Firehose #87: A Range of Views

Also: Deets on a Chi-town meetup next Friday

On the podcast, amongst ourselves, at our workplaces current and former, and betwixt our beloved listeners, we enjoy coming at and hearing about the horrors and amusements of life from a range of different viewpoints. Including—especially!—those we don’t quite agree with. One of the reasons I valued our conversation with Andrew Sullivan in Episode #449 (a minority opinion, it would seem!), is that the unwitting semi-namer of this podcast articulated some challenges to the way I think about the Israel-Hamas war, and took some of the logic of my own opinions about international relations to ends that were not comfortable. Good! We want to improve your consuming experience, and clean up messy tech on our end, but I for one look forward to more and better dissonant conversations in the future. Onward!

* Sully, veteran of classic episodes #139 and #200, extended some of his remarks about Israel in a Friday piece headlined “Bomb First, Ask Questions Later: The WCK tragedy wasn't a deviation from IDF tactics. It was a demonstration of them.”

* Taking a different view on Israel’s prosecution of the war this week was Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442), who went on Joe Rogan for the full three hours to talk about all manner of things—chess, Hitler videos, why he finds RFK Jr. “compelling”—but especially Rogan’s recent assertion that Israel was engaged in “genocide.” For that part of the conversation, start at around the 106-minute mark:

* Speaking of The Fall of Minneapolis, Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366) and podcast partner John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366) just can’t quit re-examining the Derek Chauvin trial, this time with an interested participant: Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison.

* More opposing viewpoints hashing it out: Matt Taibbi (#226, #348) was not a fan of how his work concerning Elon Musk was characterized by Briahna Joy Gray on the Rising program she co-hosts with Robby Soave (#332), so they just invited him the hell on:

* I wrote a little piece this week: “No Labels Is No Más for the 2024 Election,” and also joined a CNN panel to talk about Donald Trump, Israel/Gaza politics, and third-party challenges in the Midwest. I also noticed that C-SPAN has just published a bunch of its Book TV interviews on YouTube, which means that I’ll be for the first time here sprinkling some of my full interviews with various authors. Here, for example, is last November’s chat with Greg Lukianoff (#216, Members Only #183, #427) about The Canceling of the American Mind:

* Greg has been doing a monthly Substack appreciation of various great books. This month’s installment is dedicated to Fifdom fave “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium,” by Martin Gurri (#225). “It was recommended to me by the great Kmele Foster,” Lukianoff writes, “and it has had a profound effect on my thinking about the state of the world since I read it.”

Another Amazon ranking we’ve goosed over the years is Bryan Burroughs’s Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence. The gals at Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em had Burroughs on a cupla weeks back for an episode “that drips with fan-girling.”

And for Rule of Three purposes, here’s your sporadic reminder that there exists a truthfully named Fifth Column Unofficial Book Club, and that its next subject is familiar to close listeners of #448 with Kat Rosenfield: Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy.

* Fifdom community stalwart Benjy Shyovitz this week published a harrowing and moving essay about memory, depression, electro-shock therapy, and resilience. Go read it.

* On #449 we briefly mentioned J.K. Rowling’s public row with the Scottish speech police; friend and former guest Jacob Mchangama (#102, #344), executive director of The Future of Free Speech, took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to stand in solidarity:

The law is part of a tsunami of new or expanded hate speech bans in open democracies. In a recent report analyzing the ongoing free speech recession across 22 open democracies, The Future of Free Speech…found that hate speech policies were the second most common form of free speech restrictions adopted between 2015 and 2022, after national security restrictions.

Many groups and activists who champion minority rights celebrate the growing trend toward limiting free speech as a sign of progress in the name of equality. But minorities should be deeply skeptical about restrictions on free speech. 

Recent events demonstrate clearly that the negative impact of speech restrictions on minorities is not a hypothetical danger. At a 2017 Glasgow Pride parade, two LGBTQ Antifa activists were arrested and charged with “breaching the peace with homophobic aggravation” for holding a sign that read “These faggots fight fascists,” even though the intent was to reclaim an offensive word, not to cause offense.

Racial minorities in the U.K. have also been affected by speech bans purportedly enacted to protect members of such groups. A young Black man was arrested in his home, had his phone seized and was prosecuted for the “crime” of tweeting a raccoon emoji and using the word “coons” toward a black Conservative Party politician in an online exchange on police violence. 

Mchangama also has an interesting piece this week at Persuasion about how “Taiwan’s response to China’s aggressive disinformation campaigns has relied on a model where organic and civil society-led initiatives serve as first responders and heavy-handed government intervention is treated with great skepticism.”

* Anyone out here watching the amazing Women’s NCAA tournament, and all the insane discourse kicked up by generational Iowa talent Caitlin Clark? You can bet that Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408) is, and that if there’s a journalistic race-fire burning, he’s running straight into the flames: “The Way the Media Covers Angel Reese Feels Like a Dare.”

* Oh right, Chicago. This coming Friday, April 12, beginning at 6 pm, those of you with nothing better to do in the Windy City are invited to join me & Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) at the Old Town Ale House, which I hear good things about. It will not be an epic/endless night, as I need to be bright & perky for some college students the next morning, but we will do some good plotting about a proper live event this August.

Other upcoming events include a Free Press/FIRE debate on immigration in DALLAS, Texas, on April 11 featuring Ann Coulter and Sohrab Ahmari vs. Cenk Uygur and Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72 & #379). And Moynihan will be among a cast of familiar faces at the so-called Dissident Dialogues May 3-4 in New York City. I also see here that there’s a May 21 SoHo Forum debate between Alan Dershowitz and Glenn Greenwald (#183, #197, #211) about bombing Iran, which should be a hoot.

Walkoff music is from a favorite album of Brother Kmele’s, and is an always timely reminder that from great separation can come even greater art: