Firehose #162: You Were Warned

Also: Social media is a mistake

Strap in. This is a looooooong one, whose organization was definitely not aided by the goof-inducements of Cyclobenzaprime….

Do you remember back in May, when a quote by Moynihan in a Semafor piece titled “Inside the Identity Crisis in Anti-Woke Media” was misinterpreted by some as him dishing on his ex-colleagues at The Free Press? No? Whatever, let’s re-roll tape of what ol’ Hollywood was actually talking about, which was a thought-flash that cut through the alcohol fog during the eleventy billion consecutive hours of FP panels he hosted on Election Night (humorously enough, in the exact same location we’ve been recording our video episodes):

[Moynihan] was ranting about the dangers [Donald] 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…. “One didn’t have to be especially prescient to spot those ‘anti-woke’ types who would just slowly become MAGA flunkies.”

Bolding mine. In other words, there was, and is, a category of people who gravitated toward Trump in part to oppose the many anti-free speech excesses of the Biden administration, yet who were (and are) strangely unmoved by the anti-free speech actions of Biden’s replacement. They -- not dissimilar to GODDAMNED HILLARY CLINTON suddenly rediscovering higher principles in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s defenestration -- are at best fair-weathered friends of the First Amendment, poised to turn largely silent or even actively malicious when their team again wields the Big Stick. I am grateful to see at least some exceptions to the rule among Republican electeds, notably Sen. Ted Cruz (“That's right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going 'Nice bar you have here. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.'"). But too many people are letting their anger at Them override their loyalty to It (“It” being “the Constitution” and related Enlightenment projects), and then getting back to the regular business of carefully tending partisan audience cores, smoking whataboutism for breakfast, and belting this song out on repeat:

Sorry, am I ranting? Well, hear me rant some more, from a Reason livestream Thursday:

* Kmele on Friday went on CNN to panelize more about the Kimmel Kase:

* We talked at length about free-speech conundra on Members Only #276 with basically the best person to suss it all out, Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) President and CEO Greg Lukianoff, veteran of Episode #216, M.O. #183, and #427. (And as always on such matters, read the careful assessment by my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum.)

Another person with a relevant P.O.V. is Bill Maher, a late-nite public-affairs comedian who was canned by ABC 24 years to the day of Kimmel’s axing, and replaced by … well, watch the monologue:

* I asked Maher about his ABC canning, and how discourse around free speech vis-à-vis the White House had changed so much since then, in my Reason Q&A with him last year. Relevant excerpt:

I was recently remembering the Ari Fleischer quote, where he was asked about your comment not long after September 11 about the comparative cowardliness of Americans sending bombs from afar. His response when asked, "What do you say to Bill Maher's quote," was, "Americans have to watch what they say." Which was not great! It was not great for the spokesman of the president of the United States to say that as a general thing, or even as a specific thing.

Everybody on the left was on my side. As they should be. And that should pertain to both sides, left and right. It was wrong when someone from the right said, "Americans should watch what they say," but who are we really watching what we say for now, more than anybody? The left. That's who you have to watch what you say around.

Look, it's not like cancel culture doesn't exist on the right. I've pointed out before: Nobody got canceled harder than Colin Kaepernick. OK? So it happens both ways. But it's more of a left thing. People are much more afraid. Obviously people in the public eye even more so, but even just around the office, people are worried: "I have a thought; just safer not to say it." And that's a bad place to be.

I referenced the Ari Fleischer quote on CNN recently, in an amazing segment from a few months ago in reaction to one of these court cases that went against the Biden administration for trying to suppress speech, especially COVID-related health speech and "misinformation." I sat with a panel of journalists who were all just shaking their damn heads at the judge not allowing the Biden administration to crack down on all these lying misinformation people. As I was saying on CNN, I couldn't believe that we got to this point where journalists are cheering on the White House engaging in actual censorship, saying from the same podium that Spotify really needs to do more to crack down on Joe Rogan, that there's a dirty dozen list of people who spread the most misinformation about COVID.

Misinformation. One of the other most weasel fucking words. Whose misinformation? These people—the "science" people—have no idea what science is, that it's something that's tested every day. Otherwise it's religion. What they're talking about, what they have is a religion. Ridiculous.

Here is the aforementioned CNN segment, in which I tried to warn a panel of journalists that maybe federal censorship is bad, mmmkay?

* Moynihan on his Report this week talked mucho Kimmel/Charlie Kirk, including most recently with Mediaite founder Colby Hall, with whom the host argued about the F-word:

* Also in the Moynichair was Fifdom fave Mary Katharine Ham (#345 & #430):

Mentioned therein, and also in one of our recent episodes, was MK Hammer’s classic 2009 piece about the Tea Party violence that wasn’t, “The Town Halls of August.” I mined a similar vein in December 2009, including an accusation that I was racist for quoting a Snoop Dogg song.

* Quick omnigraf of Fifdom-world Kirk/Kimmelisms: Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, M.O. #251) wrote a Free Press jeremiad titled “Abolish the FCC,” which I am linking here despite the FP calling Nick “our favorite libertarian and editor-at-large of Reason Magazine.” Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180) wrote several thousand mostly sensible words, including the unforgettable parenthetical “(The fact that I ended up trying to hang myself about a year later was just a funny irony of time.)” Listener and HistoryBoomer Carl performed a vivisection on Heather Cox Richardson’s Tyler Robinson performance. And mega-comedian/ponytailer Andrew Schulz (#30 & #32) explained just hours ago why “Charlie Kirk & Jimmy Kimmel Prove America is Broken”:

* Just realized we’re 1,100+ words and seven videos in and haven’t even gotten to Megyn Kelly yet….

* So: On Tuesday, we made our monthly appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show, talking and sometimes mostly listening about people reverting to their ideological priors when reacting to Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “hate speech” nonsense, and the Kirk-theorizing of Candace Owens. Whole episode:

That Candace Owens stuff, as we touched on briefly in both #524 and M.O. #276, was, uh, quite the ride. Our pal Noam Dworman, God bless him, devoted nearly two hours this week to understanding and then pushing back on the theory that just maybe Kirk’s alleged recent turn away from Israel in the Israel-Gaza War had something to do with him being shot in the neck by a 22-year-old whose motives seem a bit more clear than all that:

* Since Noam is the impresario of The Comedy Cellar, let’s do another comedy clip, this time from Ryan Long, all about the throat-clear:

* Remember our recent conversations about learning when not to blow up a dinner party? Well, when Kmele did CNN Friday, he decided he wasn’t going to sit idly by and let Barack Obama be described as … black.

* Jeeminy Christmas, this thing is already too long…. Well, let me just posit, as I did on this week’s Reason Roundtable, that social media is a mistake:

* Made similar points at length the day before on the excellent Uncertain Things podcast:

I have some much longer thoughts/explications/examples on the topic, relating to the news of the past 10 awful days, but maybe I’ll save it for a separate post.

* Glad you guys liked the episode with Thor Halvorssen, and for those recoiling at his intensity, fear not! He’s actually good friends w/ Moynihan and Kmele, and we all had a grand time. “I’m not typically a podcast guest, but this issue called for it,” he tweeted. “@WeTheFifth where I talked about something I truly care about with brilliant humans.” Here’s that speech to the United Nations we were talking about:

* Comment of the Week comes from DWAnderson:

This was one of my favorite episodes. It deserves to be released from behind the paywall.

It does a great job of describing (in only 90 minutes) a bunch of the great insights from EconTalk over the years (I started listening in 2008).

There are so many great episodes, including this discussion with Erik Hoel on Effective Altruism, Utilitarianism, and the Repugnant Conclusion (https://www.econtalk.org/erik-hoel-on-effective-altruism-utilitarianism-and-the-repugnant-conclusion/) which sticks out in my mind as a being great 75-minute course in moral philosophy.

I am tempted to list many others, but suffice it to say that EconTalk has filled my life with a bunch of great insights that have changed my thinking in many ways.

* Walkoff is a demo of a good harmony song I don’t recall hearing before this week: