Workin’ for the Weekend #43: Asking a Gentile, Murdering Dogs, N-Bombing Fox

Mother’s Day Second Sunday is 8 p.m. ET!

Happy Day to all you Mothers!

Anyone wishing to top off their celebrations tomorrow with a little group video tomfoolery should A) become a paying subscriber to this podcast, and B) join us at 8 p.m. ET (link to be posted shortly before) for our monthly Second Sunday recording. Cute babies, rad guitars, and questionable butter knives always welcome.

* Let’s start with a timely amuse-bouche (particularly for those of you enjoy, or at least tolerate, jokes about queefing): Fif’ fave comedian Kyle Dunnigan is out with a new episode of Fresh Prez, featuring a solid Tucker Carlson impression, an Elon Musk song that could have been ripped from listener Scott G.’s old email, and a sleeper of a Jim Jordan:

* Speaking of Tucker, we had talked on #404 about his “theyification”; Fif’ pal Jesse Singal on his Substack took that ball and ran with it:

I really like this term, though I’d use it a bit differently — it’s not Tucker being theyified, but rather Tucker doing the theyifying. They’re doing this; they’re doing that; they won’t let you hear about the truth, and certainly won’t let you express it without repercussions. As Welch and Moynihan note, this is common language among conspiracy theorists. 

As a result, it’s easy to make fun of. But it comes from a very human, instinctual place, and we all do it to one extent or another. I think it’s hard to avoid this cognitive tendency unless we’re intentional about it, unless we build strong counter-theyification muscles. […]

A working definition of theyification might go something like: the act of treating one’s political enemies or perceived enemies as a unified bloc driven by unusually nefarious motivations rather than common human ones. 

* I trod some similar ground this week in a Reason piece (quite unpopular among current Libertarian Party management), titled “Tucker Carlson Is Lying to You.”

* Also dishing on Tucker/Fox this week is former guest Chris Stirewalt (#396) on the podcast of Andrew Sullivan (#139, #200).

* Last add Fox: Yes, it’s true, way back in December 2013, baby Kmele just flat-out strafed the Fox Business Network with N-bombs in our special episode about race, while Kennedy and I just kept physically flinching. Thanks to Busty Wimsatt at the Paloma Media YouTube channel for this hi-rez oh-yes-we-did:

* In M.O. 164 we compared the Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely choking death incident (and reaction thereof) to last year’s fatal dog-beating by a vagrant in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Alert listener Trent Simpson reminds us that Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog (#228, #331) Blocked and Reporteded about that last October.

* Beloved listener Gabrielle G. recommends this pre-Penny-arrest legal explainer from Fif’ veteran David French (#191, #325, #365) and Kentucky Public Advocate Damon Preston.

* Was glorious to meet a bunch of Fif’ fans in NYC this week at a listener meetup for the Ask a Jew podcast starring Yael Bar Tur and Chaya Leah Sufrin (can’t you people have normal names?). Chaya Leah, incidentally, is one of 18 Zionist Women You Should Know, so get on that if you haven’t. The gals were nice enough this week to make me the second of the Fifth 3 to gentile-ify Ask a Jew; from their write-up:  

Some of you know that Chaya Leah and I met on a Zoom Happy Hour (remember those?) for listeners of The Fifth Column (A Podcast). I take full credit for sliding into her DMs to find out wtf a girl like her was doing in a place like this. We quickly bonded over our love for the show and its three hosts, Matt Welch, Kmele Foster, and former guest and holocaust backup-savior, Michael Moynihan. The rest, as you know, is Jewish history.

* Comment of the Week comes from Midwest Molly:

In the 1980's, when I first learned CPR, we were taught to say the whole "Annie! Are you OK?" thing I always thought it was weird that it was in an MJ song.

I since learned that when modern CPR was invented ( around 1950-ish?), they commissioned a Swiss medical company- former toy makers- to come up with the dummy. They wanted it to be a female, because they thought getting a man to give mouth to mouth to a male dummy would be a non starter. Probably right.

The Swiss guy in charge of the project had grown up with a picture of a hauntingly beautiful woman hanging on the dining room wall. This picture was of a death mask made in the late 1800's. The woman had drowned in the River Siene in Paris, and her recovered body was laid out for passersby to identify. Many were taken by her face, serene and beautiful in death, but no one knew who she was. A death mask was made of her face, and it became a popular item.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Inconnue_de_la_Seine

I got an email this week from a guy named Ed, with the subject line “Outro Song,” and nothing in the body except this link. And so: