Get-Me-Through-the-Weekend Links: NYC’s Déjà Flu, ‘Extreme’ Kmele, and Melania’s NFT
I was all set to start this post by waxing poetical about how this week in New York City feels so much like the Fif’tastic, COVID-hammer week of March 9-13, 2020, but then I see that our pal Nancy beat me to it. So let’s use her words:
December 17, 2021 is bearing an uncanny resemblance to March 9, 2020. On that night, a whole bunch of us trundled from an event at the Soho Forum to a bar in the East Village. The place was on the small side and about 75 fans of the Fifth Column podcast piled in, having come from all over the country for an in-person event with the guys. COVID, of course, was already on the move, and maybe we all sensed in our skin, this was it, but we drank like idiots and slobbered all over each other and then the next morning, without having preplanned a thing, everybody went into their respective houses and essentially saw no one until May.
* The Déjà Flu, and reactions thereof, have been a major theme around these parts—I wrote about it Tuesday, video-podcasted about it Thursday w/ Nancy and NYC-quitter Karol Markowicz, and it came up a bit on the new #339 w/ ol’ Congresspal & known anti-shitbird Peter Meijer. Paloma Media, which has been doing a spectacular New York Week this week, contributed to the genre especially with a stop-what-you’re-doing-and-go-read-this essay from Armin Rosen.
* More about Meijer: He took previous spins w/ us on Patreon Special Dispatch #51, regulation #307, and I think on at least one other listener Zoom call. I interviewed him for Reason a cupla months back about his commando get-people-out-of-Afghanistan trip.
* What else is going on in Fif’world? Well, over at Persuasion I learned this tidbit about Kmele from old friend & former colleague (and current filmmaker) Ted Balaker:
I’m currently directing a forthcoming feature documentary based on The Coddling of the American Mind, the bestselling book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. In late 2020, our team took a meeting with a major distributor. The executives liked our angle—focusing on the mental health crisis of Generation Z. But one blanched at the controversy it could ignite, noting it would take just one journalist on Twitter to question why this distributor greenlit the project in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. I was shocked. Coddling has nothing to do with the Floyd tragedy. And how could one hypothetical Twitter user enjoy so much influence? […]
I then received word from a producer at a top nonpartisan news organization. He was working on a television special about race in America, which would feature black experts. He hoped for some viewpoint diversity, and I provided a shortlist, complete with bios and links to televised interviews. My list included entrepreneur and podcaster Kmele Foster, Columbia professor John McWhorter, and George Mason University economist Walter Williams. My friend responded quickly—his bosses declared them all too extreme.
* Kmele also came up recently in interesting newsletter essays by Robert Tracinski and some dude/thing called The Inquisition. From the former:
Anti-wokeness has also become a great cover for the illiberal right to use as an excuse to impose their own form of cancel culture, just in the opposite direction.
A while back, Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley, and Thomas Chatterton Williams warned against the danger of broadly worded bans on teaching “divisive” ideas in classrooms.
Now we have a conservative activist group called “Moms for Liberty” suing schools in Tennessee for assigning books on Martin Luther King, Jr.
* Yes, yes, YES, we know about Melania’s NFT, and it has been coming up in the Neverending Group Text. No, no, NO, we have not been organized enough to take up the kind offer of listener Cluis—otherwise known as the creator of the OMG-so-good Paloma Studio Melania—to turn that piece of awesomeness into an NFT. But but BUT Cluis for some reason got his mitts on a big cache of the recent document-dump from the JFK assassination files, and…he wanted me to share them with you. Voila.
OK! We’ll be churning out content over the holidays, because we love you, and also that’s apparently what happens during COVID clampdowns. Silver linings, people!