Seth Tower Hurd; Author of "The Five" newsletter discusses, inflation, media, politics and culture

About this episode

Vance interviews Seth Tower Hurd, a former magazine/TV journalist who now writes the twice-weekly Substack newsletter "The Five" (hard news Tuesdays, pop culture Fridays). Hurd recounts being pushed out of a 13-year magazine career and blacklisted from a coveted Rotten Tomatoes critic slot for being "moderately conservative," and connects that personal story to a broader thesis: legacy media institutions have hollowed out (shrinking budgets, fewer fact-checkers) while losing public trust, driving readers/viewers to pay independent writers and YouTubers directly instead of subscribing to papers. They dissect a specific USA Today "whips" story about Border Patrol agents and Haitian migrants as emblematic of unchecked, un-retracted media errors, and revisit the 2010 JournoList scandal as an underappreciated moment when journalists coordinated to align opinions rather than report independently. A long central thread compares the modern progressive-left "power dynamics" moral fervor (COVID elite exemptions, critical race theory, rising astrology/witchcraft culture) to Jerry Falwell's 1980s Moral Majority -- arguing both substitute tribal solidarity for consistent principle, citing double standards around Bill Clinton/Trump infidelity and mask-exempt officials (Lori Lightfoot's haircut, SF mayor at a concert). Hurd worries that a worldview centered purely on "power" rather than any transcendent ethical framework removes any basis for reconciliation, and draws a parallel between reparations-style ethics (rooted, he argues, in a Judeo-Christian moral tradition) and its absence in older conquest-based civilizations. They close discussing the erosion of shared, depoliticized cultural touchpoints (sports, holidays, music) as social glue, Vance's Ferguson riots and BLM-arc observations, and a survey of Substack, music-culture (Tom McDonald, mental-health-as-marketing pop stars), and Hurd's plan to launch a hyperlocal corruption-focused newsletter.

“I saw white kids in very expensive SUVs with out-of-state plates that gathered into a very big crowd. And those mobs burned down local black businesses that had just rebuilt from the violence a few years ago.”

“There was a scandal called JournoList... all these journalists at the big outlets... were essentially talking about how they should have the same opinions, how they were gonna throw stories towards certain things.”

“The Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights... it doesn't matter if you were born in 1983 or 1997 or 2017 -- you were born into a world with what was supposed to be the same freedom of speech... now the elites, the specials, don't have to live the way everybody else does.”

Key moments

• ~10%: TRUST/INSTITUTIONS setup — Hurd's personal blacklisting story: fired in effect from a 13-year magazine career and blocked from Rotten Tomatoes certification over perceived political views.
• ~18%: TRUST peak — media business-model collapse: readers shifting subscription dollars to independent Substacks/YouTubers because institutional trust has eroded.
• ~24%: Inflation/supply-chain discussion — bottled water rationing at a gas station as visceral evidence of supply-chain breakdown most people don't notice because online retail hides empty shelves.
• ~35%: INSTITUTIONS peak — JournoList scandal recounted as journalists coordinating opinions/story angles behind closed doors, undermining independent-voice credibility.
• ~48%: WINDOWS peak — Bill of Rights framed as a generational constant now undermined by "elites" living by different rules (mask/COVID double standards, haircut and concert exemptions for officials).
• ~65%: Astrology/witchcraft-as-rising-religion tangent, connected to critical race theory writers (Kendi, DiAngelo) and Halsey's "If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power" as symptoms of a broader cultural shift toward power-worship over shared ethical frameworks.
• ~72%: MOB peak — Ferguson/BLM riot eyewitness account: out-of-state, wealthy white agitators burning down rebuilt Black-owned businesses and a police station.
• ~88%: Closing culture-and-identity riff — Demi Lovato/Kevin Spacey identity-timing critique and declining shared pop-culture touchpoints (sports, music) as evidence of social fragmentation.

Notable quotes

“I saw white kids in very expensive SUVs with out-of-state plates... and those mobs burned down local black businesses that had just rebuilt from the violence a few years ago.”

“It's not that nobody's paying for news now -- they're paying for news. It's that there's less trust in the big institutions, so people trust individuals more, kicking in five or ten bucks to independent Substacks and YouTubers instead.”

“The elites, the specials, the famous people now don't have to live the way everybody else does... and that's also how you get the French Revolution.”