Kmele Foster Gets Menaced by Black Lives Matter Protesters: Your Latest Fifth Column
Matt Welch blasts Pat Buchanan on the Baltics, Michael Moynihan argues that presidential stupidity matters, and Kmele, bless his heart, tries to engage with BLMers in Lower Manhattan

For the first time in a month, The Fifth Column, which by now should be your very favorite podcast in the world, starring as it does myself, Michael C. Moynihan, and above all Kmele Foster, features all three talkers in the same crammed podcasting studio. Which if nothing else is a reminder that LOGISTICS BE DAMNED, the show will always go on.
Anyway, you might want to scroll to the end first on this one, as Foster, whose views on race and police abuse and Black Lives Matter are nothing if not unique, describes what happens when he makes an even bigger mistake than reading YouTube comments by waltzing outside his swank Lower Manhattan apartment to engage in dialogue with BLM activists. To the surprise of no one not named Kmele Foster, the interaction quickly goes pear-shaped, with the word "coon" being deployed, and some tuff-guy chest-thumping. It's all pretty funny.
Also certain to irritate some Hit & Run regulars is my red-faced critique of Pat Buchanan's column, "Is Trump the Peace Candidate?", in which the midwife of Trumpism suggest this ingenious "trade-off": "Russia ensures the independence of the Baltic republics that she let go. And NATO gets out of Russia's face." (BTW, here is my May-issue column, "Trump Is Not the Peace Candidate.")
Beyond that, there is a spirited argument about the so-called "respectability politics" surrounding opposition to Trump, plus some discussion of Gary Johnson. Oh just listen, damn you!
Head over to the podcast website for info on how to subscribe; you can also listen using iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play.
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I won't listen until the Angels win another WS.
That outta light a fire under you!
More Kmele for the rest of us.
I don't believe you.
BTW Matt, I don't want you to think we don't appreciate you. You're the best podcast sidekick in the business.
Matt is Jaclyn Smith to Kmele's Farrah Fawcett. I'm going to make that comparison until Albert Pujols hits a triple.
Is that a reference to the cryptic Bob Dylan reaction to heckling?
"Judas!"
"I don't believe you."
Never decided to try and figure out what that meant. I also think his music was way better with The Band and can't understand the people who were "offended" by it.
So imprinted is this moment in my nether-regions that it WAS a reference, yet I did not consciously reach to it, yes.
and can't understand the people who were "offended" by it
Some folk music fans are basically musical luddites. My BIL is that type, he looks down on anything "electronic" and says it's not real music. Imagine a cross between a hardcore country music fan and an NPR listener.
I should probably add i've never understood "serious music fans" who weren't also at least dilettante musicians themselves.
i.e. people who get so intensely opinionated, but can't play anything, or don't really know how the sausage-of-music is made.
the whole 'electric/acoustic' debate seems to me kind of silly if you actually 'play'. all instruments are "acoustic". just depends whether you're using a magnet or a microphone to amplify it.
I get it when people say they don't like 'the sound', which is fair. I can't listen to most jazz from the 1980s. I think i once thought it would be really funny to go to a Pat Methany concert and throw a Boss chorus pedal at his head. So maybe on that level, i get what they're saying.
Good jazz from the 1980s
most free-jazz is equally impossible to listen to regardless of the decade.
Sonny Sharrock had a re-emergence in the 1980s and he put out a record which was weird and interesting. You will still be hard-pressed to find anything which isn't all DX7'nd and cheesed to hell tho. It was a dark time, and many teen music nerds were forced to find other sources of 'cool', because jazz was faggy as fuck.
The sad thing is he actually plays. He just romanticizes acoustic to the point of being an annoying snob.
My TiVo is set to STUN baby!
Do Kmele lives matter?
Right after Hollywood Handbook, cookie.
A 97MB download, seriously?
Either the podcast is 3.5 hours runtime or you are publishing at a bitrate completely inappropriate for a chat show.
It's crazy. There are some podcasts that are 100 MB for an hour and others that are 10 MB for that same hour and I can't tell one bit of difference in quality.
Its all the malware they're installing on your machine, would be my guess.
Or the fact that typical human speech has a bandwidth of about 3kHz and needs maybe 8bits of resolution while the full audio range is about 15kHz and at least 16bits of resolution (assuming fresh, un-rocked ears).
My Google Translate doesn't have an English equivalent for whatever it was you just said.
Also, voice typically uses a logarithmic representation (e.g. ?-law) versus the linear representation used for most other audio (LPCM) and a lower sample rate of 8000 samples/sec versus the 44.1k samples/sec of CDs and 48k samples/sec of "DVD quality" movies.
I prefer to download the MP3 and listen "off-line". I've got bandwidth caps during the day but I'm up at 4:30 every morning in the uncapped period, so download all the audio I'm going to listen to for the day then.
I listen to what used to be the international short-wave broadcasters; right now I'm listening to some Radio Bulgaria folk music. Nothing is 100 MB an hour, and the music all sounds OK.
Kmele Foster Gets Menaced by Black Lives Matter Protesters
Spoiler alert much? I'd just gotten to the tease right before the NATO discussion. Now I don't even want to finish!
If you keep listening to get to find out what retro epithet the BLM people called Kmele. It was unexpected, and may have caused me to almost drive over an old dorky hippie. It wasn't that outrageous, of course, but it was surprising!
Did they accuse him of working for Damann?
This was an interesting one once I moved past the Trump debate. Less "who is worse" and more everything else you spoke about, which was interesting.
Thank you.
I do love this podcast. I always hated people who listen to podcasts. I still hate people who listen to podcasts. But this one is totally different, because I listen to it.
i get Paid Over ?80 per hour working from home with 2 kids at house. I never thought I would be able to do it but my best friend earns over ?9185 a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless.
Heres what I've been doing,.......... http://www.CareerPlus90.com
Speaking of malware...
Perhaps not, maybe some of us would like to be paid in Pounds Sterling.
Didn't you and Kmele do a show before this one?
Oh, Francisco....
I miss the Two Minutes of Hate. 😉
Nowadays we'd all be screaming that the Two Minutes of Hate aren't about Robby.
"Oh, Pancho!"
/Cisco Kid
"Cisco Kid, was a friend of mine"
I don't remember them talking, though.
They tried,
They did until Kennedy bitch whooped them and took over.
Getting some interesting factoids from this show... more "conservatives" swinging for Hillary than Johnson.
1. it surprises me, but at the same time not-- if that makes sense.
2. It makes me lust after Johnson even more.
Phrasing! Are we still doing phrasing? Why did we ever stop that?
It's on purpose.
Matt, it's not very libertarian of you to expect appreciation from us just because you showed up after a busy four weeks. None of us care for your personal struggles.
We all have our own orphan staffed factories to keep running, and have you tried to find competent monocle polishing help these days? Simply impossible!
Calling Kmele a coon is obviously a part of BLM's fight to stop racism, but it's probably too subtle for non-supporters to understand.
Racism has nothing to do with how you treat or feel about people of other races, it's about who has power to...something something...profit.
Matt to Kmele: Point blank. Who do you think would be more likely to capriciously launch a nuclear weapon?
That's a tough one. My knee-jerk answer is predictably: Trump.
Disagree. Hillary, hands down favorite to start a nuke war.
Ah, but it was a loaded question: "capriciously".
Hillary might do it maliciously, mendaciously, profitably, or even negligently. But probably not capriciously (ya know, just for kicks).
Hmmm, given that Clinton is bat shit crazy, forgetting where she is and what she is doing, it must be contributing to her difficulty in keeping her lies straight. It also might contribute to capricious acts.
Trump always hires smart people and lets them do their work once in charge ...
Yep, Clinton is the capricious nuke risk AND the malicious plotting nuke risk.
Matt Welch blasts Pat Buchanan
Crikey, please don't use that word 'blasts'. It reeks of partisan hackery. How about 'Matt Welch criticizes or questions or disagrees with'?
Oh, I assumed it was gay slang.
Brother Matt's Pat Buchanan blasting was salacious.
Without finger in front of it, it's largely a useless word.
Actually, he also oversimplifies and mischaraterizes Pat Buchanan's point.
You may not agree with Buchanan, but his point is that so long as you are putting a NATO force right on the Russian border you are going to keep the Russians stirred up. He attributes Russia's recent military adventures (Syria is a little different) to this reaction. Therefore he says we would be better off minding our own business and not "poking the bear" (pun intended).
I can remember clearly when Ukraine and Georgia gave up their old cold war nukes at the behest of our government. I said it was stupid then and it has since been demonstrated. For a small nation in the shadow of a large one, nukes are the great leveler. Ukraine and Georgia would not be having issues with Russian military adventures if they still had those nukes. The Russians are really picky about keeping Moscow intact and not radioactive.
On the other hand, Russia has a long history of issues with the Middle East sending terrorists (sometimes separatists rather than Islamist) from the Middle East. Remember they keep bombing stuff in the Russian Federation. Putin is not happy that we keep fucking about in the middle east keeping things stirred up. It is better for Russia when a mostly secular strong man runs things and keeps the crazies beat down at home and not traveling north to Russian. That is really all you need to know to understand what they are doing in Syria.
Ya' know, Reason could do a lot worse than publishing Foster. It is proven.
Welch, Foster, Bailey...yep...Foster would be on the short list.
Why don't they?
Let's ask the "Editor At Large".
I like Ron and ENB a lot. What happened to that dude that was always reporting on the police state? I can't remember his name right now.
Do you mean the guy who liked to give your balls the ko punch? what was his name?
Radley Balko. Moved to HuffPo.
THAT GUY! Huffpo? WTF? How does his articles go down with those boot licking fucktards?
Couple of possibilities:
1. His beat is police misbehavin', which even progtards can agree is bad, mkay
2. Even the worst media outfit occasionally fucks up and hires someone who's not a complete moron.
I posted at HuffPo for maybe a year, during which time I became completely convinced that being retarded was a prereq not only for posting there, but for writing articles.
He is now at WaPo.
And like them or not, both are larger platforms than H&R.
I think he's at the WaPo now.
There is no closed door to Kmele's prose stylings on our end.
My apologies to John Stossel whom I meant to put on that list.
I had a dream that Matt Welch had died by autoerotic asphyxiation. Reason was denying it up and down for days, until the truth was so obvious that Nick had to break down and write a post on how, yes, Matt Welch choked himself to death while touching his naughty bits.
You've been reading too much Agile after midnight.
Wait... I think you're onto something here. Agile After Midnight... it could be a thing...
Now THERE is a podcast.
"Dream"?
"Dream" as in "semi-conscious state during REM sleep," or "dream" as in "earnest wish"? I'll let you decide.
His own naughty bits, or Nick's?
I've tried listening to this podcast, and it's terrible.
I wish you luck with it though.
That is generous of you, thanks. We have been doing pretty well.
In this episode Matt, admits his Cosmotarian leanings whilst having drinks with Brother Cornell at L'hermitage ...
The "h" is silent to the point of non-existence. And I have never denied the Cosmo....
Hey Matt, I like your voice.
Kind of you, thanks.
Abortofascists kill Zika bill over earmarks for Planned Parenthood. Why are Republicans allowing this dangerous virus to spread?!
Oh... they didn't kill it. Dems killed it because it didn't earmark funds for PP.
Fucked up my tag. Second paragraph is my own.
If bad, corrupt, criminal, disgusting things have happened, this is all you need to know:
Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer
Nuff said.
If the baby wasn't kicked out by Trump they don't care about it.
That, and the microcephalics will preferentially vote for Democrats in 18 years.
hm.
Is anyone here regularly citing Patty B as an underappreciated libertarian? i missed it, if so.
Seems like maybe our constant carping has hit a nerve?
I doubt it. I think the constant carping has left some misimpressions
I don't know anyone who speaks particularly positively of Paleocons. Its possible that different arguments might occasionally overlap with things that are traditional paleocon-ground.... but never actually originating from that sort of thing AFAIK.
I think maybe its a complete mis-read of the negative reaction to left-libertarianist gestures by some writers. Its a common problem that people tend to think "if you disagree with me on X, clearly you must support [insert hated opposition figure] on Y". e.g. If you reject open-borders as a concept, well, clearly you must be a reactionary populist xenophobe, etc.
""if you disagree with me on X, clearly you must support [insert hated opposition figure] on Y""
YUP!!!!!
I voted for Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican Primary. I could speak positively on the late Senator Jesse Helms for hours.The paleocons are dead right on national sovereignty.
Yes they are, and national sovereignty is, in the real world, a necessity for developing a otherwise libertarian society. You can't move a society toward the acceptance of libertarian ideals if you are importing socialist and fascist believers at a faster rate than you can convert people.
This is why I keep making the point that controlling immigration is necessary. We need people who come here to have time to assimilate without swamping the electoral system. It is never about skin color or language, it is about the need to foster and maintain assimilation into our society.
Our goal is to make libertarian values and thought part of the US Culture. 10/20/30 million immigrants a year from places with socialist and/or fascist value systems is incompatible with our goals.
Where has the "Hillary is stable" meme come from? From my viewings of her behaviors, she seems on the verge of scannersesque head exploding of cosmic proportions.
Her sycophants, toadies, lackies, apparatchiks, and operatives?
"She's so beautiful, and so little."
Moynihan says, "Segue"... pronounced as "seg" - which i suppose could be shorthand?
poll = normal or abnormal usage?
Lazy. The word has two syllables. If that's too long, you're just lazy.
totes cray, yo
"Khantroversy"
I am no expert on the protocols with use of nuclear weapons, but the idea that one person will get elected and then "decide to nuke people" and not be over-ruled by his administration/pentagon etc. is....
.... i just think its a little ridiculous. There is no nation on earth that presents any kind of threat which we couldn't turn into very-fine pumice with our conventional military superiority (admittedly with greater or lesser actual costs)...
the idea that Trump is "SO kooky" that we should worry about his unilateral use of nukes is, well, it reminds me of my mom, honestly. worrying about dumb theoretical shit while ignoring far more practical problems right in your face.
*love you mom, just saying.
I agree. It's an extremist example, which is why it's somewhat effective. I don't see how his buffoonery makes him an evil person.
As Kmele said - and maybe you did too on here - that one person having that much power is absolutely terrifying no matter who it is.
A sick, old woman with a legion of sycophantic followers who could be compromised having that power is pretty terrifying as well.
Nursultan Nazarbayev
I've listened to all the 5th column podcasts. Kmele always brings it, Matt is rational except when discussing Trump, and MM provides comic relief and interesting tangents. Among my favorites with Cato and Very Bad Wizards.
(I listen to podcasts during my daily 3 mile walks, so need more recommendations)
I'd recommend that you walk faster.
I voted for Pat Buchanan in my very first primary election -- was afraid his opponent would get us into an endless war in the Middle East -- boy was I wrong about that!!!
Wait ... Wut?
Wound up voting for this guy from Texas that November -- wonder if he has a newsletter???
😉
Does DWB stand for "Dumb White Blonde"?
Hmmm, I don't know how, but apparently DWB stands for "turned out to be right".
I am assuming that you did not understand his post.
Open Question to anyone (including podcast hosts)
Is there any way to link to a specific time in the podcast for reference purposes?
e.g. - in soundcloud, you can append the time more or less the same way it works on youtube video (eg. #t=xxMyyS), where xx = minutes, yy=seconds
i don't see how to do that w/ these.
Turn on "airplane mode" and it works great.
i'd genuinely surprised to hear anyone here arguing that they think NATO (and the US by association) is responsible for ensuring the independence of central/eastern european states.
I seem to remember a lot of stories here @ Reason when the whole Euromaidan thing was popping off suggesting otherwise - and in fact blaming the US (*via the CIA) for Ukraine's problem existing in the first place, and saying that we need to avoid this instinct to intervene - even diplomatically - and crimp-russia's style, etc. Sheldon certainly basically said that Russia's "Sphere of influence" is theirs and we shouldn't support even offering NATO membership to any of the satellite-states.
I don't have hugely strong opinions either way*. but i would have thought the surface-level argument pat buchanan/trump makes about NATO would actually overlap with arguments this magazine has already made in the past. I still haven't heard the "red-faced critique" objection so much. Or i'm dense and i was unable to follow it.
(*actually i'm pretty much in agreement with everything Moynihan said here)
re:
Sheldon chimed in on the NATO thing the other day - which i hadn't read... and he says =
So - you can understand my slight confusion that it seems the 5th Column consensus is, "No" - NATO plays a vital role keeping the crappy russians from re-asserting authority over a range of NATO and non-NATO states in their immediate sphere, etc....
I know there's a stock-answer that "duh, dude, not every writer agrees about everything" - of course. but this seems to be sort of a "diametrically opposed" kind of thing, rather than shades of nuance.
re: these protests in Lower Manhattan that kmele describes... funny - can't seem to find a single mention in NYT
Best i could find
"May-issue column, "Trump Is Not the Peace Candidate.")"
Re-read that. It was weak soup, mostly projection, completely trashed by the commentariat. And Hilldog is far worse.
Until Matt recovers from Trump Derangement Syndrome he is not worth reading. He has fallen so far from The Declaration it's sad.
Yep, lots of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) out there.
Imagine a scenario where libertarians fall in behind a candidate whose most famous act as governor was to ask for, and get passed, the first income tax in the history of his state, and the largest tax increase. Then rave about how sensible he sounds.
Imagine running a Presidential and Vice-Presidential libertarian slate where both are heralded as not being as bad as governors as they appears because they did not capitulate to Democratic legislators ALL the time?
Imagine a Libertarian Presidential Candidate who dances around whether free speech and freedom of association should be protected for religious beliefs?
What party are Johnson and Weld running for again?
LOL, credit to the Judge for my mimic of his writing style!