Firehose #167: Hey, Hey, Milei!

Also: Tune into that Bill Maher program this Friday

Well, would you lookit that. Argentinian President and Nick Gillespie stunt double Javier Milei, just two months after his political party, La Libertad Avanza, took a beating in a local Buenos Aires elections, came out huge in the midterm parliamentary vote, winning around 41 percent of votes cast, ahead of the Peronistas’ 32. The surprisingly large victory increases the Freedom Advancers’ share in the 72-seat Senate from 6 to 20, and in the 257-seat Chamber of Deputies from 37 to 101. Yes, the chainsaw wielder has been able to change so much without much in the way of legislative support. Until now.

We haven’t talked all that much about the pint-sized anti-Peronist around these parts, aside from Members Only #190 (“Tantric Drummers for Freedom”), but I for one have always been a fan. It’s rare to have self-identified libertarians in power anywhere, let alone in one of the most self-abased countries in Latin America, and having that model available internationally makes any number of improbable political/governance outcomes at least slightly more plausible.

One week ago, The Reason Roundtable led off with an extended exchange on President Donald Trump’s pre-election $20-40 billion bailout/currency-swap proposal, and what that means for Milei:

For those who enjoy edited shorts of me Well AKShuallying, here’s a brief bit on currency swaps:

* HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher program this Friday night may just have a guest you will want to tune in for….

* Speaking of Moynihan, his Report last week was chock-a-block w/ past Fifth guests. First up was Thomas Chatterton Williams (#121, #158, #188, #197, #373, M.O. #252, M.O. #273), to talk about his book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse:

* Then came funnyman/Jews-in-things-counter Danny Polishchuk (M.O. #187) for a “very Nazi-heavy show” that discusses some of the recent Nazis-in-political-things problem that we chewed on near the top of our #529 conversation w/ Jeffrey Toobin:

* Speaking of Toobin, here’s the books of his we touched on in that episode: The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (1996), American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst (2016), Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism (2023), and The Pardon: The Politics of Presidential Mercy (2025).

* Maybe you’ve heard distant rumblings about some kind of election in New York City next week? Past guest Harry Siegel (#3, #116, #320), who so skillfully broke down the mayoral primary for us back in #511, had a typically busy last week of NYC reporting, talking election & policing with former NYPD chief Bill Bratton, and the “tectonic shift” of Zohran Mamdani with fabled documentarian Ric Burns. Channeling a bit of Mr. Siegel, I wrote a cranky piece for Reason last week about the various people & entities trying to shame Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa out of the race. Sample:

[H]edge fund smart-aleck Cliff Asness, who unlike [Bill] Ackman at least has a visible sense of humor, accused me this week of murdering Gotham: “The beret itself should’ve been disqualifying but at this point it’s anyone voting for him, and automatically electing the Jihad-loving real-life communist (not the ‘we like Denmark and Sweden’ type liberals) who are responsible for killing this city.”

Leaving aside the old-timey notion that any candidate’s quirks can be “disqualifying” in the age of Donald Trump, let us take seriously the question of responsibility. I am not now nor have I ever been a Republican. However, as a moderately aware voter in this great and terrible city, I have known for years that the Democratic mayoral nominee would be awful, and not just as the default party setting.

At this time last year, the betting money for the Dem nomination was either on the laughably corrupt incumbent Eric Adams or the repellent City Comptroller Brad Lander—a character who should have been very well known to Wall Street, given his serial advancement of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) activism while managing the city’s vast pension funds.

In other words, the time to get “serious” about a quality Republican challenger was at the very latest 2024, long before Mamdani began haunting the nightmares of us non-socialists. So who did our political gadflies put up against Sliwa’s silly beret?

Nobody. He ran unopposed.

* Very much related: The crack Reason video squad last week uncorked a mini-documentary about Gotham’s literally insane housing and rental policies; there will be a screening & convo about it in NYC this Wednesday evening. Eagle-eyed viewers may even catch a noted French-American investigator featured therein:

* Heard about that NBA gambling scandal? Aside from reading about it from gambling degenerate Nate Silver, you can listen to our very own Kmele about the controversy with friendly neighborhood sportsballer Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408).

* Raise your hand if you don’t give two figs about the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to build a Donald J. Trump ballroom! One-eyed centrist lunatic Ben Dreyfuss (veteran of episodes #83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392 and M.O. #180) is your champion, writing a “ballroom is good” piece that takes aim at the “preservationist-industrial complex,” and also details the non-Fifth Column portion of his ideological realignment story:

I used to not care about building policy. But one day, I’m reading REASON Magazine and I came across this article that blew my mind.

This guy in Denver owned a diner for decades. He’d been part of the community forever and blah blah blah. He was getting old in the tooth, and he wanted to retire, so he put the diner up for sale. No one wanted to buy the diner as a business because the diner was not a good business, but he found some people who wanted to buy the property and do something else with it. The historical preservationists used Denver’s evil laws to veto the redevelopment of the rinky dink diner. Since no one was willing to buy the diner as is, the old man was unable to retire and was effectively forced to keep operating the stupid diner.

So I read this story and I had a very visceral reaction to it. I was working at Mother Jones at the time, and though I couldn’t get anyone else interested in the story, a nice thing about the company is they sort of let you assign things to yourself if you really feel strongly about them, so I decided I was going to start looking into this whole historical preservation society situation. Real investigatory journalism, you know? Shoeleather reporting, not on the Denver diner but the cabal of troglodytes that run these preservationists. I went to a couple of community rezoning meetings in NYC where these awful people just would not let anyone do anything. And by that point, I was on the road to radicalization. I was reading urbanism blogs and watching YIMBY organizing Zooms. The story never came out because 2020 happened, and then I was cancelled lol. But in the intervening years, my feelings about this issue have only grown. I’m now, to be quite honest with you, a crank. I don’t believe in zoning at all. People should build whatever they want on their own property as long as it hits basic levels of safety (but not the absurd fake levels of safety the NIMBYs sometimes demand).

* Comment of the Week comes from Kathleen:

Do not fuck with Moynihan’s dinner.

Walkoff music, indirectly inspired by Toobin, is one of those tunes simple & stupid enough to remind aspiring songwriters everywhere that any damned fool idea can end up on a recording, let alone be presented as some kind of paean to the American farmer: