Firehose #192: Shots Fired

Also: Who wants to read 16,500 critical words about my misspent career?

Looks like I picked an excellent year to keep alive my unbroken streak of never coming close to attending the White House Correspondents Dinner. I just can’t stand to witness that kind of violence, by which I obviously mean Michael Tracey squaring off with Jim Acosta.

Detained shooter/sprinter Cole Allen, a CalTech-graduating videogame developer and “Teacher of the Month” tutorer from that radicalizing hellscape of Torrance, California, had the good manners in his coherent if morally idiotic manifesto to apologize to his students (and parents, and co-workers), though mostly because he lied to them about why he skipped town, not because he, you know, was planning to mass-murder the administration “from highest-ranking to lowest,” though excluding Kash Patel for some reason. (Maybe Cole’s a hockey fan?) More manifestoage:

I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. […]

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that. […]

The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

Allen’s thwarted ultra-violence capped off an exquisitely dumb week in which the chattering classes had been cheerfully debating the pros and cons of shoplifting and political murder. As we have long maintained on this podcast and in other fora, the political violence will continue until a preponderance of people in politics act like political violence is a problem.

* In cheerier news from our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE),

We’re thrilled to announce that The Fifth Column / Podcast is coming to Soapbox for a special LIVE recording!

Hosted by journalists Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, The Fifth Column has challenged orthodoxy from every side since 2016.

What better place for them to deliver their weekly rhetorical assault on the news cycle than a conference dedicated to defending their right to do so?

We can’t wait to host them at Soapbox. Secure your spot now!

* November 4-6, 2026

* Philadelphia, PA

* https://soapbox.fire.org/

Use the discount code FIFTH to save $50 on conference tickets. As mentioned previously in this space, other past Fif’ guests appearing at this Semiquincentennialtastic event include Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, Members Only #251), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276), Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and I’m sure others.

OTHER IMPORTANT LIVE-SHOW DATE-SETTING: For those of you within reasonable distance of Washington, D.C., please mark May 19 on your calendars….

* Speaking of live shows, didja enjoy the long-awaited Fifth Column appearance from Ryan Long? Those of you who are not paying subscribers can watch his full special from last year gratis:

* Here’s another free tease from our popular M.O. #314 convo w/ legal beagle Sarah Isgur, this time about how Congress doesn’t do its job:

* Kmele and the Tanglers this week talked about Trump’s declining popularity, gerrymandering shenanigans, and Kash Patel’s lawsuit against The Atlantic:

* On the Reason Roundtable last Monday, we talked about Zohran Mamdani’s Tax Day billionaire-baiting, Trump’s liberalization of drug research, and Palantir’s 20-sided die of a 22-point Twitter manifesto. The latter included a call for National Service, which, as always, is bait:

* Moar Reason: The inimitable Andrew Heaton landed a can’t-miss interview with … Afroman:

* Time for … AD SWAP!!! (ad swap ad swap….)

The Dispatch: Journalism Without the Circus

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***

* Fox News host and Brian Kilmeade made his debut appearance on M.O. #316; here’s a free tease of the history buff talking about his relationship with Trump:

* News derived from our recent discussion with Mark Harmon keeps percolating, in TV Insider, People magazine (appropriately!), Hello! magazine, Primetimer, and elsewhere.

* Who wants to read 16,500 words about my journalism career? Me neither! Except, they were written by one-in-a-billion Internet personality Luke Ford, and were eviscerating enough to be genuinely intriguing in places. You, the beloved Fifth Column audience, were invoked a time or four, so here’s a relevant taste:

The Fifth Column format embodies the myth at its purest. Three men with different political starting points sit around microphones and work through contested questions by talking. The show’s premise is that careful dialogue across difference produces clarity. The audience pays for this performance. What the performance actually delivers is coalition maintenance for a specific subculture: heterodox liberals, drifting libertarians, anti-woke moderates. The three hosts do not arrive at clarity through dialogue. They arrive at the positions their shared coalition already holds. The dialogue is the theater. The coalition is the structure.

The heterodox positioning that sustains Welch’s career depends on the misunderstanding myth in a sharper way. The whole premise of heterodox media is that partisans on left and right are trapped in coalition confusion, and only the heterodox see clearly. Pinsof denies the premise. Neither side is confused. Both pursue their coalition interests with adequate self-knowledge. The heterodox media class is its own coalition with its own interests, its own donors, its own audience, its own status hierarchy. Its members pretend to occupy a view from nowhere. The pretense is the product.

The irony tone reinforces the myth. Welch’s characteristic exasperated amusement assumes the audience recognizes what he is pointing out. The affect says: can you believe these people are doing this? The question presumes the viewer shares his frame and is not the target of the critique. The tone is a coalition filter. Outsiders hear smugness. Insiders hear the pleasure of shared recognition. The work signals membership in a coalition that flatters itself on seeing through the confusions of lesser coalitions, while remaining unable to see its own position as a coalition at all.

What does Welch gets from holding the myth? Welch gets a career. He gets the Fifth Column audience. He gets Reason’s continued patronage. He gets the adjacent heterodox network. He gets the sense of himself as a man who sees what others miss. All of this rests on the premise that careful communication across coalition lines matters. Abandon the premise and the career has no justification.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

It’s a rare feat for a film to be overtly referential yet completely transformative, but Roman Coppola’s 2001 feature debut CQ manages to pull off exactly this. A love letter to the sexy, stylized films produced by Dino De Laurentiis in the 1960s, CQ draws inspiration from both Danger: Diabolik and David Holzman’s Diary, producing a unique tale of a young American filmmaker in Paris tasked with salvaging a sci-fi flick after the firing of its psychotic director (Gerard Depardieu), while also trying to manage the relationship with his French girlfriend and staving off his own existential crisis. The film within the film is Codename: Dragonfly, and centers on an alluring freelance super spy (played by Angela Lindvall) who is hired to put the kibosh on Mr. E (Billy Zane), leader of an anarchist cult based on the Moon. Both this meta film and the period piece that encapsulates it benefit from Roman’s dad’s favorite production designer, Dean Tavoularis (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Outsiders). It is a highly clever, tightly scripted, visually stunning movie about the movies that naturally … was a huge flop. Rent on Prime; watch free (with ads) on Tubi; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Frank Scardino:

Kilmeade seems like a nice guy, but he embodies what I think Jonah Goldberg (or someone else at the Dispatch) calls taking Trump “hypothetically” as opposed to “seriously” or “literally.” Such a person takes one of Trump’s crazy positions, gives it the most favorable spin possible, saying something like: (1) I think Trump’s bat shit behavior is not the bizarre product of a disordered personality, but, rather, a unique effort to obtain some reasonable policy goal, (2) this bat shit behavior will likely be successful in obtaining this reasonable result, and (3) to the extent this future result is achieved, Trump is a genius.

For example, Kilmeade’s position on Trump’s tariffs. He said that Trump’s underlying goal was just to get new trade deals done, and once that happens, everyone will be better off. Obviously completely ignoring the fact that Trump just likes tariffs, Trump tariffed countries where the US had a trade surplus, and that Trump is otherwise ignoring the trade deals that are currently in place...

But I guess you have to play this game in the cable news business.

Sendoff: There were just too many people in 1970s entertainment with names like the recently departed Dave Mason. Was he the drummer in Pink Floyd? No, not quite. Smooth-voiced soft-rocker? Close, but no cigar. Unpleasant actor/comedian? No, this Dave, this Mason, was a co-founder of Traffic, part of the whole Delaney & Bonnie problem, and a session man for Jimi Hendrix and George Harrison. The song of his you probably know best is “Feelin’ Alright?”, made most famous by Joe Cocker. This is the song of his I couldn’t banish out of my head when it came out, despite never ever wanting to hear another goddamned song on the radio about adult couples breaking up: