Lovely to see some of you very fine people (on both sides!) in Philly at the Foundational for Individual Rights and Expression’s inaugural Soapbox conference, which was just a smashing success. We were fortunate enough to be joined on stage by Erika López Prater, who was fired in 2022 as an adjunct art-history instructor at Hamline University after showing her forewarned students historical images of the prophet Muhammad. Does this mean that we showed some of those images, and will include them in an upcoming release? Reader, it does.
REMINDER: There are still tickets available to our Nov. 12 Fairfield University live show with presumably exultant Democratic strategist and Episode #579 guest Yemisi Egbewole
* It was an exciting, if punishing, week. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to re-live our epic Election Night live-stream (especially when you could just listen to the edited-down version), but hey, I’m not here to kink-shame.
* An uncomfortably short amount of time later, I assembled with The Reason Roundtable team for a morning-after post-mortem:
* Kmele also morning-aftered with his side-pieces over at Tangle.
* And Moynihan gave his post-elex breakdown with Haviv Rettig Gur.
* Reason apparently likes it when I write about the Democratic Socialists of America, so this week I did a pre-election piece on the DSA’s coming-out party, and a post-game about L.A.’s new pinko mayor. Among the new CongressCommies I mini-profiled:
Melat Kiros
Colorado’s 1st Congressional District (Denver)
The 29-year-old Ethiopian immigrant and budding lawyer defeated a 30-year incumbent in the shock primary, on a platform of Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, federalizing rent control, opposing data centers, and an arms embargo on Israel, which she accuses of being an ethnostate engaged in genocide. Kiros has “made Zionism a defining issue in Denver’s congressional election,” reports Denverite, by doing things like going on Hasan Piker’s podcast in May to call the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks “an inevitable consequence of apartheid, of occupation, decades of occupation,” and refusing to characterize a deadly Boulder bombing attack on release-the-Israeli-hostages demonstrators as antisemitic. She is prediction-marketing at around 99 percent.
(Kiros won by 64 percentage points.)
* Hope you didn’t sleep on our Members Only #353 conversation with Matthew Cole about his controversial new book, Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East. Here’s an exchange about the difficulties in using anonymous sources:
* This week I went on the podcast Schooled: Inside the Nation’s Largest School District, to talk about my unhappy experiences with District 15’s famous “desegregation” plan.
* Comment of the Week comes from Laura:
Good Lord, for a hot minute I thought y’all had recorded this morning! I hope you are still sleeping it off. Malort is nothing to trifle with. . . . but thank you for a typically fun and awesome show. I had CNN on mute and your show on for the good stuff!
Sendoff: We lost a big one this weekend. Richard Lloyd, guitarist most famous for his twin attack with Tom Verlaine in Television, though also a longtime axe for Matthew Sweet and others, died Saturday at the age of 75. A fascinating and talented and troubled cat who I would write about at length if I wasn’t a little frazzled at the edges, Lloyd didn’t get too many co-writing credits in Television, but one of them, showcasing some popcraft sensibility I think was lurking amidst the many shadows, happens to be my favorite Television song:
What a blast seeing you guys in Philly! I’ve been telling folks the utter insanity of Dr. Lopez Prater’s story ever since. Thrilled to share a brief moment in time with you fellas and all the fine people at Soapbox. It made my week. Cheers!
I want to try that hooch. Yes, there’s something with me.