Firehose #109: Before the Flood

Also: A special Second Sunday tomorrow, 5 p.m. ET

Is it wrong to start off this weekend roundup with Comment of the Week? If so, I don’t want to be right. HEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeERE’s Benjy Shyovitz!

The real Holocaust was having to wait so long for a new Fifth Column episode.

With Kmele on a plane as I speak, and a regular in-the-can episode that I’m SURE will be dropped any minute now, we are in the midst of a veritable Clinton’s dam release down the Susquehanna of our ear-tubes…. Including a very special and dangerously experimental 2Waytastic Second Sunday monthly taping with paying subscribers tomorrow at 5 p.m. ET. Pay attention to this space (and your in-boxes) for details, which are still being worked out. But do know that this will be coming after Moynihan’s big-round-number birthday bash in NYC, so I predict … pain.

* Let’s get to some content. On Thursday, Moynihan piloted a Free Press livestream convo about Donald Trump’s “stop the steal” semi-backtracking, Brazil’s suspension of Twitter, Israel-Hamas latest, and the Russia-podcasters investigation, w/ County Highway Editor at Large Walter Kirn, dictatress of the proletariat hater Batya Ungar-Sargon (veteran of Episode #451), and beloved Fif’ egghead Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184):

* Speaking of Eli, he’s out with another banger of a historical episode, on the Weather Underground. From the write-up: “Between 1969 and 1974, this small gang of violent, far-left intellectuals bombed Congress, police stations, courthouses, and the Pentagon. They changed their identities to avoid detection, dyed their hair, and lived off-grid, while working to destroy the ‘imperialist’ country they detested. The Weathermen were motivated by their disgust with the Vietnam War, a war their generation was conscripted to fight. In their eyes, this great crime made the nation irredeemable.” OK, OK, let’s post another Eli A.I. song, this one a punk-rock banger about the Red Army Faction:

* Moar Moynihan on historical revisionism? Here’s a piping hot new two-hour pod hosted by old friend Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), talking about Tucker, Churchill, Vice News, Jesse Jackson, and so forth. Let’s celebrate by posting a random drunken post-game snippet from an early-days Fif’ episode, in a bar that no longer exists next to a pre-pandemic podcast studio that shall never be mentioned:

* Wait, there’s MORE Moynihan? Yep: Here his is in the Honestly chair interviewing Matt Taibbi (#226, #348) about the “Global Censorship-Industrial Complex.” The two “talk about what’s happening in Europe, Brazil, and here in the U.S. They discuss the factors that precipitated the so-called ‘misinformation wars,’ from 9/11 to Brexit and Trump’s election, that convinced elites of the need to enforce restrictions on speech. And they talk about why these efforts are doomed to backfire.”

* OK, enough already with that guy. Reason this week posted a recent print-magazine column of mine that may be of interest: “When Biden's 'Bubble Wrap' Burst: Will the liars and hacks who covered up Biden's cognitive decline face any consequences?” Excerpt:

All of this was widely documented as of February 2024. That's what makes so remarkable what came after, in the 20 weeks between the Hur report and Biden's disastrous brain freeze of a debate performance against Trump. Biden's apologists, impervious to the fact that a majority of his own supporters thought him too old for the presidency, spent months post-Hur berating anyone who believed their own eyes over the establishment's lies.

"Talk of his alleged mental decline," tweeted Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter John Harwood in March, is "utter bullshit." City University of New York journalism professor Jeff Jarvis in March excoriated The New York Times for even polling about Biden's age-related fitness. "That they even asked this question is evidence of the bias—the agenda—in their poll," Jarvis wrote on Threads. "Who made age an 'issue'? The credulous Times falling into the right-wing's projection. This is not journalism. Shameful."

When The Wall Street Journal in early June published a 45-source, 3,000-word article under the headline "Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping," Biden's favorite news show, MSNBC's Morning Joe, kicked into overdrive, with host Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, calling it "shocking," a "false, biased story," and a "Trump hit piece." (In March, Scarborough had testified that, from his own recent personal experience, Biden was "better than he's ever been intellectually.")

Fun follow-up facts: The aforementioned John Harwood last week wrote a long analysis for the navel-gazers over at Nieman Reports about how “The media is still struggling to meet the moment.” Try to guess what tweet he never mentions! Similarly, Morning Joe is now VERY concerned now about age-related decline … of Donald Trump, and is accusing the media of “moral relativism.” Huh.

* I also wrote a stat-filled piece for Reason Friday titled “We Have Already Passed Peak Public School: As families continue to defect from government-managed K-12, teachers unions are tightening their squeeze on the Democratic Party.” And for some reason we got a lot of traffic this week for this bit from 16 months ago: “Tucker Carlson Is Lying to You.”

* You can see me on C-SPAN 2 at various times this weekend (including Sunday at 10 a.m. & 10 p.m. ET) interviewing Breitbart’s Joel Pollak about his new book, The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days.

* Events: On Sept. 10 in D.C., Fifth Column-namer Katherine Mangu-Ward (#75, #395) teams up with Tyler Cowen for a Free Press debate on the American Dream vs. David Leonhardt and Bhaskar Sunkara; Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187) moderates. On Sept. 11, Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379) does a Reason Speakeasy in NYC w/ Kat Timpf (#33, #97) about her new book I Used to Like You Until…. (How Binary Thinking Divides Us).

Walkoff music comes courtesy of our Chicago host & free-jazz music pal Mike Reed: