam was going on might have had something to do with it as well.... Anyway, Milton was not wrong about that. However, there are other ways to achieve that — we have always had professional, all-volunteer fighting forces (the Marines, Air Force, Navy, etc.), and a national service program would not need to be limited to military service — that could be one component, alongside other options such as wildland fire fighting, medical service, etc.

I think it will take someone on the left to make this happen, as there is no way anyone on the right is going to propose this.

Love the show — thanks for the great work!

P.S.: Paid subscriber (send me a response, and I will upgrade to NFC!)

(I will first say DING DING DING, because Don already upgraded….

So, as longtime listeners named Ben Price know all too well, this is a subject that provokes in me an almost irrational hostility. I refused at age 18 to register for the “Selective Service,” despite then-plausible, serially mailed threats of jail time. I refused to sign the [still!] required State Oath of Allegiance when I worked for the University of California system from 1988-1990. I tried like hell to get out of taking a goddamned urine test as condition for employment at the L.A. Times, and at least got a whiny column out of it. I am an American, and Americans do not like being told what to do.

My calm argument against national service is threefold. In rough order: 1) We own ourselves. Having a *government*, run by scumbag politicians and backed by lethal weaponry, dictate how your life shall and shall not be lived when you are a grown-ass adult is abhorrent. 2) Nothing compelled is authentic. Not speech, not loyalty, not “solidarity.” I happily sing the National Anthem; I never happily stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance at school. 3) The rich and well-connected will always find a way out. Solidarity in the streets, bone spurs (or gap years) in the sheets. Back when French military service was still mandatory, you could “fulfill” it by getting a job abroad with a French multinational. Gee, I wonder what kind of kids were able to obtain those, particularly in low-cost, high-glamour cities like Budapest?

Here are some related things I’ve written, in chronological order:

“Does Declining Volunteerism Mean We Need National Service? Only If You Don’t Count Money”

“‘Selective’ Service Refuseniks Are Still Punished, Just Not Prosecuted”

“Mayor Pete’s ‘National Service’ Plan Was a Nationalist Fantasy”

“Washington Wants To Be Able To Draft Your Daughters Into Military Service, in the Name of ‘Equity’”

“Women Are on the Verge of Being Forced Into Military Conscription Due to a Perverse Notion of ‘Equality’”

“House Votes To Make Your Daughters Eligible for the Military Draft”

“BTS’s Military Conscription Is a Reminder That Mandatory ‘Service’ Is Servitude”

OK, that’s it for this month! Keep on writin’, everybody!)

-Karen Attiah and the Charlie Kirk quote that wasn’t real

-Firing people for tweets + the last good account on Twitter

-Why is Semafor worth so mu…

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Hello et bonjour from lovely, whimsical, and also a wee bit shabby Montreal, where I’m currently dropping off the firstborn (pictured) at her frankly pretty swank freshman dorm. “Dad, what is ‘intersectionality?’” was a question I heard yesterday, and hoo boy it will not be the last.

To mark the Welchification of Canada, President Donald Trump on Saturday did another trade war, making Moynihan’s precious hockey sticks and booze cost 50% more. “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” an ashen-faced Canuck PM Mark Carney said. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.” Meanwhile, the city of Montreal on Monday will vote on whether to sever all ties with Israel, and “recognize and denounce the apartheid regime in Palestine and the genocide being perpetrated there.” Things are going great.

* Huzzah for Stephanie Slade! The book (with link this time) is called Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, and here’s a J.D. Vance-tastic clip:

Here’s a baker’s half-dozen Slade pieces that’ll give you a sense of where she’s coming from:

“Against the New Nationalism” (2020)

“Is There a Future for Fusionism?” (2021)

“Both Left and Right Are Converging on Authoritarianism” (2022)

“Trump Doubled Down on Authoritarianism by Selecting J.D. Vance” (2024)

“National Conservatism Has a Bigotry Problem, Whether Yoram Hazony Wants To Admit It or Not” (2025)

“The Book That Explains the Heritage Foundation Meltdown” (2026)

“America’s Founders Blended Liberalism and Religion” (2026)

* Kmele did some CNN things this week. On Thursday it was about national debt, WalMart sales (?), the Trump-Michael Cohen rapprochement, and more:

And on Saturday he was back to yak about Trump’s dismal approval ratings, the sad case of #Resistance Democrats, and ABC suing the Federal Communications Commission:

* Speaking of the latter, free speech hero and FIRE co-founder Robert Corn-Revere came off the top rope this week in giving FCC scumbag Brendan Carr a hearty two thumbs up for jeopardizing his own stupid agency. Excerpt:

It is widely said that you are nothing but a political hack who sold out your previously professed beliefs about free expression and the rule of law for the short-term goal of being named FCC chairman, that you corrupted the agency’s nonpartisan purpose by focusing its efforts on punishing perceived critics of the Trump administration, and that you regularly prostrate yourself with cringe-worthy displays of servility to soothe the president’s fragile ego.

All these things may be true. But the criticism is terribly unfair because it fails to acknowledge your substantive accomplishments. When the dust settles, it may turn out that you have done more than any FCC chairman since the agency’s creation in 1934 to advance full First Amendment protection for the broadcast medium.

* Kmele & the Tanglers this week talked about Woke 1, “Natalie,” and Jon Ossoff:

* This week’s Reason Roundtable covered (surprise!) the DSA, Trump cancelling military exercises with South Korea, and why Harry Truman is underrated:

In the very, very dark days of June 2020, when people (including we three co-hosts) hadn’t seen each other for four months, the mischievous woman in the above pic opened up her marvelous and very airy countryside house & barn to us rabble and our families for a life-saving re-meetup, plus (of course!) a podcast episode. That woman was Kathy Hayes, mother of Nancy Rommelmann, widow of three great men including legendary New York Review of Books caricaturist David Levine. As mentioned in Episode #571, Kathy died Monday after a looong final chapter of broken hip + dementia. She was a funny, stylish, flirty center of attention who loved to regale you with stories about her overseas adventures and exotic ancestors. Her great life’s work was the three gorgeous adjoining properties near Stanfordville, and she loved to see people love the land right back. Even the ones from space.

* Comment of the Week comes from Andrew P:

This is the video form of “Some Idiot Wrote This” and I’m all for it.

Sendoff: Blues singer/songwriter/pianist Latimore died this week at the age of my parents, 87. Had I heard of Latimore before plucking his name off the obit list? Reader, I had not. Did I have time this week to bone up on the recently deceased, maybe even take a stab at a cover? Double negatory. But this slice o’ mid-‘70s soul is tasty, and perhaps even has unplanned resonance with the themes at the start of this Firehose! More depth and more time next week….

-J.D. Vance seizes the means of production

-Let’s define “conservative” in case you forgot

-So what the hell is Fusionism?

-From free markets to owning the libs

-Cultural resentment > economic anxiety

-Is there a reset after Trump?

-Whe…

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-Welch has a bone to pick with Ben Dreyfuss

-Clip Roulette

-Tucker and the Demon Bomb

-Jason Arday, martyr?

-The Jonah Lehrer comparison

-The Samantha Power mic disaster

-Fuck you Joaquin

-John Mearsheimer, Stephen F. Cohen and the Russian apologists

-Ukraine didn’t go away

-Trump, Kim Jong-un and the South Korea war games

-Midterm Madness / Polymarket, wha happen?

-Median Strategies and the fake poll

-Adam Bonica, Marc Elias and scamming the elderly

-Is Cuba a dictatorship? Apparently a difficult question

-The Padilla Affair / Slobo Googling

-Theft as a “biological need”

-Chocolate City

-Stay tuned for más Moynihan Report

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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Since all work and no play makes Jack wander through the empty halls of the haunted hotel with a butcher knife, we do occasionally step out into the sunshine and (for a change!) enjoy a cocktail or seven. Such, such were the joys of last night’s annual Osprey Blues Festival hosted this Saturday by our partner in crimes, Jonathan Farber. You’d think we woulda snapped some Fif’ pics on this rare public/private outing, but instead we will torture you with horrid listener-created A.I. art.

* As mentioned here previously, at the end of Members Only #339, fired ABC News veteran Terry Moran spilled tea about “the one time I did feel the heavy hand of censorship.” It was spring of 2021, the day that Nightline was scheduled to air his long-gestated piece on the Covid lab-leak hypothesis, and the segment came back with edits rendering it “incomprehensible,” thanks in part (he was told) to some pre-screening by none other than Anthony Fauci:

Unsurprisingly, this revelation attracted notice: In Mediaite, Fox News, the New York Post, Hot Air, ZeroHedge, Newsbreak, Belaaz, Twitchy … hell, even Ground News!

Another Mediaite-attracting clip was this bit on whether ABC News is a liberal institution (“yes”), whether viewpoint diversity is a good thing (“yes”), whether journalism has a bubble problem (“yes”), and whether Terry Moran is himself in it (weellllll….)

Also, on that episode Moynihan briefly mentioned the fired-post-9/11 academic Ward Churchill, who (as many listeners pointed out) promptly died. Not the first time that’s happened….

Finally, several of you pointed out and criticized the do something nature of Moran’s public-policy thots. Well, turns out I wrote a whole-ass cover story about that media tendency back in 2011, with the perhaps-ungenerous headline of “The Simpletons: David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and the banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry.” Snippet:

Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail. On September 30, 2008, in a classic of the do-something genre, Brooks argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program should be rammed through Congress over public objections because the federal government needed “to give people a sense that somebody was in charge, that something was going to be done.” Did that “something” involve buying up toxic assets? Introducing or relaxing certain banking regulations? Taking over or winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Not important. “What we need in this situation,” Brooks declared, “is authority.”

American discourse is saddled with a large and influential do-something school of political punditry, a cadre of pragmatists from Meet the Press to your local editorial board who are forever seeking to solve the country’s problems by transcending ideology, demanding collective citizen sacrifice, and—always—empowering authority. In their new book That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, Friedman and Johns Hopkins foreign policy professor Michael Mandelbaum lament that people “in positions of authority everywhere have less influence than in the past,” due to a “corrosive cynicism” preventing “the collective action that is required.” America, David Brooks wrote in March 2010, “is suffering a devastating crisis of authority,” resulting in a “corrosive cynicism about public action.” The similarities are not accidental.

* Rare sighting Thursday of Moynihan on cable news, talking about ICE, J.D. Vance’s response to socialism, AOC’s woke-triangulations, Todd Blanche’s speech to the Justice Department, and Donald Trump re-re-naming the Kennedy Center. Heckuva screen cap:

* Kmele, too, took his regular perch on CNN Tuesday, yakking about DSA elections, the post-Trump GOP, moves to nationalize election policy, and the Air Force 1 switcheroo:

* On Wednesday I appeared on Runaway Country with Alex Wagner, a newish pod in the Crooked Media/Pod Saves America stable, talking about the DSA, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party, and Tucker Carlson’s trial balloon for a third-party run. My bit starts at the 33:46 mark, though you may want to re-wind if you like Act Blue ads:

* Speaking of the alleged Tucker Carlson candidacy, I threw some cold water on it Wednesday over at Reason. Here’s a section on the Carlson/J.D. Vance/Peter Thiel relationship that may be of interest (as are some of the hyperlinks therein):

Carlson was one of a dozen attendees at a foundational 2019 meeting in Rockbridge, Ohio, convened by Vance and his longtime mentor Peter Thiel, that soon blossomed into “one of the most influential forces in GOP politics,” according to a November 2025 Washington Post article about the collection of Silicon Valley investors, economic populists, and media entrepreneurs. “Political strategists,” the Post asserted, “credit the close-knit network of businessmen-cum-donors with helping fuel the president’s reelection last year and propelling one of its own—Vance—into the vice presidency.”

It was also good for Carlson: 1789 Capital, a “patriotic” and “anti-woke” venture capital firm founded by some of the Rockbridge attendees in 2022, chose as its first investment Last Country Inc., the digital media company Carlson founded after being fired by Fox News. (Beginning in the momentous month of November 2024, the venture fund brought on Donald Trump Jr. as a partner.)

The vice president and the podcaster have had each other’s backs ever since that first meeting, in service of Rockbridge’s aim to (in the Post‘s characterization) “equip MAGA to outlive Trump.” In March 2025, Carlson called Vance “the only person in the entire Republican Party…who’s capable of carrying on the Trump legacy and expanding it, making it what it should fully be.” At a Heritage Foundation event the following month, he said “J.D. Vance is the future, period.”

Things got squirrely after the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk, which sent some in the conservative mediasphere down conspiratorial and antisemitic rabbit holes, leading both to widespread condemnation and strategic fence-sitting. Amid a season of reporting about racist and antisemitic trolling among professional young conservatives in Washington, D.C., Carlson chose this moment to interview Nazi Groyper Nick Fuentes, a decision that would soon lead to convulsions at the Carlson-supporting Heritage Foundation.

Vance’s first response to all that was to post on X that “The infighting is stupid.”

* Tangle News this week posted a live discussion on A.I. that it held a month or two back in West Virginia, featuring Kmele with past Fif’ guests Andy Mills (#457, M.O. #289) and Kat Rosenfield (#448, #565):

* And just saw that Kmele’s Big Think posted his interview with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History one month ago:

* Friend o’ pod Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347 and #394) had a good Atlantic piece on (why not!) Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. Professional politics passage:

In 1972, the San Francisco Examiner published a four-part investigation into abuse and financial impropriety within the church, and five years later, New West magazine reported on the physical and psychological terror that Jones inflicted on his followers. But Jones’s proven get-out-the-vote operation apparently eclipsed local officials’ misgivings. Jones’s ever more abusive and erratic behavior was ignored or rationalized by people who should have looked harder.

State Assemblyman and future Mayor Willie Brown once praised Jones as an “American Gandhi,” a combination of Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and Mao Zedong (he meant this as a compliment). California Governor Jerry Brown attended a testimonial dinner held in Jones’s honor, and in 1976 the Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Walter Mondale, invited him onto his campaign plane. Nine months before the massacre, the city supervisor Harvey Milk, one of America’s first openly gay politicians, lauded Jones as a “man of the highest character” in a letter to President Jimmy Carter.

* Meant to post this last week, but: Two-time guest Scott Lincicome (#479 & #499) published a crackerjack, eminently book-markable survey on the controversies and countervailing facts about data centers. Nut graf: “[M]ost of the common objections to data centers collapse under scrutiny. The buildings certainly aren’t faultless and raise some real challenges, but they also generate substantial benefits that the backlash conveniently ignores. To the extent data centers really do create problems, moreover, the source is mainly government policy, especially subsidies and energy bottlenecks. And that means better policy can mitigate the real problems surrounding America’s data center buildout—no bans or dire economic consequences needed.”

* Comment of the Week comes from Regina Rodriguez:

Quick note on Amazon Hub Delivery (program where independent contractors can build their own delivery company) - my hubby runs his own (non-delivery) business out of the house but economic conditions have made it so the business is earning maybe half of what it normally would. He looked into the Amazon Hub delivery and let me tell you, it’s been a lifeline. At the start up he decided what days he wanted to deliver, how much and Amazon set him up with all the technology so that its super efficient. He’s getting fresh air, exercise and additional coin, and I get to keep my paid Fifth subscription - Thank you Jeff Bezos.

Sendoff: One of the stock music-biz characters I enjoy most is The Hustler—a guy (almost always male) who maybe starts off as a would-be pop idol, transitions quickly to TV, some promotions here and there, trying to surf out the changes in the industry for as long as he can, and maybe create some indelible moments along the way. So describes Johnny Benjamin de Jong, a.k.a. Johnny Young, a.k.a. a guy you’ve probably never heard of unless you’re Australian, who died this week of pancreatic cancer at the age of 79. The Dutch-born Young was most famous for being the creator/producer/host of Australia’s Young Talent Time show from 1971 to 1988, launching various pop careers. But he got his start as the groovy mid-‘60s front man for Johnny Young and Kompany, scoring a number-one Aussie hit with the double-sided “Step Back” / “Cara-lyn,” covers both. He was also at this time hosting The Go!! Show, which was exactly like it sounds. But the magic really happened when he moved into an apartment with Barry Gibb, who prodded him to write his own damn songs. The results made Australian music history—not for the Kompany, but for acts such as Russell Morris, Ross D. Wyllie, and Ronnie Burns. These songs were less beach-party, more introspective, topical, and psychedelic. For Burns he wrote “Smiley,” a 1969 track about a Vietnam vet. Wyllie (and then later Herman’s Hermits) got “The Star,” one of those self-referential songs about the promise and limits of fame (I try to hack through it here). But it was Morris’s “The Real Thing” that changed time—record-breaking length (6:20!), record-breaking cost, part “Strawberry Fields,” part Manson-inflected Beach Boys; carved firmly into the Aussie rock pantheon:

Terry Moran, former ABC News correspondent, revealed on The Fifth Column (Members Only episode #339) that the network gave the Dr. Anthony Fauci editorial oversight on a story about the COVID lab-leak theory.

“The day that it’s supposed to air, it gets reviewed and it comes back to me and it is incomprehensible. I’d never been angrier,” said Moran. “Lawyers, standards, and I was told… Fauci.

Moran told The Fifth Column hosts Michael Moynihan & Matt Welch that he had not previously spoken about the incident.

“I probably shouldn’t have.”

-Terry reads that tweet

-Fired, suspended, non-renewed…whatever

-Any regrets?

-Network news is dying and everyone’s jumping ship

-The 9/11 flag-pin controversy

-Hire more people who voted for Trump

-Why not …

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-Did anybody actually watch this Tucker and Hunter interview?

-“Montrosity” and other difficult words

-The adventures of Proximity Hong

-The curious case of Jason Arday

-Is there any chance Jesse Singal is racist?

-AOC discovers Woke 1.0 was crazy

-Shane Gillis and the conspiracy of enforcing things nobody believed

-Thank you, Thom Tillis. Also, fuck you.

-Funding the other side’s whackos

-Mamdani declares war on Amazon

-A general rent strike. Over one cockroach.

-David Remnick meets the DSA

-Kmele gets swarmed by the Hasan bots

-So, how great was Mao?

-Midterm Madness and the 2028 Democratic sweepstakes

-Clip Roulette

-Kmele tries to explain himself. It does not help.

-Can America get at least a busted Boris Johnson?

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

Follow The Fifth Column

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Facebook: @thefifthcolumn

One of the odd things about Friday’s Real Time With Bill Maher experience was how much of the discussion centered on places and institutions where the madnesses of 2020-21 have not yet subsided. And then, like clockwork, the controversial-in-lingering-woke-circles WNBA player Sophie Cunningham (see last week’s Firehose for details) was smacked hard full across the face by DiJonai Carrington, who, after being ejected, posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on Threads. (I will note here that Cunningham has become a lightning rod chiefly for advocating that only biological women should be allowed to play in women’s sports, which is a race-neutral concept.) The once-great Sports Illustrated magazine commemorated the hackery with the vile headline: “Sophie Cunningham Got a Bitter Taste of Karma.”

In a related side-drama, former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kantor Freedom have declared that they are entering the next WNBA draft, because after all, the league rules (plus the dominant POV of the anti-Cunningham faction) just say you need to be a woman, without getting hung up on the definition of the word. As ever on all things WNBA, it’s best to consult with Iowahawk.

