Firehose #190: Planet Waves

Also: Second Sunday postponed to Third Sunday, because live show

Quick bit o’ housekeeping: Because our 10^th-anniversary show tomorrow at the Village Underground in NYC falls on the second Sunday of April, the monthly Second Sunday Zoom call for paying subscribers will now take place on the Third Sunday, April 19, at a time to be determined. TYFYATTM.

* Been a while since we featured Fifdom fave Kyle Dunnigan around these parts, so here’s a fresh new track of topical import:

* Hungarians go to the polls this weekend, as we’ve been yammering about here and there. Normally, this would rank pretty low on the who-gives-a-rip meter, except for that the president of the United States has gone to unprecedented lengths to campaign for a (politically flagging) politician in an allied democracy, including a last-ditch promise to “use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy.” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán could really use that economic help, since his 16 years of anti-liberal rule have driven the once-trailblazing Hungarian economy to near the back of the post-communist line. Friend and past guest Johan Norberg (Episode #419) published two recent pieces detailing at length Orbán’s crappy record—“How Viktor Orbán’s Hungary Eroded the Rule of Law and Free Markets,” for the Cato Institute, and, for the Washington Post, “Hungary Is a Laboratory for Illiberal Nationalism. The Results Are in.”

Economic historian Phil Magness this week published an interesting essay on where Orbán fits into the post-liberal project. I wrote a somewhat crabby piece about J.D. Vance’s disgraceful campaign visit to the country, titled “Viktor Orbán and His American Apologists All Deserve To Lose.” Excerpt:

There has understandably sprouted a whole journalistic cottage mini-industry to explain the inexplicable: Why has this administration shredded all precedent by going whole-hog campaign mode for the fading autocrat of a country whose GDP ranks somewhere between Greece and Uzbekistan? While I appreciate and learn from these efforts (and have contributed my share), there is, I think, a far more pressing issue for those Americans who may or may not give a rat’s ass about Magyarország: Regardless of motivation, U.S. politicians are telling on themselves, and advertising their own potentially appalling behavior, by shilling for a proven anti-liberal failure. […]

It will be morbidly fascinating to see how Vance, Trump, and Rubio will react if Orbán loses the election but then engages in legal chicanery to dispute or overturn the results. He has, after all, expanded and packed the Hungarian Supreme Court; embedded his political party’s control over whole swaths of the country’s commercial, media, and civic institutions; and spent the past few weeks making increasingly lurid accusations of Ukrainian election interference. Trump, no stranger to fantastical election-contestations of his own, has put more personal investment in this one faraway election than any American president has in any foreign election in history, while touting a National Security Strategy that openly backs “patriotic European parties” and cultivates “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.” The incentives going in are a mess. […]

American postliberal conservatives know Viktor Orbán’s voluminous track record of steering his country downward on virtually every comparative international ranking of freedom, prosperity, and the rule of law. They know that he has serially expropriated private pensions, seized private property from foreigners, regulated whole private industries out of business, and taken government stakes in hundreds of previously private companies. They don’t care. In fact, they see it as aspirational.

* Also nonplussed with Vance’s trip was Jonah Goldberg (#182), which is a fine lead-in for a new Firehose featurette called … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap ad swap….)

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* Our Members Only #311 conversation with Democratic presidential thinking-about-it Rahm Emanuel has been ping-ponging around, especially this bit:

Follow-on coverage in The Hill, Fox News, New York Post, The Washington Times, Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Rocky Mountain Voice, The Daily Caller, 930 WFMD Chicago, and Hot Air, among others.

* M.O. #313, for those of you in the cheap seats, was the first Mailbag episode in a coon’s age, so you could hear us take the usual flak & fun from the faithful. We also predicted, as of Monday night, that “there’s no chance he’s gonna do all the war crimes on Tuesday evening.”

* If you want to get your Kmele fix, here’s him & the Tanglers talking more about Iran:

* Moar Kmele: Non-paying subscribers who couldn’t get past the paywall-jump in our M.O. #312 conversation with Cuba specialist Ted Henken missed this classic exchange on Latin America racial notions vs. America’s “demented” hangups:

* Speaking of demented racial hangups, pal Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412, #442) used his blowtorch on Ibram X. Kendi’s new book this week; here’s the video version:

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Space is back, baby! With Americans riding high on the successful Artemis II mission and audiences flocking to theaters to see Project Hail Mary, it’s almost like we’ve remembered that there is an entire rest of the fucking universe to explore. So before we get distracted by some terrestrial drama, let’s fire up Al Reinert’s 1989 documentary, For All Mankind. Reinert combines incredible footage from the Apollo missions with the voices of the 24 astronauts that have visited the moon, but what takes the doc to another level is the evocative score by Brian Eno. What Reinert gives us is no history lesson—there are no particulars about individual missions, or even who is speaking at any given time. It is instead a synthesis of man’s past journeys to the moon presented as the monomyth. You’ll walk away with a new appreciation for these heroes’ journeys, and have a whole lotta feels along the way. Buy the Blu-Ray, watch on HBO Max; enjoy this excerpt of astronauts fucking around on the moon:

* Comment of the Week comes from Brad:

It was fun to imagine that this guest was actually Gary Oldman working out a character performance.

Sendoff: Three musical/personal topics we have oft chewed over the past (*gulp*) decade—the nonsense of “cultural appropriation,” the freedom to self-reinvent, and the question of which beloved artist will be cancelled in death—combined this week with the demise at age 67 of hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa. The New York Times hed is kinda perfect on that latter point: “‘His Legacy Is Complex’: Grappling With Afrika Bambaataa.” The complexities chiefly included … four accusations of sexual molestation, one of which led to a settlement. The reinvention came when this Bronx River Projects kid named Jared Taylor, son of immigrants from Jamaica and the Barbados, re-christened himself and ending up founding thd Universal Zulu Nation. And the vanguard cultural mixing and innovation we celebrate here today was a song and moment that Moynihan has mentioned often: Transforming Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” into “Planet Rock.”