Firehose #111: TMI

No, like, literally

Let’s see, any news about our friends this week?

Why yes! Including a few action items, starting with: 1) My Monday-morning-coffee videocast, The Reason Roundtable, with Nick Gillespie (veteran of Special Dispatch #72 & Episode #379), Peter Suderman and Fifth Column-namer Katherine Mangu-Ward (#75, #395), this past week announced a live show at The Village Underground in New York City on Nov. 4. That’s right — the night before the election! Tickets are already flying off the shelves, so I fear it may be sold out by the time I hit “send.” Go go go!

2) As teased on the Chat & foreshadowed in Firehose #106, gang-gang Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) on Tuesday released the handsome print edition of her terrific collection Forty Bucks and a Dream: Stories from Los Angeles. Complete with intro from Sarah Hepola (#354), and blurbs from the aforementioned Nick Gillespie, plus Kerry Howley and Caitlin Flanagan. From the latter: “With a great sense of what makes a story an L.A. story, with tremendous style, and lots of shoe leather reporting, this book is a winner from the first page to the last. I loved it.”

3) Oh right, let’s not bury the lede here:

* Moar Gillespie. Though embedding a Twitter video surpasses my capabilities, you can watch him briefly asking once and future president Donald J. Trump about the deficit at this link. And you can watch his recent conversation with preggo pal Kat Timpf (#33, #97) about her new book I Used to Like You Until…. (How Binary Thinking Divides Us):

* Moar Mangu: You can watch her Free Press/FIRE American Dream debate w/ Tyler Cowen and against David Leonhardt and Bhaskar Sunkara at this paying-subscribers link, and listen to it at this freebie one.

* We haven’t talked too much on the flagship podcast about the egregious anti-Twitter crackdowns happening with increasing frequency around the world, but my Reason colleagues Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller talked recently about the illiberal goings-on in Brazil with former Fif’ guest and Brazilian resident Glenn Greenwald (#183, #197, #211):

* Taking a different tack on Twitter, as referenced too briefly in Members Only #226, was former guest Thomas Chatterton Williams (#121, #158, #188, #197, #373), who on Friday had an Atlantic piece published under the headline “Elon Musk Is Debasing American Society: He’s not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts.”

* Moynihan, per usual, has been oot & aboot. Here he is from earlier last week Honestly-talking about Hezbollocks pager-sabotage with foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins. And here he is Friday doing the Free Press livestream thang w/ Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451), Abigail Shrier and River Page on the bullet-point subjects of “Teamsters withhold Kamala endorsement, Trump blames Dem rhetoric for assassination attempts, fallout from Hezbollah pager attack & Diddy refused bail.”

* On #471, Moynihan frankly got a little heated when it comes to the intersection of free trade and … bananas. As multiple listeners pointed out, Remy got there first:

* There are too many Fifdom links chasing too few hours in the day, so let’s pile some in a paragraph. FIRE chief Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427) went on Ask a Jew to talk about “all things free speech, like why campuses are burning, how violence is kind of bad, actually, and why he fights for our right to say dumb things, and be called out on them.” Lukianoff charge and “starmanning” coiner Angel Eduardo wrote an always-relevant piece titled “Yes, When it Comes to Using Violence to Stop Speech, even ‘Rarely’ Is Too Much.” Pals Andy Mills and Matthew Boll (#457) had on their Reflector podcast Sarah Isgur and Mike Pesca (#343, #418, #467) to answer the eternal question, “Why Do Politicians Lie?” The aforementioned Rommelmann had a fab convo on Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em with the I-can’t-believe-he-hasn’t-been-on-Fif’ Michael Powell, now at The Atlantic after being a key in-house voice of sanity at The New York Times. And after threatening for years to write about it, fave Mexican Gustavo Arellano (#306 & #377) finally uncorked (on Substack, no less!) his treatise on “Rancho Libertarianism.” Some excerpts:

• The rancho libertarian is not a whiner. They know the world is a fucked-up place — terribly so. The children of the rancho libertarian grew up with the lore of deprivation, of blood feuds and deshaires that last generations. But the rancho libertarian doesn’t complain — they do something about it. […]

• [T] the rancho libertarian has no use for a government that tells them how to live — no thank you to mandates, to the banning of the combustible engine and chroming, to code enforcement officers or DEI managers. Let the rancho libertarian live, and get the hell out of the way. This is the part that liberals will never understand. […]

At the end, my political ideology was and is based on the life of my parents, aunts and uncles. They Made It, so I Made It. We never got a break — and we never took a break. We never made excuses, and we did it as Mexicans in a country that despised us.

I don’t fully believe in such bootstrap tenets, but I respect the hell out of those who do. You hate on any part of that, you ain’t my political kind, regardless of party affiliation.

Maybe that’s what rancho libertarianism ultimately is: breaks. But not lucky ones. Don’t break, and break all obstacles ahead of you. But not just for you — and definitely not for the people who don’t believe in this philosophy, racists and flojos alike.

Selfish? Maybe. A method for success in the Estados Pudridos? Damn straight. Worked for my family — and here we are.

* On M.O. #225, Michael pointed out the hilarious video of Eddie Vedder singing what appears to sound like Linkedin names. Well, Axl here points us to another classic of rock & roll subtitling, this time involving Joe Cocker:

* Speaking of comedy, new sitcom just dropped:

* And speaking of RFK 2.0, we had Journalo-Gossip It Girl Olivia Nuzzi on #190, and I wrote about her Bloomberg show getting de-emphasized in Firehose #108. For you free subscribers, we talked about her case Friday night on M.O. #226; there have been plenty more developments since.

* Comment of the Week (hey, I’m the one who curates this!) comes from Human Being:

Matt referencing that he briefly wrote for the National Post sent me down a rabbit hole of nostalgia. Believe it or not, I was an avid reader of the National Post between the ages of 6 and 12 (I was an annoying child.) I checked - his tenure coincided with that period. Matt, I almost certainly read at least some of your columns back then. Thank you for undoubtedly helping me get better grades in social studies and English and indoctrinating me to subscribe to your podcast all these years later.

(Pssst. I think you might be able to access some of my NatPost archive here.)

Walkoff music has always creeped me out, so maybe now it will creep you out, too.