Workin’ for the Weekend #63: All About You! (And Coleman Hughes on Rogan, and Everyone Doing Everything)

Too much Fifdom news chasing too little time!

In all the excitement last week introducing our many new subscribers to the…specialness of the Fifth Column community, I quite forgot several regular features of this weekend roundup, from the headline convention to the events listings, so this post will be longer than most. Also, everyone in our universe seems to be doing everything everywhere nowadays.

* Including you. Here is Melanie Notkin writing in The Spectator about “The rise of the underground free speech groups”:

One of the first independent-thinking podcasts was The Fifth Column podcast, launched in 2016 by journalists Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan and Matt Welch as a counterpoint to contemporary journalism.

“The media leans into tribal politics but we see the world differently,” Welch told me over the phone. “It’s more fun than having to worry about which orthodoxy you support and who you’re supposed to hate.”

The Fifth Column has 27,000 subscribers [note: north of 29,000 now], a “substantial percentage” of whom are paid members who enjoy bonus episodes, monthly Zooms with the hosts, and access to the thriving “Fifdom” community which has spawned unofficial offshoots: a book club; multiple fantasy sports teams; and the “Fifdom Athletic Group” on Strava, the online sports community.

“People who otherwise would have a hard time figuring out what they have in common, have created this gigantic community,” Welch said. “It’s beautiful to see.”

When Shelley, forty-six, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, the Fifdom Strava group offered support before and after surgery to remove her thyroid. “I am excited to have this group there for me when I’m ready,” Shelley wrote over email.

Two members proposed marriage in the Fifth Column studio, and two baby Fifdoms were named after Moynihan and after Foster’s baby boy.

The Fifdom also spawned a new podcast. When secular Jewish Israeli Yael and haredi-orthodox ChayaLeah met on a Fifth Column Zoom, the two were more interested in what they had in common than not. They soon launched the Ask a Jew podcast where Welch and Moynihan have been guests.

Other former Fif’ guests mentioned therein include Meghan Daum (Episode #157), Yascha Mounk (#124, #195), Katie Herzog (#228, #331), and Jesse Singal (#111, #171).

* Speaking of the now-ubiquitous Yael Bar tur, she went on City Journal’s 10 Blocks podcast Thursday with fave Fifdom author Martin Gurri (#225) and host Brian C. Anderson to discuss “Immoral Equivalence: Countering Anti-Israel Extremism in the West.”

* Since we have an obvious Comment of the Week winner below, I did want to honorable-mention Yael’s reaction to #426 with Matt Duss:

First of all, I love you guys (3 of you at least)

The framework through which MD and other liberals look at the conflict is a western one, that of rational actors who ultimately want the same things that we in the west want, namely prosperity and freedom. This is why they search for false parallels and even moral justifications for what we saw on October 7th, and what Jews in the region have been seeing for hundreds of years. There has to exist some rational explanation to justify the lens through which we view the world, that if X happens, it's a reaction to Y. It's the same framework that guides those who believe violent crime is a response to poverty, for example, or that 9/11 is a response to American aggression. It's an incredibly narrow and self-centered framework that puts American values and norms—which Israel shares but many of its neighbors don't—in the forefront. It centers Americans, if you will. I think we need to be able to look at hundreds and thousands of years of hatred and incitement in the eye to understand, and to attempt to undo them.

We should listen to Hamas and their supporters in the west when they talk, and believe them when they say the ultimate goal is annihilation of Israel. This is the first starting point on understanding the conflict, any attempt to explain that away weakens that hate that is so clearly stated, and pokes enough small holes in an otherwise clear Hamas ideology to allow well-meaning westerners as well as vile antisemites something very weak to lean on (mixed metaphors inspired by MW). This hate pre-dates settlements, it pre-dates the establishment of Israel, it even pre-dates the existence of the Palestinian people. It can't and shouldn't be explained away by lesser evils on the Israeli side, this creates a false moral equivalence that compares quest for genocide with blemishes on the records of those who deal with the genocide. Kind of reminds me of the cartoon of a Hamas terrorist holding a sign saying "kill Jews", and a well-meaning American pleading with an Israeli: "can't you just meet him in the middle"?

Does Israel do things that add fuel to this hate? Sure. But to paraphrase something Kmele once said about police and race—if we need the number of errors or violence committed by Jews to reach zero as a starting point, we'll never solve this conflict. Yes, really shitty extreme settlers exist, yes, there are violent elements in Israeli politics—I'm embarrassed by them as are a majority of my fellow Israelis who have been taking to the streets to protest the last year or so. But society is judged by how it treats extremism and violence, not by the absence of it. Every Israeli knows the story of Elor Azaria, a soldier who in 2016 killed a Palestinian terrorist who had just stabbed a fellow soldier. The problem is Elor killed the terrorists when he was already on the ground, neutralized. He was charged with manslaughter by an Israeli court. The incident caused a huge stir, because these are the frank and open discussions we are having every day in Israel.

So this is my plea to stop with false equivalencies, to stop weighing Hamas atrocities in one hand against the imperfections of a democratic society on the other, because your hand will fall off. It does a disservice (to put it mildly) to Israelis, as well as Palestinians who want to drop the hatred and commit to peace and prosperity.

Love, an Israeli who wishes we could all see the world through a western-liberal lens, and who for some reason still believes in peace.

* The photo at the top of this post, of Comedy Cellar owner Noam Dworman, professional young talented person Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379 & #412), and Moynihan staggering to the airport gate on the way to Israel a year ago (we had just brutalized an airport bar tab) is apt, given this past week’s frenetic activity. First up, Noam has yet again found himself with a differently gruntled recent guest, after he & Moynihan on a podcast released Sunday talked about the Mideast conflict du jour with Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Khalidi called it an “ambush.” You be the judge:

* Speaking of young Coleman, he appeared Friday on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast of some note (and length). Israel/Hamas stuff starts about 55 minutes in.

* On Monday, Coleman appeared alongside John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366) on The Glenn Show, hosted Glenn Loury (also #121, #188 & #366), to talk about “The Colorblindness Controversy and Israel-Hamas”:

* I wrote a thing for Reason Friday under the headline, “Who Is—and Isn't—Ready To Change Their Minds About the Gaza Hospital Blast?”

* Handsome Aussie pal Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328 & #423) published a piece Friday (thanks, Kathleen!) titled “It’s Not About Israel. It’s About Us.” Here’s how it ends:

My father now has Alzheimers and recently moved into Jewish aged care. The nursing home recently hired armed guards, in case some glassy-eyed devotee enacts Allah's will by slaughtering as many elderly Sydney Jews as he can. My friend’s daughter goes to a Jewish school in Sydney. She worries about her little girl waiting at a bus stop, wearing *that* school uniform. A uniform as distinctive as a yellow Star of David embroidered on her chest. Jewish civilians are collateral damage, everywhere, always. They are the top target of hate crimes. Sydney's mosques, by contrast, do not feel the need to arm themselves against homicidal Jews.

So yes, let us weep for Gazans. But let us not lose sight of ourselves, of our shared Australian humanity. My dad was born eighty years ago amid the cinders of flaming Jewish flesh. He will die, again, protected by armed guards. A full circle. A timeless trap. The oldest hatred. “But but but Gazan babies! Israel deserves it. Jews are the oppressors. This time is different!”

Yes, when it comes to Jew hatred, this time is always different. It always has been.

* Uncharacteristically glum piece Friday from our hilarious sidekick Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, Members Only #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180). Excerpt:

I’m just incredibly upset and angry about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza and how the discourse is going in the United States. […]

I am mad. I am upset about what happened and I am mad about how people I have spent years happy to make jokes with despite our political differences genuinely seem to be proving that they’re antisemites.

I feel like a fucking idiot for not seeing it before. But that doesn’t even matter because the thing that really upsets me is that I just am so hurt. I can’t talk my way out of the hurt.

* Some sad news in our community this week. James Irving Wimsatt, father of our beloved Andrew Wimsatt, died last Sunday at age 96. From the obit:

A distinguished scholar of medieval literature, he authored numerous highly regarded books and essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, culminating in the highly praised Chaucer and His French Contemporaries (1993), which demonstrated, for the first time, how Middle French lyric poets influenced Chaucer’s writing. In retirement, he completed Hopkins’s Poetics of Speech Sound (2006) and studied the intersection of poetry, linguistics and rhyme, a project which consumed his interest until the end. Dr. Wimsatt’s academic positions included: Temple professor of English Literature, the University of Texas at Austin (1977-92); professor, the University of North Carolina—Greensboro (1966-77); assistant professor, Texas Christian University (1964-66). During his long and storied professional life he received the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; ACLS Research Fellowship; Huntington Library Fellowship, among others.

* The father of Craig Mahoney, our very favorite baseball painter and NYC tequila-pourer, also recently passed.

* And our hearts go out to the family of friend and former congressman Justin Amash (#184, #389), who announced Friday that several of his relatives in Gaza were killed at the Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church there, where they had been sheltering in the face of Israeli bombardment.

* Can we get some more uplifting family-related news? Yes, we can. The release this week of Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Nancy Rommelmann (#79, Special Dispatch #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) wrote in The Free Press Saturday, marks the fulfillment of a Hollywood dream her daughter’s father and grandfather fought for, and that her daughter has been able to realize in projects like Reservation Dogs and Fancy Dance.

* Rare movie trailer that makes both the Chat and the Neverending Text String….

* Big Reason Speakeasy Oct. 23 in NYC, in which Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379) interviews Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183) and Rikki Schlott about their new book, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution. Which … you might hear more about soon!

* Comment of the Week comes from Duchesse des Esseintes:

Welcome, newbies—not to hell but to a weird, hilarious, and warm place that smells of booze and weed where...

- Moynihan will regale you with absolutely obscure WWII and Cold War anecdotes while also repeatedly hinting at the fact that he will sleep with you (if you are a woman) or with your wife (if you are a man) or with both of you (he is, after all, just a simple straight guy who prefaces most of his stories with "So yesterday I was at this gay bar again...").

- Kmele (if he shows up) will do his signature stoned-chipmunk-giggle while mocking the downfall of race-baiters, educate you on telescopes and time and space and shit, and laugh at you for being poor while also begging you to join the "Never Fly Coach" tier so he can finally upgrade from first class to private jet.

- Matt pretends to work at Reason; he is the nicest and most reliable one of the three and usually also has the most sensible takes. Whenever he doesn't forget how to turn on his computer or that the internet exists in the first place, he interacts with listeners (in a non-sexual, non-extortionist way—take note, Kmele and Moynihan!). There are also rumours that he lived in Prague for some time, but these are as yet unconfirmed because he is known for never ever talking about this time in his life. He also somehow manages to make baseball sound remotely interesting to us eurotrash who are listening.

Matt, Kmele and Moynihan also have sweet and hilarious kids who sometimes hijack the recordings (including the world's youngest rabbi). For all their faults— which are innumerable—the three lads are amazing dads.

Further selling points: racist accents and Ben fucking Dreyfuss.

Walkoff music is from a new album that just came out from some British blokes.