Mailbucket #1: The Being Brave Files, and the Substack Nazi Scam

Look, you people just write more great long emails than we know what to do with!

Let’s face it: The ratio of handsome, high quality emails we receive here at Fif’ HQ to emails we read out loud on our weekly Members Only episodes is roughly … 20 to 1? More? This is an unsatisfying formula for more than just our loyal correspondents! Especially when it comes thoughtful missives, full of useful and/or funny tidbits, that are just too long to be read out loud.

So let’s sic the Mailbucket on this backlog! I will do some light snipping & copy-editing & styleguide-imposition & link-addition as necessary, and may even add a response or three. Let’s get it ‘tarted!

From: Mike Freedman

Subject: The Great Substack Nazi Scandal, Disingenuous Mischaracterisation Edition (With Added Capsule Bourbon Review)

Date: Jan. 13, 2024

Gentlemen,

With great pleasure (as usual, being a paid subscriber, ahem), I read Matt's Workin' for the Weekend just now. I have had some Rare Breed tonight and am thusly feeling limber, hence the loquacity and foolish assumption you might actually read this.

I just wanted to add to the steaming news pile of “Nazis on Substack” stuff, listed in numbered form for pace and ease of reference:

1. About 10 days ago, for my recently launched podcast (ahem again), I interviewed Elle Griffin, who wrote the open letter that circulated as the initial response to Jonathan M. Katz's Atlantic article, and we discussed her work on that and her views on free speech generally — she is great fun to talk to and definitely not a Nazi sympathizer.

2. The episode drew a response on Substack Notes from Katz, who tagged me in it (see attached screenshot). Katz in my view mischaracterized what Elle said in the interview and claimed she provided “confirmation” she was “puppeteered” by Hamish McKenzie in the genesis and circulation of the open letter.

3. Rather than dispute the facts in the replies like some flame-war-waging loon, I invited him onto the podcast to give his perspective. He subsequently emailed me, and I responded, but as yet no news on whether he'll come on for a chat. I hope he does, as I genuinely would like to get his side and find out more about his motives and endgame in all this.

All that aside, keep up the sterling work of amusing your many listeners of which I am one, providing a sadly too-rare voice of reason, and occasionally dropping a reference that pans out. Case in point: I tracked down the film The Natural History of Destruction thanks to Moynihan's shout-out and subsequent listener-provided link, and then watched a bunch of Sergei Loznitsa's work, including an excellent film called Donbass that you should watch if you haven't already, and then I interviewed him for the podcast — episode forthcoming. You made a mind-baby. Congratulations, he has his father’s eyes.

Whiskey + long day + late night = run-on sentences and self-interest, so forgive my rambling.

Mike

P.S.: I'm on the Rare Breed because I aborted an attempt to drink Gold Bar's Rickhouse Cask Strength 103, which, to quote Johnny Cash from Live at Folsom Prison, tasted like "somethin' that run off Luther's boots." No star. Avoid.

(Matt’s italicized response: Make sure to drop a link to the Loznitza interview in both the comments here and the Chat!)

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From: Mandy

Subject: Adventures in being brave and calling bullshit in front of very famous authors

Date: Jan. 13, 2024

Dear Great Purveyors of Podcast Therapy,

Greetings from beautiful and debaucherous Key West, where I, a stupid and annoying high school English teacher, am attending the annual Key West Literary Seminar almost entirely so I can hang out with Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen. The theme of this year's event is "Florida: The State We're In," which naturally means that in between many genuinely interesting and insightful author talks, there has been some eyeroll-inducing political commentary. The eyeroll inducement hit its peak this afternoon during a panel on "Book Bans: What We're Doing to Fight Florida's Anti-Reader Policies," featuring two prominent authors, a prominent bookseller, a lawyer from PEN America, and some dweeb from Bard College.

The panel went basically as you'd expect — Don't Say Gay, Stop WOKE, censorship, DeSantis bad, Supreme Court bad, Amanda Gorman got banned, we're not saying progressives are the good guys except we're totally saying that, hashtag resist resist resist — and I saw an opportunity to make my favorite podcast hosts proud by being brave, calling bullshit, and bragging about it later in an email. So during the Q&A, I told the esteemed panelists that I did not think their righteous fight against the culture of censorship would ever be won without persuasion, in addition to beating each other over the head with lawsuits and legislation. I asked them to tell the audience the best, most compelling, most sympathetic argument they had ever heard in favor of book restrictions in schools in Florida, and how they would respond to it. They considered the question thoughtfully and each took the time to give a serious answer, showing that they were ready to approach people on the other side with compassion and intellectual empathy.

Haha, no, of course they didn't do that. The PEN lawyer said "parental rights," which isn't an argument but a poorly defined concept, and said that "debunking" it was "very easy." The Bard guy said, "Well, I could see an argument that reading books is difficult and hurts people's brains," demonstrating the flair for condescending dismissiveness we hope to see in all educators. One of the prominent authors ignored the question entirely and used it as an opportunity to promote her new bookstore. The other two panelists didn't even attempt to answer.

On the bright side, there were a few hundred other people in the audience, and a few of them told me it was an interesting question that they needed to think about, and in the end, isn't that what BBCB is all about? It was easy this this time because I didn't really have anything at stake except a few famous people thinking I was an asshole, but maybe having done it once will lower the threshold for doing it again. I don't really have a question, unless you can answer the question, "Why are authors and lawyers and professors so disappointing." I just want to keep spreading the gospel.

Regards,

Mandy

P.S.: Dave Barry used his time to explain why we should vote for him for president, and unsurprisingly, he was very funny and persuasive.  However, when I talked to him in the book signing line, he did not remember that he had done a live show with The Fifth Column back in June of 2021, a lapse that unfortunately makes me question his fitness for the nation's highest office.

(Dave Barry gets a lifetime pass, for everything. Lawyers and professors are disappointing to those with unreasonably high expectations [see also: journalists]. And BY FAR the biggest single category of interesting long emails we receive involve heroic and often hilarious anecdotes about Being Brave and Calling Bullshit. Perhaps in a near-future installment of the Mailbucket, I shall collect a bunch just on that topic.)

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From: Dan

Subject: Ni Hao from Japan

Date: Jan. 12, 2024

Dearest Fifth,

Salutations from Tokyo, where a decade-long influx of nouveau riche tourists from Shanghai and Beijing is close to vindicating Kmele's belief that you can greet people in Chinese here. 

As a new member of the community working my way through past episodes, allow me to take you up on your invitation from #403 to share some observations about the political culture here in Japan.  

_____

Background: American with Israeli family roots coming and going from Japan for the last 25 years, with about 10 years total actually living here. Fluent in Japanese.

Run my own energy industry consultancy.

Drink: Trying to decide between a bottle of this whisky and this citron spirit, both of which I picked up on my last visit to Israel in September. (More on that in a minute.) 

_____

I've formed my understanding of Japanese politics by engaging with specific issues and events as they've arisen, as opposed to through top-down, structured study of the field. Reason being, although Japan is an endlessly fascinating country, post-Cold War Japanese politics — and much from the Cold War period as well — taken as a whole, is insufferably fucking boring. Make-you-want-to-blow-your-head-off boring, but as you know, the only way to accomplish that here is by making your own firearm, or perhaps by putting some kind of weird pipe bomb in your mouth and crossing your fingers. Too much trouble. So back to the bar. Live another day. But I digress. 

Japanese politics is a Rube Goldberg machine wrapped in a smoky backroom inside a black box. The single simple task the machine does is to make sure that nothing ever changes in the power structures in the society. But somehow they've managed to concoct a Rube Goldberg machine that isn't even entertaining to watch.... Except when looking at it through the lens of something specific. So I'll share my most recent lens. 

When the Israeli Ambassador to Japan spoke at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan in the week after October 7, he ripped Tokyo Broadcasting Service a new asshole for hosting Mei Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army — the organization responsible for the 1972 Lod Airport massacre — as a guest commentator in their news coverage of the aftermath of October 7. They presented Mei as "a Lebanon-born journalist with many years of experience reporting on Palestine and the Middle East," without a word about any of the factors that might — just might! — give her a strong bias. 

Aside from a few-right wing news outlets in Japan, the majority of news here has a left-wing bent. This is a country where I walk by my friendly Communist Party neighborhood office on the way home each night. TBS tends to be even a bit more left than average, and they also have a bad habit of poor fact-checking followed by weak non-apologies, a la BBC. A right-wing (but non-lunatic) Japanese scholar of Islamic thought and Arabic language named Akari Iiyama has a delightful habit of trolling TBS with properly researched counter-assaults on her YouTube channel. 

All in all, coverage of the current war between Israel and Hamas here has been instructive in that it has brought into relief specific pathologies in how Japanese media deals with complex world events (especially war, a phenomenon which most Japanese would rather not be reminded was part of their not so distant history), which are interesting to contemplate, and it has also exposed me to a few Japanese public intellectuals — more than I knew existed — who deal competently with global events. 

I'll close with an anecdote from my fall visit to Israel. In early September I elbowed my way onto a Japanese government-sponsored trade mission to Israel (lots of Japanese investment in Israeli tech in the last seven or eight years) to represent a client of mine. I was the only non-Japanese person on the mission — always fun to make Japanese people scratch their heads at the presence of a foreigner where they don't expect to encounter one — and it was surreal shaking hands with President [Isaac] Herzog, as Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry [Yasutoshi] Nishimura introduced me as one of the delegates from Japan. And just when I thought I'd made an exceedingly powerful Japanese contact in Nishimura — he was considered a contender for Prime Minister within the next decade — fuck me if two months later he's not forced to resign from the Cabinet over a boringly small slush fund/kickback scandal. 

So, back to the bar. Tokyo is the greatest city in the world for drinking. Hope you guys will come and let me show you around sometime. 

Best,

Dan

(Swear to God we were literally talking about the Japanese Red Army and the Lod Airport massacre in Nancy Rommelmann’s living room this very morning! Thank you for filling out what for me is a VERY blank mental canvas of this odd country!)

***

From: Larry

Subject: Shakin' my damn head as these masking rules

Date: Jan. 11, 2024

I'm a computer programmer using a language called Python, and I've regularly attended Python conferences for 15 years. The biggest is called "PyCon"; it's held in the U.S. every year and attracts 3,000+ nerds of varying personal hygiene for up to 10 days in May.

The 2020 in-person conference was canceled due to COVID, replaced with a virtual conference; 2021, same deal.

PyCon 2022 was held in person, but there was a mask rule. As you doubtless recall, mask rules were basically over by May 2022 — masks weren't required by the hotels, or the restaurants, or the airlines, or the airports. In fact, the other conferences held simultaneously at the convention center didn't require masks. Nor did the convention center have a masking rule — and its employees didn't wear masks. It was just us. It was weird having to wear masks, walking by the mask-free attendees of the other conferences, and the mask-free employees of the conference center. I asked our conference chair about it, and she said that early on they'd promised that it would be a masks-required event, and they couldn't go back on it.

Imagine my surprise when PyCon 2023 was a masks-required event. We wore the masks but there was a lot of grumbling.

Now imagine my surprise when PyCon 2024 announced: masks are still required! What's new this year is that they no longer claim it's about COVID. They say:

We’re masking to keep our immuno-compromised friends safe at PyCon U.S. and to ensure that those of us who share their homes with immuno-compromised people can also consider joining us without quarantining when they return home.

This is an obvious lie; the masking rule is obviously about COVID. This nonsense about our immuno-compromised friends is virtue-signaling bullshit. It's hard to imagine there's a large contingent of people who are immuno-compromised, or live with someone who is immuno-compromised, and who would be willing to travel to Pittsburgh via no-masks-required flights from no-masks-required airports, and stay in a no-masks-required hotel, and eat at no-masks-required restaurants, and go to a no-masks-required convention center filled with lots of people not wearing masks and using a central HVAC system — who could only attend PyCon if PyCon's attendees were masked while at the convention center.

I'd feel pity for the organizers — so scared of the modern that they still want to force everyone to wear masks, despite how crazy and useless that is! — except that I'm so damn mad about it. And for the first time in years I'll be skipping the conference.

(You are correct, sir: No pity, pure scorn. My gentle suggestion would be to cut and paste your penultimate paragraph here [maybe minus the first two sentences], and send it directly to the conference organizers, in as public way as humanly possible, while explaining how this cost them your business until they snap out of it. Seems to me that a very many cowardly and irritating organizational policies—not just about Covid!—rely on a mixture of inertia and people grumpily going along with it rather than kicking up a fuss. Enough! Maybe you should start a competing PyCan conference….)  

***

From: Clay Bolton

Subject: Moving The Fifth Column from Substack to Supporting Cast

Date: Jan. 8, 2024

Dear Kmele, Michael, and Matt, 

I’m reaching out because I imagine you share my concerns about recent developments regarding Substack's content policies and their decision to host and handle payments for users promoting extreme views, including those associated with hate groups.

Meanwhile, at Supporting Cast, we believe in fostering a safe and inclusive environment where diverse voices can thrive while respecting the boundaries of responsible content moderation; check out our acceptable use policy if you’re curious to learn more.

If you haven’t heard of us, that’s by design — we’re a completely white-labeled, full-featured subscription platform that sits in the background. But I’m sure you know our partners. We power subscriptions for many of the largest podcasters in the world, including NPR, Radiolab, Slate, Wondery, Dan Savage, and Malcolm Gladwell/Pushkin. We’d love to partner with you as well.

You may feel that you’re stuck with Substack, but we can actually migrate users from Substack to Supporting Cast painlessly. Your subscribers wouldn’t need to cancel in one system and rejoin in another — we’d connect with your Stripe account to import your data and your subscribers wouldn’t notice any changes (other than having to follow a new private feed). Plus, once you make the switch, your listeners will be able to use Spotify to listen to your exclusive content!

We’re so confident that you’ll be better off following the migration that we’re willing to contractually guarantee you’ll make more money with Supporting Cast than you’re currently making with Substack.

If you’d like to schedule a meeting to learn more about Supporting Cast, please let us know what days/times work best for you.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Clay

(Well, “imagine” was the appropriate verb, anyway. Protip: When making a pitch to potential new customers, it is advantageous to have any idea at all about their basic ethos, especially as pertains to the casus belli for raiding a competitor. To assist you in that discovery process, here’s part of Reason #2 why we switched to Substack in the first place:

[A]t some point opportunistic unfriendlies may decide to get REALLY MAD ONLINE at one or all of us, and when that day comes, the one place in the world we want our content to be is at Substack. Why? 

This company … is literally built to withstand once and future social-media mobs. As chief operating officer Hamish McKenzie told Matt Welch in a recent Reason interview, “The perpetrators of [deplatforming] pressure come from all aspects of society, all over the political spectrum. I think that’s a sign of the time we live in. We’re quite determined to not let that become a distraction.” 

It’s no accident that so many misfit journalists and commentators who have guested on The Fifth Column at various points have ended up here […]

The Fifth Column cares fundamentally about free speech (as past episodes with Jacob Mchangama, Jonathan Rauch, Greg Lukianoff, and many others will demonstrate); so does Substack.

For what it’s worth, your “acceptable use policy” is, for us, unacceptable, particularly this festival of potential interpretation:

Customer agrees not to use, and not to encourage or allow any other person or entity to use, the Services in prohibited manners, including but not limited to … transmitting through the Services any information that is, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise defamatory; discriminatory based on race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age; or otherwise malicious, abusive, harassing, threatening, or harmful to any person or entity.

Good luck with that money-guarantee!)

***

OK! Hope you’ve enjoyed this inaugural Mailbucket. We’ve got two (2) episodes in the can, so there will be plenty of Fif’ content to keep you occupied this week. Happy Martin Luther King Day!