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:

#409 - Pride Wars, Dumb Tupac, and POC Jim Jun 02, 2023

Show notes

* Kmele is moving to a place where everything is free

* ChatGPT is a fabulist

* Moynihan’s new Orwell piece

* Wikipedia v. AI chatbots

* The assassination of (our) Kennedy

* Random gossip columnist: Jamie Foxx was murdered by Pfizer

* A better America: when Rick James met Linda Blair

* BTW: Tupac Shakur was very dumb. And very violent.

* Keeping people with dumb politics out of the various halls of fame…

* Pride warz….

* Root causes and Bud Light and Target and….

* Inconsistent baseball atheism

* But you like these old skool book bans

* The debt ceiling deal

* Biden meets a sandbag

* Kamala wages war on…racist home appraisers

* Congrats, you ridiculous failures!

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 #168 - Trans Pickleball, Debating Thoreau, and Eric Clapton v. Huey Newton May 30, 2023

Show notes

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

* Stan Jonathan vs. Pierce Bouchard

* The Lia Thomas of Pickleball

* Owning a house sucks

* “Lia has these books”

* Kmele loves Thoreau

* Matt hates Thoreau

* Feinstein and elder abuse

* “…to function”

* On gas stoves and gesture science

* C.S. knows someone with dumb ideas

* Robert Murdoch controls your brain

* Legislating curricula

* Huey Newton and Eric Clapton

#408 - It's For Nobody (w/ Ethan Strauss) May 25, 2023

Show notes

* Tina, RIP. Bill Lee, RIP.

* Zone of Interest

* DeSantis announces

* Tim Scott announced too, btw

* An increasingly crowded and unimpressive field

* Our old pal Ethan Strauss joins

* Why does Joe keep saying that…thing about Iraq?

* “Trump is sharper than Biden”

* An interregnum on Ike Turner

* Ethan’s piece on Glen Kuiper

* The American employment gulag: exiled forever

* Paying indulgences

* Is it ok to boycott brands for not having the right politics? A debate

* Cruising, the gay Casablanca /Donnie Moore, baseball’s Ike Turner

* Bonus blathering about Basketball

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 #165 - In Memoriam May 22, 2023

Show notes

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

* RIP Martin Amis (and Andy Rourke and Jeremy Clarke)

* “Pussies are bullshit”

* A reading list: Money. London Fields. Zone of Interest. (Note: these all appear to be sold out on Amazon)

* On Orwell and D.J. Taylor’s new biography

* The Citibike “Karen” and her “white tears”

* Online vigilantism

* Salman Rushdie’s return

* Why’s there no challenge to Biden from The Squad?

* The…

#407 - The Cruelty, the Conspiracist, and the Report (w/ Eli Lake) May 18, 2023

Show notes

* “Zero-to-insane in the first three minutes”

* The terrible 2024 election

* The right’s bizarre infatuation with RFK Jr.

* The immigration crisis in NYC

* The cruelty isn’t always the point

* How the average American thinks about illegal immigration

* Eli Lake joins to wish us all a Happy Durham Week

* Takeaways from the Durham Report

* The “heroes of democracy” are, in fact, the villains of democracy

* David Frum’s Atlantic piece

* Eli on Robert Kennedy Sr., the cop

* Diane Feinstein, John Fetterman, Joe Biden

* That insane LA Times piece (that we will talk about more later)

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

#406 - Killing Kaitlin Kollins May 12, 2023

Show notes

* Charging the Islip Strangler

* Moynihan’s weird bias

* A bad WSJ podcast

* The Trump townhall

* Rating Kaitlan Collins

* Journalists who hate journalism

* The not Desantis response

* Tucker’s Twitter take

* Can he succeed?

* Killing [TK], A Series

* Sorry, but that guy you hate is actually really smart

* That amazing Firing Line destruction of Leander Perez

* Our grim election / memories of 1968

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 #164 - Smooth Criminal May 08, 2023

Show notes

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

* Che jumps on the third rail

* Unaliving all the bad words

* Throat clearing Suedehead

* Let’s come to a conclusion before we know anything, ok?

* Another pretendian

* You guys are like Glenn Beck too, you know

* Nonsense talk about Western science from a nonsense person (and that insane Zoom intro mentioned by Moynihan)

* Michael Jackson’s doll isn’t ok

* A supermarket encou…

#405 - "Death Train, White Fight, The Unfunniest Man in America" May 04, 2023

Show notes

* A homicide at Broadway-Lafayette

* Crazy strangers on a train

* The dumb racialization of a tragic death

* The “delightful” and violent Michael Jackson impersonator

* Amazon’s Afrika Bambaataa impersonator goes to Cuba

* On Tucker’s identitarian texts

* Fox News’s leak war

* The Daily Show’s 81% rating collapse

* So many shitty late night talk shows

* You won’t notice the writer’s strike

* Hating the Correspondent’s Dinner is as boring as the Correspondent’s Dinner itself

* Gas stoves and Australian vapes

* Adderall nightmare updates

* Send pics

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 #163 - Danny Aiello, Black Hockey, and Ugly MMA May 02, 2023

Show notes

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

* Moynihan on Maher

* Los Angeles is a weird place

* Kmele in Chicago with Nirvana’s producer

* The mechanics of Hollywood that we don’t understand

* AA and Scientology

* A hockey disaster

* We need more “black” hockey players

* A listener on Father Coughlin and Ayn Rand

* RIP Wes’s mom

* First class talk

* A listener in defense of MMA

* Holy shit this Danny Aiello response video

* Holy …

Members Only #162 - Jon Ronson on Neo-Nazi Debutantes, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and "Platforming" Alex Jones Apr 30, 2023

Show notes

He first came on to talk about a suicide in the porn industry. Then he came back to help us explore the origins of our roiling culture wars. And now Jon Ronson returns for his third one-on-one conversation with Michael Moynihan, this time to discuss The Debutante, his brilliant new podcast about high society neo-Nazis, bad swastika tattoos, Throbbing Gr…

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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