Firehose #98: The Dog Ate Our Internet

Also: The Internet informed me that I did a drive-by of Acid Central

Technology, amirite? The dreaded T-word hobbled our efforts in Episode #460, has imposed an unfortunate editing backlog on our Second Sunday/Members Only content, and even conspired against me being able to email the above photo to myself for the purposes of this newsletter. And yet! Said photo, a drive-by taken in the sleepy Hudson Valley hamlet of Millbrook, elicited the following comment on my Instagram: “That’s where Dr. Leary lived for a chunk of the 60s, and where G. Gordon Liddy went to arrest him.”

Color me intrigued! So I used technology to do a quickie search, and shore ‘nuff:

Leary and the group he gathered around him lived at the estate and performed research into psychedelics there. The Castalia Foundation also hosted weekend retreats on the estate where people paid to undergo the psychedelic experience without drugs, through meditation, yoga, and group therapy sessions. Leary, Alpert, and Ralph Metzner wrote the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience at the mansion. People who lived at the estate included Richard Alpert, Arthur Kleps, and Maynard Ferguson, while the numerous visitors and guests included R. D. Laing, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Mingus, Helen Merrill, and Ivy League academics. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters visited in their bus Furthur but were unable to meet with Leary. Nina Graboi described Millbrook as "a cross between a country club, a madhouse, a research institute, a monastery, and a Fellini movie set. When you entered you were greeted by a sign that asked you to 'kindly check your esteemed ego at the door.'"

During Leary's residence at the mansion (1963–1968) the culture and ambiance there evolved from scholarly research into psychedelics to a more party-oriented atmosphere, exacerbated by an increasing stream of visitors, some youthful and of the hippie persuasion. The mansion was the target of drug raids. Leary and his group were evicted in 1968, and Leary moved to California.

Benefactress Peggy Mellon Hitchcock, in fact, died just last month. Seeing as how the Hitchcock Gatehouse Estate is just about a 14-mile drive from Fifdom Upstate HQ, I predict some … colorful tourism. So thanks, technology!

* Onward with video, audio, and LOTS of text: On the aforementioned #460 we talked about the All In episode in which hosts Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg question Donald Trump. Here ‘tis:

* Last week in the comments Cluis was kind enough to say that this here weekend thingie is “pound for pound the content champ of substack with only TGIF as a close second,” to which I responded, accurately, that “TGIF crushes me like a grape.” (Name that liner notes reference!) Let’s let Nellie Bowles, who popped into #187 once upon a time, use her grown-up words to demonstrate how right I am:

Don’t believe your eyes: The big move from the Biden presidential campaign over the last two weeks has been to say that what you see with your own eyes is not what is happening, not at all, not even close. Biden is young and strapping (I literally just saw him jump off a galloping horse, spin, and land on his feet with a gun drawn). The target this week: Biden froze onstage for a moment as a crowd applauded, and it was a little weird, but it was made much weirder by Barack Obama taking Biden by the hand, giving it a little squeeze, and gently walking him offstage.

You shouldn’t believe me; simply watch the video for yourself. Disinformation police, gather! Fact checkers, unite! Here’s the Associated Press with a “fact check.” It’s not a freeze, it’s a pause!

And as the AP notes, it’s also not even a thing: “A source who helped organize, and attended, the fundraiser told the AP that there was nothing noteworthy about this moment.” The trouble is, it takes two to decide whether something is noteworthy. When I hit another car in the parking garage, is that noteworthy? I don’t think so. Why are you so obsessed with whether your bumper lives on the sidewalk now? “This did not happen,” said Eric Schultz, senior adviser to Obama, responding to the video showing that it really did happen. CBS News called one embarrassing clip “a digitally altered video,” yet it was the exact version shared by the White House. 

Others have come up with a new word for videos that are technically completely real but also annoying to the candidate who simply must win, and that term is cheap fakes. Like deep fake, but real, but we hate them.

Now listen, you can say, “Yeah, Biden is old, but the other guy is absolutely nuts and surrounds himself with maniacs, so who cares?” That’s a really good argument. That’s compelling. But that would involve persuasion and an admission that the dear leader is human. It’s much better to say: those videos are lies, because we just saw Biden water skiing while holding a goddamn dolphin over his head. Okay? Those are the real facts, please get back to work. 

* Speaking of The Free Press, Moynihan was in the Honestly hosting chair twice this week, first interviewing the great cognitive psychologist and public intellectual (YES I SAID IT) Steven Pinker about “Why Smart People Believe Stupid Things,” a conversation that covered “the psychology of conspiracy theories, free speech and academic freedom, why democracy and enlightenment values are contrary to human nature, the moral panic around AI, and much more.” Then ‘ol Reaction Face hosted a debate between druggie downer Kevin Sabet and Masshole cannabisoligist Dr. Peter Grinspoon over whether legalizing weed was a “mistake.”

* Oh, screw it, one more FP link. I think it was in #459 when I predicted that you’ll be hearing fantastical ooga-booga stuff in the media about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation white paper, from 2022, for a post-Biden Republican presidency. Let’s look at the first page of Google News results on “Project 2025,” shall we? “How Fox News is helping Trump and Project 2025’s dystopian mission” (MSNBC), “Project 2025: The US far-right plan to undermine democracy and rights globally” (openDemocracy), “People Are Reacting To ‘Project 2025’ — Far Right Conservatives' Plan For The Future, And They're Not Holding Back” (Buzzfeed), and so forth.

Well, leave it to Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, Special Dispatch #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184) to ask a question you might otherwise think would be relevant to even jaundiced journalistic explorations of Heritage’s cunning plan: What’s the connective tissue to the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee?

For the last six months, Trump’s campaign has gone out of its way to distance itself from Project 2025. A December 8 memo from the Trump campaign’s two senior advisers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said, “People publicly discussing potential administration jobs for themselves or their friends are, in fact, hurting President Trump. . . and themselves. These are an unwelcomed distraction.” 

Ellen Keenan, a spokeswoman for Project 2025, told The Free Press, “Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign, and it is ultimately up to the president to decide which policies to implement.” 

Sources close to the Trump campaign tell The Free Press that they remain annoyed at the Heritage project. “The message we are sending to Heritage and others is the same as it was in December,” one source said. “You’re not helping.”

* Moar video! Here’s Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394) going on Noam Dworman’s Live From the Table podcast this week to, among other things, reportedly endorse a non-existent John Fetterman/Ritchie Torres ticket:

* Does the state of politics in the year 2024 make you yearn for a bracing acid bath? Then good Lord, Kevin D. Williamson (#44) writing in The Dispatch about Aaron Dimmock, the former naval aviator and self-described Trump supporter unsuccessfully challenging Rep. Matt Gaetz (R – Fla.) in the GOP primary, is the spleneticism you’ve been waiting for. Here’s how Williamson sticks the landing:

And so here endeth the candidate profile. Good luck, Aaron Dimmock, “radical candor coach”—coach!—and gormless Trump sycophant. You’re going to lose—for nothing. I may not have a gigantic readership, but this probably will be the most-read thing ever written about you, and it would have been better if you could have worked up the manhood to say what you and I both know to be obviously—and I mean illuminated-by-Klieg-lights obviously—true. It isn’t easy ending up the weasel in a story in which Matt Gaetz figures prominently.

Over at the Washington Post—where a few reporters are trying to sandbag the new publisher for having the audacity to point out that their work sucks and has sucked pretty hard since 50 years ago when Americans started confusing Bob Woodward with Bob Redford—they’ll tell you: “Democracy dies in darkness.” But that isn’t it, at all. There isn’t any darkness. There are no shadows in which to hide our deeds. There aren’t any secrets. There are just the animal facts, naked and undisguised, right out there in public view for all to see. Even political journalists can see it, in their few sober moments, though they may be constrained at most times by professional norms to pretend that they don’t.

* On June 15, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a much-discussed piece titled, “What Have We Liberals Done to the West Coast?”, surveying the statistical wreckage of California, Oregon, and Washington as compared to the Democratic-run states along the Atlantic Ocean. (“Drug overdoses appear to have risen last year in every Democratic state on the West Coast, while they dropped last year in each Democratic state in the Northeast. The homicide rate in Portland last year was more than double that of New York City,” etc.) In the piece, Kristof highlighted one particularly gruesome Portland case of an allegedly well-intentioned bail fund gone horribly wrong:

Consider a volunteer group called the Portland Freedom Fund that was set up to pay bail for people of color. The organization raised money from well-intentioned liberal donors, and the underlying problems were real: Bail requirements hit poor people hard.

In 2022, the Portland Freedom Fund helped a Black man named Mohamed Adan who had been arrested after allegedly strangling his former girlfriend, holding a gun to her head and then — in violation of a restraining order — cutting off his G.P.S. monitor and entering her building. “He told me that he would kill me,” the former girlfriend, Rachael Abraham, warned.

The Freedom Fund paid Adan’s bail, and he walked out of jail. A week later, Adan allegedly removed his G.P.S. monitor again and entered Abraham’s home. The police found Abraham’s body drenched in blood with a large knife nearby; three children were also in the house.

That last hyperlink went to work from Fifth Column superfriend Nancy Rommelmann (#79, S.D. #27, S.D. #30, #198, #203, S.D. #34, S.D. #50, S.D. #64, S.D. #111), who in December 2022 wrote the definitive piece on Abraham for Washington Examiner Magazine, “A Murder in Portland: How bail reform has enabled crime and chaos,” as well as a Substack companion essay, “The Reality Portland Does Not Want to See.” Kristof’s belated notice prompted this tweet from Jesse Singal (#111 & #171):  

This continues a very long pattern of the largest mainstream outlets catching up to thoughtful "heterodox" writers less beholden to kid-gloves takes on certain issues. In this case @NancyRomm beat the Times by a year and a half, but obviously wouldn't have been able to write this piece for the Times rather than the Examiner in late 2022

Points off for the H-word, but otherwise: Interesting! Related Rommelthoughts on June 17 and 21; from criminal-defense lawyer guy Scott Greenfield June 22.

* Another beloved Fifdom bathrobe-wearer, Mr. Ben Dreyfuss (#83, #97, #148, #214, M.O. #129, M.O. #140, #392, M.O. #180), has a banger of an essay this week titled “Meet The Dapper Young Morons Who Should Stop Calling Themselves Reporters.” Riffing from a Blocked and Reported episode with Delaware Dave Weigel (#73), Ben-Drey recalls the retroactive post-election journalo freakout over a pre-2016-election Mother Jones profile of Richard Spencer that ran under the initial headline of “Meet the dapper white nationalist who wins even if Trump loses.”

I hadn’t written the original headline because I was actually in a mental institution for October 2016 (lol), but I was back in the saddle for the outrage. There was a lot of anger. Social media anger, yes, but it got worse than that, and people were complaining through other channels.

I was very against changing the headline. I do not believe in letting the outraged mobs win. It’s a moral hazard. But I was overruled

Then, per Ben, reporter Josh Harkinson found himself on the receiving end of an internal struggle session:

At the time, I thought maybe it was just that everyone was being weird in those early months of Trump’s presidency. There was a lot of hair-on-fire stuff happening in liberal America and liberal newsrooms.

But I learned over the next few years that, actually, those people in that room represented an increasingly prominent view of journalism that was so activist-y and ideological that it was weird even at Mother Jones. It never abated. It got worse and worse and worse over Trump’s whole presidency, and by 2020, the lunatics were running the asylum.

And that happened everywhere. […]

The complainers who wanted Josh to apologize or us to change the headline, or any headline, or every headline are shortsighted destroyers of a journalistic tradition that, while not perfect, is better than the alternative.

* More backroom media intrigue. Though it almost certainly helps to give a rat’s patootie about the National Basketball Association, Ethan Strauss (#185, #333, #383, M.O. #151, #408) has pulled off what I find to be a fascinating trilogy behind the media machinations and journalistic rivalries generating all kinds of bewildering fog around the Los Angeles Lakers hiring former shooting guard and current pod/broadcaster J.J. Redick to be their new coach instead of college ball overlord Dan Hurley. Speculative media literacy at its finest! Parts 1, 2, and now 3.

* Events? Tickets to our recently added second live show in Chicago, on Friday Aug. 16, are inexplicably still available. I guess some of you enjoy FOMO….

* Comment of the Week comes from Stacey Seeks:

I’m so wishing that Kmele had done the whole show in falsetto.

Walkoff music is … well, the problem started last week, and I’m afraid it’s not going away any time soon. Realized whilst listening to R.E.M.’s most successful record in the context of family loss that, well, I have historically underrated Automatic for the People, including on the superly-duperly early episode of the Political Beats podcast with Jeff Blehar and Scot Bertram. In my very limited defense, the two songs on that album I find mildly grating are among the first three tracks, which tends to discolor things. But also, certain themes and vibes just hit different at age 55 than 24. I could certainly write a 3,000-word essay about this subject, but instead, enjoy this video that was so obscure, Mike Mills hadn’t even seen it almost a decade into its existence.