These are the types of moments where you want to hear from former Fifth Column guests Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, Members Only #151, #408) and Kat Rosenfield (#448, #565), and sure enough, the two podcasted on those and other topics just this Friday. Though, as we shall soon see, that was not the only reminder this week that though the tide may have subsided, there are still all kinds of nasty crabs jabbing their claws at any available normie feet.

* Here’s the Overtime segment from Friday night:

* On both the Overtime and earlier in the main episode, praise was sung for Nicholas Eberstadt’s terrific book Men Without Work. I talked with Eberstadt about the labor force’s missing men back in the old Paloma Media studio, for episode #376.

* There was also a stray reference (I think? Hard to remember through all the fast talk) to the laugh-out-loud travails of finally resigned Cambridge bullshit-artist prof Jason Arday, who we laughed about with Jesse Singal in #568. Jesse published a New York Times op-Ed Saturday under the headline, “A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It,” arguing that: “This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny.” To which former Washington Post press critic Dan Froomkin blueskied, “Who at @nytopinion.nytimes.com decided: ‘hey, let’s Jesse Singal to do some racist schadenfreude!’”

Jesse and his better half recorded a paywalled Blocked and Reported episode on the topic as well.

* Kmele did his CNN thing on Saturday:

* I did my Reason Roundtable thing on Monday:

* This week around here we switched it up and put our trio-only episode behind the paywall. Here’s some of what you non-paying subscribers missed:

* And here’s a clip about A.I. with our techno-grump guest on M.O. #337, Harper’s Magazine Publisher Rick MacArthur:

* Some listeners flagged the moment in our latest episode where I balked at David Frum’s assertion that Donald Trump doesn’t love his kids. The point I was attempting to make wasn’t necessarily about parenthood, it was about the use of omniscience when characterizing a political opponent, as Frum did toward the end of his controversial March 2003 National Review piece, “Unpatriotic Conservatives.” Here are those last three paragraphs that I contended were what critics of the piece always quote:

There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

For those who didn’t know, Frum and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, lost their daughter Miranda to cancer two years ago. Crittenden a few months back published a book about it called Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable. America’s very own reporter Nancy Rommelmann reviewed it a couple weeks ago in Commentary.

* Comment of the Week comes from Gordo:

I moved to Columbus from California, for a few years. I would pass by Meijer’s and think, “What the fuck nonsense word is that, and what the hell is a Meijer?”

After about a year I finally went in, I stayed for about an hour. I didn’t need to, but I wanted to see everything, I took it all in. I went to my car and wrote to several people, the same message:

“I’m in a store, it’s better if I don’t write the name, but, you can buy a filet of fish, a pet fish, and live fucking ammo.”

That was five years ago, and I still remember sending that text.

Thank god I live back in Monterey, the Midwest is too damned cold.

Say what you want about California people, but know this, I can see the Pacific right now, and the weather is perfect all year round. 🖕

Sendoff: One of the most glorious and star-crossed career paths in 20^th century music was the proto-punk Garage Rock-turned Punk Rock-turned New Wave pipeline. A category filled with local legends, spectacular flameouts, and some loud, sloppy, fantastically uneven recordings. I had never heard of Jeff Conolly before he died on my birthday from bladder cancer at age 69, but I can guarantee Moynihan has a story or two. “There may have been no more voluble and volatile presence on the Boston rock scene in the late 1970s and 1980s than Jeff Conolly,” begins the WBUR obit. The garage/punk band was DMZ; the shambolic & ever-lineup-shifting alt-rock combo the Lyres was the vehicle thereafter. Conolly sang, played the organ, flopped around, and fired everyone (his washouts included guys who would move on to The Cars and Yo La Tengo). It’s a lot of noise and aggression and wit, but occasionally, as in this song (which I try to hack through here), the results come dangerously close to infectious power pop. RIP, wild man!