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:

Members Only #211 - The Ann Landers Edition May 28, 2024

Show notes

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

* The LP snoozer

* Remembering that lady who said that gross thing about kids

* You will never play in the NBA, baby

* Zone of Interest redux, briefly

* The Ann Landers portion begins

* Should I stop being an academic and become a cop who lurks on dating apps?

* The anti-Semitic date

* I can’t be brave and call bullshit. So what do I do?

* Well, it all depends

* How to talk about…

#456 - Hoops, Sneks, and Very Bad Doctors (w/ Aaron Sibarium) May 24, 2024

Show notes

* The most serious race controversy of 2024: that lady basketball player

* “I mean, I've been a huge fan of Blackpink for years and I've never heard a single one of their songs.:

* Snek and the Supreme Court

* Everyone's wife is Ginny Thoma

* The defense rests

* Local news and crappy journalists

* In defense of…Marilyn Mosby?

* Israel and the ICC

* Enter Sibarium: the UCLA Medical School controversy

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

#455 - Debate Me, Joe May 18, 2024

Show notes

* At a party

* At Fenway

* Losers (which is apparently already a show)

* Jake, Dana, Donald, and Joe

* Cui bono?

* How Joe wins

* How Donald wins

* The NY trial continues…

* Mitt Romney would pardon DT

* “Attacked our legal system”

* The new Noem

* Post-Donald, where does the party go?

* How goes it in Ukraine?

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 #210 - Odds, Bobs, Feminist Bank Tellers, and the Records That Changed Us May 14, 2024

Show notes

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

* Italian bootlegs

* Warm Fanta

* Drinking on your European vacation

* The Comfort of Strangers

* Pre-internet travel

* Jake Siegel: a moderate dissent…and Fifth reaction

* Probability and the feminist bank teller

* What happens when people call you bad names in public

* 9 times out of 10, they were rapping

* Awful media critics

* What would CH do?

* Steve Albini

* “And the songs that…

#454 - A Conspiracy So Vast (w/ Jacob Siegel) May 09, 2024

Show notes

So many of you have written us demanding the return of Jacob Siegel that when word got to us that he was back in New York, we hunted him down and demanded that he submit to a *third* appearance on The Fifth. We discovered that Comrade Siegel, a gravelly voiced veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq and senior writer at Tablet, is hard at work on a book, an expansion of his already expansive essay “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” So we sat back in our chairs, asked a few questions, and basically handed the mic to Jake for an extended peroration on the Disinformation Industrial Complex, Trump’s foreign policy, why we should end American aid to Israel, and whether or not his unified theory of censorship counts as a “conspiracy theory.”

We assume this one will provoke lots of listener mail. So agree or disagree, send it over and perhaps we’ll do a special “Responding to Jake” episode over at Substack.

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 #209 - Rotten (and Racist) in Denmark May 06, 2024

Show notes

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

* Shogun erasure

* Revolutionary accents

* A debate on Israel and a subsequent anti-Moynihan calumny

* Alas, anti-Semitism is common in certain parts of the world

* Pointing this out seems pretty obvious

* The WAV file

* My melanated baby

* Teaching kids versus raising kids

* Indoctrinating someone else’s kids into your way of thinking is some serious cult shit

* Torturing …

#453 - No Step on Snek May 03, 2024

Show notes

* Children of the revolution

* No journalists allowed!

* The Italian Gadsden flag

* Oh no, Matt Welch…no, no, no

* In defense of …Al Sharpton?

* Dead soul singers

* The great Baby Huey

* Forgiving student debt is insane

* College is dumb but it makes economic sense…for now

* The New York Times and NPR

* Jihad rehab

* Twitter welcomes another sexless fascist

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 #208 - Bananas Foster Apr 30, 2024

Show notes

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

* The Banana genocide

* Professor, professor…let’s stick to the facts

* A conspiracy documentary full of cranks and losers

* 60 journalism professors find a story they cannot countenance

* Listeners on ADHD and Adderall

* RFK in CA

* Nodding along with Lemon

* How to talk to an Auschwitz survivor

* The trickiness of memory

* Two sets of rules

* Peaceful protesters get a call fr…

#452 - The Strawberry Statement 2024 / The Eternal Adderall Shortage (w/ C.J. Ciaramella) Apr 25, 2024

Show notes

A two-for-one offering from The Fifth: first, the lads discuss the ongoing student stupidities, free speech and protest, Kmele at TED, and how your views are probably pretty normal (ed. note: considering the full-court coverage of the Columbia intifada, it’s sort of surprising that no one is referencing this terrible 1970 film, written by Ad-Roc’s dad). And then, some bonus content with Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella, who joins to discuss the government war on Adderall, his own ADHD diagnosis, and why it took him two months to get his prescription filled.

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 #207 - Columbia Breakdown: Next Stop Baader Meinhof? Apr 22, 2024

Show notes

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

* Swedish breakdown

* Columbia breakdown

* The continued rise of American extremism

* The politics of “genocide”

* The politics of propaganda

* Chicago expectations

* A newborn in the Fifdom

* Our Batya episode