Firehose #116: Partying Like it’s 1999

Also: Catastrophe journalism vs. journalistic catastrophizing

The thing semi-forgotten about the Purple One’s first hit single with The Revolution is that, in the immortal words of Wikipedia, it was “a protest against nuclear proliferation.” OK, it wasn’t precisely that, but it did, like so much of 1980s culture, take place against the fraught backdrop of, I dunno, MASSIVE THERMO-NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST. What made Prince’s contribution unique was the fuck-it-let’s-dance-and-screw component, which is something to keep in mind as we head into a U.S. presidential election that, all rhetoric notwithstanding, is unlikely to produce or make considerably more likely the threat of a MASSIVE THERMO-NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST. Still, dancing and screwing is advised.

* Speaking of 1999, that’s what Moynihan just wrote about for Air Mail, specifically the then-huge, now vaguely remembered anti-globalization protests that weirdly presaged the rise of Donald Trump. Excerpt:

The campus Komsomol was a little fuzzy on the inner workings of the W.T.O., but trade sounded like capitalism, and capitalism was bad. So when the group announced that its 1999 annual meeting would take place in Seattle, more than 40,000 protesters descended on the Emerald City, intent on disrupting the meeting and … well, no one knew what was supposed to happen next.

When a Wall Street Journal reporter questioned one young protester’s motivations, she averred that it was a “general question of oppression” because the W.T.O. “doesn’t care about women’s rights.” Indeed, footage of the protest shows signs opposing G.M.O. crops, supporting the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, denouncing sweatshops, and wishing death upon the entire capitalist system. As President Bill Clinton commented, “Every group in the world with an axe to grind is going to Seattle to demonstrate.” […]

Fast-forward to 2020, and an op-ed in The New York Times titled “The W.T.O. Should Be Abolished” carries the byline of Republican senator Josh Hawley. A few months after Hawley’s article appeared, I found myself watching the vice-presidential debate with former Trump campaign manager and self-described “Leninist” Steve Bannon, who expressed an admiration for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and regret that he opposed Barack Obama’s 2008 auto bailouts. When I accused him of sounding more like Noam Chomsky than Ronald Reagan, he didn’t object.

* All of which reminds me of being brutally hung over and freshly liberated from my wallet in Washington, D.C., the day after the 2000 election, while Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan warmly embraced in front of a gigantic crazed hippie booming out “Shoulder-to-shoulder on trade!”…. Anyway, I wrote a piece this week, too; my quadrennial shaming exercise of news organizations being too cowardly to disclose who their employees are voting for. (This was written before the recent spasm of non-endorsements roiled what remains of the newspaper industry.) Excerpt from me:

Slate, a publication within the mainstream of the opinion-journalism left, last reported a staffer voting for a Republican all the way back in 2012, when Mitt Romney got two compared to Barack Obama’s 29. “Will that be the last time ever?” Editor in Chief Jared Hohlt demurred in 2020 (we're still waiting on 2024). “That’s kind of up to the Republican Party more than it's up to Slate.” Is it though?

Now, imagine those lopsided numbers—in 2020, Slate went Joe Biden 59, Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins one, plus one staffer who couldn’t decide between the two—only this time played out at the most august and pretentious journalistic institutions. Maybe The Atlantic, to pluck one title out of a top hat, has a felt need this week to demonstrate with some hard voting evidence that it indeed “is a heterodox place, staffed by freethinkers” who sometimes think Vice President Kamala Harris is “too liberal,” as the magazine stated in its, um, endorsement of Kamala Harris. C’mon, Jeffrey Goldberg, show us your votes!

* Reason staffers’ lack of Trump support therein did not merit a mention in ex-libertarian Shikha Dalmia’s otherwise Reason-heavy j’accuse in The Bulwark, “Faced With Trump, Libertarianism Shrugged.” Alert readers will observe a certain continuity of intellectual rigor. Blaming a more targeted corner of the old libertarian tent is Jonah Goldberg (veteran of Episode #182), in a piece titled “Down From Libertarianism.” Excerpt:

[I]t seems obvious that a bunch of very rich people, who once described themselves as libertarians, have concluded that libertarianism won’t get the job done. Peter Thiel, a youthful fan of Ayn Rand, was once a libertarian hero. He championed the idea of man-made floating city-states in the middle of the ocean that would be a kind of maritime Galt’s Gulch. […]

Whatever you make of that stuff—I think it has some appeal despite its Bond villain vibe—it appears that the super-investor has hedged his bets. Rather than put all of his eggs on some Randian Casablanca in international waters, he’s also investing in domestic American politics, and perhaps changing American government at a very fundamental level. A while back, Thiel struck up a friendship with Curtis Yarvin, the dashboard saint of the “neo-reactionary” or “Dark Enlightenment” movement, which considers liberal democracy a failure. […]

And Thiel is hardly alone. Elon Musk, another spectrum-y, hyper-intelligent, libertarianish John Galt type, has clearly made a huge bet on Trump. […] From everything I’ve heard and read, it seems clear that none of these people think Trump is one of them. They think they can use him, bribe him, herd him. It’s not an unreasonable bet. Trump has already reversed himself completely on TikTok and crypto-currencies[.]

* Moynihan this week did a Free Press Live videocast with Girl Friday Nellie Bowles (veteran of #187), Olivia Reingold (#459), and Sean Patrick Cooper, talking about “the continued fallout from Trump’s recent shift at McDonald’s,” how “The New York Times, NBC, Al Jazeera, and others have depended on a source in their coverage of the war in Gaza who is actually a Hamas-linked official,” and the “tens of millions of dollars raised by Black Lives Matter [that] was spent on lavish parties and luxury real estate”:

* America’s correspondent Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) went down to hurricane-ravaged Asheville for RealClearInvestigations to tell the stories of heroic, shell-shocked survivors. Excerpt:  

An ecosystem of good hearts formed post-Helene: the S*E*R*T team; the hundreds of trucks pulling up to T-Birds; the AI developer who, the day after the hurricane, made it his business to figure out how to find, bottle, and deliver drinking water; the Asheville bakery giving free fresh-baked pastries to patrons who left 20s in the tip jar; the seemingly limitless number of churches (“You hear the state sometimes referred to the as the prong in the Bible Belt,” said Beverly Ramsey, who is also an ordained minister) being of service, including the man in a “Don’t Let the Bad Days Win” shirt unloading pallets of bottled water and baby diapers; private citizens volunteering to go door-to-door to do wellness checks; translators helping non-English speakers fill out aid applications; community centers providing relaxation rooms to exhausted road workers; and the man who keeps a backpack of emergency supplies at-the-ready at all times who brought his 9-year-old daughter with him as he carried life-sustaining goods to people unable to escape their mountain homes, people for whom the surprise of a little girl brought its own kind of sunshine.

“Kids are just as motivated to help people as adults are,” the man said, adding that he did not bring his daughter on the darker missions, the ones he would not talk about.

* Once again, Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366) and John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366) are arguing over the new Ta-Nehisi Coates book, The Message. Teases Loury: “[W]e really go at it. We disagree about the book’s value, we disagree about what it’s trying to accomplish, we disagree about its narrative strategies, we disagree about its author’s intentions, we disagree about the political project at its core. We disagree about practically everything, except this: the guy can write one hell of a sentence.”

* Speaking of Israel, past guest Oren Kessler (#425) has joined Substack, inaugurating his presence there with a fascinating piece about his late grandfather’s recently published book, A Doctor’s Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust.

* The culturally and geographically transcendent Dodger great Fernando Valenzuela died this week, too young. Rising to the occasion in memoriam was old friend Gustavo Arellano (#306 & #377), in word and video:

* The aforementioned newspaper industry kerfuffle over last-minute non-endorsements has gotten Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, Members Only #151, #408) a bit stabby … toward the Washington Post:

The actual scandal, in my opinion, is also a contributing factor in why the paper has struggled to maintain an audience: The staffers wholly rejected objectivity in favor of cheerleading for one side. They got entirely too ideological while interpreting Donald Trump’s norm-breaking as permission to lack standards themselves. And they did it to such a degree that they pretended away the current president’s senility up until the very moment it became impossible to deny.

Now that is a media scandal, a massive one that inspires yet less trust from the public towards the press. These actions, or abdications really, not only failed to serve the consumer good and the public good, but I’d argue they backfired, hurting the Democratic party. A lack of sane media pressure led to a situation where the party procrastinated its way into a sloppy presidential campaign speed run.

Bezos wants to return to a time when the newspaper represented neutrality, if not in reality then at least in brand. The idea, I’m guessing, is that you get to vigorously investigate Donald Trump, but not lose credibility in your venture by trumpeting your all consuming bias against him. This should be a feasible aim, but it’s difficult to get this message through to journalists who simply reject the premise of having a “bias” against a person and party they regard as objectively evil.

Fair enough, let’s say they’re correct about Trump. He’s bad, authoritarian, etc. You’ve still got to do the job while he exists. They’ve proven they can’t, apparently. They’ve demonstrated that, when the other team’s president becomes incapable of performing his basic duties, they’ll be the last to admit what everyone else can plainly see. That inability to call balls and strikes has hurt the paper as a product. It’s also sacrificed its social capital. The Washington Post doesn’t need yet another editorial endorsement. It needs an ability to describe reality divorced from what its current staffers want.

* Speaking of journalism, Substack honcho Hamish McKenzie (#369) did an I’m-not-bragging brag about being included in a New York magazine “Power Issue” list of “57 of the most powerful people in media.” Excerpt:

There are few things that the media industry likes to talk about more than itself. The pity is that it is an increasingly small and irrelevant bubble, and so there are fewer and fewer people around to listen. The Group of 57 (as no one is calling us) is mostly made up of executives, anchors, and editors (and, to be fair, a smattering of Substack publishers), and the idea that we are powerful is a bit sad. While I remain a believer in traditional media, very few of those featured are relevant in today’s culture and in what the media landscape has become. Even the reporter who wrote the piece implicitly acknowledged this as she yawned her way through our interview. “You are so bored!” I yelled, in the most gentlemanly way possible, while trying to come up with spicy quotes like: “Anything that looks or smells like The New Republic is going to die.” 

The real power in media today lies with the writers and creators who have a direct line to their audiences. They are the ones who shape minds and shift culture, not the mahogany-desked bosses at CNN, the worn-sole executive editors of Hearst, or the TV anchors who serve as white noise for septuagenarians to fall asleep to after their 8 p.m. brandy. With few exceptions, the media power brokers of yesterday now oversee a series of properties with dwindling reach and a limited ability to convince anyone of anything, while the stars of new media attract larger audiences and harbor more diverse perspectives. The difference between most of the Group of 57 and independent creators—the Substackers, YouTubers, TikTokkers, and podcasters of the world—is that people actually care to listen to the latter, and their businesses are growing alongside their influence. 

And thank god. We sorely need alternatives to centralized power in the media.

* Events? Well, we get about one email a week saying something along the lines of, “Hey, I’m coming to NYC soon; any recs?” to which we answer far fewer than we should. But like, you know you can literally do a walking tour with the hilarious genius reprobate Bill Schulz (#79), right? Here, sign up for his walk around Turtle Bay!

* Comment of the Week comes from Chris McKeever:

I want to make a buddy comedy starring Ben Dreyfuss and Dan Crenshaw as a hesitant duo forced to team up by circumstances beyond their control. I’d call it ‘In the Kingdom of the Blind’ and feel way too clever for it.

Walkoff music is a good for your pre-Armageddon dance parties: