Firehose #94: #BeachReads

Also: Um, Eli Lake had robots make us a theme song?

Normally in these weekend roundups I err on the side of embedding video, for the stated-right-there-in-my-annual-report reason that, well, we don’t otherwise do a lot of visuals! Also, it’s fun. But this past week in particular has been filled with notable Fifdom works of the textual variety, plus it’s Memorial Day beach time (photo evidence above; credit Liz Wolfe), so let’s get that blender whirring, and go to some (stifles gag reflex at odious term) #longreads.

* OK, I promised text, but this video is too juicy not to frontload. On Monday, in what I have been told was perhaps the spiciest SoHo Forum debate evah, Alan Dershowitz and Glenn Greenwald (Episode #183, #197, #211) went toe to toe over bombing Iran, as did a non-insubstantial number of audience members:

* OK, one more. Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379) went on Noam Dworman’s Live From the Table podcast this week, to talk about (per Nick’s description) “everything from the absence of influential libertarian politicians to New York City’s insane landmarking laws to drug legalization to foreign policy.”

* All right, maybe just one more. Normally I don’t cross the streams, but on Thursday we released a May 18 taping (in front of a live Reason Weekend audience) of an atypically evergreen Reason Roundtable, where me & Nick & Peter Suderman & Katherine Mangu-Ward (#75, #395) talked at some length about the vice presidency—past, future, and gag-inducing present. We also gabbed a bit at the end about the current status of the Libertarian Party, a subject that’s pretty topical this weekend.

* Oh! And I see that the Dissident Dialogues are now available to the public in non-bootleg form, at least on audio. For your aural pleasuring, here at last are Michael Moynihan and Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, S.D. #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184) debating Jake Klein and I-see-racist-people Rising co-host Briahna Joy Gray over whether Israel vs. Hamas is a “just war.”

* Speaking of Eli, I regret to inform you that he has deployed his A.I. chops into making us … a new theme song:

* On #456, we talked about team names in the WNBA. So, this week, did Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408), in a piece titled “Apparently You're Not Supposed to Talk About WNBA Team Names?” We also referenced a great Unherd piece by Kat Rosenfield (#448) about the hostile media reactions to Nellie Bowles (#187). Excerpt:

If the summer of 2020 was a party that eventually devolved into a chaotic rager, Morning After the Revolution is the album of unflattering photos taken by a guest who left before the police showed up. Look: there’s the moment from the pandemic where Donald Trump said he wanted schools to reopen, so we shut them down until 2023. There’s the time a male spa-goer displayed an erect penis in front of a 14-year-old girl, and media commentators hurried to dismiss the entire thing as a Right-wing hoax. There’s the one where we started recreationally destroying the lives of random white women who looked a little too much like manager-callers; there’s the $3,000 anti-racist dinner party and the “Defund the Police” banner!

The revolutionaries are in this picture, and they don’t like it. Even as early as 2022, there were signs that people were happy to forget the movement once the marching-shouting-posting action was over; when reporters discovered that the $90 million raised by Black Lives Matter had been squandered on, among other things, a party house in Los Angeles, the response was a studied incuriosity. But even then, it’s hard to exaggerate how much this attempt to defund, dismantle and drastically remake every institution in service of social justice has been… well, not-that. Four years after his death became the spark that lit the flame of revolution, George Floyd’s lingering impact can mainly be seen in the hastily-installed DEI programmes in corporate offices nationwide, where hourly wage workers sit through interminable sensitivity trainings — and where the main beneficiaries are 28-year-old college-educated white women from HR, who now receive six-figure salaries to lecture their coworkers on the importance of daily pronoun exchanges and the scourge of microaggressions.

* OK, let’s get to some #BeachReads. First up, Jew-Askee Yael Bar tur, who reveres the Eurovision song contest more even than Scandinavians, has written a fine little essay headlined “How Israel lost the elites and won the people -- a Eurovision story.” Excerpt:

Charismatic performers and quality songs score highly of course, but the voting has always been geopolitical. Balkan countries vote for each other, as do Scandinavians. Ukraine won in 2022 (the betting odds had it at 62%) and Russia was kicked out the same year. When Israel won in 1979 (back-to-back champions baby!), it could have been because our entry “Hallelujah” was a masterpiece, or because five days earlier we (the country, not the musical legend Gali Atari) signed a peace deal with Egypt.

For us Israelis, our ranking in Eurovision is the ultimate popularity contest, but more importantly – a temperature check to see if we are accepted—an annual tally of who obviously hates Jews (Ireland!) and who is inscribed in the Book of Life (We love you, uh, Germany?)

* Next up—in a story that began with an email from a Fifth Column listener!— Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) is out with a banger for RealClearInvestigations: “Bubba: A Cancel-Culture Casualty – but Not in a Town Without Pity.” This is how it begins:

On November 7, 2023, I was forwarded an email that began, “I know the world is on fire but have you guys read anything about Bubba Copeland, the Alabama Mayor/Pastor who committed suicide after being outed by 1819 ‘news’?” 

The woman who wrote the email was a longtime friend of Fred “Bubba” Copeland, whose suicide at age 49 and what was believed to have led to it – the online newsletter 1819 News publishing a story that revealed Copeland as a secret cross-dresser who several years earlier had published erotic fiction under a pseudonym – had rocked the towns of Phenix City, Alabama, where Copeland was the pastor at First Baptist Church, and nearby Smiths Station, where he was the mayor. It was on a country road 15 miles north of Smiths Station where Copeland fatally shot himself in front of local police on November 3. 

The email writer, who I’ll call Laura, was disgusted at the national press for seizing on the story and characterizing Copeland’s “outing” and subsequent suicide as symbolic of the perils facing the trans community. “He liked to cross-dress -- who said he was trans?” she said, referring to  articles like one in the Los Angeles Times titled, “America’s tragic war on LGBTQ+ people extends its collateral damage.” Like many others, this piece showed little interest in Copeland beyond requisitioning his suicide to prove a point.

Laura did not appreciate her friend’s death being “whitewashed and used as propaganda for trans activists’ benefit.” She was also livid at 1819 News and did not want theirs to be the last word.

Always email us your news tips, is what I’m saying! Nancy talked about the case earlier this month on Blocked and Reported with Katie Herzog (#228, #331).

* #BeachRead III is a dizzyingly long series of Censorship Industrial Complex stories from Matt Taibbi (#226, #348). I guess I’ll just throw them up in chronological order:

1) “FOIA Library: The University of Washington: The raw correspondence returned in two Freedom of Information requests to one of America's biggest sponsors of "anti-disinformation" work, Kate Starbird's University of Washington.”

2) “FOIA Files: Garry Kasparov Resigns from Aspen Institute Commission, Compares it to Soviet Committee: If I'm being honest...This type of approach was common practice in the USSR.”

3) “Introducing the Censorship Files: What you can expect to find in Racket's FOIA library, opening today. Why we targeted publicly-funded ‘anti-disinformation’ programs, which are misnamed.”

4) “Censorship Files: ‘We Have Very Little Evidence About What Works’: Do ‘anti-disinformation’ tactics work? Listen to the experts themselves.”

5) “Censorship Files: ‘We Will Not Be Intimidated From Continuing Our Mission in... 2024': When Stanford's Election Integrity Partnership stirred up controversy, its participants defiantly planned a rerun for this year.”

6) “The Overlooked Twitter Files Scandal: How the Intelligence Community Wore Down the Platform: Was Twitter set up by intelligence agencies? A handful of documents casts the conquest of private platforms by security officials in a new light.”

7) “More Twitter Files: Your Posts Replaced With ‘Dog Pictures, Quinoa Recipes, and Sports Scores’?: In a possible preview of our future, a Twitter contractor proposed aggressive solutions for speech, including putting users in ‘voids’ and replacing their content with pet pics.”

* Comment of the Week comes from Benjy Shyovitz:

“Kerfluffle” is endearing. The real problem is “cowwoborate.”

* Walkoff music, which I listened to/watched last night, is technically from the great Leonard Bernstein, but TBH I’m just here for some Gene Kelly dancing.