Firehose #97: Four Non Blondes

Also: New Chicago live show to be added hopefully very soon, because the first one sold out in 30 hours!

Look, I feel Olivia Reingold’s pain. It’s hard, as she recounted in agonizing detail last episode, to go from fair-haired head-turner to indifferently-locked human wallpaper. You think, with a few alterations (like, no shrooms), I wouldn’t go back to this?

* Speaking of the questionably blonded, who’s got six thumbs and an already sold-out Chicago live show, even before we had shared the link with freebie subscribers? Dese guys!

As paying subscribers have known for 28 hours, and NFC’ers for 52 (one of the advertised perks of such status), we are doing the dirty Aug. 17, two days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, at listener Mike Reed’s Constellation club in the Windy City. Tickets are were $38, there will be beloved surprise guests, bells will ring & whistles will sound, etc. BUT NOW THAT YOU MANIACS HAVE ALREADY RAIDED THE WHOLE DAMN LIQUOR CABINET … we are in the process of adding another show, either just before or just after. Stay tuned to this space.

[Have been reminding youse guys for a while now that paying subscribers get first dibs at special stuff!

* This weekend’s regularly scheduled content will include a number of never-ending beefs. For instance, here’s me in the New York Post, writing about the years-long journalistic campaign to go ooga-booga about the sinister, apparently Christian-nationalist Supreme Court. Excerpt, with hyperlinks edited and some paragraphs combined:

“Trump allies prepare to infuse ‘Christian nationalism’ in second administration,” warned a Politico headline, over an article about … a single such ally, who heads up a three-year-old think tank no one’s ever heard of, and speaks with the former president “at least once a month” (according to an anonymous source, natch). Scary!

Remember the Revolutionary War-era pine-tree flag breathlessly reported to have flown outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito? That has now magically been transformed, according to The Conversation (motto: “Academic rigor, journalistic flair”), into a “call for Christian nationalism.” Good to know.

After self-described “relentless truth pirate” Lauren Windsor relentlessly infiltrated a Supreme Court Historical Society gala to lie about her personal beliefs in a James O’Keefe-style attempt to embarrass Alito on secretly recorded audio, a wide swath of the leftosphere depicted the justice’s unremarkable responses to Windsor’s leading questions about political polarization by suggesting (via misused headline punctuation) that Alito had finally been caught in the act of doing a Christian nationalism.

“Alito’s ‘Godliness’ Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement,” mis-asserted The New York Times (Alito did not say the word “godliness”). “Caught on Tape, Alito Exposed as ‘Crusader for Christian Nationalism,’” went the widely shared headline on Common Dreams (that quote was from an Alito critic). Salon, which impressively if surprisingly still exists, announced that “Experts alarmed at Alito’s secretly recorded Christian nationalist ‘confession,’” which would ring more true if he had confessed anything of the sort.

* Nina Paley fans know the mother of all never-ending beefs; those of us in the print magazine business know what a pain in the neck it is to pin down a not-immediately-obsolete essay during the middle of a hot war. And yet! Here I am in the “July” issue of Reason (IOW, written in April, final-proofread in early May, posted online last Sunday) making new friends with a piece headlined “What If the U.S. Cuts Off Aid to Israel?: Ending U.S. aid would give Washington less leverage in the Middle East. That's why it's worth doing.” As a certain opinionated Jewish listener who shall go nameless until she outs herself in the comments texted me, “I was totally prepared to hate [it], but I have to say it was so well done that I think I agree with you. I think. I’m still not 100% there but I’m very close.” I’ll take it!

Elaborating on some of the stuff we talked about with Jacob Siegel in Episode #454, the piece is kind of the third in a foreign policy Reason trilogy: “The Anarchic Interlude: In 1990s Prague, wonderful things happened in the chaotic space between the end of communism and the rise of its replacement” (particularly the section under “The Pink Stink and the Road Not Taken”), and “After the War: In the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's time for Europe to step up and America to step back.” From the new one:

The horrors of October 7 revealed that the seemingly operable status quo of October 6 was in fact untenable. It was, and is, untenable for Israel to live next to neighbors, to the north and southwest, who regularly fire rockets into the country and sporadically dig tunnels to execute acts of terrorism. It's untenable for Gaza's residents to live under the dictatorial whims of a theocratic death cult that takes money from foreign governments not to build prosperity but to harass and murder Israelis. It's untenable for the region's autocrats to loudly pin the blame for their own heavy-handed misgovernance on American and Israeli scapegoats while quietly reaching out for assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Qatar enjoys the status of being a major non-NATO ally with the U.S. while also financing and sheltering the leadership of Hamas. That too is untenable, and the designation should be withdrawn. Residents of the Palestinian West Bank live in a harassed and conflict-ridden uncertainty and emasculation, with second-class property rights and lousy government services. Untenable. Iran flexes its muscle to turn parts of Israel's neighbors into vassal states rather than fully fledged independent entities. None of this is tenable.

Meanwhile, the U.S. floats above the whole region, handing out aid and military contracts like a grand seigneur, hoping on Mondays to build peace, on Tuesdays to launch airstrikes, and on Wednesday try to tamp down the resulting messes from spreading into a regional war. It does deals with some of the most hideous regimes on earth while the captive populations seethe.

It is axiomatic, yet catastrophically underappreciated in Washington: Those with the most power will inevitably behave corruptly, and those without responsibility will inevitably behave irresponsibly. An Israel less tethered may feel less constrained, sure, but it may also find itself more isolated on the world stage, and therefore a tad more cautious. Arab leaders without the American security blanket may find themselves having to speak blunt truths to their populations, including about the true sources of their comparative lack of prosperity and freedom. And a United States less compromised by getting its thumbs in every pie will potentially have more, not less, moral standing in the world.

So cut off Israel. And Egypt, and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well. Let them bear the responsibility of their own actions, and the costs of their own security. It's time to consciously manage America's imperial drawdown, rather than careen between fading Atlanticism and resurgent populism.

* Enough of these confounded words! This is supposed to be a video-heavy newsletter, so here (care of the ever-alert Busty Wimsatt) is a clip of me this week on CNN reacting to the Hunter Biden conviction, and pondering the deep importance of Project 2025:

* Moar Matt TV: On News Nation’s Dan Abrams Live, talking with co-panelist David Carlucci about Squad clown Jamaal Bowman getting his clock cleaned in a primary challenge by the AIPAC/Hillary Clinton-favored George Latimer:

* Speaking of Israel/Hamas blowback, and beefs that just will not die, what’s the German word for I was on the losing side of a notorious, potentially career-altering debate, and yet no one is talking about me, so…. ? Because Jake Klein has seen the one infamous hour of the Dissident Dialogues, and raised it an additional four:

* Did someone mention Moynihan? He’s still doing podcast interviews for The Free Press, this time with former Russian MP Ilya Ponomarev, who “insists that it is imperative to topple Vladimir Putin’s regime altogether,” and is “actively working to do just that.” Solid reaction face on the still shot:

* More eternal flame-wars: Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442) has at long last and length responded to the 30,000 words of critique levied at him earlier this year by Radley Balko (#68) over Coleman’s January contention in The Free Press that Derek Chauvin was made legal scapegoat for the death of George Floyd. (You can follow links to the controversy, and our teeny tiny implication in it, working your way backward from Firehose #84).

* At the end of #458, we had some discussion about the fading star of overrated race-thinker Ibram X. Kendi. It probably will not surprise you to know that Glenn Loury (#121, #188, #366) and conversation partner John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366) took a closer look “Inside the Ibram X. Kendi Collapse”:

* Speaking of Loury, he was the interlocutee on this week’s Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379), where he talked about his new memoir Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, as well as crack, infidelity, immigrants, college protesters … the usual:

* And speaking of Nick, he was on Noam Dworman’s Live from the Table podcast to argue with Kat Rosenfield (#448) about … football players giving graduation speeches or something?

* I also noticed when digging through the YouTubes that the Dissident Dialogues volk have posted Gillespie’s debate (with Freddie Sayers, Mary Harrington, and Sohrab Ahmari) on “whether Liberalism can be saved from the jaws of its mutant totalitarian progeny”:

* I think you people have enough video now. Let’s go to the Listener Comment of the Week, from Rachel:

I did not need to have an existential crisis today about whether I should go blond

Walkoff music would have been R.E.M.’s surprise and surprisingly moving reunited live version of “Losing My Religion” at the Songwriters Hall of Fame awards, but I could not find any complete/embeddable take, so the landmark official video – an homage to the amazing Czech photographer Jan Saudek – of a song I am not ashamed of admitting means more to me than all but a few others, will have to do. But am I leaning into a Gen X Father’s Day by doing a swan dive into the catacombs of R.E.M. content? You damn right I am.