Firehose #121: You Can Have Your White Meat….

Also: MAHA-ha-ha

Don we now our gay apparel? Oh, we don…. As an eventful November dovetails into tryptophan season (at least until RFK-jay MAHA’s us back into line), there is much here at Fif’ headquarters to be thankful for. Beginning, tautologically enough, with you all, who make it possible for us to crank on the content machine when the going gets weird. We hope you survive the coming onslaught of Thanksgiving-politics thinkpieces, and maybe we’ll even see you soon at some soon-to-be-announced live event!

* Judging by the mails, there’s a WHOLE lot of you who want to dive into the weeds of nutrition/health/policy/seed-oils/fluoride, so here’s a bit of fan service, in the form of Moynihan and Free Press co-YouTuber Batya Ungar-Sargon (veteran of Episode #451) interviewing Dr. Vinay Prasad about his “Simple Litmus Test for RFK Jr.’s Ideas”:

* Is Trump Really Pro Free Speech? That’s the headline on a conversation with Moynihan that was posted Sunday on The Winston Marshall Show. Yep: Same bloke who quit Mumford & Sons over politics a few years back. And, ol’ Hollywood sat in the Honestly hosting chair to talk with political demographer Ruy Teixeira and verbose lefty-grump Freddie DeBoer about “how Democrats became the party of elites, whether Kamala Harris’s loss is the death knell of identity politics, why abortion wasn’t enough to save the Democrats, and whether the party will learn any significant lessons from this historic defeat.”

* Oh hey I see that Moynihan’s Oct. 28 Substack livestream with the aforepictured Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423, #445, Members Only #231) about immigration is up over at the recent birthday boy’s eminently subscribable YouTube channel:

* Let’s do some backfill from #480. That was Semafor Ben Smith’s fourth Fifth rodeo; previously he talked about The Dossier in #125, the NYT problems (or at least, we asked) in #227, and the viral traffic gods in #404. Just before, Smith had gone on the Reflector podcast with pals Andy Mills and Matthew Boll (#457) to take a stab at the the question, “Why doesn’t anyone trust the media?” Also, here’s that Vanity Fair Cormac McCarthy article we were talking about; here is some skepticism about it; here’s a video of a guy who knows a thing or two about the subject of CM:

* Some of you like it when Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366) and John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366) argue about politics, so here they are, processing the election. From Loury’s write-up: “Here’s my feeling: in a word, elation. I’m glad Trump won, and I’m excited to see what the next four years look like. Given the ambivalence I’ve expressed in the past, that may come as a bit of a surprise. I’ll have more to say about it in the full subscriber-only post-show. In this conversation, John accepts that his preferred candidate was defeated. But he still thinks of Trump as a charismatic moron. Well, I don’t. He’s accomplished something historic, he needs to be taken seriously.” (Emphases in original.)

* Also processing the election and aftermath, through the lens of (naturally!) sports and media, is our incisive friend Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), in a piece succinctly headlined “Athletes Doing the Trump Dance, Sports Journos Going to BlueSky.”

* Comment of the Week comes from Ameya A:

He pulled out when he found out that the Justice Deparment was founded before 2007.

* Before any bratty 9-year-old in your car whines about there not being any Thanksgiving songs, please do remind all who would wish for such a thing that one actually exists, and, well….

More proper walkoff music, at the correct behest of listener Kevin, is a ridiculous Ben Dreyfuss Van Morrison clip from our greatest Thanksgiving movie: