Firehose #101: And It Could Have Been So Much Worse

Also: Second Sunday tonight at Roughly 6 p.m. ET

Let’s not sugarcoat any of this. The shit has hit the fan, the bullet has nicked The Ear, and a perfectly innocent bystander, a 50-year-old girl-dad and ex-volunteer fire chief named Corey Comperatore, was brutally murdered while protecting his wife and daughter from the bullets of a political assassin. Next time you feel tempted by the siren song of organized hatreds, take a good look at who pays the ultimate price:

Yes, we’re doing our regularly scheduled Second Sunday of the month Zoom call for paying subscribers today, penciled in for 6 p.m. ET. Yes, these are the times that try Fifdom’s souls. See you in a few.

I’m not a big re-listener of our back catalogue, so I don’t know how everything holds up in the fullness of time. But we have been talking about the problem of domestic political violence basically since our inception on April Fool’s Day 2016. So without further review, here are our initial podcasts after….

* The Unite the Right rally & protester-killing in Charlottesville (w/ DeRay McKesson)

* The post-George Floyd riots (followed by ritual self-criticism)

* The deadly riots in Kenosha (w/ Tina Nguyen)

* The January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riot (w/ Peter Meijer). (There was also a during-podcast, and a post-facto self-critique.)

* The May 2022 mass murder in Buffalo

Feel free to list others in the comments, and to retrospectively assess what you hear at those links. It’s hard to keep one’s head on straight during moments like these, though that is what you pay us to attempt.

Here are three past writings of possible relevance from me:

* “Prediction: 2024 Will See Deadly Political Violence in the Streets” (December 2023)

* “Bernie Sanders Links Political Rhetoric to Violence When 'Right-Wing,' Not When Perpetrated by His Own Volunteer” (June 2017)

* “Against Incitement: Political speech doesn't kill people, people kill people” (March 2011)

* Onward, if briefly. Douglas Murray (veteran of Episode #190) was quick out of the box in The Free Press with a piece making the case that “Yesterday evening’s attack on Donald Trump is reminiscent of the shootings of Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt—and their pitch-perfect response.”

* Some video for you. This week for the Honestly pod Moynihan moderated a debate between Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg (#182) about the former’s controversial essay “We’re All Soviets Now”:

* I was going to decorate the bottom of this weekender with the usual entertainments, but I have just found out while typing this that an L.A. journalist comrade, Evan Wright, author most famously of Generation Kill, has died of his own hand. Evan, a very talented writer with an extremely unusual backstory, was a friend of both my wife and Nancy Rommelmann. I will always remember fondly the July 4^th we spent together with him and one of his Generation Kill Marines way up in a Malibu fire canyon, talking just crazy and hilarious shit about Iraq, deployment-boredom, trash-talking, rules of engagement, and what it’s like to be a relatively clueless embed in a forward recon unit.

It’s been a bad, bad day. Walkoff music: