Firehose #112: Mazel Tov!

Also: Too many live events, tbh.

One of the things I love most about this community of ne’r-do-wells is that, AKSHually, y’all do good sometimes! For instance, funding beloved listener Aaron Monheim’s stem-cell transplant, defraying the costs of my late nephew’s celebration of life, helping Livia Moynihan raise money for pediatric cancer research, and on and on. The stakes of your generosity may have been a tad lower last week, but they were considerably more hilarious.

It all started when a bunch of campus protesters disrupted an MIT Israel Alliance talk by IDF reservist and visiting engineering professor Shahar Kvatinsky, calling him a “murderer,” a rape apologist, and so forth. But then things got weird, according to America’s greatest newspaper: “As he recounted uncovering troves of weapons stored in Gazans’ homes and detailed the Israeli military’s strict rules of engagement, one woman got up, silently grabbed four pizza boxes, and briefly stepped out into the hallway before returning to the talk, attendees told The Post.”

They de-colonized the pizza! Well, until Yael Bar tur & the Fifdom rallied, reaching out to nerdy student Will Sussman, stuffing his Venmo, and making this happy event possible:  

Mazel tov! Speaking of which….

What a lovely wedding Saturday between funny gal Sarah Rose Siskind and old comrade Nick Gillespie (veteran of Special Dispatch #72 & Episode #379). Many Fif’ listeners (including Never Fly Coachers!) were in attendance, as well as past guests, old pals, and people you always suspected could cut a rug, but hadn’t yet furnished definitive proof.

* Also in attendance was Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, S.D. #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184), who over the weekend wrote about something we chewed on Friday afternoon in the as-yet-unreleased M.O. #227, but which since then has obviously been confirmed: the successful Israeli assassination in Lebanon of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and what that means to the broader Middle East. Eli, echoing some of the Twitter reaction by pal and ex-congressman Peter Meijer (S.D. #51, #307, #339, #367,  #424, M.O. #184), spiked the football a bit, and dinged the United States for being more concerned about managing escalation than allowing Israel to defang its enemies in a hot war:

In a series of brilliant operations—beginning with the simultaneous explosion of encrypted pagers belonging to Hezbollah’s commanders, and culminating with the coup de grace on Friday that eliminated the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and the rest of his high command—Israel managed to decapitate the entire leadership of the most fearsome terrorist army on the planet. In so doing, it ignored the advice of its allies in the West, and radically disrupted the balance of power in the Middle East.

* Eli last week also did one of his historical Honestly podcasts, this time exploring the oft-cited but rarely understood parallels between the U.S. and the late Roman empire. From the intro:

Tiberius, like Trump, was an elite who turned on the elites, a class traitor who channeled the resentments and anger of the common man against a system rigged against him. Both men disregarded the unwritten political rules of their era. And, in turn, those norm violations prompted their enemies to disregard the rules themselves. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed and eventually the death of the republic itself. 

In America, we remain a republic, for now, but the cycle of escalations between Trump and his opponents strains our foundations like no political crisis since the civil war.

* I mentioned on #472 the recent Dispatch piece by Jonah Goldberg (#182) contrasting Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, which came out the same year. “It was a sort of conflict of visions,” Goldberg writes. “Hamilton’s version of America was one where blacks and Hispanics could take ownership of—‘culturally appropriate’ if you want to use that dumb term—the founding. Miranda’s vision of America was dynamic, inclusive, innovative, and deeply patriotic without being propagandistic. Coates’ vision was of immutable white sin and grievance.”

Also getting huge ups from the Fifdom community is Goldberg’s conversation this week with Sam Harris, on “dogma, epistemological free-for-alls, the emancipation of C-3PO, and truth as its own defense,” as well as “the root causes of the rise of antisemitism in elite institutions,” “the rise and future of artificial intelligence,” and “what happens after Trump.”

* We talked at the beginning of #471 about Melania Trump’s new memoir, and her heroic defense of her own nude modeling against … you know, all those people mad about it. Expanding on the theme, in a crackerjack Free Press piece this week on the “subversive genius of Melania,” was Kat Rosenfield (#448). Excerpt:

Even those of us who once had mixed feelings about Melania must grudgingly admit, at this point, that the woman is the GOAT of DGAF. Indeed, until she popped up on social media, carefully enunciating the words nude modeling work with the tongue-clicking precision of an ASMR influencer, you might well have forgotten that she even existed—which is quite a feat, considering that her husband is the Republican presidential candidate in an election that’s just six weeks away, and in which the other nominees’ spouses are being paraded around like prize turkeys at the county fair. Even Doug Emhoff, who despite a fairly sordid marital history that includes at least one documented incident of nanny impregnation, has been thrust by the Harris campaign into the highly public role of Wife Guy Extraordinaire.

While Emhoff’s X bio proudly boasts: Devoted dad. Proud husband to @KamalaHarris. Advocate for justice and equality. Official account is @SecondGentleman, Melania’s X bio simply states: The official profile for Melania Trump.

Donald? Donald who?

* Kat joined Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111) on Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em this week to talk about l’affaire Olivia Nuzzi (#190), which we had ranted about on M.O. #226. Also tilling those soiled fields this week were Katie Herzog (#228, #331) and Jesse Singal (#111 & #171), in a premium episode of Blocked and Reported. And also, with trademark hilarity, Mr. Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180). If you don’t read down to the bottom of Ben’s super-sane interview with himself, you’re missing out:

Would you sleep with RFK Jr?

…

Final question.

No.

You had to think about it!

He’s a celebrity. Of course, I had to think about it.

Eww.

What I would do is flirt with him and lead him on until he thought we were going to sleep together because I’d like to know I could have him if I wanted him and then when we were back in his bedroom, and he tried to take off my pants, I’d reject him, and I’d say that I couldn’t sleep with him because of his disgusting voice, and I’d call him a circus freak, and I’d taunt him mercilessly until in a burst of rage hit me in the face, and my nose and lip would be bleeding, and I’d grin like a psychopath, and then I’d spit on him, I’d spit my blood on him, and he’d be disgusted and fall back in horror, and I’d jump on him and let the blood from my mouth and nose pour all over his face and all over his white buttoned shirt, and I’d say “this is vaccinated blood. You’re going to have autism now” and then I’d run away into the night, and no one would believe me that this happened, but I’d known and he’d know and God would know, and that would be enough.

* I see from kkmoresi in the Chat that there’s some new deal called the Substack Election Dialogues, where “some of the top publishers in politics [will] engage with each other in conversation,” on topics “that they find intellectually challenging,” and “issues that are yet unresolved in their minds as they approach the ballots.” More:

In the coming weeks, you can tune in to watch live dialogues featuring 

Nate Silver, Matthew Yglesias, Jessica Reed Kraus, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, Mehdi Hasan, Dana Loesch, Michael Moore, Robert B. Hubbell, Dan Pfeiffer, Joyce Vance, Sarah Longwell, Chris Cillizza, Judd Legum, Jay Kuo, Sarah Haider, Bill Bishop, Josh Barro, Chris Hedges, Alex Berenson, Michael C. Moynihan, Kmele, Josh Szeps, Ben Domenech, Steve Schmidt, and many more. Subscribe to the publishers participating and follow this space for updates on the schedule and to learn more. 

Love the selective Stingification there….

* Omnigraf of newsbits from our world: Andrew Sullivan (#139, #200 & #449) wrote up why he’s voting for Kamala Harris. Mike Pesca (#343, #418, #467) dissected what he characterized as Michael Shellenberger’s “smears” against disinformation specialist Renée DiResta. Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187) interviewed Sen. Rand Paul about why he is “one of just seven [Republican] senators who still refuses to endorse Trump.” Oh, and lookee that—beloved listener/bootleg merch-designer Nika Scothorne has blessed us with an essay about the “Monsters of Rock and the Collapse of the Soviet Union.”

* Fair warning: There are just too many in-person events during this five-week sprint to the presidential finish line. We told you last week about the free “Demand for Bullshit” conference that The Fifth Column will be keynoting Oct. 9 at the University of Florida at Gainesville, as well as The Reason Roundtable live at The Village Underground in New York City on Nov. 4. Add to that two other Reason events in late October, plus another Free Press/FIRE debate in NYC Oct. 9, about whether the U.S. should police the world, featuring Bret Stephens and Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394) vs. Lee Fang and Matt Taibbi (#226, #348).

* Comment of the Week comes from Terry Fife:

On the Sturgill Simpson tip… he delivered one of the finest SNL performances in recent memory a few years back. Do yourself a favor 

Walkoff music to ring in the fall is the first new product from this lot in 16 years. Mazel tov!