Firehose #147: Comin’ at the King

Also: Dave Barry’s Substack is funnier than yours

Like Duk Dong, this one’s Long….

* Let’s start here: As mentioned on Episode #507, I have been spending a L-O-T of time converting your 320 comments’ worth of answers to my post-election who-do-you-trust question into a maximally utilizable document that you will see here next week. As a teaser for those results, the one journalistic outlet recommended the most by you lot was … The Free Press, launched in 2022 by our friend and past guest Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187).

As the tallest Lilliputian in Substackia, run by one of the most polarizing figures in American media, The Free Press is no stranger to incoming fire. But this past week introduced a new caliber of bullet—pieces mentioning (even leading with!) our very own ex-Freeper, Michael Moynihan. Such as Semafor’s, “Inside the Identity Crisis in Anti-Woke Media,” by Max Tani and Ben Smith (#125, #227, #404, #480):

The libertarian journalist Michael Moynihan felt the shift on election night 2024, after it had become clear that Donald Trump would win. He was co-hosting a livestream for The Free Press, a new publication that had boomed in response to The New York Times’s leftward turn, and was ranting about the dangers Trump would pose to free speech to an impassive group of anti-woke talkers.

“This is one of those many moments when I realized that this wasn’t, shall we say, a stable coalition,” he said in an email last week, after leaving a short stint at The Free Press. “One didn’t have to be especially prescient to spot those ‘anti-woke’ types who would just slowly become MAGA flunkies.”

Moynihan’s is a particularly stark example of an identity crisis now tearing through what had been one of the most vibrant slices of American media: the eclectic websites, podcasts, newsletters, and television programs that captured a reaction against left-wing speech-policing, identity politics, and social media-driven protest movements.

That loose group, rooted in part in a letter published in Harper’s Magazine in 2020, includes HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the digital show Breaking Points, opinion outlets like Quillette, UnHerd and Persuasion, the Jewish online magazine Tablet, and podcasts like Blocked & Reported and The Fifth Column. Now, they are reckoning with a president who has embraced their positions on many of their favored issues — in particular, the traditional boundaries of sex and gender, the role of affirmative action, and the left-wing slant of American academia — but who is pursuing their goals with the illiberal tactics they’d abhorred.

Let’s see if I can ape Semafor’s house style here…. MATT’S VIEW:

I forget what episode it was (maybe #480?), where in response to the prompt What media property do you find most interesting today, Kmele said Semafor, and I said … The Free Press. In part because they are both doing what very few outlets are attempting out here in Substack/podcast/indie-land — cobbling together a whole-ass newsroom/kommentary klub of people whose politics do not necessarily align with one another. This makes them both competitors (for eyeballs, for buzz, for investors, for live events), and also more susceptible than the rest of us to cherry-picked political criticism. Which obviously gets directed more at Bari than Ben.

This was the second time in four weeks (as previously detailed in Firehose #143) that Smith has probed the long-evident faultlines within the bloc that opposed the post-2014 spike in lefty/journalistic illiberalism. (We are no strangers to tracing such divisions.) Certainly, Trump 2.0 is surfacing some differences between those who aspire to airy-fairy principles and those who seek to harness government power in our fallen world, while additionally putting pressure on properties that have assembled significant pro-Trump audiences. But also, it is in the material interest of both Semafor and the more explicitly hostile-to-Bari ecosystem to reduce her site (and whatever broader category of outlets you want to rope in) as “Anti-Woke Media.” The FP, growing pains notwithstanding, is a good deal more than all that.

And that’s the memo.

* Speaking of both lefty/journalistic illiberalism and coming-at-kings, the Columbia Journalism Review this week unloaded its #MeToo guns at “moral clarity” champion Wesley Lowery (who we cross-examined back in July 2020). It’s an odd piece, as best dissected … in The Free Press! By Kat Rosenfield (#448), who added further thots on Substack:

[I]t seems like the big revelation here is just what a boring, ordinary, garden-variety sort of ugh total loser this guy turned out to be — and how badly he squandered the kind of opportunity most people would kill for. In any other time, Wesley Lowery would have been just another journalist with serviceable writing skills and an above-average nose for news; it just so happened that he stumbled backwards into a cultural moment where, briefly, incredibly, there was a huge and slavering market for the one weird thing he was selling. (See also: DiAngelo, Robin; Kendi, Ibram X.) And instead of recognizing his star status for the extraordinary good luck that it was — instead of rising to the occasion and proving himself worthy of the moral authority conferred upon him — Lowery's primary concern was how best to leverage his newfound fame and fortune to, as the kids say, smash.

* Further mining this vein, as you might expect, are Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em gals Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) and Sarah Hepola (#354). Now 100% more fun on YouTube!

* As mentioned on #507, King Kmele (as my eldest calls him) was on CNN’s News Night with Abby Phillip Wednesday. Or, as a Townhall wag put it, “Watch a 'Shark Tank' Host Obliterate a CNN Panel's Fake News Nonsense Over the Economy.” Here’s a clip of our boy trying to get a word in edgewise on public education:

* The apparently tireless Mike Pesca (#343, #418, #467) was a special guest star of the specially-Matt-hosted version of this week’s Reason Roundtable, talking about Trump’s War on Harvard, Pesca’s War on Pennies, and (why not) Mission Impossible:

* The latter is a good enough reason to be reminded (via alert listener Brian Huber in the Chat), that legendary funnyman Dave Barry (S.D. #72) is on Substack:

PARIS — Three Hours Later

Tom Cruise, having fully recovered from the decapitation and molten lava, is meeting with his ragtag team of rogue misfits: the Tech Genius, the Wryly Humorous British Person, and the Attractive Woman Who Would Be a Potential Love Interest for Tom Cruise Except That Something Tragic Always Happens To Her.

TOM CRUISE: We need to find the second plot device before the Mystery Villain does.

TECH GENIUS (tapping on laptop): OK, with a few keystrokes I've hacked into every database in existence, and... found it!

TOM CRUISE: Where?

TECH GENIUS: On the Moon. It's in an underground vault protected by... Uh-oh, this is bad.

TOM CRUISE: What is it? Extremely high voltage? Lasers? Missile-firing drones? Poison gas?

TECH GENIUS: It requires two-factor authentication.

TOM CRUISE: Dammit!

TECH GENIUS: There's no way you can get past that.

TOM CRUISE (grimly): I have to try.

ATTRACTIVE WOMAN: I'll go with you, Tom Cruise! (She dies.)

* Speaking of Miami live-show vets, was very gratified to see so much love for Members Only #251 guest Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379). If you liked his words therein about The Great Gatsby, here they are in extended form.

* And yes, here’s The Glug:

* Our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have a new Substack, called Expression, that you should check out. FIRE Chief Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427) has a fresh piece out in The Atlantic arguing that “Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard.”

* Let’s check in with the (FIRE-sponsored) Moynihan Report. First up this week was controversial journalism professor (and long-ago Warblog aficionado!) Jeff Jarvis, talking about the death of mass media, conservatism, identity politics, fascism, and suchlike:

* Then came artist and author Ari Richter, talking about his 2024 book,
Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance.

* Comment of the Week comes from DangerouslyUnstable:

This will probably get lost for being late to the party (which is maybe a good thing), but this seems like the best place to tell this story since this episode is so Memorial Day adjacent.

I attended the West Point graduation last weekend as my younger brother is in the Class of 2025. This was probably not evident on the broadcast (I have no idea, I haven't watched it), but the cadet corps had some kind of a bingo game going during Trump's speech, where they cheered when he mentioned specific things (I suspected this might be the case from the oddities of some of the cheers, and confirmed it later with some cadets. I suppose they could have been lying to me).

The one place it might have been obvious was when he finally mentioned "Chee-i-na", which elicited a cheer from the cadets, causing Trump to stop and say "I don't know what that was about", before continuing on.

The other most notable cheers were when he finally got around to blaming Biden for something or other, and from very early in the speech when he mentioned the Superintendent's family, in particular his daughter. I don't think this was part of the bingo game, I think they just got a kick out of cheering his college-age (and presumably attractive) daughter.

It did make the more interminable portions of the speech bearable though, so that was nice.

Walkoff, per this good/hilarious new doc, is the moment when the Swedish rocket took off: