Firehose #83: No More Years!

Also: NFC Second Sunday penciled in for 5 pm OR 8 pm ET

As in last month, our monthly Second Sunday taping with paying subscribers will be, as originally intended, exclusively for the Never Fly Coach tier, which begins at the low low price of $300 per year. (Please note that the window offered there can always be edited upward.) We will send an email out with a link before taping, which is at the moment penciled in for either 5 pm or 8 pm ET (will update in the comments as I know more). Onward!

* Has been a busy week for American politics. I celebrated by devoting The Reason Roundtable to proposed electoral reforms, writing a SOTU-preview titled “The State of Our Biden Is Historically Frail: Who you gonna believe during Thursday's speech, the president's protectors or your lying eyes?”, then jumping on The Hill’s Rising with co-hosts Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave (veteran of Episode #332) to talk about third party/independent candidates….

… and then recording #445, and then going on Scripps News Primetime to talk No Labels (sadly cannot convert the file into usable video), and then doing WIBC-FM on third parties, and then mining the SOTU archives for re-election-year braggadocio, then listening to my offspring (pictured) chant “No more years!” during the C-SPAN telecast, then writing “No Labels, With No Candidate, Says Yes to a 2024 Presidential Campaign: The 14-year-old nonprofit is about to find out whether third-party politics has a centrist/establishment lane,” then talking about the latter on Boyd Matheson’s Inside Sources, then driving to the countryside to take a long nap.

* Did someone reference Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? At the links above, certainly. Here’s comrade Andrew Schulz (#30 & #32) interviewing America’s next president about Jeffrey Epstein, Larry David, Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, O.J. Simpson, and how the CIA killed everyone named Kennedy and also did Ukraine:

* New-to-Substack stat nerd Nate Silver was featured this past week on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie, where the baseball/politics/poker guy talked about his new site, his new book, the new politics created by Oct. 7, and more, all in front of a live audience that included quite a few members of Planet Fifdom:

* Speaking of Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72 & #379), last week he issued this bit of righteous tweet-praise: “What I admire and respect about @noam_dworman, the owner of @ComedyCellarUSA, is that he is a serious champion of free speech and a great interviewer & interlocutor who gives people he disagrees with time and space to explain their POV.” Linked at the bottom of that tweet was Noam’s great interview with Seattle Comedy Bar owners Jes Anderson and Dane Hesseldahl to discuss how they justified canceling comedians they already booked because other people protested:

* This week Matt Taibbi (#226, #348) was, along with Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, awarded the inaugural Samizdat Prize by the RealClear Media Fund. This three-paragraph section from Taibbi’s acceptance speech will be of particular interest:

As writers like former CIA analyst Martin Gurri began noticing long before the election of Donald Trump, the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed. The inevitable result was that populations all over the world began to see more clearly the warts of leaders and governments that had previously been covered up, thanks to tight control over the flow of information. It also made communication and organization of dissident movements much easier. We started to see this with Occupy and the Tea Party in the United States, and the aforementioned Arab Spring, but the election of Donald Trump was the Rubicon-crossing event for information overlords.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) of seeing how presidential campaign journalism worked before the Internet took over. Politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office. Sitting among the traveling press on campaigns of people like John Kerry and Barack Obama, I heard how campaign reporters talked, how they thought of their jobs. They were fiercely protective of their gatekeeping role, which gave them enormous power. If reporters didn’t think a candidate was good enough for them — if he was too “kooky” like Ron Paul, too “elfin” like Dennis Kucinich, or too “lazy” as just a handful of influential reporters decided about Fred Thompson — the “Boys on the Bus” would snort and trade cutting remarks in riffing sessions before and after events. Campaigns would be elevated or die in these moments. I thought it was crazy, and said so in print, which made me a pariah, and I never thought it would end.

Then Trump came along and destroyed the whole system with one stroke, getting elected in spite of the blunt disapproval of media. His single Twitter account allowed him to bypass the press and speak to people directly. When that worked, and similar episodes like Brexit caused panic abroad, governments decided to take the anarchic potential of the Internet and turn it on its head. What was something like the “Self-publish” culture of the Soviet Union suddenly became, as we saw in the Twitter Files, an instrument of surveillance and social control.

* Fan fave Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423) on the last episode nominated as an example of audience-capture degeneration Bret Weinstein (#99). Writing about that in detail a couple weeks back was Jesse Singal (#111, #171), in a post headlined “Bret Weinstein Sure Has A Lot Of Theories: It’s frustrating to watch the worst sort of conspiracy theorist become a thought leader by scaring and misleading people.” Also, don’t sleep on Josh-o’s latest episode, “Is Josh a Zionist?”

* Comment of the Week comes from Travis:

Coen has already made me laugh more than Hannah Gadsby.

Walkoff music, from a real one, comes from the neverending R.I.P. file: