Firehose #119: The Vibes, They Are a-Shiftin’

Also: Second Sunday 4 pm ET for all paying subscribers

We took you through the craziness of Campaign 2016, called bullshit on identitarian scolds years before it was reputationally safe, navigated the insanity of Red Scare 2017, opened the virtual bar during Covid lockdowns, kept our heads in the mad summer of 2020, gave inside-the-Capitol reportage from the Jan. 6 riot, kicked against the censorious pricks of 2021-22, provided community and perspective after last year’s atrocious Oct. 7, went HAM at the DNC in Chicago, helped throw the Mother of All Election Night Parties … and here we will be, bigger and better than ever during Trump 2.0, and also available for your (paying-subscriber) cross-examination and commiseration THIS DAMNED SUNDAY, at 4 p.m. ET. See you there.

* How should we do this week’s recap? Chronologically? Well, yes and no. I see that King Kmele has clambered off his throne and stepped away from his BoardMeetingConference to deliver a mini-sermon in response to the widespread contention (including by Thomas Chatterton Williams) that the election Tuesday marked the Death of Woke:

The vibe shift is real, but I worry this framing is a bit too narrow. […]

Bottom Line Up Front:

This isn’t over. This is a forever war, and understanding the terrain is crucial to seeing that clearly.

“Wokeness” is just one manifestation of a deeper cultural defect—a flexible puritanical impulse that adapts easily to the shibboleths on both sides of our political divide, often with genuinely totalitarian potential.

This impulse ebbs and flows, intensifying on the left or right for a season and then receding for a time, but it never fully disappears. While “anti-wokeness” emerged to resist a form of this puritanism, it sometimes employs the same corrosive tactics, fueling a cycle of reprisals rather than addressing the core issue.

The tidy slogans of each “current thing” (Believe All Women, Black Lives Matter, Ban Critical Race Theory, Wear a Mask, Get the Shot, Stop the Steal) can obscure what we most need to confront (and safeguard). The real concerns are fundamentalist certainty, essentialism, and demands for conformity underlying each cause. Here, censorship and shaming take precedence over pluralism, with “sanctity” or “safety” invoked to suppress “bad” ideas. This impulse fuels graceless persecutions that eradicate the possibility of nuance and create a climate where any suspected heretic—or anyone insufficiently enthusiastic about enforcing orthodoxy—can become a target for swift cancellation. Just another “witch” for the pyre.

What I’m describing is a defect at the heart of our political and social order, one that breeds cycles of destructive purges and counter-purges. Perhaps it’s natural, like our capacity for envy. Nevertheless, if we don’t take the source of the rot seriously, it threatens to undermine free expression and, by extension, the very possibility of open debate and knowledge creation—the essence of any civilization worth preserving. Confronting this malignancy is a necessity, and doing so effectively demands clear eyes, unflinching resolve, and persistent vigilance.

* OK, let’s go back to the beginning (of this week). On Monday night in NYC I saw a very nice many of you out for a live taping of The Reason Roundtable podcast with Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward (veteran of Episodes #75 & #395) and Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72 & #379). The basic gist was to preview best/worst possible outcomes of the election, a Harris victory, or a Trump victory. Pay special attention to the silence when I asked the crowd who of them supported Trump, since at least two people told me afterward they just sat on their hands:

Was fun to catch up with a whole bunch of you at the after-party!

Also, speaking of The Reason Roundtable (which I rarely do here!), that pod now has its very own YouTube channel. Please go subscribe to it! You’ll be glad you did! (Also, this is foreshadowing….)

* In a similar spirit of views-you-can-use, on election morning I published a piece under the headline, “The Alarmingly High, Frustratingly Unknown Stakes of Election 2024: We don't know how Kamala Harris would wield her awesome power, and we don't know how the rule of law would constrain Donald Trump.” Let’s excerpt my Trump projection, so I can be tortured appropriately later:

[H]aving to constantly calculate the probabilities between taking an erratic executive literally and seriously is itself a kind of civic tax. To pull two examples from 2015–2017 at semi-random, no, President Trump did not deport the U.S. citizen children of illegal immigrants, as he had serially threatened on the campaign trail. But also, yes, he did almost immediately act on his "Muslim ban" trial balloon by suddenly suspending entry of all legal refugees into the country, as well as citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries, throwing families and airports into chaos. […]

Trump would have wide latitude to shape immigration enforcement as he sees fit, so if you like restrictionism, with all the collateral damage that comes with it, he's your man. Commanders in chief have even more authority over foreign policy and the use of military force, though as Reason's Brian Doherty noted this week, "In general, he kept both the expense and reach of the American empire's military-industrial complex growing or at least the same." And presidents also have unique and important pardon power, which means that Trump's promise to Libertarians to free Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is a tantalizing possibility, constrained only by his reliability in keeping promises.

On Trump's biggest single domestic and foreign policy issue—enacting across-the-board import tariffs, and thus cementing a reversal of seven decades' worth of poverty-alleviating global reductions in trade barriers—he would have broad authority to make those changes without congressional approval, quite unlike his frequently paired ideas to cut or end federal taxation on all kinds of income (tips, car-loan interest, Social Security benefits, and so on). In other words, his vaunted bridge to the 19th century, where the federal government somehow recreates the high-tariffs, no-federal-taxes funding regime in a world of global supply chains and trillion-dollar governments, would likely fall down on the tax end. The erection of more tariffs, coupled with the lack of across-the-board tax cuts, would make life in these United States considerably more expensive at a time when Americans are howling about the discomfort of inflation.

* That night’s party in and around our swank penthouse studio was, I am very confident asserting, the single greatest place to watch the election unfold (here’s the playlist we made in 25 minutes), in addition to being a content-generation machine. On the latter, check out the aforepictured Trump non-enthusiast Coco Welch offering live analysis with Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.C. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111), and then coming back a little later to shoo away both Kmele and Moynihan.

* Next, it was our first Fifth Column livestream, with Rommelman, Kat Rosenfield (#448), and an already despondent Jesse Singal (#111 & #171). I will update our Twitter-streams with embeds here just as soon as I get a smarter person to work around the stupid-ass Elon-block.

* Then it was time for The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, featuring Kmele, Suderman, Allison Schrager (#398), Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442), and Peter Meijer (S.D. #51, #307, #339, #367,  #424, Members Only #184):

* Somewhere amidst all that came Mike Pesca (#343, #418, #467), talking to Kmele and Coleman and Meijer.

* Meanwhile, 30 feet away was the marathon, six-hour Free Press livestream anchored by Moynihan, as well as Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187) and Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451), and featuring basically all of us plus dozens more from our multiverse:

* Then who else to do the sloppy nightcap but yer boyz, with the former congressman and a hey-Koolaid Moynihan after his telethon finally wrapped.

* Hours later, because #professionalism, we trekked out to Connecticut to join a victorious Megyn Kelly in what shall henceforth be known as The Annulment Episode. We talked winning-coalition demographics, shoddy polling, the impotence of celebrities, and (of course!) the ladies from The View:

* Then we capped off our 24-hour bender with Episode #478, amen. To be followed shortly thereafter by M.O. #233. Had enough yet? Too bad! Still, let’s move on to some other notes from the Fifiverse.

* As mentioned in M.O. #233, I took interest in the post-election piece by Matt Taibbi (#226, #348) called “Begin the Deprogramming: There was no ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated.’” What did that awful Biden-era vaccine-marketing slogan have to do with the election? Vibes, man. Also, a certain Noble-Lie censorious sanctimony:

Stigmatizing wasn’t an unintended consequence. It almost surely was the point. It was one thing for a clearly declining Joe Biden to keep repeating the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” saw after data started coming in about “breakthrough” infections and the questionable efficacy of the vaccine against new variants. But it went beyond Biden. It was repeated ad nauseum by White House spokespeople, which in turn led to media coverage delivering the real intended message: “It is a pandemic that’s centered in red America,” as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump put it.

Early official misinformation led to people like Rachel Maddow saying the risk not just of death but getting “really sick” after the shot was “basically zero,” and the risk of giving the disease to someone else “just drops off a cliff.” The “pandemic of the unvaccinated” campaign then led to countless stories about dumbasss Republicans/Trumpers/Tucker Carlson fans filling hospitals and issuing deathbed self-condemnations. From there it was a short jump to people like Kimmel saying farewell to “wheezy,” or Trevor Noah joking we have “more than enough vaccines for every man, woman and child who doesn’t listen to Joe Rogan,” or Howard Stern railing against “imbeciles”:

I’m really of mind to say, “Look, if you didn’t get vaccinated [and] you got Covid, you don’t get into a hospital… You had the cure and you wouldn’t take it.”

* OK, this is already WAY too long, so let’s do a lightning-graf of interesting content from our peeps. Jesse Singal says “We Are Losers,” Kat Rosenfield claims “It’s Not Because She’s a Woman,” Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180) sez “The Thing About Elections Is That Sometimes You Lose Them,” Gustavo Arellano (#306 & #377) argues why “Why It’s Wrong to Blame Trump’s Victory on Latino Men,” Andrew Sullivan (#139, #200 & #449) feels “The Energizing Clarity of Democracy,” and Nancy Rommelmann wants to get busy “Building a Better Media Mousetrap.” Don’t we all?

* Speaking of which, our pals Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller at Reason’s Just Asking Questions podcast also has a brand spanking new YouTube channel that you should subscribe to right the hell now, as evidenced by their timely interview this week with a polling analyst guy I’ve referenced a lot, Patrick Ruffini:

* Comment of the Week, a kind of be-careful-what-you-wish-for situation, comes from Jake S:

I relate to a lot of what’s been discussed in the emails, but especially to the last message about the guys not getting drunk enough on air. We need more of that and what better time to start than tonight!

Walkoff comes from the Election 2024 playlist: