The Fifth Column

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

News
**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:

The Revolution Will Be Staffed by PhDs (w/co-host Peter Meijer) - #564 Jul 02, 2026

Show notes

-The Fifth Column whiskey racket begins

-Matt moves during a heat wave… Peter Meijer reports for duty

-Meijer, class traitor, explains the pied-à-terre tax

-Mayor Mamdani balances the budget, if you ignore the bailout

-Kmele gets Hayek’d

-Machine politics was bad, but graduate student politics is worse.

-Bannon’s old Leninist fantasy, now available in DSA packaging

-Kamala Harris genuflects toward Mamdani-world

-MAGA wants the factories back. The robots have other ideas.

-Ro Khanna’s children: landed gentry

-Midterm Madness, Rocky Mountain High

-Melat Kiros justifies 9/11

-Scott Wiener gets yelled at for insufficient revolutionary fervor

-Stalinism, but make it customer-facing

-The revolution will be staffed by PhD candidates

-Speaking of revolution: happy birthday, America

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 (A Podcast) 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

Adam Carolla Has Nowhere Else to Go (Members Only #332) Jul 01, 2026

Show notes

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

Also: a serious discussion of the cinematic category known as “movies where they clearly came up with the title first.”

-The N-word trap at the Hudson Yards gym

-Joe Jackson dressed for the evil dad part

-Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound defense

-Richard Simmons slaps a cage fighter

-How to respond to an asshole

-Con Air, Face/Off, and insane ’90s movies

-Pr…

One-Hitter: Sarah Isgur Explains the Supreme Court’s Big Finish (Members Only #331) Jun 30, 2026

Show notes

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

We are lucky to be joined once again by Executive Editor of SCOTUSblog, Sarah Isgur, and on a day when the Supreme Court gave everyone a lot to argue about.

-Trump loses, birth tourism maybe does not

-Anchor babies and America’s soccer future

-The 14th Amendment gets weird

-A color-blind Constitution, except when it isn’t

-Immigration is the culture war now

-Executive p…

The Cadres and the Cabal (#563) Jun 26, 2026

Show notes

-Welch enters his Charles Nelson Reilly era

-Laura Branigan, Happy Mondays, and songs you didn’t know were covers

-Puerto Rico’s revenge

-The cadres are closing in

-Reihan Salam and Larry Flynt

-DAC hits the media circuit and refuses to answer the easiest question in politics

-Aber Kawas explains 9/11, in a Miss South Carolina sort of way

-Vaporware word clouds masquerading as policy

-No borders, no prisons, no TSA PreCheck… no joke

-Nationalizing airlines, abolishing comfort, and calling it justice

-Mamdani’s machine, the DSA bench, and the Democratic Party’s growing nervous breakdown

-Polymarket vs. the polls

-The internet is not a socialist invention, no matter how hard socialists try

-Senate Republicans discover Trump skepticism several years too late

-The SAVE Act tantrum and the incredible courage of people who already lost

-Tucker, Trump, Iran, inflation, and the limits of MAGA obedience

-Peter Thiel’s terrifying secret network of people talking at conferences

-Moynihan goes to Dialog and accidentally joins the Illuminati

-Kmele reports back from the alleged cabal

-Bohemian Grove was cooler because at least you had to break in

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 (A Podcast) is a listener/viewer 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

One Hitter: The DSA Takes NYC w/ Michael A. Cohen (Members Only #330) Jun 24, 2026

Show notes

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

Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for MSNOW, a senior fellow at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, and co-director of its Afghanistan Assumptions Project. He also writes the Truth and Consequences newsletter. He is not the former fixer of Donald Trump.

-The correct Michael Cohen stops by

-Mamdani flexes in the primaries and three congress critters cometh

-DAC gets worse the more…

Genocide Juice and the Socialist Machine w/Reihan Salam (Members Only #329) Jun 24, 2026

Show notes

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

-Ethnicity as performance

-Manhattan politics with the president of the Manhattan Institute

-Dan Goldman orders coffee, receives moral instruction

-The many political personalities of Brad Lander

-Taxpayer-funded activism and the Office of Mass Engagement

-Mamdani and the borg beneath the campaign

-AOC, cadres, and disciplined political parties

-Gaza as the om…

The Iran Deal Is Bad and Everyone Is Stupid (#562) Jun 19, 2026

Show notes

-Kmele debuts his Sebastian Bach beach jeans

-The Iran deal is like the JCPOA, but a lot worse

-Lebanon sneaks into a U.S.-Iran deal

-Strait of Hormuz, 60-day promises, and negotiating with hostage-takers

-Why can’t the hawks ever learn?

-Ukraine brings the war home to Russia

-Drones, oil refineries, and the new cost of war

-Europe wakes up… sort of

-Meloni jabs her digits at Trump

-Polymarket checks the damage in Israeli politics

-as well as NY-13 and the rise of the DSA

-Hamilton Heights is Gaza now

-Mamdani’s little machine comes for Dan Goldman

-Gaza replaces BLM as the Democratic purity test

-The long-term problem with Mamdani economics

-Gavin Newsom vs. Trump’s DOJ

-The New York Times makes the Epstein suicide case

-Tucker, Trump, Loomer, and the inevitable reunion

-Baseball is gay in June

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

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

Batya Ungar-Sargon and the Status Revolution (Members Only #328) Jun 17, 2026

Show notes

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

Batya Ungar-Sargon, host of Batya! on NewsNation, returns!!! And with a new book, The Jews and the Left, about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and why so much of the modern left has made Jews the enemy.

-JD Vance, Tucker, and the anti-Israel right

-The Iran deal, Rubio’s silence, and Trump’s trial balloon

-What Batya got wrong about the war

-Could Trump have sold the war better?

The Knicks, Oyster Man, and the Infinite Lies (#561) Jun 12, 2026

Show notes

-The Knicks give New York its greatest night in years and OG makes his MVP case

-Valid destruction or peaceful rioting?

-A brief detour through America’s dumbest college mascots

-Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis give Moynihan a perfect Comedy Cellar night

-Kmele roots for the Spurs, but only to punish Knicks fans

-Spike Lee has been on the court long enough

-Which celebrity row courtsider gets booed?

-Mamdani gets into the affordable soccer jersey business

-The World Cup comes to New Jersey by boat

-Introducing Midterm Madness

-LA’s mayoral race and the Spencer Pratt stolen-election fantasy

-California’s governor’s race and the strange usefulness of market signals

-The race to watch

-Platner’s character problem is not going away

-Jodi Kantor explains when MeToo does and does not count

-Bill Pulte gets pulled, Jay Clayton gets nominated

-A fully fledged disgusting party on a federal level

-UFC 250 comes to the White House because this is who we are now

-Bullshit, postmodern Trumpism, and the infinite lies

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a listener/viewer-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

A Hamster Wheel of Shit w/Ana Navarro (Members Only #327) Jun 10, 2026

Show notes

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

Throughout this entire interview, Ana remains furious that our office was stocked with whiskey, but only half a bottle of white wine and absolutely no pizza.

-The White House press corps just takes it

-Kristen Welker gets the Trump treatment (and would Trump have tried that with Tim Russert?)

-Ana Navarro is here, from one of them Mexican countries

-Charles…

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected