This just in! Those ugly mugs above will be prettified (and Dem-ified) at our Fairfield University live show Nov. 12, six days after our livestreaming of the midterms. Yemisi Egbewole, the centristy Dem-strategist star of Episode #579 will join us for the post-election breakdown & attendant heckling from the Yutes. There are no plans to release this as an episode, so buy tickets here or suffer the cruel fate of FOMO. As for the election-night debacle, the guest roster and checklist of truly abysmal broadcast ideas continue to accumulate; you’ll want to bookmark wethefifth.com/live.

* We talked a bit on the gloriously headlined #580 about Vivek Ramaswamy’s very bad week of doing politics. Which is a good reminder that we interviewed Vivek when he was a presidential candidate back in June 2023, and that I wrote a piece six months later titled “Vivek Ramaswamy Really, Really Wants You To Know He Thinks January 6 Was an ‘Inside Job.’” More importantly, any such kerfuffle over the vileness of campaign ads is a fine excuse to re-post this bad boy, featuring some familiar voice-work….

* Members Only #351 was Jacob Siegel’s fourth rodeo on the Fifth. In August 2017 he broke down a deplorables rally (and counter-rally) in Boston; in July 2020 he talked about that summer’s media madness; and in May 2024 he unspooled the essay that would become his new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control. Here’s a clip from our latest:

* Moynihan on his Report this week had on legendary Brat Pack novelist and 1980s survivor Jay McInerney, to talk about “drugs, fame, models, 9/11, cancel culture, Zohran Mamdani, Raymond Carver, and the ex-girlfriend who helped destroy the presidential ambitions of a prominent Democrat.”

* Speaking of TMR, Moynihan’s sidepiece won two Signal Awards gold medals: for Best Video Podcast and Best Video Podcast Guest (both for the legendary William Shatner episode). The Fifth Column received a silver medal for Best News & Politics Podcast. Thanks to everyone who voted!

* The Reason Roundtable this week started with some ranting from me about France:

* Reminder! You can also see me Oct. 31 at an “American Patriotism at 250” panel hosted by the University of Austin.

* Kmele & the Tanglers this week talked France, Vivek, and the midterms:

* This Date in Fif’ History: In 2023, 18 days after the Oct. 7 massacre, Moynihan and I chewed on that news plus the already-trickling-in G-word, in an episode with a Top 10 title: “From the Haganah to Häagen-Dazs.”

Oct. 25 is also the 40-year anniversary of Bill Buckner’s Wikipedia-worthy World Series error, which is an excuse to re-share what may be my favorite baseball-related songs of all time:

* Comment of the Week is a triptych, beginning with Jaye BM:

Matt put your earmuffs on. Okay, now that we’re alone in here, imagine those smutty audiobooks with Jacob as narrator? That accent is just 🧑‍🍳 💋

Continuing with Maria Teresa Agurcia:

Next time, will you let him talk uninterrupted for the entire 90 minutes?

And wrapping with Gordo:

I knew a guy with a similar voice, he lived under a bridge.

Sendoff: John Anderson, the Country Music Hall of Famer singer/songwriter, died this week at age 71. Anderson had a southern accent where he came from, which like Tom Petty was Florida. Was not shy about singing right through it. You probably know him best for the ‘80s crossover hit “Swingin,’” but this track here is pure Americana, shoot it into my veins:

-We will have an Election Night livestream. Booze, guests, and probable disaster

-Our mystery guest didn’t couldn’t make it today. We won’t name names, but we’ll give you some subtle clues.

-Steve Witkoff discovered Vladimir Putin’s humanitarian side.

-Trump has some thoughts about Zelenskyy. andPutin gets a pass.

-Americans ranked their favorite countries. Where does Russia rank?

-A very stiff competition for the Senate’s biggest idiot and the “Not One Inch” myth

-the dumbest man in the Senate meets the dumbest man in media

-Donald Trump and his love of men

-Midterm Madness

-Vivek vs. Amy Acton, and the attack ad from hell.

-The tone and tenor of American politics is somehow worse than ever

-Alina Habba, Ric Grenell, and the alleged $50 million pardon racket.

-JD Vance answered a question about corruption. Ten thousand weasels applauded.

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

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-Jacob Siegel on raising his kids in Israel

-Who benefits from a fractured US-Israel relationship?

-JD Vance had endorsements to spare, just not for Netanyahu

-Israel prepared for life without America’s special relationship

-An entirely natural detour to France

-French…

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The 174-year-old tourism office you see burning down above stands about 50 yards away from a playground that my daughters have visited probably 100 times. It’s an 8-minute walk to their grandparents’ apartment, in the fashionable and touristic neighborhood of Presqu’île, the heart of France’s second city, Lyon.

“No business was spared on the Presqu’île,” Lyon Magazine reported this morning, adding: “You have to see it to believe it.” Smashed storefronts, looted stocks of clothing and electronics, graffiti everywhere (“Free Palestine,” “ACAB,” etc.) defying both local language laws and the head-in-sand fiction that these passions were ignited primarily by school policies and the cost of living. I am grateful the little fuckers didn’t get close enough to damage one of my favorite churches in the world, the nearly thousand-year-old Basilica of Saint-Martin d’Ainay.

Lyon did not see the worst of France’s Oct. 17 ignominy. In wildly chaotic Marseilles, according to the television journalist Paul Amar, “They came prepared. They had the addresses of town halls. They had addresses of Jewish shop owners. In a street in Marseille, all businesses owned by Jews were set on fire. Businesses run by Muslims weren’t.” A synagogue was ransacked in Paris. And in the central-France city of Limoges, this:

Hard not to agree with past Fifth Column guest and current part-time resident of France, Thomas Chatterton Williams, when he says, “What is happening in France today is evidence of true sickness, a body politic that has turned cancerous.” And unfortunately both for single-issue enthusiasts and the country as a whole, that sickness is not monocausal. France has an unhealthy and mathematically untenable approach toward work vs. government-provided entitlements (a main driver of the past two weeks of protests), toward destructive vandalism as political expression (note that the Yellow Vests, last season’s burn-shit protagonists, were out in large numbers on Oct. 17), toward assimilating large numbers of Muslim immigrants, and toward fixating on Israel and the United States as the root of geopolitical evil. Those foreigners pining for the long-delayed, now almost guaranteed Le Pen victory in next year’s elections likely underrate the gargantuan structural problems that the pro-welfare-state nationalists will face either when speeding the country toward its inevitable fiscal cliff, or in having to tell an eternally restive population that, well, maybe you’ll need to retire at 63 instead of 62.

As I mentioned in some recent episode, debt crises and cost-of-living squeezes—which we are seeing all over the globe—providing kindling for all kinds of potential unrest, including of the cross-border variety. France is not the only European country on fire. Shit with Russia is getting dangerously weird. Trumpworld is not getting less erratic in the run-up to the midterms. I don’t mean to spread my internal vapors, but … I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

* Hey, let’s move some damn tickets! Nov. 12, post-midterms breakdown & related hilarities at Fairfield University in Connecticut. You can also see me Oct. 31 at an “American Patriotism at 250” panel hosted by the University of Austin.

* Speaking of Midterm Madness, we had poll-cruncher extraordinaire (and more importantly, PECOTA-inventor) Nate Silver on Members Only #350. Here’s a free clip on why Republicans are in serious trouble (and maybe Donald Trump is the new First Gay President):

Silver’s latest is titled “The Good, Bad and Ugly Outcomes in the Senate: Can Democrats still win the Senate if the polls overestimate them? And how ugly could the map get for Republicans if the polls are wrong in the other direction?”

* Moynihan on his Report this week interviewed the great (and greatly named) historian Simon Sebag Montefiore on why “You’re (Probably) Wrong About the Middle East.”

* Speaking of the Blonde Zionist, he was on the recently re-christened Chosen People Problems this week, to talk about “the media landscape, the state of Europe, why having a podcast is better than being a father, and why he spends his days looking for antisemitic quotes in books from 100 years ago.”

* On Episode #579 we talked with listener-beloved Demo-guest Yemisi Egbewole in part about the disastrous debut of White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. K-Zach was then shitcanned. That episode also discussed the also-shitcanned corruption grotesque Kimberly Guilfoyle from her post as U.S. ambassador to Greece. Dear Fifth friend Kennedy (veteran of #37) dropped a Daily Mail hammer on her former Fox News colleague just prior to her ouster, in a piece headlined “Kimberly Guilfoyle Flaunted Her Nudes Album to Me... With Each Man’s Amex Card Next to His Compromising Photo.”

Kmele & the Tanglers talked Guilfoyle this week:

* Forgot to mention last week that Reason posted a lil’ print-mag column from me on “The Democrats’ Socialist Moment.” Excerpt:

Insurgent blocs within major political parties reveal themselves by showing when they’re willing to lose. The Tea Party during its productive heyday of 2009–13 backed some pretty out-there primary candidates who went on to squander some winnable general elections, such as anti–sharia law crusader Sharron Angle, who face-planted in her attempt to unseat a vulnerable Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.). Trump, too, has enforced loyalty by jeopardizing seats, as he did earlier this year by bouncing longtime Sen. John Cornyn (R–Texas) with the abjectly corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Nothing matters more this year for Democrats—and, arguably, the national electorate—than wresting control of the closely divided Senate, which at press time was almost universally forecast as a 50–50 toss-up. Trump’s final two years in office will look a lot different should the opposition party hold the whip hand on the legislative branch’s oversight and investigatory functions. And yet such is the antipathy of younger Democratic voters toward the perceived crusts of the party’s establishment that the DSA and DSA-adjacent cheerleaders fought viciously to elevate three very flawed candidates to contested statewide Senate elections. […]

Numerically minor as it may be, the DSA insurgency is jerking the much larger party leftward on taxing billionaires (including California’s disastrous wealth tax ballot initiative this November), blocking data centers, drastically expanding the already unaffordable entitlement state, and condemning Israel. This remains true even if El-Sayed loses: If you are more likely to lose your job in a primary election than the general, then what matters more is the passion of the grassroots mob, even if that proves to be normie poison.

* This Date in Fif’ History: On Oct. 18, 2018, beloved Aussie c**t Josh Szeps made what was already his fourth appearance on The Fifth Column, in an episode that discussed the Proud Boys fighting Antifa, Kanye West visiting the White House, Norman Mailer stabbing his wife, and Saudi Arabia doing much worse to Jamal Khashoggi.

That same day, Reason published a top-five favorite article of mine, titled “Mad Genius: The Reason founding story.” My talented colleagues made a great video version:

* Comment of the Week goes to Mike W G:

I debated this guy in high school and he crushed everyone. We came second in the state of Michigan, but he and his partner were on another level. Still crazy to see him all the time and hear his Michigan accent.

Sendoff: Rory Bourke, member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, died Oct. 11 at the age of 84. How do you get into this particularly HoF? Writing this bad boy:

-The House leaned Democratic, the Senate was a toss-up…then came Labor Day

-The first thing Nate Silver does every morning

-$4.50 gas, AI data centers, and T…

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VOTE for The Fifth Column as the Best News & Politics Show

is here and we will figure out how to pronounce her name….next time

-A Democratic consultant defending Fox News out of the gate

-Was Mike Lindell ever really a crackhead?

-Ladies and gentlemen, the new White House press secretary, Katie Zachariah

-Did we fuck Scott Jennings?

-How does a WH press secretary actually prepare?

-Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $100,000 AmEx problem

-James Talarico’s imaginary stay in an Ohio psych ward

-the art of standing out among 435 members of Congress

-Abdul El-Sayed vs Mike Rogers in Michigan

-Jon Ossoff and the case for normal Democrats

-JD Vance’s interesting definition of socialism

-Midterm Madness on Zachariah, Alaska, and Michigan

-Trump gets it right on data centers. Until he doesn’t.

-Brian Kilmeade stands up for Ukraine against Rachel Compost Duffy

-Come watch us live in Connecticut!

-What exactly is Third Way?

-Yemisi’s heresies on crime and climate

-Immigration and the Jamaican-Nigerian experience

-Kmele and the Blacks of Connecticut

-Where is the Democratic Party headed, and how much does the DSA matter?

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

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Before we get into once of the most disgraceful acts in the history of the American presidency, a reminder: Join us Sunday night at 6 p.m. ET for our Second Sunday Zoom call with paying subscribers!

* Here’s the mother of all Friday afternoon news dumps, care of President Donald Trump on his own social media app:

I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter. Additionally, based on the condition of their Diesel Refineries, Russia will then deliver, within a short period of time, 3,000,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel. Between our TOTAL CONTROL of the Strait of Hormuz, and this great announcement on Russian Energy, Diesel Prices for Americans and, indeed, the World, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST! Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority. This is a very big and important announcement.

This is a jaw-dropping reversal of American foreign policy. The U.S. has maintained a ban on Russian energy imports since Putin launched his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As recently as three weeks ago, Trump signed into law a measure that slaps up to 100 percent tariffs on countries that … import Russian fuel. The delivery amounts are not very significant—that initial 2.25 million barrels amounts to 16 hours of U.S. consumption; also we have a net surplus of 1.5 million barrels of diesel per day. But the principle of the agreement, along with dangled offers to sell parts of the Russian giant Lukoil to investors that just so happen to be in business with lead American negotiator Jared Kushner, give the White House a direct rooting interest in the fortunes of Russian refineries. Which Ukraine has been droning.

Sure enough, Trump said today that it’s time for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to go:

Speaking to reporters at the White House on Saturday, he said the United States had told Ukraine, “you can do whatever you want to Russia. Don’t hit the refineries because that’s a world problem that’s caused.”

[Zelensky], he said, “wants to make problems for the world.” He added, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.”

“He wants to make problems for the world,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Zelensky. “He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers with diesel fuel because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.”

Other choice quotes include, “I suggest they get a new leader, who can make a deal. Because he could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does.”

There is zero chance this will be good politics for Trump, as he faces an already knee-buckling midterm referendum on his misrule. The American public sides overwhelmingly with Ukraine over Russia—62 percent to 2 percent in this YouGov poll from April. A Pew Research survey that same month showed 84 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of Putin, 83 percent have an unfavorable view of Russia, and 51 percent consider Russia to be an enemy; meanwhile 50 percent have a favorable view of Zelensky, and just 32 percent have confidence that Trump can make good decisions about the war. Elected Republicans who have blasted the diesel deal include Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Rep. Don Bacon, and Rep. Michael McCaul.

Trump has consistently blamed Zelensky, more than Putin, for starting, let alone failing to negotiate the end of, Putin’s war of territorial conquest on the European continent. As recently as today he reiterated the narcissistic and delusional idea that “If the [2020] election weren’t rigged, I would have been president, and that war would have never started.” His historically conflict-of-interest-riddled negotiators for a historically conflict-of-interest-riddled White House are offering sweetheart deals to the most order-threatening dictator on the planet while the boss agitates to get the heroic victim canned. To the extent that “we” are represented by the executive branch of the federal government, we are becoming the baddies.

Former Fifth guests who have added value to this discussion include Episode #569 veteran David Frum, in this piece for The Atlantic; plus Scott Lincicome (#479 & #499), in a T-shirt-reaffirming tweet. You should obviously take this opportunity to listen or re-listen to our Members Only #348 discussion with oil markets guy Marshall Adkins, and I will also non-humbly add my August 2025 Reason piece on Trump’s dictatorships-and-double-standards when it comes to Putin, Zelensky, and (of course!) Saudi Arabia.

* Those of you who were content with the free tease for M.O. #349 with New York Times necrologist Sam Roberts, author of Are They Dead Yet?: The Art of the Obit, are missing out on what is by acclamation one of our best episodes in a while. Here’s another free taste:

My own obits, or at least words-typed-on-the-occasion-of-deaths, include: Hunter S. Thompson, Gerald Ford, Cathy Seipp, Václav Havel, Andrew Breitbart, Lou Reed, Miloš Forman, Milan Kundera, Brian Wilson, Dan Grossman, Brian Doherty, and our very own Andrew “Busty” Wimsatt.

* Let’s go early to our Comment of the Week, the selection of which is a rather blatant attempt to encourage similar behavior. Thank you, L Brown:

Thanks very much for this interview; did not disappoint!

Some links:

“Graham Mason” obituary

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1390221/Graham-Mason.html

Obituary of Jack Garman, the 24-year-old NASA Engineer referenced by Sam, who saved the Moon Landing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/25/us/jack-garman-whose-judgment-call-saved-moon-landing-dies-at-72.html

Obituary of Bill Harris

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/us/bill-harris-dead.html

Excerpt from Sam’s book:

https://longreads.com/2026/08/11/obituaries-new-york-times-sam-roberts/

* Great to see a bunch of Fif’ faithful this week at The Reason Roundtable’s 10-year anniversary show in NYC! In advance, I wrote up a lil’ institutional history; here’s the show itself, featuring an intro by our dear friend Kennedy (#37):

* Moynihan on his Report this week interviewed the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney about his new film, Musk.

* Kmele and the Tanglers did some Midterm Madness-style forecasting this week:

* Speaking of the midterms, here’s a Paley Center for the Media panel discussion I participated in on Oct. 1:

* Fif’-related events: Oct. 31 is my “American Patriotism at 250” panel at the University of Austin. Nov. 6 the lot of us will be closing the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s sold-out Soapbox 26 conference in Philly. Nov. 12 we’ll be doing some post-midterms breakdown at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Finally, Nov. 13-14 is the 100% unofficial Dallas Meetup of Fifth Column listeners.

Another Reason event I heartily recommend is the Oct. 12 NYC world premiere of Jim Epstein’s terrific new doc, Escaping Venezuela. Here’s the trailer:

* Beloved pals and Fifdom community stalwarts Chaya Leah Sufrin and Yael Bar tur of Ask a Jew fame have TOTALLY SOLD OUT, by which I mean they’ve joined Dan Senor’s Ark Media juggernaut, which means extra podcasts, but also they changed their dang name, to Chosen People Problems. Their first “professional” episode featured Douglas Murray (#390):

* Did I intend to smush several more items into this Firehose? Indeed I did. But sometimes you have to wake up at the crack o’ death to fly to Miami w/ your chilluns, and so here we are.

Sendoff: Freddie Jackson, man. This is exactly what ‘80s R&B sounded like. What a voice.

Kmele is the King of Halloween, did you know that?

Below find the link for this month’s Second Sunday, taking place LIVE on Zoom at 6PM Eastern Time (on Sunday)

Paid subscribers get the link below the fold.

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-Sam Roberts’ father takes him to see the Rosenbergs’ funeral

-Fifty years in journalism and an unexpected career writing obituaries

-Anna Nicole Smith and the brutality of British obituaries

-Charlie Rangel’s complicated legacy

-Who deserves a New York Times obituary?

-Writing Rudy Giuliani’s obituary b…

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-all the bad words are here

-come to Fairfield on November 12th! (https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html)

-Trump in Nebraska….always a good sign for Republicans

-Anal sex, picnics, breakfast in bed, lobster

-Europe is melting! (still)

-who will replace Macron?

-France’s immigration problem

-Sweden discovers gun crime

-America, the assimilation machine

-meritocracy is fucking fantastic

-questions are bad when ethnicities are in front of them

-Vivek, the big guy and the worst swing in baseball

-Midterm Madness where candidate quality counts

-if you had to arrest one person at the New York Times…

-MAGA-curious CBS boss and The Daily Beast

-Theo Von discovers socialism

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The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show. PLEASE HELP US TAKE HOME THE GOLD (or whatever the statue is made of, assuming there is one).

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In this house barn we celebrate the annual arboreal costume change, and the busy season of work & televised sports it portends. Sure, you could put on your A.I.-generated screen saver of autumn leaves and crackling fires, but ain’t it grander to touch grass and breathe in the real thing?

OK, enough Hudson Valley propaganda; here’s your reminder/link to go vote for The Fifth Column (and, OK, *maybe* The Moynihan Report) for various Signal Awards “Listeners Choice” categories. The Signal Awards were founded in 2022 by the rabble who brought you the Webby Awards way back when. So long ago, in fact, that I first started writing about them in 2000 (including a decently spot-on dotcom-1.0-crash number on “Which Webby nominees will be dead this time next year?”) I see that my 2001 report from the only Webbys I attended included this graf:

After the ceremony, on the sparsely populated smoking balcony, a San Francisco enthusiast who co-founded an actually successful Internet company shook his head and laughed. “Can you believe how bloody provincial that was?” he asked, as a dominatrix dot-com she-cop searched for eager young male programmers to butt-whip.

I can’t stress enough how little this stuff matters, though as Cubs/Red Sox/Astros fans can tell you, as long as your flawed self is in these things, it certainly is much preferable to win.

* Fall’s busy with live events, so your quick reminders, beginning out of chronological order with my now-RSVPable Oct. 31 “American Patriotism at 250” at the University of Austin. No better way to spend Halloween! Promo:

UATX is pleased to welcome Charles Kesler, Matt Welch, and Jedidiah Purdy for a thoughtful and engaging conversation about patriotism in America. Representing a range of political and intellectual perspectives, our panelists will consider what patriotism means in contemporary America and the ideas that continue to shape our understanding of it.

More: Oct. 7 is the sold-out-but-waitlistable 10^th anniversary live show of The Reason Roundtable in NYC. Nov. 6 The Fifth Column will be doing the final presentation at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s sold-out Soapbox 26 conference in Philly. And Nov. 12 we’ll be doing some post-midterms breakdown at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

* Gratified to read the rave reviews of our Members Only #348 One-Hitter with global oil markets guy Marshall Adkins. In fact, let’s do the first of two Comments of the Week, from squarooticus:

While I love the meandering conversations with folks like Sarah Hepola and Chris Christie, in-depth, substantive conversations with experts on issues of the day are so rare in modern media, and critical for reasoning our way out of the populist mess we find ourselves in. There is a latent appetite for this kind of content by people who are fucking exhausted with what passes for public discourse in 2026.

Amen. That’s what these One-Hitters are for. Here’s a clip, talkin’ ‘bout diesel, the Venezuela effect, and how “we’ve never seen this before…the disruption on the refining side”:

Some of our more, ah, excitable listeners expressed a bit o’ fury that this conversation was “cut off.” Nope! As their very name suggests, One-Hitters are designed to be short, nutrient-rich discussions on a single topic. At 40 minutes, Adkins was at the exact median of our recent One-Hitter length — longer than Sarah Isgur, Damon Root, and Rand Paul; shorter than Thor Halvorssen, Peter Moskos, and Michael A. Cohen. We like to add variety to the Fif’ diet! Speaking of which….

* Our publication-day M.O. #347 conversation with Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em co-podcaster Sarah Hepola (veteran of Episode #354) about her well-reviewed new memoir, The Only Thing There Is to Want: A Memoir of Three Loves, was pret-tay, pretty polarizing! To which I say … good! Not that we relish negative notices from our paying customers, but rather that we aim to mix things up, topics-wise, including sometimes away from the news and toward the more universal (and divisive!) questions. Anyway, here’s a clip of Hepola cougin’ out:

* Comment of the Week 2 goes to Jessemy:

I cannot stop writing obsessive fan fiction about MM and SH. They had a wild sober night, he joins AA, they conceive a miracle baby at 53 and 53. They have the friendliest divorce ever and raise a child into their 90s. The end.

* The Moynihan Report this week published a great interview with Joby Warrick, author of the new book The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist.

In more stop-the-presses news, Herr Moynihan also published some … writing! Buckets and buckets of the stuff, mostly about the spread of bogus history. A Fif’-relevant chunk:

It can’t be overemphasized just how many “normal” history books, by normal authors and published by normal imprints, are barely fact-checked and deformed by sloppy mistakes, apocryphal quotes, and junk history.

I was surprised to see the paint-by-numbers lefty book Separation of Church and Hate, by former Fifth Column guest John Fugelsang, squeaking into the top 50, many months after its initial publication. […]

When leafing through the book, I noticed a quote Fugelsang attributes to Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic radio priest who polluted American airwaves in the 1930s, until Japanese imperialism made him irrelevant. Having spent far too much time wading through back issues of his newspaper Social Justice, one gets accustomed to the rhythm and cadence of Coughlin’s venom. And something was off with this:

“In December 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany, the celebrity priest declared that Jewish refugees should not be allowed to enter the US, saying in 1938, ‘When we get through with the Jews of America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.’”

Coughlin was an accomplished Jew-hater and Nazi apologist but…he never said this.

* We talked on #577 about the colossal own-goal that was Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) this week. So did Kmele and the Tanglers:

You can watch Schmitt’s awful National Conservatism Conference speech here.

* Kmele this week also participated in a live Hampshire taping of NPR’s The Middle with Jeremy Hobson, on the subject of “What’s at Stake for You in This Election?”

* This week’s Reason Roundtable was on the midterms, the Iran War’s unpopularity, bad economic numbers, and something something A.I.:

* This Date in Fif’ History: How long ago was Oct. 4, 2018? So long ago that one of our regular guests back then was some newspaper gal named … Bari Weiss! Talking here in #115 about … the Brett Kavanaugh hearings! I look forward to your reports in the comments….

Our own private October Fourths include me, in 2020, writing “The Case Against Donald Trump.” The conceit:

Focusing on Trump’s deeds, instead of words, from Inauguration Day until just before the first reported U.S. death from COVID-19 on February 29, is a clarifying, even liberating, exercise. At a time when so much of American discourse is about symbolism instead of policy, adjectives instead of nouns, feelings instead of facts, this approach waves away the toxic political fog and drills down into the bedrock of this presidency. What has the Manhattan real estate developer actually built in Washington; how has that already impacted the lives of his constituents; and what lasting changes are likely if his job performance is ratified by the voting public in November?

Working through those questions will produce different answers for everyone, but here’s a preview of mine: On the broad federal issues I care about most—limiting the size and scope of government, protecting individual liberties, allowing for peaceable exchange between willing partners, and contributing to international peace and human flourishing—Trump has been not just passively suboptimal but actively malign. Rewarding his record will cement bad policy and complete the Republican Party’s transformation into a vehicle for big-government nationalism that’s openly suspicious of free markets and perceived enemies.

On Oct. 4, 2010, Moynihan wrote a blog post about Hugo Chavez’s latest electoral triumph, under the headline “Yeah, This Isn’t Going to End Well.”

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

What would happen if you asked Richard Elfman, director of the fantastically warped midnight movie Forbidden Zone, to make an after-school special? The answer is Shrunken Heads, which initially adheres to the classic trope of following a group of three sweet but awkward boys as they decide it’s time to stand up to a group of local bullies. Young Tommie, Bill, and Freddie seek advice from Mr. Sumatra (played by the great Julius Harris of Live and Let Die fame), the kind old man who runs the newsstand. Mr. Sumatra, you see, is from Haiti, and offers some tactics based on his police experience working in cahoots with the Tonton Macoute. Our heroes make their stand, only to be literally murdered in the street. The end? It is not! Mr. Sumatra collects the trio’s heads, and takes them back to his condominium, where he engages in that voodoo that he do. The boys are soon resurrected and imbued with incredible powers for their forthcoming campaign of revenge. Richard Elfman doesn’t make a lot of movies, but he sure does make ‘em weird. Watch free (with ads) on Tubi; buy the Blu-ray; here’s the trailer:

Sendoff: I apologize in advance to all our Indonesian subscribers for my profound ignorance, but everything I read about the late Guruh Sukarnoputra, who died late last month at age 73, is just hallucinatory. Like: “In the realm of dance and music, his name is as fragrant as the frangipani flower.” And: “He was the youngest son of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno with his third wife, Fatmawati, and the brother of former Indonesian president, Megawati Sukarnoputri. He served as a member of the People’s Representative Council for 30 years and was one of the longest-serving members of the Parliament of Indonesia.” Like, what? Guruh is most famous for his 1977 collaboration Guruh Gipsy, named by Indonesian Rolling Stone as that country’s second best album all time. Though I rather like this nifty little disco-inflected pop number he wrote and I assume produced for the artist Chrisye:

In what is surely the crowning achievement of our careers, The Fifth Column has been nominated for a Signal Award in the news & politics category. A secretive “judging academy” will apparently decide if we will take home the gold (or silver, or bronze) headphones, but oh–what’s this? There’s a separate Listener’s Choice award that apparently goes to the show with the best fans.

Yes people, the folks at the Signal Awards have thrown down the gauntlet and asked which show has more loyal, attractive, fans who have 5 minutes to spare today to vote for their favorite podcasters at the link below:

VOTE THE FIFTH!

But wait, there’s more! Not only do you get to vote for The Fifth, but you also get to vote for… William Shatner? That’s right, The Moynihan Report is up for–get this–Best Video Podcast Guest:

VOTE SHATNER!

But seriously folks, The Moynihan Report was also nominated for Best Individual Episode (recognizing Michael’s half of the Shatner episode):

VOTE MOYNIHAN + SHATNER!

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Also, is Marshall the real

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-Kmele’s Cross-Country Trail of Tears

-Trump Praises the Latinos

-Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble

-Coming Soon: Jason’s Weird Fetishes

-Trump Talks to Time

-The Weave We Go

-No Fatties, No Trannies, No Weirdos

-It’s Worse Because It’s Worse

-Saving Western Civilization, One Taxpayer-Funded Ad at a Time

-Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Awesome Week

-The Indian Question

-Roxane Gay, Harvard Medical School Artist in Residence

-Midterm Madness: New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio and L.A.

-How Not to Hijack an Israeli Plane

The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show. PLEASE HELP US TAKE HOME THE GOLD (or whatever the statue is made of, assuming there is one).

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-Sarah is back on the wagon (not really!)

-The married man, the younger man, and the New Orleans homicide detective

-Women’s tears are a recording device

-Kavanaugh, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves

…

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Before I risk Coleman Hughes’s wrath by kicking more sand in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s eye, some quick reminders about upcoming Fifth Column-related live events, in chronological order:

Oct. 1 I’m on a panel about “The Media and The Midterms: Determining America’s Future,” at the Paley Center for Media in NYC. Oct. 7 is the sold-out-but-waitlistable 10^th anniversary live show of The Reason Roundtable in NYC. Oct. 31 I’m on panel about patriotism at the University of Austin. Nov. 6 The Fifth Column will be semi-keynoting at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s sold-out Soapbox 26 conference in Philly. Nov. 12 we’ll be doing some post-midterms breakdown at Fairfield University in Connecticut. And Nov. 13-14 is the 100% unofficial Dallas Meetup of Fifth Column listeners.

* OK. As discussed in Members Only #346, I was frustrated and occasionally repulsed by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s semi-confessional New York Times Magazine cover story, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” In part because of the conceit right there in the headline: She assumed as a given that she was “fighting for every black child,” because that was her intent. Faced with the lived-experience reality of her preferred educational-policy approaches being bad for her black child (and others), she exhibited precious little curiosity about the connection between those preferences and that result. If anything, she clung to her longstanding, sneer-heavy position that those who have disagreed with her methods are doing so out of hostility toward or insufficient regard for the plight of poor minorities.

As Maud Maron, who has long been derided as a pariah by NHJ and an entire swath of the activist educational establishment for her defenses of scholastic rigor in District 2, wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal:

[H]er operating assumption [is] that white parents are to blame for the bad schools in which too many black children are trapped. “This systemic sorting of worthy and unworthy children is justified by saying that our ‘brightest’ students deserve and demand more rigor,” she writes in her most recent article. “While many of the city’s Asian students have benefited from these screens, in reality the screens are part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system.”

My insistence that my children get a good education is neither tawdry nor a bargain. It’s called being a good parent, and Ms. Hannah-Jones could and should have done it for her own child. Now, instead of asking hard questions about why her approach failed, she doubles down on her original thesis: racism.

Ms. Hannah-Jones and I both have children who are juniors in the New York City public schools. I also have two older children who graduated in 2024 and 2026, as well as a fifth-grader, so I have some comparison points Ms. Hannah-Jones lacks. My two eldest graduated from a school system that required Regents exams—subject-matter competency tests that measure students’ baseline proficiency and stress-test whether the system itself is serving students. My youngest two, like Najya, won’t have to take those exams because the “equity” movement Ms. Hannah-Jones champions won the day: The state Education Department has decided that the class of 2027 is the last that will have to pass the Regents to graduate.

I have also seen the effect of replacing state test scores, grades and attendance as admission rubrics for middle school and high school with lottery numbers. It did lessen the number of white and Asian kids in “good” schools and increase black and Hispanic enrollment. It also fueled the exodus of families of all colors from the school system. Ms. Hannah-Jones calls that racism in action. But city data don’t support her claim. The school system asked families why they left. Forty-one percent wanted a more rigorous education than the city’s public schools could provide. Of families who switched to charters, which overwhelmingly serve minority students, 46% cited the need for greater academic rigor. For families moving to private schools, 42% did.

Some similar ed-policy notes here from the always-interesting John Arnold.

Here’s a tale of two articles about the same school system from 2016, in which, again, the headlines contain a tell: First was my Reason colleague Jim Epstein’s “How to Fix ‘One of the Most Segregated Public School Systems In the Nation,’” then NHJ’s “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” What’s the tell? The protagonist. Epstein (also a Brooklyn parent, though that doesn’t come up), is animated by the admittedly difficult question of how to improve a troubled school system (including a focus on the very elementary school that NHJ sent her kid to). Hannah-Jones, meanwhile, is writing about herself, hoping that her shining example, along with some shaming of those less courageous, can produce a Hero Ball fix to systemic inequality:

I told Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and “free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to “good” public schools felt like implying that children in “bad” schools deserved the schools they got, too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural — a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.

Nikole Hannah-Jones has been writing about education policy for going on two decades without ever once grappling seriously in public with the notion that people who advocate for, say, charter schools oftentimes do so precisely because they REJECT the notion that “children in ‘bad’ schools deserved the schools they got.” Here’s Epstein’s doc, which among other things (including a quick NHJ sighting!) discusses the three charter schools within walking distance of the “segregated, low-income school” Hannah-Jones knowingly inflicted on her daughter:

The NHJ-tastic operational method of tarring policy skeptics, including otherwise totally private citizens, with the scarlet letter of racism is what launched me on my path from committed public-school parent to payer of multiple private tuitions. I re-read this week my bewildered September 2019 piece about the aggressively dishonest way that a massive, “equity”-driven admissions overhaul was sold in our trailblazing Brooklyn school district, and it made me furious all over again about the still-lingering decrepit habits of mind and argumentation that led us to this very fallen moment that NHJ’s poor kid is so pissed about. The chronological headlines on some of my relevant pieces since then tell a story of what a system designed by Nikole Hannah-Jones sympathizers looks like in practice:

“Even Social Engineers Don’t Want Their Kids Used as Demographic Pawns”

“Brooklyn School Integration Is Totally Working! (Except for Some Non-Compliant Families, but They Probably Hate Diversity)”

“Bureaucrats Are Trying to ‘Control’ School Choice”

“N.Y. Schools Chief Richard Carranza Can’t Quit Calling Parents ‘Racist’”

“The Equity Mess: Despite their professed goals, Democrats’ pandemic policies have widened disparities between races, classes, and genders.”

“Families Are Fleeing Government-Run Schools”

“NYC Scrapping Gifted and Talented Program Is a Triumph of Redefining Language”

“Public Schools Experiencing ‘White Flight’”

“How Brooklyn’s Much-Copied Diversity Plan Helped Throw its Best Middle School Into Chaos”

“The People Who Wrecked N.Y. Schools Love Zohran Mamdani”

* I ranted a bit about these topics, plus Trump v. White House reporters & the wilderness era of Fusionism, on this week’s Reason Roundtable:

* Episode #576 with CNN defender-of-Trump Scott Jennings generated some headlines, such as: “‘Do You Stand With CNN?’ Scott Jennings Grilled About Whose Side He’s on in Trump’s Battle With Network” (Mediaite); “Scott Jennings Asked Point-Blank if Trump Has ‘A Corruption Problem’” (Mediaite); “CNN’s Scott Jennings Grilled on Trump’s ‘Corruption Problem’: See His Response” (TV Insider); “Scott Jennings Pauses 5 Seconds When Asked About Donald Trump ‘Corruption’” (RealityTea); “Scott Jennings Hesitates Big-Time When Asked If Trump Has A ‘Corruption Problem’” (HuffPost); and “Job-Hungry Scott Jennings Freezes at Simple Trump Question” (Daily Beast).

For anyone fretting that the above interest was ginned up by the selective editing of social-media clips, here’s a straight-through 8 ½ minute chunk of an otherwise freely available podcast:

* M.O. #346 w/ beloved pal Josh-o Szeps included some clip roulette from the United Nations; note that this was recorded before Benjamin Netanyahu’s beeper callback.

* Kmele’s enTanglement this week was also about the U.N.:

* Moynihan this week donned a tie for his Report interview with legendary NYC gossip Michael Musto:

* How about a nutrient-rich omnigraf of past Fifth Column guests adding to our collective knowledge over the past week? We had talked with David Pakman in M.O. #345 about a deeply dishonest Associated Press presentation about a possible resurgence of lynching. Up steps John McWhorter (veteran of #84, #121, #188 & #366) with a New York Times piece headlined “Are Lynchings Really Happening?” (Betteridge’s Law applies.) We have talked aplenty this year about doomer vs. non-doomer A.I. scenarios; recent guest Steven Pinker (#557) just elaborated on his doomer-skepticism in an open letter to Scott Alexander. Scott Lincicome (#479 & #499) had a fine Washington Post piece on how deeply unpopular Trump’s tariffs have become. And our comrades over at Reflector/Longview/Guys-maybe-pick-a-name have a new miniseries out on homelessness called “Street Fight” that’s well worth your time.

* This date in Fifth Column history: How long ago was our episode of Sept. 27, 2019? Long enough ago that we were talking about Moynihan winning an Emmy award (!), and the possibilities of Donald Trump being impeached. But also, not-long ago enough that we were disputing the notion that Cancel Culture was a “myth” while making fun of Greta Thunberg!

As for our individual pursuits on that date, in 2010, Moynihan wrote a piece on “The Execrable Alan Grayson,” in 2013, I appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher; and in 2021, Kmele was … at a conference?

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

Prompted by Moynihan recounting yet another tale of woe from the rolling sanitarium that is the New York City subway, this week we’re rewatching The Incident: a claustrophobic, pressure cooker of film that reminds us that riding the MTA has been a gamble since at least 1967. Martin Sheen makes his big screen debut as one of a pair of drunken hoods who stumble onto a train car and begin harassing people while the other passengers look the other way. The legend of Kitty Genovese looms large over this drama, but the twist here is that the bystanders’ failure to intervene on behalf of a fellow passenger just means that they’re lined up to be the next victims of intensifying hostilities as the hoods eventually take the entire car hostage. It’s like The Taking of the Pelham One Two Three meets Funny Games, with Ed McMahon and a baby-faced Beau Bridges. Hang on tight for an infuriating ride that will likely bear some resemblance to your own commuting experience (unless you live in Tucker Carlson’s Moscow). Watch free (with ads) on YouTube; buy the Blu-ray; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week goes to MacKenzie Madison Murphy:

“That’s a very generic question” will now be my response to very specific questions.

Sendoff: I will go on record as absolutely despising that little moment they do in every World Series where they stop one game and everyone holds up a sign about how much they want to beat cancer. Please note that I do not say this because the Angels lost their 100^th game on the last day of the season today, thus becoming the final MLB franchise to hit that inglorious mark, nor do I say that because I’ve got some weird hard-on for cancer. Let the record state that I actually rather despise cancer, that I also despise compulsory group-signaling interruptions, and that if I were in that gun-to-the-head position I’d hold up the gnarliest looking sign that said “FUCK CANCER!!!” preferably designed by my old friend COOP. I was already thinking about such things this week when looking for a recently deceased musical artist to include in this week’s Sendoff, and alighting upon the obviously energetic and productive pop-punk guitarist, singer, and producer Chad Gilbert, who spent one-third of his far-too-short 45 years just rage-battling the C-word into what was usually a draw. The fuckers took out a dad and productive artist in what should have been the prime of his life. I did not know his band New Found Glory, but they were alarmingly huge, and you will immediately recognize the sound of plaintive early-aughts sugar-punk on songs like “My Friends Over You.” Here’s Gilbert singing lead in New Found Glory’s side project, the International Heroes of Hardcore. RIP, punk dude.

-Moynihan’s anti-Australian bigotry

-the Lupita Nyong’o pronunciation challenge

-Why is daddy wearing boobs?

-this actor can play any ethnicity

-Josh’s dad, the George Costanza of Australia

-UN Clip-o-rama

-in defense of the UN, sort of

-can America afford to piss off all its allies?

-Greta Thunberg goes to the Rena…

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-Kmele’s cult-adjacent upbringing

-Pakman’s Argentina upbringing

-Macklemore, Robert Kraft and the limits of independent media

-Do people actually control their media diet?

-Nick Fuentes, Fishback and Twitter not being real life

-Pakman puts himself at the tip of the junk food pyramid

-Should The Fifth…

Read more

-Jennings the teetotaler

-wtf happened to Moynihan’s hair?

-Jennings’ working-class Kentucky origin story

-back when Kentucky + West Virginia were swing states

-Rush Limbaugh + Paul Harvey University

-what would Rush make of $9K for stay-at-home moms?

-what kind of Republican is Scott Jennings anyway?

-why is Trump so unpopular?

-tariffs, potash + the new Republican orthodoxy

-the Greenland victory (?) lap begins

-Scott’s muscular Republicanism meets the universities

-Van Jones vs. his own side

-Trump vs. CNN and the White House press pool

-Scott Jennings, future press secretary?

-Trump + Mamdani, together again

-Texas gets way too interesting

-Georgia gets weird

-trying to have the one pundit take nobody else has

-do not get in Scott Jennings’ personal space

-does Trump have a corruption problem?

-Trump crypto + the Kentucky coffee can

-whatever happened to Republican “family values”?

-Mitch McConnell is alive

-has Tucker left the MAGA coalition?

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

Follow The Fifth Column

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Before we get into some of the Fif’-related news and commentary of the week, we’ve got a few live events to announce!

* Nov. 12, Fairfield University, Connecticut, $35 for non-students. Our good friends at Fairfield are inviting The Fifth Column as part of the John Charles Meditz College of Arts and Sciences’ Enduring Question Series. Special guest very likely; FOMO guaranteed for non-attendees. Tickets here.

* Oct. 1, just me, the Paley Center for Media, NYC, $30 for non-members. This one’s called, “The Media and The Midterms: Determining America’s Future,” with Karen Defilippi, Patrick Egan, Astead W. Herndon, Jay Townsend, moderated by Margaret Talev. Tickets here.

* Oct. 31, University of Austin, just me again (plus others) on a panel about patriotism that I don’t see advertised yet on UATX’s Events page.

* These next two have been announced before, and are in sold out/waiting list mode or pretty near, but: Oct. 7, The Reason Roundtable 10^th anniversary show, NYC, $10. Tickets here. Plus:

* Nov. 4-6, full Fifth Column, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s sold-out Soapbox 26 conference, featuring a special guest. Conference also includes such past Fif’ guests as Sarah Isgur (Members Only #314, M.O. #331), Noam Dworman (#549), David French (#191, #325, #365, #555) Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276), Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and Ilya Shapiro (#361).

* OK! Y’all seemed to enjoy our M.O. #344 conversation with The Atlantic’s Tyler Austin Harper. Here’s a clip of Harper talking about why/how he left academia and Woke 1 behind:

Supplemental TAH reading: “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” “The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities,” “Why Do Rich Kids Love Socialism?”, and my favorite, “Inside the Dangerous, Secretive World of Extreme Fishing.”

* Episode #575 with Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei was of course free to all comers, but here’s a 12-minute clip for those who still haven’t hit Play, in which JVH ranks Donald Trump’s three most precedent-breaking actions:

* The Moynihan Report this week one-on-oned with past Fif’ guest Jon Lovett of Pod Saves fame:

* Kmele & the Tanglers this week talked A.I.:

* Near the end of this week’s Reason Roundtable, which also led with the A.I. hullaballoo, I soliloquized about our dearly departed pal, Andrew “Busty” Wimsatt. Here’s that bit:

* I also talked about Andrew, and the questions surrounding his brutal murder, on News Nation’s Katie Pavlich Tonight:

* A week ago I was on News Nation’s The Hill Sunday talking with host Chris Stirewalt (#396) + two co-panelists about potential A.I. regulatory capture, Trump’s catastrophically idiotic $5,000 “dividend” idea, and reflections on the anniversary of 9/11. My two blocs begin at around the 25-minute mark:

* This has been quite the week for Republican racisms, as briefly mentioned on M.O. #344. First was Texas Railroad Commission nominee Bo French absolutely staying in character by expressing chagrin that U. of Texas fans include many people of subcontinental descent; then Karl Rove declaring that he’ll vote for French’s Democratic opponent as a result; then conservative Erick Erickson uncorking a long damnation of the “white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies” infiltrating into right-leaning institutions. All of which have been greeted with a mixture of shrieking, denial, and the defiant grabbing of shovels.

In that latter class strode Pinochet enthusiast Will Tanner, co-founder of the Lost Causey, colonialism-lamenting American Tribune Substack. “Jesus did not say you have to let a bunch of pagans who worship demons replace your children,” was one of Tanner’s responses; “’umm actually you’re not allowed to notice the demographic displacement and replacement of your people because the left notices that you are white and hates you for it,’” was another. But I was blissfully unaware of the man’s public flatulence until this tweet crossed into my stream:

Confederate Gen. Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor, had to surrender to a German 48er immigrant officer at the end of the war. Describing his response to the lecture about “American values” he received from the German in broken English, he wrote:

“I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. Happily for the world, since the days of Huss and Luther, neither tyranny nor taste can repress the Teutonic intellect in search of truth or exposure of error. A kindly, worthy people, the Germans, but wearing on occasions.”

Could he be referring to … yep, he was: Peter Joseph Osterhaus. My great-great-great grandfather.

It’s true, PJO was impolitic in that moment; a common reading-the-room immigrant flaw that hobbled his six-month stint as post-war military commander of Vicksburg. (Though he did master the verbal niceties enough to fashion a long U.S. diplomatic career in Lyon and Mannheim.) It’s also true that Gen. Taylor’s Scar-like sarcasm could not mask a defensive, imperious ugliness that treated former slaves with precisely the humanity you’d expect from the owner of a large sugar plantation bought for him by his daddy-president. A section from Taylor’s memoir, bemoaning those nassty Northernersses making a fuss over postwar negro-murdering in the South:

As crocodiles conceal their prey until it becomes savory and tender and ripe for eating, so the Radicals kept these dark corpses to serve up to the public when important elections approached, or some especial villainy was to be enacted by the Congress. People who had never been south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers knew all about this “Ku-Klux”; but I failed, after many inquiries, to find a single man in the South who ever heard of it, saving in newspapers. Doubtless there were many acts of violence. When ignorant negroes, instigated by pestilent emissaries, went beyond endurance, the whites killed them; and this was to be expected.

Tanner is dutifully impressed with Taylor’s bloodlines (as were those many generals who kept promoting him far above his station, hoping to benefit from his connections to Jefferson Davis, who had married his sister), but does not continue the genealogy forward. Osterhaus, who enlisted as a connection-less private at the age of 38, kept on contributing to the defense of America through siring Rear Admiral Hugo Wilson Osterhaus, for whom the USS Osterhaus was named. Hugo’s son Hugo Wilson Osterhaus, Jr. also became a Rear Admiral; my brief memory of him was that he was very grumpy (unsurprisingly!). Both Hugos are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, on land once owned by Robert E. Lee.

My mom wrote a book about great-great-great grandpa (for whom my brother is named), called Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus. Here’s me interviewing her about it:

* Speaking of Founding Fathers, is it me, or has The Babylon Bee’s batting average gotten considerably higher as of late?

* A funnier American institution, Dave Barry (S.D. #72), goes almost serious (but still very funny) in talking about how his reporter-wife Michelle just got canned from the newspaper. Excerpt:

Michelle has been a sportswriter for four decades. For most of her career, she has written more than 400 stories a year. So we’re talking thousands of stories, containing tens of thousands of names and statistics, and I’m guessing that in all that time she got maybe a dozen facts wrong. She had to be accurate, because she was — in fact still is — a woman, which means that every time she writes a story, she has to prove that she knows what she’s talking about. Men do not have to prove this, because men have penises, which give men a natural ability, from birth, to speak authoritatively about all sports, all the time. This is why a casual male sports fan can watch three minutes of a football game between two teams he has never seen before and declare, with complete confidence, that the coaches — who have been coaching for years, and whose jobs depend on their teams’ performance, and who have been up late night after night preparing for this game — have NO IDEA what they’re doing. The casual male sports fan can tell this at a glance, thanks to his penis. […]

That’s how it is in newspapers these days. Papers that were once thriving, vibrant civic institutions are now, in many markets, shriveled husks, shuffling zombies, if they still exist at all. There are a bunch of reasons for this, some of them the newspaper industry’s own fault. I’m not writing this to assign blame. I’m writing it to lament the fact that a lot of the newspaper people losing their jobs are, like Michelle, really good at what they do, and really care about how they do it, and now all the stories that they would have written will never get written. And Facebook and X and YouTube can’t begin to make up for that loss.

And it sucks.

* This date in Fifth Column history: Screw it, a new recurring feature! On Sept. 20, 2018, we posted an episode after what must have been a record-setting gap of three whole weeks since last we’d podded. Was titled “Notes on Moynihan’s European Excursion, The Kavanaugh Hearings.” Moynihan is … not apologetic. Nor even close to sober. Man, did we drive episodes straight into the ditch back then….

On an individual basis, this date last year was when Kmele dumbfounded a CNN co-panelist by questioning her assertion that Barack Obama is black. In 2016, Reason posted my (sadly!) prescient cover story, “Debt Denialists: Democrats and Republicans fiddle while the balance sheet burns.” And in 2006, Moynihan wrote “Sweden’s Politics of Personal Destruction: Voters say nay to Social Democrats, but ‘the most successful society the world has ever known’ will, alas, survive.”

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

If there’s a film genre I like even more than find him and kill him, it’s a group of relative strangers wind up in a big, spooky house. The 1971 Belgian-Italian film The Devil’s Nightmare may lack the polish of Robert Wise’s The Haunting, but it makes up for it with lesbian sex, baby-killing Nazis (okay, one baby-killing Nazi), and Satan himself. After a group of seven tourists (each embodying one of the seven deadly sins) find themselves stranded, they are forced to shack up at an imposing, conveniently located old castle. Enter cult superstar Erika Blanc as Lisa Müller, who proceeds to seduce each of the tourists, using pride, greed, gluttony, etc. to bring about their demise. Spoiler alert: she’s a succubus! With a great score by Alessandro Alessandroni maintaining the vibe throughout, it’s a slow, sexy, creepy and fun film that’s a perfect way to kick off Halloween season. Stream mediocre-quality transfer on Amazon Prime; buy the Blu-ray; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Jose Morales:

SO GOOD!!! Tyler’s article about Bates in the Atlantic should be a movie (I just read it after watching this podcast). He seriously lays it out almost as a screenplay. The opening paragraphs are so perfect for a movie - driving into the small, quaint town. It would be a new “American Fiction”. I had experiences similar to Tyler’s, both at work and in life. In tech, I saw comparable—if less draconian—programs introduced. White employees were told how to pronounce names and to give BIPOC colleagues priority in discussions. We had discussions about “decolonizing code”. I was once invited to a prestigious industry event that helped place people in really great positions, only to realize upon arriving that I had apparently been included because of my last name—without anyone or the invite having any mention of this. More recently, a very liberal white friend tried to define my identity for me and could not accept that the political movement she was describing does not represent all Latinos. My kid’s old school, wanted to be sure that everyone was an anti racist - which in that case meant that white people had to accept that they were all racists and that they needed to work on that. Like Bates College, the school was exceptionally liberal, yet they would have you believe that everyone was really just a racist. I do feel like much of this has died down (although still seems to be alive in California schools - particularly private expensive ones). I just hope V2 will not come back to kill us (If AI does not first :) )

Sendoff: I guess we’ve hit the middle-age-musician-who-was-actually-younger-than-me-dying phase. I didn’t really know the late Duncan Sheik, outside of hearing his memorable name uttered many a time on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic” show. Re-listening to his debut hit “Barely Breathing” (embedded below), is a reminder that *every* micro-period has a music production time-stamp; mark this one “mid-to-late-‘90s-alternapop.” Was an early friend/collaborator with Lisa Loeb; rocketed to near-sex symbol status, then had the presence of mind to step out of the spotlight, then eventually execute a successful Pivot to Broadway. Died of a heart attack at 56. Consult your cardiologist, kids.