Episode Details

Moynihan is one-third of the The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch — and he’s a long-time correspondent for Vice. In this episode we mostly cover the cascading news out of Afghanistan, but also bounce around to topics like old media, woke media, neocons and Israel, Big Tech, and third rails. We also reminisce a little about our mutual friend, the late Christopher Hitchens — like that one time Hitch called me a lesbian on air.

You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For three clips of my conversation with Moynihan — on our shared bewilderment over anti-vaxxers, on the need for intellectual humility and occasionally eating crow, and on gay men having a very different culture of consent and flirting — head over to our YouTube page.

Two of the subjects that Moynihan and I covered in the episode — wokeness and anti-vaxxers — are discussed by readers below, spurred by previous pods with Wesley Yang and Michael Lewis. This first reader “really enjoyed your conversation with Wesley and his idea of the ‘successor ideology’”:

I appreciated your and Wesley’s suggestion that a kind of racial anxiety feeds into both “woke” and Trumpist takes on culture, specifically the woke anxiety that America will soon (if not already) no longer be primarily black and white, and so they will be less justified in framing their projects in his mode. Yes, I agree! 

I am a mother of two young children. My family mostly hails from the British Isles (though it was a long time ago!) and my husband was born in Iran. Thus our children are, in the current understanding, “biracial” — or if you prefer, “brown” — or “white”? depending on the season? And yet, what an empty, grasping way to look at them! I shudder to think of the day my children will be informed by someone that they are growing up not with vegetarian, Catholic, urban, Persian, Muslim, musical, and Midwestern values and influences, but with “whiteness” or “brownness” to which they must confess some kind of allegiance. The absurdity of this idea should be obvious.

Not just the absurdity, but the toxic crudeness of it all. Another multi-racial perspective from a reader:

A recent piece at The Atlantic, “The Surprising Innovations of Pandemic-Era Sex,” reads like a parody of 1990s POMO-speak: “Many queer people are reimagining their own boundaries and thinking of this reentry period as a time for sexual self-discovery.” When you boil it down to ordinary English, the piece argues that any person should be free to have sex with whomever they wish and however they like.

Well sure. Almost all readers of The Atlantic would agree. Those who don’t will not be persuaded by sentences like, “This drive stems from the fact that many queer and trans people — especially those of color — live under a kind of sociocultural duress in which our livelihoods and human rights are constantly subject to negotiation and popular debate, to say nothing of our physical safety.”

It’s not surprising that the author, Madison Moore, is “an assistant professor of queer studies” at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Their” personal web page is here. I’m not sure how to name this kind of young ga