A few weeks ago, with Matt Welch bleeding out of his ears and supposedly forbidden from flying, Kmele and Moynihan hopped a plane to a post-apocalyptic hellscape called “San Francisco” to kibizt with their new benevolent overlords at Substack. Unlike the boring prigs at Patreon (whose “Trust and Safety” commissars never even returned our calls), Substack rather generously hosted the Fifth crew for drinks, drinks, some more drinks,
This is really good. Love that you all can exchange jabs and still let each other talk. Lara is a champ. A despicable commie champ, but a champ nonetheless. Would love to see her on again
I have a suggestion for a candidate to replace Matt. OJ Simpson because that would allow Matt to protest using the chant, "Juice will not replace us". Also, I'm calling this conspiracy, The Mediocre Replacement Theory. (Not that Matt is mediocre, just that using a more grandiose qualifier in the title was already spoken for.)
So, years ago, before the Trump era, I worked in a local café. The lease was up and the landlord wanted to kick us out and let the space out to some fancy hipster juice bar. The staff went to the property management company to protest. Anyway, we ended up using a very similar, and in retrospect, deeply regrettable chant.
Looking back, the armbands we wore probably didn’t do as much to help clarify our cause as we’d hoped.
I wish they'd explicitly asked Bazelon whether she thinks the DA's policies have no impact on the police department's clearance rates that she loves to complain about. My intuition is that they have a huge influence, but I don't know for sure.
How can it not be deflating to arrest the same people over and over again? She's smart, she MUST understand that aspect, unless the relationship between the DA's office and SFPD is so acrimonious that each can do no right in the other's eyes and therefore any transgression by the other side is rooted in isms rather than real world issues.
> Boudin had never run for any office before, so it's unfair to expect him to excel. He was just sitting at home one day and this guy showed up and said you're the new DA, and he didn't have any say in it.
> Boudin is a data nerd. He is so smart. Like many bad economists, politicians, people at the CDC, etc, his smartness was the problem and common people couldn't take it.
> There is no relationship between decriminalizing something and getting more of it.
> It was the police, they don't like fighting crime like Boudin does. Also of course it was the police.
I appreciate Lara having the will to argue the points on their merits. A couple big straw man arguments she puts forth kinda irk me. It never bolsters your argument to reference a caricature of the other side’s most extreme proponents as a talking point. There are reasonable people who disagree with her, best to start with a rebuttal to those people. I really don’t care that they filled the Commonwealth Club full of crazy pro-recall people, though I feel bad for her that night. Doesn’t change the merits (or lack thereof) of her arguments re:Chesa’s utter incompetence or the gross, rich-leftist that blocks him from having humility or better sense.
Also, love Moyn, but I think that Marxist jokes could’ve been chilled a bit, for the sake of calling out some of her weaker talking points.
I’m also skewed because I live in SF and this particular topic I’m very passionate about.
When you look at the recall money, and divide it by large and small $ per side, as well in town vs out of town, as well as tech vs not-tech...you’ll see the picture is much more complicated than her description.
Still crazy how much power the accusation of being ‘Republican’ still carries as ammo.
I nearly crashed my car looking at the inside of skull when she brought up Tucker and Fox News re: Chesa Boudin. She kept going back to that well of caricatures that have almost no basis in reality.
As I’m listening to this, I am sitting outside a coffee shop in Marin County, Kmele’s brief stomping ground. Marin is 20 mins north of San Francisco and has experienced much of the overflow of the crime and homelessness of the city. I just had to jump in between a violent homeless man accosting a woman and threatening her with some home-furnished weapon....well not “home.” He spit at me, lovely, and then ran off after kicking another woman’s full grocery over. This is the second encounter I’ve had with this guy. The other was when my daughter’s basketball team was having an end of year ice cream social. We were all sitting outside and he stops about 20 feet away and proceeds to sh@& in front of us. This was a Saturday in a main plaza at 3pm. It’s not that I don’t have empathy for people who find themselves in these scenarios, but one gets the sense that no feasible solution is available or even being pursued.
Every time I hear someone as objectively intelligent and insightful as Lara - or any of our two/three usual hosts - say something like “…the big conversation going on on Twitter recently has been…” I cringe a little. It’s like hearing LeBron James talking about his score on Pop-a-Shot at a street fair. That app is such a cesspool and waste of time and mental energy that could be devoted to much more productive ends.
Kinda funny to me to listen to this episode just after listening to the latest Blocked and Reported episode, which included a discussion of the firing of Sam Thielman (and Hamish's subsequent apology and settlement).
So I'm listening to MM rant about his recent subway experiences, and also his experiences at Trump rallies, and as I'm spinning up an old theory in my head that I've been refining for the last 20 years about the nationalization of politics, and in steps KF to interrupt that internal conversation and distill it down in a couple of sentences. I have a sense that a lot of the chaos that is erupting, especially in blue zones, is a direct result of instituting policies that are popular on progressive Twitter and sound good on paper, but that ignore many fundamental truths about large swaths of humanity that make them impossible to maintain in a civilized society where most of us would like to live. I lived in the Bay Area for 5 years, and visited San Francisco quite often as I had friends who lived in the city proper. My wife and I still have friends who live there, so we visit every couple of years, and anyone making the argument that the whole vibe hasn't changed is deluding themselves.
Which then brings me to MM's point about going to Trump rallies and asking questions of the attendees and not being able to pin anybody down on specific policies, but rather just a generic sense of 'othering' and 'feeling' (including his own 'feeling' of intimidation on the subway in NYC). While I think there are unquestionably issues with crime in these blue zones, how much is an actual problem, and how much is the amplification that we all experience now because everything is now essentially a national issue? In some respects, it reminds me of the 'abduction panics' of the 90's. One of the big stories on the local news almost every night for months and months was the abduction of a young girl, Sarah Anne Wood, the daughter of a local pastor, who was riding her bike and was abducted by a predator. This, and other stories like this, were plastered all over local and national news organizations throughout the country, which led directly to the nationalization of helicopter parenting, despite the fact that child abductions were still exceedingly rare. How much of MM's experience on the subway is genuinely feeling threatened due to the actual conditions on the subway, and how much of it is just that 'feeling' that things are going in the wrong direction and I could be the next victim?
As an aside, how many Bay Area residents remember Gavin Newsom's tenure as mayor, when 'compassion, not cash' was the slogan? People saw that giving cash to people who were mostly addicted to substances and not just down on their luck was not a good idea. My anecdotal experience was that it seemed to be working, at least from the standpoint of keeping human excretions off of the streets. At some point, it was deemed too mean a policy, but my sense the real reason was that the various special interest groups that were getting paid to build affordable housing and provide other services were no longer seeing as much revenue and lobbied for a change in direction.
I don't think the police force deserves less compassion than the other branches of executive government in big liberal cities like St. Paul or San Francisco. Where was the discussion of the impossibility of keeping a functional PD the last two years?
The sexual tension between Moynihan and Lara gave me heart palpitations. I kept having to pause and fan my face.
Never Fly Coach-ers wedding invitations incoming
I thought the EXACT same thing. Perhaps we should start a ‘Go Fund Me’ to subsidize a proper MM/LB first date?
This is really good. Love that you all can exchange jabs and still let each other talk. Lara is a champ. A despicable commie champ, but a champ nonetheless. Would love to see her on again
I have a suggestion for a candidate to replace Matt. OJ Simpson because that would allow Matt to protest using the chant, "Juice will not replace us". Also, I'm calling this conspiracy, The Mediocre Replacement Theory. (Not that Matt is mediocre, just that using a more grandiose qualifier in the title was already spoken for.)
So, years ago, before the Trump era, I worked in a local café. The lease was up and the landlord wanted to kick us out and let the space out to some fancy hipster juice bar. The staff went to the property management company to protest. Anyway, we ended up using a very similar, and in retrospect, deeply regrettable chant.
Looking back, the armbands we wore probably didn’t do as much to help clarify our cause as we’d hoped.
I wish they'd explicitly asked Bazelon whether she thinks the DA's policies have no impact on the police department's clearance rates that she loves to complain about. My intuition is that they have a huge influence, but I don't know for sure.
How can it not be deflating to arrest the same people over and over again? She's smart, she MUST understand that aspect, unless the relationship between the DA's office and SFPD is so acrimonious that each can do no right in the other's eyes and therefore any transgression by the other side is rooted in isms rather than real world issues.
Shorter Lara:
> Boudin had never run for any office before, so it's unfair to expect him to excel. He was just sitting at home one day and this guy showed up and said you're the new DA, and he didn't have any say in it.
> Boudin is a data nerd. He is so smart. Like many bad economists, politicians, people at the CDC, etc, his smartness was the problem and common people couldn't take it.
> There is no relationship between decriminalizing something and getting more of it.
> It was the police, they don't like fighting crime like Boudin does. Also of course it was the police.
I appreciate Lara having the will to argue the points on their merits. A couple big straw man arguments she puts forth kinda irk me. It never bolsters your argument to reference a caricature of the other side’s most extreme proponents as a talking point. There are reasonable people who disagree with her, best to start with a rebuttal to those people. I really don’t care that they filled the Commonwealth Club full of crazy pro-recall people, though I feel bad for her that night. Doesn’t change the merits (or lack thereof) of her arguments re:Chesa’s utter incompetence or the gross, rich-leftist that blocks him from having humility or better sense.
Also, love Moyn, but I think that Marxist jokes could’ve been chilled a bit, for the sake of calling out some of her weaker talking points.
I’m also skewed because I live in SF and this particular topic I’m very passionate about.
When you look at the recall money, and divide it by large and small $ per side, as well in town vs out of town, as well as tech vs not-tech...you’ll see the picture is much more complicated than her description.
Still crazy how much power the accusation of being ‘Republican’ still carries as ammo.
My .02
I nearly crashed my car looking at the inside of skull when she brought up Tucker and Fox News re: Chesa Boudin. She kept going back to that well of caricatures that have almost no basis in reality.
‘Inside of skull’ 😂😂😂😂
Rich-leftist worldview*
As I’m listening to this, I am sitting outside a coffee shop in Marin County, Kmele’s brief stomping ground. Marin is 20 mins north of San Francisco and has experienced much of the overflow of the crime and homelessness of the city. I just had to jump in between a violent homeless man accosting a woman and threatening her with some home-furnished weapon....well not “home.” He spit at me, lovely, and then ran off after kicking another woman’s full grocery over. This is the second encounter I’ve had with this guy. The other was when my daughter’s basketball team was having an end of year ice cream social. We were all sitting outside and he stops about 20 feet away and proceeds to sh@& in front of us. This was a Saturday in a main plaza at 3pm. It’s not that I don’t have empathy for people who find themselves in these scenarios, but one gets the sense that no feasible solution is available or even being pursued.
Every time I hear someone as objectively intelligent and insightful as Lara - or any of our two/three usual hosts - say something like “…the big conversation going on on Twitter recently has been…” I cringe a little. It’s like hearing LeBron James talking about his score on Pop-a-Shot at a street fair. That app is such a cesspool and waste of time and mental energy that could be devoted to much more productive ends.
You rat bastards need to have a merch store so I can walk around wearing a passive aggressive “be brave, call bullshit” hoodie.
Kinda funny to me to listen to this episode just after listening to the latest Blocked and Reported episode, which included a discussion of the firing of Sam Thielman (and Hamish's subsequent apology and settlement).
Jesus. This discussion really does confirm Lara is a fundamentally broken person. She would have personally executed Osip Mandelstam.
Nadezhda’s book should have been called Hope Against Lara.
🇭🇳 🇭🇳🇭🇳 🤍
NorCal local,
Thanx to the guys, for confirming a shelved suspicion I had about Laura at her previous TFC appearance.
Respect, but not a fan.
Hammish and to all at Substak, great job, wonderful platform, keep the innovation going!! Thank you.
So I'm listening to MM rant about his recent subway experiences, and also his experiences at Trump rallies, and as I'm spinning up an old theory in my head that I've been refining for the last 20 years about the nationalization of politics, and in steps KF to interrupt that internal conversation and distill it down in a couple of sentences. I have a sense that a lot of the chaos that is erupting, especially in blue zones, is a direct result of instituting policies that are popular on progressive Twitter and sound good on paper, but that ignore many fundamental truths about large swaths of humanity that make them impossible to maintain in a civilized society where most of us would like to live. I lived in the Bay Area for 5 years, and visited San Francisco quite often as I had friends who lived in the city proper. My wife and I still have friends who live there, so we visit every couple of years, and anyone making the argument that the whole vibe hasn't changed is deluding themselves.
Which then brings me to MM's point about going to Trump rallies and asking questions of the attendees and not being able to pin anybody down on specific policies, but rather just a generic sense of 'othering' and 'feeling' (including his own 'feeling' of intimidation on the subway in NYC). While I think there are unquestionably issues with crime in these blue zones, how much is an actual problem, and how much is the amplification that we all experience now because everything is now essentially a national issue? In some respects, it reminds me of the 'abduction panics' of the 90's. One of the big stories on the local news almost every night for months and months was the abduction of a young girl, Sarah Anne Wood, the daughter of a local pastor, who was riding her bike and was abducted by a predator. This, and other stories like this, were plastered all over local and national news organizations throughout the country, which led directly to the nationalization of helicopter parenting, despite the fact that child abductions were still exceedingly rare. How much of MM's experience on the subway is genuinely feeling threatened due to the actual conditions on the subway, and how much of it is just that 'feeling' that things are going in the wrong direction and I could be the next victim?
As an aside, how many Bay Area residents remember Gavin Newsom's tenure as mayor, when 'compassion, not cash' was the slogan? People saw that giving cash to people who were mostly addicted to substances and not just down on their luck was not a good idea. My anecdotal experience was that it seemed to be working, at least from the standpoint of keeping human excretions off of the streets. At some point, it was deemed too mean a policy, but my sense the real reason was that the various special interest groups that were getting paid to build affordable housing and provide other services were no longer seeing as much revenue and lobbied for a change in direction.
I don't think the police force deserves less compassion than the other branches of executive government in big liberal cities like St. Paul or San Francisco. Where was the discussion of the impossibility of keeping a functional PD the last two years?
Matt can’t be replaced but his replacement is definitely Ben Dreyfuss