Workin’ for the Weekend #23: Ask a Moynihan, Megyn vs. Meghan, and Deracialization Now!

Also: Tomorrow is Second Sunday

The image above, filled with some of the very best friends you may or may not have actually met, was taken in Tel Aviv’s fantastic Carmel Market, where we drank dozens of shots, ate schnitzel on challah, and came this close to buying bright pink and green counterfeit Jordans for my teenage daughter. It is rightly the very favorite place of our guide to it, the (not pictured), bullet-scars-available-on-request father of beloved Fifdom Israeli-American ambassador Yael Bar Tur (pictured).

Yael, as you well know, is co-anchor along with Fifdom Shabbat super-hostess Chaya Leah Sufrin of the Paloma Media-birthed breakout podcast Ask a Jew, available right here on Substack. This week our buddy-cop Jews—the atheist from Israel and the Orthodox from the LBC!—invited on none other than Michael “Megyn Kelly still thinks I’m Jewish” Moynihan. From their show notes:

Best friend of the Jews and righteous among the podcasters -  Michael Moynihan of the Fifth Column podcast is our special guest this week! We feel especially blessed by his goyish presence (in person!) since The Fifth Column sort of gave birth to Ask A Jew, though no one really takes responsibility (think 3 Men and A Baby) […]

During these 90 or so precious in-person (!) minutes, we learn that Michael's little girl is on the ADL's watchlist, pitch our spinoff, "Jews in canoes", and pine for Swedish Zionists and Jewish astronauts, both of which we can count on one hand.

Towards the end of the episode we spend a good amount of time talking about the Fifth Column, drugs, and IDF women, as per MMs contract.

* Speaking again of Yael, she could see me groovin’ to some of the local tunes out there in Izzy-raj-el, and so made me a Mizrahi for beginners mixtape, some of whose seedcorn I have planted for a not-quite-done Spotify Holy Land collection that’s kind of a Christmas mix without Christmas songs. Anybody who groks what I’m getting at there is encouraged to suggest potential additions in the comments….

* Did someone mention Megyn Kelly? Made our monthly appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show this week, talking about THE TWITTER FILES, the return of threatened COVID mandates, the late Kirstie Alley, some crazy-ass thing Keith Olbermann said, and Megyn’s deep and abiding hatred for Meghan Markle. Because Kelly’s show has, like Bill Maher’s, attracted a cottage industry of can-you-believe-she-said-THAT postwrites, your humble narrators were referenced this week in the Daily Express, the New York Post, Suggest, Slay, and many other bot farms. Here’s the whole episode:

* Some tangential news related to the apparently never-ending TWITTER FILES unspool. Twitter Filer #2 Bari Weiss (veteran of episodes #89, #115, #159, #180 & #187) this week announced that her Common Sense multiverse has morphed/expanded into The Free Press. From the write-up:

The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of journalistic enterprises: honesty, doggedness, and fierce independence. We publish investigative stories and provocative commentary about the world as it actually is—with the quality once expected from the legacy press, but with the fearlessness of the new.

We place a special emphasis on subjects and stories that others ignore or misrepresent. We always aim to highlight multiple perspectives on complicated subjects. And we don’t allow ideology to stand in the way of searching for the truth.

* So how are things going at Bari’s previous employer, The New York Times? This was the view that greeted me Thursday as I walked by their midtown HQ:

* Twitter Filer numero uno, Matt Taibbi, participated recently in a debate about the media that many of our listeners found of particular interest. His sparring partners were New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and multi-platinum author Malcolm Gladwell; on the TK’er’s side arguing in favor of “Be it resolved, don't trust mainstream media,” was friend-o’-Fif’ Douglas Murray. You can read a transcript at Taibbi’s Substack, and watch the video at this link:

* On thing Bari’s TWITTER FILES contribution in particular underscored was that Twitter internally operated various types of blacklists that they helpfully labeled “BLACKLIST.” Being a curious sort inherently attracted to numbers, I used that as an opportunity to look into an anomaly I’d been distantly registering for a half-year—my Twitter follower count, which had marched northward through rain and snow month after month, suddenly flatlined like a half-year ago. So I took a shallow dive into my analytics, and then a deeper dive … and next weekend I hope to present here the headline results from a more comprehensive look. A tiny teaser of a finding: My monthly impressions went from a consistent average of 6 million, to consistently 3 million, to a new valley of 1.5 million. Why? Who the hell knows! (I rather suspect there’s an explanation that does not involve me being singled out as a Bad.)

* Greg Thomas, co-founder of the Jazz Leadership Project, has been writing a multipart series on his Tune In To Leadership blog under the headline/exhortation of “Deracialization Now.” As this excerpt from part two demonstrates, there’s a whole lotta Kmele vibe going on, as well as the name-checking of many in our universe:

There are notable individuals who have consciously and deliberately stopped identifying with the concept of race and who abjure the process of racialization. Author Thomas Chatterton Williams believes that it is possible and crucial to “unlearn race.” Jewish American executive coach Amiel Handelsman has embraced the goal of deracialization. Dr. Sheena Mason advocates a pro-human stance that she terms “racelessness.” Likewise, Dr. Carlos Hoyt advocates “anti-racialization.” In fact, Mason and Hoyt and I co-facilitated a conference in September 2022, “Resolving the Race-ism Dilemma,” grounded in this very perspective.

Artist and National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson argues that whereas we certainly shouldn’t be blind to the ways we have been racialized historically, neither should we be bound to it either. The Fifth Column podcast co-host Kmele Foster, a staunch libertarian individualist, calls himself a “race abolitionist,” and goes as far as rejecting self-identification as “black,” presumably because of the racial connotations of the word. Writer and former co-host of the FAIR Perspectives podcast, Angel Eduardo, disavows race as a fiction, as nonsense. […]

Are all of the people above simply deluded? Are they in denial about the history and even the continued prevalence of racism in the United States? Are they obtuse, blind advocates of color-blindness in some wish for a “kumbaya” future without conflict?

No. Each of these individuals has undergone deep self-reflection and study. Even though differences of emphasis can be found among them, they have concluded that the concept of race is fatally flawed. I emphatically agree.

* As regards Prince, subject of the M.O. 144 Easter Egg, alert listener L Brown reminds us that earlier this year old pal Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368) did not one but three episodes of Political Beats about the Purple One (one, two, three). Also, by unpopular demand, here’s my 1994 grunge cover of “Purple Rain.”

* Oh yeah, tomorrow is the Second Sunday of the month, where we typically invite paying subscribers to join as we yap. Our moving parts around here have been moving enough so that I cannot at this moment say when and where Sunday, but expect some communication here tomorrow.

Outro music will be familiar to anyone who watched the Elvis movie, though I daresay even that subgroup will be rattled anew by the whole roll: