The Fifth Column

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**The Fifth Column**

Your weekly rhetorical assault on the on the news cycle, the people who make it, and occasionally ourselves. Kmele Foster (Freethink), Michael Moynihan (Vice), and Matt Welch (Reason) talk and laugh and drink their way to at least quasi-sanity in a world gone mad, often with the aid of clean and articulate guests. Weekly Members Only subscription edition often comes with listener mail and professional-quality (if inappropriate) singing. Analysis. Commentary. Sedition.

www.wethefifth.com

Latest Episodes:

#530 - They Don't Care About Us Oct 30, 2025

Show notes

* We are now alone / He’s out of our life

* The Republican rebels?

* Announcing a Fifth Column live show in LA! Subscribers get first crack!

* Prediction: a stadium full of lusty boos for Matt Welch

* Cuomo’s nonexistent campaign

* The Truth and Armpits Party

* On Zohran’s vaunted “political instincts”

* If the cops rough you up in Queens, it’s because the Jews told them to do it

* A “brilliant” campaign of easy promises

* The thrill of being in love with a politician again

* In destroying both parties, they become one!

* Karine Jean-Pierre is….not that bright

* Oh great! More dumb race politics

* You better you bet (on basketball)

* A cap on intentional walks

* Let’s blow up a certain cocaine smuggling group of “athletes”

* That guy who slapped Andy K...

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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

Members Only #283 - Putin on the Fritz (w/ Ambassador Michael McFaul) Oct 28, 2025

Show notes

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

Michael McFaul, former US ambassador to Russia, has a new book…

- The disaster of Russia

- Trump’s evolving views on Putin (and Nigel’s…and Georgia’s…)

- When McFaul met Putin…in 1991

- Was the Maidan uprising an American-sponsored coup?

- It’s not about NATO

- From boring technocrat to a nationalist, imperialist ideologue

- What does Putin believe?

- Vlad the flat taxer

- He’s not a Bolshevik

- A crook, sure. But an ideological crook

- Does no one care about 200,000 dead Russians?

- Liberation or surveillance

- Elite fatigue in Putin’s Russia

- The documentary Moynihan mentioned

- Mike McFaul, Soviet bootlegger

#529 - I Don’t Want You to Go to Jail for That, Jeffrey Toobin! Oct 23, 2025

Show notes

•Who subscribes to the New York Post?

•One Battle After Another Redux

•Myrna Opsahl and other deep cuts

•F. Lee Bailey, legal consultant

•Fawn Hall Gate

•Double secret Nazis

•Second Amendment People

•The one on the right is on the left

•Rehabilitation of the American radical

•Omnibombers of the 1970s

•I beg your pardon

•An x-ray into Donald Trump’s soul

•Hunter Biden & presidential power

•From Whitewater to Russiagate

•Jeffrey’s mea culpa

•Trump’s Venezuelan boat strikes vs. Obama’s drone program

•”I’m not black, I’m O.J.”

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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

Members Only #282 – There Will Be Spoilers (One Battle After Another, Cartoon Politics, and Car Chases) Oct 21, 2025

Show notes

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

Rooting against the dancing Irish poor

Does One Battle After Another “whitewash left-wing violence?”

LOTS OF SPOILERS, FYI

In praise of Bullitt-esque car chases…

The Lockjaw cartoon

The genius of Jim Downey

Matt is hemophobic

Right-wing SNL

Could you reverse the politics of OBAA?

Leo’s character is basically an old-school DSA guy

Can there be a subtle conservative film?

The best 9/11 film was a film about a French guy in a leotard

The post-9/11 liberal flirtation with neoconservatism

John Malkovich v. Robert Fisk

The lone pro-Vietnam War movie

Remembering the conservative crackup

The ideological slingshot

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Members Only #281 - When You've Eaten the Poison, You Might as Well Lick the Plate (w/ Jake Adelstein) Oct 17, 2025

Show notes

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

Check out Jake Adelstein’s new book,The Devil Takes Bitcoin

•A Japanese literacy test

•Chvalry is not dead

•They don’t teach you how to drink in J school

•The Ansel Elgortification of Jake Adelstein

•The Yakuza throw a killer Halloween party

•Lions, and Tigers and Joe Gallo

•The Yakuza’s pension plan

•What’s with the penis enlargement ads?

•For relaxing times, make it Suntor…

#528: President Comacho Delivers Peace, w/ Mary Katharine Ham Oct 15, 2025

Show notes

* Misgendering Fox News

* Wait, Michael was at a dinner?

* Kmele tries to pronounce Normally

* “Clearly we don’t fucking prepare”

* “The last time I was with you guys, we were in a much smaller, darker room and I got very drunk”

* Trump brings the hostages back …

* … then emcees a roast

* Somebody tell Bill Kristol!

* A little bit psycho vs. the UN bitching at the Jews

* 9/11 is a joke?

* Little Marco’s big moment

* Kash Patel’s shirt-coin

* Trump = 1998 Democrat?

* Never go full Bulworth

* Debate prep for menstrual insults

* MKH’s trashy tastes

* The White House Octagon

* Texting Comacho

* 2025 Democrats: still woke!

* Kushner props

* D’Angelo, RIP

* Yeah, that was a blowjob

* Being on Melania’s list

* Who succeeds Trump?

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

Members Only #280 - Megyn Kelly Blowback, Principled Sanity, and Nihilistic Dread Oct 11, 2025

Show notes

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

•One Battle After Another

•Kmele’s hot take that will bring ruin to Hollywood

•Separating the art from John Cusack

•The kinship of Susan Sarandon & Mao Zedong

•It’s not the dead kid that is most unsettling part of Stand By Me

•Amity, as you know, means friendship

•No dick at the Old Vic

•The humbling of Russell Brand

•Confidence is a preference for the habitual…

#527 - War is Over (If Hamas Wants It) Oct 09, 2025

Show notes

* Subscribe to our YouTube channel already!

* A shirt full of toothpaste

* Whiskey in a jar

* Your dumb, complaining emails

* A roundtable of cranks and weirdos

* Happy 100 year anniversary Antifa!

* People. People. It ain’t fascism. And it ain’t ISIS.

* Wait, Twitter IS real life!!!!!!

* The long shadow of 2020

* Remembering Seattle’s WASP autonomous zone

* Ted Cruz’s hoop dreams

* Sammy Hagar vs. the government shutdown

* Should we tariff Canadian stunt pilots?

* Death to the paper tigers!

* We’re cautiously optimistic...

* When Bari met 60

* Charm, offensive

* I bet you don’t remember *this* shitty Vice deal

* You CANNOT talk to TNC that way

* Journo shock! Moron social media hyperventilates about unacceptable lesbian!

* Norman Finkelstein does a yiddish racism

* Sorry about these A*** C*** song titles

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Thanks for reading The Fifth Column (A Podcast)! This episode is public so feel free to share it.

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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

UNLOCKED: Russ Roberts, on the Weight of History & the Elasticity of Memory Oct 07, 2025

Show notes

Last month, after years of you people begging us, we finally had on the great Russ Roberts—author, educator, and proprietor of the phantasmagorically influential podcast EconTalk. The extremely wide-ranging conversation, whose pre-Pivot-to-Video video is available to Never Fly Coach subscribers, one of the most could you please unpaywall this so I can share it? episodes in recent memory, and so here we are.

You SAID you wanted to share this. So share this! Pretty please?

* Russ’s drinks by the pool with Hitchens

* How potato chips are made. And what it tells us about economics

* Backwards towards “artisanal”

* How will a NatCon economy perform?

* It ain’t all doom and gloom (surprisingly)

* Do academic economists matter?

* Russ talks to Milton Friedman

* Do long-term economic trends tells us anything??

* On moving to Israel

* On returning to a (relatively) calm America

* Notes from Russ’s father

* A TikTok war

* Was Moneyball wrong? Or do people just not understand Moneyball?

* The Close Encounters mashed potato mountain

* And much, much more

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

#526 - Megyn Kelly is All Out of Generosity Oct 02, 2025

Show notes

It’s fine if you want to listen to this episode on Apple podcasts or Spotify or Substack. We get it! That’s the way you’ve always done it! But you do realize that after 525 episodes (not including the hundreds of subscriber-only episodes), we’ve finally launched the Fifth Column video podcast, right? And you know that you are required by federal law to subscribe to the new Fifth Column YouTube channel? Ok...thanks...and now...Megyn Kelly...

* Botox and Scotch

* When Megyn went “temporarily insane”

* To be frivolous and Oprah-like

* You’re my inspiration, Ben

* From traffic cop to a truncheon-wielding cop

* Escalation is bad. “Yes, but one must fight fire with fire.”

* Principle vs. vengeance

* Does Andy McCarthy have Trump Derangement Syndrome?

* Megyn “speaks fluent MAGA”

* More MAGA than libertarian or NRO…

* We need to talk about Candace

* “Tucker is in a different camp”

* Wait, Moynihan has some opinions about the awfulness of Candace

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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