Workin’ for the Weekend #78: Coleman’s Close-up

Also: Second Sunday pre-empted by Super Bowl, so First Sunday, this Sunday!

What a good photographer! Oh right that’s me. Anyhoo, before we get to the coming-out week for our friend and frequent guest Coleman Hughes, a stray thought got trapped in my brain-cage: Y’all keep using the word firehose to describe the recent content delivery around these parts. Is it time to retire the old Loverboy homage, and re-brand this here weekend update to … Firehose? Or better yet, fIREHOSE? Lemme know….

More housekeeping: Our Second Sunday Zoom hangout with paying subscribers would have been normally scheduled for Feb. 11, but since that is also Super Bowl Sunday, we are moving it up to TOMORROW, Feb. 4, planned for 8 p.m. ET. What’s more, this one will be specifically for the Never Fly Coach tier, as was the original advertised intent of Second Sundays. That means qualifying subscribers will RECEIVE AN EMAIL with the link, instead of seeing it posted here on the site. Got it? Onward.

* Tuesday is the arrival of Coleman Hughes’s new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. To mark the occasion, the New York Times gave Coleman the respectful-if-oddly-labeled profile treatment: “The Young Black Conservative Who Grew Up With, and Rejects, D.E.I.” Here’s how it begins:

For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery.

To support the idea, Democrats had invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had revived the reparations issue in an article in The Atlantic, and the actor and activist Danny Glover.

Republicans turned to a virtual unknown: a 23-year-old philosophy major at Columbia University, Coleman Hughes.

I know what you’re saying: Hey, didn’t Coleman come on The Fifth Column immediately after that testimony? Yes in fact he did: Episode #144. More from the profile:

He bonded [at Columbia] with a few like-minded students and professors like John McWhorter, who said he considered Mr. Hughes like a son. […]

“People were shouting ‘shame!’ at him as he walked out the door [of Congress],” said Thomas Chatterton Williams, a friend and writer who shares many of Mr. Hughes views on race. “Coleman is a really tough guy to shake up, but I know he didn’t feel good about that.”

TCW & J-McWh (totally a thing), along with Coleman & dignity-defender Glenn Loury, joined Kmele for the special, class-favorite anti-racism episodes #121 & #188. Speaking of the not-black guy:

Kmele Foster, a 43-year-old libertarian-leaning political commentator, became friends with Mr. Hughes after seeing some of his work online. He said that Black conservatives of his generation had much less to contend with than Mr. Hughes did.

“I suspect,” Mr. Foster said, “that Coleman, going into a polarized environment in college where it was more explicitly frowned upon for having his views, was probably better prepared for what would come at him.” […]

Mr. Foster, the political commentator, says such experiences can weigh on people, even for those with the thickest skin: “It can still be pretty hurtful to have people suggest that when you take a position, it’s some sort of betrayal to your ‘people.’”

The piece also gets into Coleman’s TED controversies, which we discussed on #423.

You can expect Coleman to be in the crosshairs for a while—here he is dispatching with behatted leftoid Nathan J. Robinson (Robinson’s response to the response here). Radley Balko (#68) brought out all the adjectives for a lengthy critique of Coleman’s Free Press conclusions about The Fall of Minneapolis (which we talked about in #435). Media Matters seems unhappy: “New York Times gives glowing profile to right-wing writer who repackaged misleading claims about the police murder of George Floyd.” I’m sure his book, and existence, will be giving off sparks for a while….

* Some of that Glenn Loury rant:

* Kmele went on the podcast of our friend Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, Members Only #151, #408) to talk about aliens, God, Hayek, libertarianism, drugs, Big Tech, and so forth:

* Speaking of co-hosts captured on video, The Reason Roundtable is now a YouTube product:

* Oh yeah, I interviewed Bill Maher! “The Last Liberal: Bill Maher on weed, wokeness, and 30 years of free speech.” Come for the tale of how he suppressed golden Kanye West material; stay for this exchange, which I will decorate with links to previous Fifth Column episodes!:

So I was talking early in my editorhood to Greg Lukianoff from FIRE [#216, M.O. #183, #427], who you had on recently. Back then FIRE was still just doing campus stuff and hadn't expanded.

Yeah, there's a little cadre of you guys—you and him and Bari  [#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187] and Andrew Sullivan [#139 & #200], who are just so great that you exist in this culture, because it's a small band of us, but we're the ones who haven't gone insane, and people know it.

* I went on my great pal Ken Layne’s Desert Oracle Radio for some reminiscences about the 2000-2003 (or thereabouts) blogging era. Some of the story overlaps with the L.A. Examiner tale told in M.O. #179, which, what the hell, let’s make that free for everybody now! Some Olden Days clips on the subject from me (please do not judge too harshly!): “Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld,” Columbia Journalism Review (September 2003), “Confessions of a ‘Booger,’” National Post (August 2004), “Farewell to Warblogging,” Reason (April 2006).

* We talked in M.O. #198 about commie spies (shocker); big props to commenter JM for unearthing this great 1996 Nicholas von Hoffman Washington Post piece grappling with how the post-Soviet revelations made much of Cold War-era American politics look way different in retrospect. Chunky excerpt; but please read the whole thing:

The sum and substance of this growing body of material is that: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed in June 1953 for atomic espionage, were guilty; Alger Hiss, a darling of the establishment was guilty; and that dozens of lesser known persons such as Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon and Harry Gold, whose innocence of the accusations made against them had been a tenet of leftist faith for decades, were traitors or, at the least, the ideological vassals of a foreign power.

Even moderate politicians who insisted upon the fact -- and argued that these people might have influenced U.S. foreign policy -- were scorned. […]

In the eyes of celebrity liberalism, those up in arms about the government's acceptance of communist ambition were the unappetizing people of the dull world of the lower middle class. They were the piano-legged babushkas of American politics, stolid Slavs and such, thick of finger and numb of mind.

In the ongoing kulturkampf dividing the society, the elites of Hollywood, Cambridge and liberal think-tankery had little sympathy for bow-legged men with their American Legion caps and their fat wives, their yapping about Yalta and the Katyn Forest. Catholic and kitsch, looking out of their picture windows at their flocks of pink plastic flamingos, the lower middles and their foreign policy anguish were too infra dig to be taken seriously.

Once a year these people would hold huge Captive Nation Day rallies in cities across the country, which Democratic politicians of taste and sensibility avoided. The only Democrats in evidence at these rallies of unstylish anti-communists were often dismissed by their social superiors as smarmy, corrupt, machine pols.

Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen, all the Nazi concentration camps were dismantled, but the Gulag grew and left-liberals like California congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas and the editors at the New Republic magazine seemed not to care. Working class anti-communist voters did not fail to notice the disdain with which some of the liberal intelligentsia regarded them. The early 1950s, not coincidentally, marked the beginning of the great outmigration of the blue-collar workers from the Democratic Party.

* Super-graf of more good recent work from the Fifdom Extended Universe:  The great (and nearly cancelled) podcast producer Andy Mills finally broke his media silence about (*waves hands*) all that, with Katie Herzog (#228, #331) on Blocked and Reported. Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394) had an Uncomfortable Conversation with Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423) about whether hate speech is OK. Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407, M.O. #184) devoted a Re-Education episode about the life of Menachem Begin. And Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) published a fascinating interview with former IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus.

* Comment of the Week comes from JoMa:

I'll assume everyone had the same response with the first 60 seconds of the podcast and turned around in the car and yelled at their kids and asked which one of them screwed with their phone and changed the playback speed to methamphetamine levels. Jesus Christ, Kmele...

* Chat of the Week comes from Jason Pepino:

There no candidates that I can justify voting for in this upcoming election so I am going to write in Kmele for President. Who’s with me?!

Walkoff music is predictable, but necessary: