Firehose #213: Fall Comes Alive!

Also: Loser hhwhites come after my ancestors

Before we get into some of the Fif’-related news and commentary of the week, we’ve got a few live events to announce!

* Nov. 12, Fairfield University, Connecticut, $35 for non-students. Our good friends at Fairfield are inviting The Fifth Column as part of the John Charles Meditz College of Arts and Sciences’ Enduring Question Series. Special guest very likely; FOMO guaranteed for non-attendees. Tickets here.

* Oct. 1, just me, the Paley Center for Media, NYC, $30 for non-members. This one’s called, “The Media and The Midterms: Determining America’s Future,” with Karen Defilippi, Patrick Egan, Astead W. Herndon, Jay Townsend, moderated by Margaret Talev. Tickets here.

* Oct. 31, University of Austin, just me again (plus others) on a panel about patriotism that I don’t see advertised yet on UATX’s Events page.

* These next two have been announced before, and are in sold out/waiting list mode or pretty near, but: Oct. 7, The Reason Roundtable 10^th anniversary show, NYC, $10. Tickets here. Plus:

* Nov. 4-6, full Fifth Column, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s sold-out Soapbox 26 conference, featuring a special guest. Conference also includes such past Fif’ guests as Sarah Isgur (Members Only #314, M.O. #331), Noam Dworman (#549), David French (#191, #325, #365, #555) Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551), 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 Ilya Shapiro (#361).

* OK! Y’all seemed to enjoy our M.O. #344 conversation with The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper. Here’s a clip of Harper talking about why/how he left academia and Woke 1 behind:

Supplemental TAH reading: “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” “Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?”, and my favorite, “Inside the Dangerous, Secretive World of Extreme Fishing.”

* Episode #575 with Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei was of course free to all comers, but here’s a 12-minute clip for those who still haven’t hit Play, in which JVH ranks Donald Trump’s three most precedent-breaking actions:

* The Moynihan Report this week one-on-oned with past Fif’ guest Jon Lovett of Pod Saves fame:

* Kmele & the Tanglers this week talked A.I.:

* Near the end of this week’s Reason Roundtable, which also led with the A.I. hullaballoo, I soliloquized about our dearly departed pal, Andrew “Busty” Wimsatt. Here’s that bit:

* I also talked about Andrew, and the questions surrounding his brutal murder, on News Nation’s Katie Pavlich Tonight:

* A week ago I was on News Nation’s The Hill Sunday talking with host Chris Stirewalt (#396) + two co-panelists about potential A.I. regulatory capture, Trump’s catastrophically idiotic $5,000 “dividend” idea, and reflections on the anniversary of 9/11. My two blocs begin at around the 25-minute mark:

* This has been quite the week for Republican racisms, as briefly mentioned on M.O. #344. First was Texas Railroad Commission nominee Bo French absolutely staying in character by expressing chagrin that U. of Texas fans include many people of subcontinental descent; then Karl Rove declaring that he’ll vote for French’s Democratic opponent as a result; then conservative Erick Erickson uncorking a long damnation of the “white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies” infiltrating into right-leaning institutions. All of which have been greeted with a mixture of shrieking, denial, and the defiant grabbing of shovels.

In that latter class strode Pinochet enthusiast Will Tanner, co-founder of the Lost Causey, colonialism-lamenting American Tribune Substack. “Jesus did not say you have to let a bunch of pagans who worship demons replace your children,” was one of Tanner’s responses; “’umm actually you’re not allowed to notice the demographic displacement and replacement of your people because the left notices that you are white and hates you for it,’” was another. But I was blissfully unaware of the man’s public flatulence until this tweet crossed into my stream:

Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, had to surrender to a German 48er immigrant officer at the end of the war. Describing his response to the lecture about “American values” he received from the German in broken English, he wrote:

“I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. Happily for the world, since the days of Huss and Luther, neither tyranny nor taste can repress the Teutonic intellect in search of truth or exposure of error. A kindly, worthy people, the Germans, but wearing on occasions.”

Could he be referring to … yep, he was: Peter Joseph Osterhaus. My great-great-great grandfather.

It’s true, PJO was impolitic in that moment; a common reading-the-room immigrant flaw that hobbled his six-month stint as post-war military commander of Vicksburg. (Though he did master the verbal niceties enough to fashion a long U.S. diplomatic career in Lyon and Mannheim.) It’s also true that Gen. Taylor’s Scar-like sarcasm could not mask a defensive, imperious ugliness that treated former slaves with precisely the humanity you’d expect from the owner of a large sugar plantation bought for him by his daddy-president. A section from Taylor’s memoir, bemoaning those nassty Northernersses making a fuss over postwar negro-murdering in the South:

As crocodiles conceal their prey until it becomes savory and tender and ripe for eating, so the Radicals kept these dark corpses to serve up to the public when important elections approached, or some especial villainy was to be enacted by the Congress. People who had never been south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers knew all about this “Ku-Klux”; but I failed, after many inquiries, to find a single man in the South who ever heard of it, saving in newspapers. Doubtless there were many acts of violence. When ignorant negroes, instigated by pestilent emissaries, went beyond endurance, the whites killed them; and this was to be expected.

Tanner is dutifully impressed with Taylor’s bloodlines (as were those many generals who kept promoting him far above his station, hoping to benefit from his connections to Jefferson Davis, who had married his sister), but does not continue the genealogy forward. Osterhaus, who enlisted as a connection-less private at the age of 38, kept on contributing to the defense of America through siring Rear Admiral Hugo Wilson Osterhaus, for whom the USS Osterhaus was named. Hugo’s son Hugo Wilson Osterhaus, Jr. also became a Rear Admiral; my brief memory of him was that he was very grumpy (unsurprisingly!). Both Hugos are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, on land once owned by Robert E. Lee.

My mom wrote a book about great-great-great grandpa (for whom my brother is named), called Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus. Here’s me interviewing her about it:

* Speaking of Founding Fathers, is it me, or has The Babylon Bee’s batting average gotten considerably higher as of late?

* A funnier American institution, Dave Barry (S.D. #72), goes almost serious (but still very funny) in talking about how his reporter-wife Michelle just got canned from the newspaper. Excerpt:

Michelle has been a sportswriter for four decades. For most of her career, she has written more than 400 stories a year. So we’re talking thousands of stories, containing tens of thousands of names and statistics, and I’m guessing that in all that time she got maybe a dozen facts wrong. She had to be accurate, because she was — in fact still is — a woman, which means that every time she writes a story, she has to prove that she knows what she’s talking about. Men do not have to prove this, because men have penises, which give men a natural ability, from birth, to speak authoritatively about all sports, all the time. This is why a casual male sports fan can watch three minutes of a football game between two teams he has never seen before and declare, with complete confidence, that the coaches — who have been coaching for years, and whose jobs depend on their teams’ performance, and who have been up late night after night preparing for this game — have NO IDEA what they’re doing. The casual male sports fan can tell this at a glance, thanks to his penis. […]

That’s how it is in newspapers these days. Papers that were once thriving, vibrant civic institutions are now, in many markets, shriveled husks, shuffling zombies, if they still exist at all. There are a bunch of reasons for this, some of them the newspaper industry’s own fault. I’m not writing this to assign blame. I’m writing it to lament the fact that a lot of the newspaper people losing their jobs are, like Michelle, really good at what they do, and really care about how they do it, and now all the stories that they would have written will never get written. And Facebook and X and YouTube can’t begin to make up for that loss.

And it sucks.

* This date in Fifth Column history: Screw it, a new recurring feature! On Sept. 20, 2018, we posted an episode after what must have been a record-setting gap of three whole weeks since last we’d podded. Was titled “Notes on Moynihan’s European Excursion, The Kavanaugh Hearings.” Moynihan is … not apologetic. Nor even close to sober. Man, did we drive episodes straight into the ditch back then….

On an individual basis, this date last year was when Kmele dumbfounded a CNN co-panelist by questioning her assertion that Barack Obama is black. In 2016, Reason posted my (sadly!) prescient cover story, “Debt Denialists: Democrats and Republicans fiddle while the balance sheet burns.” And in 2006, Moynihan wrote “Sweden’s Politics of Personal Destruction: Voters say nay to Social Democrats, but ‘the most successful society the world has ever known’ will, alas, survive.”

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

If there’s a film genre I like even more than find him and kill him, it’s a group of relative strangers wind up in a big, spooky house. The 1971 Belgian-Italian film The Devil’s Nightmare may lack the polish of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, but it makes up for it with lesbian sex, baby-killing Nazis (okay, one baby-killing Nazi), and Satan himself. After a group of seven tourists (each embodying one of the seven deadly sins) find themselves stranded, they are forced to shack up at an imposing, conveniently located old castle. Enter cult superstar Erika Blanc as Lisa Müller, who proceeds to seduce each of the tourists, using pride, greed, gluttony, etc. to bring about their demise. Spoiler alert: she’s a succubus! With a great score by Alessandro Alessandroni maintaining the vibe throughout, it’s a slow, sexy, creepy and fun film that’s a perfect way to kick off Halloween season. Stream mediocre-quality transfer on Amazon Prime; buy the Blu-ray; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Jose Morales:

SO GOOD!!! Tyler’s article about Bates in the Atlantic should be a movie (I just read it after watching this podcast). He seriously lays it out almost as a screenplay. The opening paragraphs are so perfect for a movie - driving into the small, quaint town. It would be a new “American Fiction”. I had experiences similar to Tyler’s, both at work and in life. In tech, I saw comparable—if less draconian—programs introduced. White employees were told how to pronounce names and to give BIPOC colleagues priority in discussions. We had discussions about “decolonizing code”. I was once invited to a prestigious industry event that helped place people in really great positions, only to realize upon arriving that I had apparently been included because of my last name—without anyone or the invite having any mention of this. More recently, a very liberal white friend tried to define my identity for me and could not accept that the political movement she was describing does not represent all Latinos. My kid’s old school, wanted to be sure that everyone was an anti racist - which in that case meant that white people had to accept that they were all racists and that they needed to work on that. Like Bates College, the school was exceptionally liberal, yet they would have you believe that everyone was really just a racist. I do feel like much of this has died down (although still seems to be alive in California schools - particularly private expensive ones). I just hope V2 will not come back to kill us (If AI does not first :) )

Sendoff: I guess we’ve hit the middle-age-musician-who-was-actually-younger-than-me-dying phase. I didn’t really know the late Duncan Sheik, outside of hearing his memorable name uttered many a time on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” show. Re-listening to his debut hit “Barely Breathing” (embedded below), is a reminder that *every* micro-period has a music production time-stamp; mark this one “mid-to-late-‘90s-alternapop.” Was an early friend/collaborator with Lisa Loeb; rocketed to near-sex symbol status, then had the presence of mind to step out of the spotlight, then eventually execute a successful Pivot to Broadway. Died of a heart attack at 56. Consult your cardiologist, kids.