The Fifth Column

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Europe Is Melting, Meritocracy Is Racist, and Everyone Gets Dignity Oct 07, 2026

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Did we mention we’re nominated…did you vote yet? If not, what in the actual fuck is your problem?

-all the bad words are here

-come to Fairfield on November 12th! (https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html)

-Trump in Nebraska….always a good sign for Republicans

-Anal sex, picnics, breakfast in bed, lobster

-Europe is melting! (still)

-who will replace Macron?

-France’s immigration problem

-Sweden discovers gun crime

-America, the assimilation machine

-meritocracy is fucking fantastic

-questions are bad when ethnicities are in front of them

-Vivek, the big guy and the worst swing in baseball

-Midterm Madness where candidate quality counts

-if you had to arrest one person at the New York Times…

-MAGA-curious CBS boss and The Daily Beast

-Theo Von discovers socialism

JOIN US: https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html

The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show. PLEASE HELP US TAKE HOME THE GOLD (or whatever the statue is made of, assuming there is one).

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wethefifth.com/subscribe

One Hitter: Why Oil Prices Could Get Much Worse (w/ Marshall Adkins) Members Only #348 Oct 03, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

Marshall spent 25 years covering oil and gas at Raymond James before retiring this week. He joins the guys to explain what’s actually driving prices higher, why diesel matters more than most people realize, and how war, refinery outages, and shrinking reserves have left the global energy market with very little room for error.

Also, is Marshall the real

The Weave Within the Weave (#577) Oct 02, 2026

Show notes

…and Moynihan discusses Harvard’s artist in residence. Also, we’ve been nominated for something! vote for us in for the Signal Awards!

-Kmele’s Cross-Country Trail of Tears

-Trump Praises the Latinos

-Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble

-Coming Soon: Jason’s Weird Fetishes

-Trump Talks to Time

-The Weave We Go

-No Fatties, No Trannies, No Weirdos

-It’s Worse Because It’s Worse

-Saving Western Civilization, One Taxpayer-Funded Ad at a Time

-Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Awesome Week

-The Indian Question

-Roxane Gay, Harvard Medical School Artist in Residence

-Midterm Madness: New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio and L.A.

-How Not to Hijack an Israeli Plane

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a viewer-listener publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show. PLEASE HELP US TAKE HOME THE GOLD (or whatever the statue is made of, assuming there is one).

ALSO: Vote for The Moynihan Report for:Best video podcast Best guest (William Shatner)Best episode

VOTE VOTE VOTE (for us)

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wethefifth.com/subscribe

Sarah Hepola and the Life You Didn’t Choose (Members Only #347) Sep 29, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

Finally, a break from politics and a discussion about…love. If you like Sarah, check out her podcast with friend of The Fifth Column Nancy Rommelmann Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast

-Sarah is back on the wagon (not really!)

-The married man, the younger man, and the New Orleans homicide detective

-Women’s tears are a recording device

-Kavanaugh, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves

…

The UN, Wokeness, and Other Failed Institutions (Members Only #346) Sep 25, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

-being gay, doing drugs, that’s the Szeps life

-Moynihan’s anti-Australian bigotry

-the Lupita Nyong’o pronunciation challenge

-Why is daddy wearing boobs?

-this actor can play any ethnicity

-Josh’s dad, the George Costanza of Australia

-UN Clip-o-rama

-in defense of the UN, sort of

-can America afford to piss off all its allies?

-Greta Thunberg goes to the Rena…

The Algorithm Is the Editor-in-Chief (w/ David Pakman) Members Only #345 Sep 23, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

-Pakman is a fan of this show. Will he regret saying this?

-Kmele’s cult-adjacent upbringing

-Pakman’s Argentina upbringing

-Macklemore, Robert Kraft and the limits of independent media

-Do people actually control their media diet?

-Nick Fuentes, Fishback and Twitter not being real life

-Pakman puts himself at the tip of the junk food pyramid

-Should The Fifth…

The Loyal Republican w/ Scott Jennings (#576) Sep 22, 2026

Show notes

And is he gonna get that press secretary job or not?

-Jennings the teetotaler

-wtf happened to Moynihan’s hair?

-Jennings’ working-class Kentucky origin story

-back when Kentucky + West Virginia were swing states

-Rush Limbaugh + Paul Harvey University

-what would Rush make of $9K for stay-at-home moms?

-what kind of Republican is Scott Jennings anyway?

-why is Trump so unpopular?

-tariffs, potash + the new Republican orthodoxy

-the Greenland victory (?) lap begins

-Scott’s muscular Republicanism meets the universities

-Van Jones vs. his own side

-Trump vs. CNN and the White House press pool

-Scott Jennings, future press secretary?

-Trump + Mamdani, together again

-Texas gets way too interesting

-Georgia gets weird

-trying to have the one pundit take nobody else has

-do not get in Scott Jennings’ personal space

-does Trump have a corruption problem?

-Trump crypto + the Kentucky coffee can

-whatever happened to Republican “family values”?

-Mitch McConnell is alive

-has Tucker left the MAGA coalition?

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

The Fifth Column is a viewer/listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wethefifth.com/subscribe

Academically Unserious With Authoritarian Bureaucratic Aspirations (w/ Tyler Austin Harper) Members Only #344 Sep 18, 2026

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

Tyler Austin Harper, staff writer for The Atlantic and co-host of the Time To Say Goodbye podcast joins Michael C. Moynihan & Matt Welch to talk about extreme fishing, picking socialsts as your fighters, and his recent pot-stirring essay “Why I quit the tenure track.”

•It’s morning in America, or is it Japan?

•The Night Fisher

•Worse than Al Qaeda•A pro-America leftist

•Why Tyler Austin Harper quit the …

AI Might Kill Us. Here’s Why It Matters: w/ Jim VandeHei (#575) Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

-Simplify, simplify, simplify…

-Do people like Jim as a boss?

-The two things to screen for in prospective employees

-The humility of Mike Allen

-AI and the newsroom

-The way you consume news is about to completely change

-Are we at the Napster stage of AI?

-The demand for local news didn’t die

-DEI without the corporate activism

-Axios refuses to take a stand

-Moynihan’s Vice postmortem

-Jim used to be a hothead. Mostly.

-AI might kill us. Why it matters

-Kmele vs. the AI doomers

-Hugging Face and the runaway AI problem

-Stuxnet was the dumb version

-Midterm Madness goes off-script

-Who should actually be Person of the Year?

-Too much Trump porn at the New York Times?

-Jim simplifies Trump’s three biggest precedent breaks

-Why Trump does it anyway

Read Simplify: Do 50 Percent More with 50 Percent Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz

(Bookshop | Amazon)

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wethefifth.com/subscribe

The Things We Thought After 9/11 (#574) Sep 11, 2026

Show notes

-RIP Andrew Wimsatt, a true friend of the show and beloved member of the Fifth Column community

-And in lighter news, it’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11

-Trump’s 9/11 story

-Why we’re called The Fifth Column

-When Matt Welch welcomed us to war

-Moynihan moved to New York on September 10, 2001

-How much of your memory of the day is actually real?

-Mary Beard and other “the US had it coming” takes

-Little Eichmanns and the root-causes Olympics

-Did we win the War on Terror?

-You get $5,000! And you get $5,000!

-Midterm Madness and the two Dan Sullivans

-Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP speedrun to zero

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.wethefifth.com/subscribe

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