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:

326 w/ Eli Lake "Afghan Withdrawal, Pandemic Surrender, Daddy Issues" Aug 25, 2021

Show notes

W/ Eli Lake, Opinion Columnist @ Bloomberg

- New Dad

- Moynihan's Big Night Out

- Things to Remember (or Naw)

- Meet Gutter (He Kidnaps Kids)

- Whose on Top

- The Most Inevitable Thing in the World

- Hard Limits

- Public Sentiments

- Vietnam Syndrome

- Hip Hop Conservatives

- Afghan Clean Up

- The Afghanistan Variant

Recorded: 8/23/21

Published: 8/25/21

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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

325 w/ David French "Systemic Racism, Earnest Disagreement, About Those CRT Bans" Aug 10, 2021

Show notes

W/ David French

- Various Notes on the Amy Cooper Interview

- The Enablers

- Earnest Disagreement

- The Two Illiberal Wings of Twitter

- False Dichotomies, All The Way Down

- Negative Partisanship and the Politics of Animosity

- When ‘Your’ Base Turns on You

- The Home Teams Defect

- Structural, Systemic, Real, Imagined

- Revising the CRT Bans

- The Empty Promise of CRT

Published: 8/10/21

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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

324 "Simmon's Flu Game, Why Amy Cooper Matters, Bet on the House?" Jul 29, 2021

Show notes

Coco Shoots Her Shot
Gangs All Here
New York is Back**
Real Winners Don't Bother Trying
Carrying MJ Off The Floor
Just Quit
Masks + Superstition
Save the Babies
Surprise 🎁
The Stories We Refuse to Tell Ourselves
If It Happened

Recorded: 7.27.2021

Published: 7.29.2021

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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

323 w/ Jonathan Rauch "Saving Truth, CRT Martyrs, Equal But Separate" Jul 09, 2021

Show notes

w/ Jonathan Rauch @ Author of "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth." Senior fellow @BrookingsInst. Contributing writer @TheAtlantic.

- I Heart Lizzo

- Where Things When Wrong

- Flooding the Zone

- Breaking Journalism

- The Humanitarian Threat and Moral Clarity

- Cancel Culture, Information Warfare, Social Coercion

- Truth + Checking

- Greatest Leap Forward

- Ibram Orwell

- Bans, Martyrs, Inevitable Failure

- Separate, Equal. Same Great Taste.

Recorded: 7.6.2021

Published: 7.9.2021

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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

322 w/ Chris Rufo "Banning Critical Race Theory, Robin DiAngelo's Retread, Bill Cosby - Free, Guilty" Jul 02, 2021

Show notes

"Well, it's my show. So, it's how I wanna do it." - Joy-Ann Reid

"I can do what I wanna do." - Bobby Brown

"Whateva! Whateva! I do what I want!" - Eric Cartman

w/ Chris Rufo @ Senior Fellow, The Manhattan Institute -- Contributing Editor, City Journal

- When Rufo Met Reid

- The Art of Culture War

- Activist Journalist

- Critical Race Theory: Boardroom, College Campus, Neighborhood Preschool

- Bans, Censorship, Pedagogy, Choice

- Machiavellian Realism, Pyrrhic Victories

- Classical Liberal Caution, Libertarian Naïveté

- The "Last" Word

- Creed Wars and Culture Wars

- Welch Reviews Robin DiAngelo's "Nice Racism"

- "Doing The Work"

- Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable

- Pro Criminal Justice Reforms + Pro Putting People Under the Jail

- Broken Promises

Recorded: 6.30.2021

Published: 7.2.2021

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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

321 - "Back to the Ramble, How to Gauge the Age of Outrage, Racist Car Crashes" Jun 24, 2021

Show notes

Kmele reveals his big secret!
What on Earth is a "coupon Karen"?
When Shaun Was King
When Kmele was king of Juneteenth
Measuring the outrage economy
Measuring the wages of junk history
Racist car crashes
"When the people fail, the concept fails"
The end of Afghanistan (the war / the country)
There's a perpetual riot goin' on
Another CRT digression
RIP to an entertaining, insane, narcissistic, possible murderer

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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

320 w/ Harry Siegel - "Bonfire of Insanity, The Unmaking of a Mayor, CRT IRL" Jun 19, 2021

Show notes

New York Daily News columnist Harry Siegel joins TFC for the first hour to talk all things New York (with a focus on halfwit mayoral candidates jockeying to replace a halfwit mayor). But if you don't care about kvetching, NYCentric coastal elites, the back half of the show is, as usual, about how coastal elites are dumb, joyless, and boring. Something for everyone.

- New York is back? Harry is back to tell us it never went away

- Harry would rather be an effete, elitist jerk wearing his mask too long, thank you very much

- The New York City mayoral race tells us nothing about America

- The weirdness of Eric Adams

- Check the crime, y'all

- "Desegregating" NYC schools

Harry Siegel Postgame

- The increasingly annoying CRT debate

- Defining truth in an era of lies

- Pointless: the Joe and Vlad summit

- More cyber war hawkishness from Moynihan (obviously)

- The lessons we never learn from 9/11

- The dangers of political violence--and of opposing (certain) political violence

- You're wrong about Jeff Bezos's taxes

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

310 - "Two Live Shows and a Key West Hangover" Jun 09, 2021

Show notes

Florida is open for business, so The Fifth Column flung its masks into the garbage and headed to the Sunshine State for back-to-back live shows in Miami (coming soon to Patreon!) and a poolside recording in Key West (hence that hollow sound). Nursing hangovers and gasping in the heat, the lads stumble through the following pressing (and pointless) topics:

- Those Miami shows were pretty fun, eh?

- Wait, why exactly are we in Florida?

- Kmele thinks Creepy Joe wasn't being creepy

- The global minimum tax is dumb

- Ransomware everywhere

- This not wearing masks things is pretty great, innit?

- COVID addicts, COVID miscellany

- Kmele on the Fauci emails: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

- The end of Tiananmen

- State violence works

- And so very much more...

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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

309 w/ Jane Coaston "The Argument, The Reckoning, and Unfinished Business" Jun 02, 2021

Show notes

w/ Jane Coaston @ (Host, "The Argument" @ The New York Times)

Take Four
From Vox to NYT's "Rising Libertarian Star"
Coming Out
John Brown
The Black Community
Appraisal of America's Racial Reckoning
The New Culture War
Anti-Racist Classrooms and Workplaces
Slightly Off Mic
Whole Foods Edge Lord
Panics, Counter-Panics, Counter-Counter-Panics

Recorded: 5.28.2021

Published: 6.2.2021

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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

308 - "A Year of Reckoning, Return to the Ramble, Objectivity (or Something)" May 30, 2021

Show notes

Radical Honesty
A Year of (Racial) Reckoning
Losing the Thread
George Floyd
Amy Cooper, Christian Cooper... and the other dog walkers?
Covering Lab Leaks and UFOs
The Death of Truth
The Myth of Objectivity
Journalism for the Real World
Boston Basketball (and racial slurs)
Trump Grand jury

Recorded May 26, 2021

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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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