Mailbucket #11: Swatting John Carney, Surviving a Subway Assault

Also: We have the best damn listeners on the Seven Seas!

You people have no idea how many awesome emails we get. I say that because even though we have this here Mailbucket feature to highlight some of the best of the longer-form stuff we receive (previous iterations: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10), the ones we haven’t shared include once and future journalistic deep-dives, potentially AYFKM information about the Bay of Pigs fiasco (!), and of course those never-ending NSFW pics for Moynihan.

The collection below is all at once an entertaining holiday diversion, a testament to the best damn listenership (listenerhood?) in the biz, and, well, a journey. So much so that I decided to hive off the many healthcare-related emails into another ‘bucket I might just drop here before the New Year.

As per ancient custom, I do some light-touch copy editing, snip a few sentences, add the odd hyperlink, and sometimes respond at the bottom in italics. Enjoy!

From: Landis

Subject: I Accidentally Swatted John Carney

Date: Nov. 20, 2024

Gentlemen,

With the mention of Breitbart’s Carney as a potential future guest, I thought this tale required sharing. This is long, but I think it’s worthy.

In 2020 I started using Clubhouse. I was living in small-town Kentucky at the time, and as much as I loved the working-class folks that I would shoot pool and drink with, occasionally I needed some deeper conversational partners. I found a group who listen to this here podcast and we would talk through the night, debating all sorts of issues and generally shooting the shit.

Well another group I would regularly chat with included John Carney and Razib Khan. To refresh your Clubhouse understanding, there’s the stage and the audience. Control over the room rests with whoever’s on stage, and no one can talk, change anything, or come up on stage without someone already up there inviting them.

So, one night I join a room to find maybe a dozen people in the audience and weirdly only one person on stage: John Carney. He’s unmuted, and out of his microphone is coming the most ragged, tortured, death-rattle breathing you’ve ever heard. Obviously something’s weird here. No one in the audience is leaving and John sounds like he’s dying. So I start messaging people in the room trying to figure out what’s going on. Is John in trouble? Did people hear him stop talking and collapse? Is anyone trying to do anything?

Razib Khan gets back to me and is like, Dude I don’t know what’s up, and just joined, but yeah, this is weird and sounds bad. At this point I’m like “Shit, we’re essentially all listening to a public baby monitor of a dude in medical distress.” The breathing is just horrific and getting worse. Nothing else can be heard in the background, and no one in the audience can talk. Someone messages saying they heard a thump before the ragged breathing.

So I decide to jump to action and be the hero. I’m messaging with Razib asking if he knows anyone at Breitbart who can check on him, and he’s trying to figure out how to get someone there but failing. What Razib does know is the state John lives in. So I jump on the landline and manage to get transferred through to the state police, but we don’t know anything but name and state.

Ask yourself at this point how you would try to explain what is going on to a random dispatcher six states over. “Uh so there’s this app called Clubhouse and….” Well, somehow I manage to wade through this convoluted explanation of what’s going on, and that we’re listening to a guy who sounds like he’s dying in real time. Dispatcher finally takes me seriously. He finds a result for a John Carney with an age that sounds right with a history of cardiac problems. Fuck.

Well, the state dispatcher can’t directly dispatch local P.D., so he has to call them then patch me through, which means I then have to explain the whole situation to them again. They send officers out and have to break a window to enter. We hear nothing through his mic. Wrong John Carney. Fuck.

This pattern repeats like four times, me bouncing back and forth between local P.D. and the state dispatcher. The whole time this brutal breathing is playing from John’s mic, and I’m waiting for it to come to a halting stop. Finally we think we’ve found the right John Carney after tracking down a middle initial and narrowing down the age through googling around.

“Okay, local dispatch says officers are arriving, can you hear anything?” Thumps in the background. It’s the right house. Dispatcher and I are pumped. He can hear it, too, through the landline’s speaker phone. He confirms to local, who radios in the confirmation. The pounding on the door gets louder. “Police! Is anyone home?” Ragged breathing continues. No response. After a few minutes of this loud pounding and shouting with no response, they break in. Moment of truth, here’s the rescue! Everyone on Clubhouse is listening with bated breath as the cops come up the stairs and enter the room. More people are joining. There’s maybe 30 listeners now.

“Sir are you okay?”

Breathing stops, John stirs. He starts going, “What the fuck is happening?”

He had fallen asleep on mic. No medical problem, no emergency.

“Do you know a [my Dad’s name from caller ID]?” “No, who the fuck is that?”
“Are you on some sort of app called Playhouse?”

“Oh shit.” Fumbling with phone. Mic cuts and room ends.

I’d accidentally just swatted John Carney.

I texted him about it, and he was very kind and understanding. Didn’t pick up a false report because the dispatcher listened to it all go down with me. Apparently half the people in the room knew and were just listening to him sleep because they thought it was funny, but none saw my messages in time.

Anyway, best to you fellas if you made it through all that. Thanks for the good listening. […] There’s some great Fifdom folks here in D.C. I’ve had drinks with. You all draw a good crowd together.

Cheers fuckers,

(All. Time. Email.)

***

From: Kevin

Subject: Loving But Leaving NYC After Getting Assaulted in the Subway

Date: Dec. 21, 2024

Hi gentleman,

I enjoyed your recent episode with Josh Barro about NYC, particularly the discussion on the [Daniel] Penny case. I lived in NYC for five years until 2022, when I moved away. While I loved living there for all the same reasons you all do, an unfortunate and violent encounter with a “person without shelter” (is that what we are supposed to say now?) made me decide to move away.

In 2022, I was riding a fairly full subway at around 10 p.m. I was sitting at one end with my girlfriend, and a man who looked homeless was sitting all the way in the other end of the train from me. As you all know, this by itself is not unusual in NYC — he was just sitting there, quiet and not doing anything, until, suddenly, he stood up, ran all the way down the train to my end and randomly punched me in the chest. He then started screaming nonstop, saying he had a knife and was going to stab me to death unless I got off the train at the next stop.

Understandably I was petrified, and promptly got off the train with my girlfriend and everyone else at the next stop. I was truly worried he was going to start stabbing me, so I was preparing myself for fighting for my life until those doors finally opened up. I then called the police, who thankfully promptly came to get my police report. They asked if I needed to go to the hospital, and I declined. Thankfully I wasn’t actually hurt — I am a former U.S. Army infantryman and Afghanistan veteran who can take a punch — so I opted to go home and sleep off my nerves instead.

Well, guess what? Turns out, that man who assaulted me lived on a platform in Grand Central Station! I was going to work a month later, and saw him while transferring trains, so I ran to the police nearby to report him. That man (who was just standing 20 feet away) assaulted me, I told them, and I have a report. They pulled up my report, and then told me, well, they couldn’t do anything since my report was classified as “harassment.” HARASSMENT! This man, they said, [only] harassed me, so they couldn’t arrest him. I said that report makes no sense, as he physically attacked me and menaced me. They asked if I went to the hospital, [to] which I said no. Well, they said, it’s only classified as an assault if I went to the hospital or was visibly injured.

I was fuming mad. I emailed all my NYC representatives, including Mayor Adams. Eventually, the police called me and said they upgraded it to “menacing.” Well, I kept seeing the same man in Grand Central for months, and each time I reported him to the police they would refuse to do anything since “there was no proof it was him.”

What Barro mentioned about the need for allowing involuntary institutionalization for these people was right. The law then, it seemed, was designed to only work if A) someone was actually injured in an attack, or B) someone decided to physically assault someone else. This clearly helps no one — it doesn’t help the people who clearly are homeless and need to be helped, and doesn’t help people who actually had to be physically injured to be able to get dangerous people off of the trains. Instead of maintaining the peace, by design the law either put people in jail or forced injury upon innocent bystanders.

It was a very frustrating experience. For months, I would feel a pang of fear whenever those subway doors connecting trains opened and a homeless man walked in. It’s hard to express just how much that experience affected me. I’m no snowflake — you all in fact read a letter I wrote back in 2017 while I was in Afghanistan — but getting randomly assaulted by a man who I would see every other week but could do nothing about really changed my feelings about living in NYC.

So I totally understand the general sentiment in NYC about the Penny case. In NYC, we are accustomed to just trying to avoid confrontation with these people. That is why no one helped me when I was getting assaulted. I am a former infantryman, ostensibly a “tough guy,” but I admit I was afraid to even defend myself from this man. Not because I was afraid that the law would turn against me if I did anything (which, however, it probably would have), but because I really did not know if he was going to start stabbing me in front of my girlfriend as he was claiming he would.

Penny, then, just had a natural reaction to the situation that, unfortunately, we New Yorkers are trained out of, through repeat exposure and lack of enforcement from the city government. At the end of the day, it seems, just getting off the train and hoping the next person he attacks isn’t severely hurt is about as much as I could have done, lest I risk my own life either physically or legally by reacting.

(This is the email I am going to have handy whenever some non-NYC-subway-rider tries to tell me that people are getting too hysterical about riding local mass transit, though I suppose such well AKShually-ing might be muted for a while after the recent burning horror. I am truly sorry and pissed off about your experience, Kevin, and thankful my teenage daughter no longer rides the every day to and from … Grand Central.)

***

From: Charlie H.

Subject: Fifth Column in the South China Sea

Date: Nov. 10, 2024

I’m sitting poolside at the Ritz Carlton Bali enjoying an ice cold Bintang Pilsner!

I am a chaplain (Episcopalian) on the best damn ship in the U.S. Navy, [redacted]. Last year [redacted journalist] from the [redacted publication] rode with us and wrote a piece on his experience with us. Link [redacted, though Charlie, feel free to add in the comments if you so choose!].

I met Mr. [journalist] in the pilot house in the middle of the South China Sea, where we spoke about Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and my favorite podcast, The Fifth Column. It was wild talking about the Fifth Column on a warship in the South China Sea. He said he knew the honorable Michael Moynihan. We subsequently had a successful Taiwan Strait passage. I do disagree with Mr. [journalist’s] assessment of our food on board. It is fantastic.

We have sailors from all across the world on our ship. I am so proud of them as we are truly pursuing a more perfect union. I look around and I think, this is what is right about the U.S.A. Nowhere else can boast a true diverse group of people that comes together to serve a common goal!!! It’s what separates us from our adversaries. This isn’t just some bullshit diversity is our strength, but rather a true coming together in the midst of adversity. When our adversaries see the USS [Redacted] on the horizon, they know we don’t fuck around!

It is this idea of forming a more perfect union that makes me so proud. It is profoundly unsettling when I hear discourse coming from the Continental U.S. disparaging our nation. Our sailors are out here working eternal hours and spending so much time away from their families. In the midst of our stress and adversity, I have to ask, why are we out here? Why are my sailors going through so much hardships, especially with the ghosts of hate and discord swirling in the U.S.?

Then I hit the deck plates and see the sailors laughing and joking. They are setting themselves up for success. They are worth fighting for … their families are worth fighting for.

Our ship’s namesake … is an immigrant from Mexico. He joined the Marines the day he received his green card. The day he left for Afghanistan he wrote his brother, “Be proud of me bro, and be proud to be an American.” He sacrificed his life jumping on a grenade saving his fellow Marines [in] 2004. Be proud to be an American, he said!

Our country produces greatness. Our ship produces greatness. Amidst any angst in our society … I challenge folks to open up your eyes and see this idea of a more perfect union unfolding all around us. There is so much good happening in the U.S.A.

Our ship’s motto is Fortis ad Finem … courageous to the end! We have sailors out here living it day in and day out. To the fifthdom, always stay courageous ‘til the end. Now, back to the pool and ice cold Bintang!

Very respectfully,

(U.S.A.! U.S.A! Mi padre, this swelled me up with pride for ALL the things. We’ll be all right back here; just a little spittle flecked around the mouth now and then. Also, not gonna lie, that Bintang sounds delicious…. When’s the Fif’ USO Tour?)

***

From: Frank Scardino

Subject: Italian-Americans and Their Discontents

Date: Dec. 20, 2024

Gents,

Honored to be awarded Top Comment of the Week last Sunday. Shocking that a white-ethnic joke did the trick. In that vein, if you would indulge me for a lengthier email, I’d like to share a quick story that I think you’d enjoy.

I was interning in 2017 for a federal judge in Boston who will remain nameless (but was a nice guy, super smart, though he had never used a computer before … that’s a different story). One day, at lunch, he said, “Hey Scardino, you’re Italian right? I got a story for you.” He then regaled me with the following:

During the mid-1990s, the judge was on the bench in Boston presiding over one of the last RICO cases against the Boston mafia.

Part of the evidence was a gangland murder that took place in the North End of Boston in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s. My recollection is that some mafia soldier, Sammy the Stromboli or something, had just gotten out of jail; the mafia thought he was a snitch, and put a hit out on him.

Later, in broad daylight in the North End of Boston, in a brazen act of greaseball-on-greaseball crime, some other mafioso walks up to Sammy the Stromboli, pulls out a .357 magnum, and blows the poor guy away.

Unbeknownst to the I-tals, right as this murder was taking place, a nice, clean-cut Mormon kid — white button-down short-sleeve shirt with Book of Mormon in hand — was walking down the street on his mission, trying to spread to good news of Joseph Smith to the fine Catholics of Boston’s North End (as Moynihan could attest, good fucking luck).

The Mormon kid witnessed the murder, and, apparently unfamiliar with the code of omerta or the adage of “snitches get stitches,” ran to the nearest pay-phone and called 911.

The 911 phone call was recorded and played for the court during the RICO trial, and went something like this:

911 Operator: “911, what is your emergency?”

Mormon kid [Crying and shrieking]: “Oh my goodness, I was walking down the street, and one man just pulled out a gun and shot another man. This is so terrible! Oh no, I don’t know what to do.”

911 Operator: “Sir, can you please describe the suspect? Is he black, Hispanic, or white?”

Mormon kid [Channeling his inner Kmele]: “He’s not black, he’s not Hispanic, he’s not white, he’s … he’s ... he’s ITALIAN!”

The judge said that when this was played in the courtroom, all of the Mafioso goombas were just losing their shit in the gallery. Even when someone’s liberty is at stake, who doesn’t like a good white ethnic joke?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year guys.

(I have a German ex-bandmate who, after the 5,000^th Hitler joke thrown in his general direction, I expressed some kind of apologetic shrug or gesture. He said, firmly: “No, ALL jokes about Hitler are hilarious.” Also true, though less genocide-y, about our unibrow friends. Thanks, Scardino!)

***

From: Marc

Subject: You Know I’m Not Cheating on You With Her; She’s Italian!

Date: Dec. 17, 2024

Good day, gents. I’m not drunk; I am overly caffeinated. But, read this anyway.

Regarding Members Only #241 and the discussion of ancestry, I couldn’t agree with Kmele more that ancestry doesn’t define us.

I grew up in a small town in Ohio (less than 1,000 people; one stoplight). I don’t remember people talking about their ancestry. It wasn’t until college — when I overheard my roommate tell his girlfriend “Becky, you know I’m not cheating on you with her; she’s Italian!” — that I gave ancestry any thought.

There were families in my little town that were probably Irish (the Nolans) or German (the Krumwiedes) based on their last names, but it wasn’t a thing — not the way it was for my roommate who grew up in Cleveland.

We’re more defined by where we grew up. For me, it was a small town in Ohio. I’m from the Midwest and will admit to having a lot of Midwest traits.

I’m also adopted. I always knew I was adopted, and I never wanted to meet my birth parents. But a few years ago, the state of Ohio opened access to closed adoption records. I gave it a lot of thought and ultimately decided to request my information.

I received my birth mother’s name in the mail (holding that envelope was weird), and found out that she lived just a few towns away from where I grew up. Same county.

It didn’t take long to track down information about her online. But, I still didn’t want to meet … for a number of reasons, including [that] it seemed disrespectful to the people who raised me. They are my parents and always will be my parents.

But it did lead me to send my DNA (along with a fake name) to 23andMe.

(You don’t HAVE to give these companies your real name. Also, pay with a gift card. What are they going to do; sue me because it said I was C. Montgomery Snrub?)

What I found: No close DNA relatives in the system, along with an ever-changing ancestry. At first, I was “Generally Western European.” A few years later, it was refined to roughly 2/3 English and 1/3 Irish. Now, it says 60% Swiss/German and 40% English/Scottish.

I have enough knowledge of European history to understand how that refinement is plausible, but it just allowed me to file this all where I think it belongs: It doesn’t matter … not in any meaningful way.

I am who I am because of the people who raised me, where I grew up and the people I’ve met along the way.

Thank you so very much for the podcast. It’s a true joy in my life.

One morning, my wife comes downstairs and finds me doubled over in the kitchen and laughing. It took me a few minutes to recover enough to tell her about Cameo, Larry Blackmon, and the red codpiece. She looked at me and said: “Anything that makes you laugh that hard is worth it.”

It is, and you guys are.

Although, I haven’t told her that I’m at the Never Fly Coach level.

(Your secret’s safe with us! Also, DING DING DING!... As for family trees & lore, I have so much respect for people like you going through the conflicts of curiosity, discovery, and genuine protective concern for your real family. My wife has helped several adopted kids find their birth parents, and there are just so many different possible preferences and outcomes….)

***

From: Taylor

Subject: Memories of East Texas, or: Cormac McCarthy Was an Asshole

Date: Dec. 5, 2024

Dear Gentlemen,

Please let me begin by saying that I have been a paying subscriber (and aspirational Never Fly Coach member) since the summer of 2022, when I ruined a Portland dinner party by suggesting to the host that she actually may not have appreciated Beyonce “using her platform” during The Great Unpleasantness of 2020, as her melanin content alone wasn’t an indicator that she would agree with the host’s values. I followed this up with a cutting, though in hindsight ill-advised, inquiry as to whether she appreciated the fact that Ted Nugent and Kid Rock were also “using their platform.” While I was never invited back, I did realize on the drive home, alone and wondering why I had no friends, that you were often the only voices of sanity I heard during my eight-year stint in the People’s Republic of Portland.

I am writing this, having moved back to New Mexico in February, on my fourth Santa Fe Brewing Company 7k IPA, in Albuquerque at 5k elevation. Having grown up in Santa Fe, I would first like to thank Kmele for the many shout-outs to my beloved hometown without ever encouraging anyone to move there and “find themselves.” We hate that. In light of recent revelations, I should mention that most Santa Fe locals have a “Cormack McCarthy is an asshole” story, which is usually deployed at house parties (the bars close at 9 p.m.) to one-up the inevitable “Val Kilmer is an asshole” story that is our birthright. I myself happen to have one of the former and two of the latter — not counting the time my stepfather may or may not have (perhaps justifiably) carjacked Val. As the three of you are hardly desperate for content, I won’t elaborate.

Instead, let me share how your podcast made me eat my words this week. I was listening to a recent episode where Moynihan expressed frustration at the fact that some media, including music, has become virtually unfindable in the digital age. “Ridiculous,” I thought. Out-of-print books? Maybe. But just because Moynihan can’t find a copy of Kampfgeist und Kartoffelsalat: Eine kritische Betrachtung der Wehrmacht-Kantinenpolitik (1939) doesn’t mean the rest of us are struggling to find Marquee Moon on Spotify. After all, we live in a world where you can deep-dive into a 12-hour YouTube playlist of ‘90s Taco Bell commercials if the mood strikes. Surely, there’s no music so obscure it can’t be streamed.

Fast forward to this morning when I woke up with Memories of East Texas by Michelle Shocked looping in my brain. Naturally, I jumped on Spotify to scratch the itch. Nothing. YouTube? Nothing. Obviously, I turned to Google as a last resort, where I found nary an MP3, and instead came across a series of 10-year old articles and videos. Following these breadcrumbs, I was able to piece together the following two pieces of information:

1. At some point in the ‘90s, our girl found Jesus, and

2. At a 2013 performance at Yoshi’s in Oakland (always wanted to go), she unleashed a wild and totally unprovoked homophobic tirade that, as far as I can tell, was genuinely unhinged. She tried — and failed — to backtrack a few days later, then doubled down by taking a “vow of silence,” which seems to have involved wearing a white jumpsuit, harassing nightclub owners, and scrubbing her own entire body of work from the internet. If Kmele’s eyes have glazed completely over at this point, he might try thinking of her as the Kanye West of late ‘80s Americana — or perhaps the Cormack McCarthy, since she also seems to be something of an asshole.

In any case, there I was, eating my own words; Moynihan was right. Some things truly are unfindable in the digital age. But $19.24 and one vinyl copy of Short Sharp Shocked later, I’ll have that song out of my head in 3-5 business days, and a healthy serving of crow to boot. So if you, like most people, haven’t thought about Michelle Shocked in 30 years, feel free to think of her as the fun-loving, rowdy, East Texas girl who managed to prove Moynihan right.

(True fact: I saw Michelle Shocked perform in my hometown of Long Beach, California, in 2000 at an arena-show opening for … Ralph Nader, who I was covering. Also performing was one Patti Smith. Because I’m Gen X ride or die, I was MUCH more nervous in the VIP pen after w/ Shocked than with the Godmother of Punk. But, Patti was a sweetheart to me, as was her guitar boypal, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t manage more than a grunt or two in Michelle’s direction, so I will be fond of Miss Smith until long after Shocked goes Baháʼí, and you will be clinging onto the very last known copy of [the very good!] Short Sharp Shocked.

OK! Next one of these to come very soon. Please note that I am doing my annual crowdsourcey playlist of emblematic/meaningful songs by musicians who died in 2024, in case anyone wants to nominate some in the comments and/or that Twitter thread. Rock on!)