The Fifth Column

Look, you people (OK, like five of you) demanded it, so now yer gonna get it, good and Californian: A cassingle on the late, great Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, and some perhaps under-known ways in which he and they shaped the music industry and culture that we continue to live in today. Along the way we get into garages, punk rock, 12-strings, the be…

Moynihan and Welch talk to Nadav Eyal, senior columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth and one of Israel’s most prominent (and best-sourced) journalists. Typically, we would keep a bonus episode like this one behind the paywall. We were feeling generous today. But never rely on our continued generosity. So subscribe, cheapskate!

* Meetings cancelled, meetings kept

* How the attack on Iran unfolded

* James Bond is a Jew

* Taking out the IRGC leadership and partially neutering Iran’s missile capabilities

* Was Iran actually readying a nuclear weapon?

* Was Trump part of an elaborate ruse?

* Western Europe reacts…

* Does Israel actually drive American foreign policy?

* The Mossad stuff is impressive. But…

* Nadav’s Twitter thread

* The first 48 hours are the easy part

* Netanyahu’s political prospects

* And lots, lots more

Senator Rand Paul joins the lads to lament the big, beautiful bill; the big beautiful Soviet military parade; the Twitter halfwits waging war on him; his party’s descent into populist voodoo economics; whether or not he’s an advocate of “open borders”; and what he makes of Marines on the streets of Los Angeles. After the senator leaves, Foster, Moynihan, and Welch stick around to discuss…all those same issues.

* A grim anniversary

* Elon’s brilliant troll

* The big, ugly bill

* Bannon tells the truth. But is still a liar

* How dare they attack their attacker??

* They have cards

* Asymmetric and immoral

* Changing minds…by human sacrifice

* The blackest propaganda

* The New York Times v. Palantir

* And much, much more

* ABBA’s Vietnam

* Barnen i Nicaragua

* Mike Tyson, Ratso, and Cus the Communist

* Burning down the house / sort of scolded by a firefighter

* The rent is too damn free

* Everyone is contemptuous of everyone

* Is Trump the Bernie Goetz of Harvard?

* Rebutting “higher ed is just fine” revisionism

* From YAF to Students for Liberty to Turning Point…

* Dating apps, height discrimina…

* Racist Macca?

* Some bad names

* In praise of (trans?) Pee Wee

* Does Long Duck Dong denounce his past?

* Was that a Reaganite video game?

* Trade war nonsense: the court says…maybe not

* Moynihan’s $700 dress (including a $250 tariff)

* Kmele on CNN

* The end of Elon

* Just like Reagan and Thatcher but not all

* No suspects, no DNA, no fingerprints, no leads

* MI:7 DEI

* We think we *might* have talked about politics in this episode?

* Happy anniversary Christian Cooper!

* Talking to the dude who made those drug PSAs

* The Glug (1981)

* 2020: The year that broke America

* Burning down the house (almost)

* The tax protestor in our midst

* Johnny Rotten, Johnny Ramone, the Plastic People, and the politics of punl

* Nick of Schumpeterian Gatsby…

* The ritual humiliation white genocide slide show!

* That’s not really true. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?

* Trolling with refugees

* That Mandela picture MM mentioned…

* Uncle Paul

* “Well do you DENOUNCE that language? Huh? Huh? Did you even say thank you??”

* The big, not-so-beautiful bill

* The trillion dollar dome

* Gaza and the “14,000”

* Our Original Sin and Korean Robert

* When did he lose it?

* That Christie clip is actually six years old. But here it is.

* Jack London and hobo Oakland

* The lovely government of Qatar

* Trump in Saudi

* A carnival of corruption

* Chasing heroes…

* The end of the “introventionalists”

* But do they *fear* him?

* The new Chomskyites

* Declining freedom…

* Trump’s fat, rich friend who wants price controls

* The triumph of gesture politics

* Black Leo

You demanded, we complied. Last month in this space, I interviewed science/technology/Covid journalist David Zweig about his great new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions. It was a bracing conversation, filled with damning media/elite criticism, blue-state horrors, and F-bombs galore.

Then a funny thing happened: Dozens of you wonderful paying subscribers said Mr. Welch, tear down this paywall, so we can share this with our normie friends! And so I have.

A good time to mash the subscribe button!

Now it’s your turn, o demanding listeners (and even non-demanding freeloaders) – let’s hook some new normies into your favorite podcast, and maybe persuade some of you fence-sitters about the primo content you’ve been missing out on. As Pope Bob from Chicago has taught us, the more people subscribe, the more special treats for everybody. Amen.

Without further ado, the original text for the episode.

***

On May 11, 2020, as I was navigating personal collapse (“it’s been a really shitty two months,” I said on an interesting-to-listen-to-now Special Dispatch #20), my two daughters were wrestling unhappily with Zoom school, and all three of us lads were in the process of buying Covid cars, I came across a Wired article that landed like a Cher-style open-handed slap across the face: “The Case for Reopening Schools: Lots of other countries have decided that it's time to take this step. Why is the US holding back?”

The piece, by David Zweig, was very contrary to the U.S. news coverage at the time, chock full o’ studies and data points and hyperlinks, and opened like this:

Schools are reopening in countries around the world in response to a substantial body of evidence that children are largely unaffected by Covid-19 and minimally contagious when they get infected. Experts and policymakers abroad also acknowledge that school closures perpetuate a long list of known harms to children.

Yet, oddly, the US is following a divergent path.

Along with other real-world evidence trickling in from around the globe, Zweig’s essay (plus a June 24 follow-up), was part of my four-month journey from close-the-schools alarmist to open-the-schools monster, the latter condition from which I would spend more of my journalistic energy over the ensuing few years than I care to remember.

Zweig, also a New York City parent of two schoolkids at the outbreak of Covid, is determined never to forget. His book An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, is more than mere rage-calorie score-settling, however. At heart, he tells me in this occasionally fiery conversation, it’s about how we make decisions under crisis, and how our country operates under duress.

What he both discovers and explicates, in fascinating detours through Evidence-Based Medicine and the philosophy of science, is that two institutions in particular let us down: Public health elites, and the media. “This is an extraordinarily compelling story about evidence being ignored and dismissed,” he says. “They ignored empirical evidence that was right in front of their fucking face.”

Trust me, you’ll want to get to the last 15 minutes here, where Zweig describes how this process transformed his politics. It was “this revelatory moment,” he says: “Oh my God, I was a complete arrogant asshole.” Few others are spared.

Some links:

* Excerpt in The Atlantic, “The Disaster of School Closures Should Have Been Foreseen”

* Excerpt in The Free Press, “How Covid Lies Destroyed Kids’ Lives”

* Zweig’s Substack, Silent Lunch

* NPR, “What Parents Can Learn From Child Care Centers That Stayed Open During Lockdowns,” June 24, 2020

* The New York Times, “How 132 Epidemiologists Are Deciding When to Send Their Children to School,” June 12, 2020