Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast 66. Meme Lords and Mean Girls, with Pinch Hitter Matt Welch!
Special guest Matt Welch apologizes “for being a dude, for being taller, and that I’m not from Texas.” All of which is to say he can never replace the lovely Sarah Hepola as co-host. Nevertheless! Matt, editor-at-large at Reason and true-bluest member of the Fifth Column podcast (fight me), joins Nancy to talk about the tantrum Elon Musk threw last week when Substack unrolled a new feature called Notes, which appears to be a lot like Twitter, sans ads and tribal warfare. Musk wants to make Twitter “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner,” but he more than blinked at the advent of competition, making a bunch of bogus claims and planting his edge-lord boot between the platforms. This led to some very staunch allies, including Twitter Files news-breaker Matt Taibbi, to vamoose and declare Musk “a hostile rival.”
Then it’s on to Portland, where Nancy lived from 2004-2019 and a city where Matt has deep family ties. Both now wonder: Why does the news media in the Rose City hedge on certain subjects? And what up with local scribes declining to appear onstage with Nancy to discuss those hot topics?
Will there be a baseball segment? You bet! Topics include: taxpayer-funded ballfields (boo!); the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum; the World Baseball Classic Ohtani-Trout nail-biter (video in episode notes), never-before-seen fan footage of Yankee Roger Maris breaking the home run record in 1961 (ditto), and Matt’s new Substack, “The View Level,” where he expresses opinions on all-things-baseball, including an iconic film that New Yorker writer Roger Angell declared his least favorite, although ballplayers loved it. “I remember coming out of a screening of that awful film and running into my friend and neighbor Mike Wallace,” Angell wrote. “‘Wasn’t that awful?’ I said, and then noticed he was weeping.”
It’s a vote for baseball, which is to say a vote for America’s old-school favorite past time, when you become a free or paid subscriber.