The Fifth Column

What if you’re just … born wrong? (No, I don’t mean the darling little girl to the right.)

You may know Bill Schulz through his years toiling as Greg Gutfeld’s “repulsive sidekick” on ye olde Fox News late-nite WTF show Red Eye (on which all of your co-hosts, and several of our guests, got some valuable reps back in the day). You may know Bill through his years on Compound Media doing shows with the also-if-differently-than-Bill hilarious Joanne Nosuchinsky Goodhart. You should know Schulz for his terrific lad-mag writing; you definitely know him for his way-back-when appearances on Fifth Column Episode #79 & at our sloppy second live show in Miami in 2021.

But what you almost certainly didn’t realize until THIS VERY MOMENT is that William Dawes Schulz is the 7th great-grandson and namesake of a man who played a key if now mostly forgotten role at the outset of the American Revolution: William Dawes.

Yes, as teased on our previous “Revolutionaries” episode with the great Jack Henneman about the even greater Paul Revere, there were other midnight riders besides the original Raider, and chief among them was poor Bill’s comparatively portly predecessor. So in the spirit of equal time, and because you need to hear about what happened when a Red Eye derelict brought some gay-bar humor and William Dawes apologia to the Paul Revere House, here is who my youngest daughter calls “Crazy Cigarette Man” to defend historical enthusiasm, and avenge his family’s name.

* Heckling Coco

* Licensed to tour

* Turtle Bays all the way down

* Did Dick Allen sign the Declaration?

* 1776, the musical gateway drug

* A failure at school (life?), except for history

* “I am not related to a famous person. I’m related to William Dawes.”

* “This was our social network back then. That’s all. You had dudes on horses.”

* Would it kill Moynihan? Fingers crossed!

* Dr. Joseph Warren, spymaster

* Revere is to Sam Malone what Dawes is Norm

* But Dawes started first!

* These aren’t the rebels you’re looking for

* Ode to Brown Beauty

* Revere captured, Dawes thrown, Prescott keeps going

* “When I was younger, I was very angry at that poem”

* The first rule of the Boston Tea Party is….

* Matt’s grandma has a cooler name than your grandma

* Charles Gates Dawes, #NeverForget

* “And then every once in a while, I’d sort of give it to Paul Revere. And that did not go over well” … at the PAUL REVERE HOUSE.

* This is why you can’t have nice things, Bill Schultz!

* “Philadelphia and Boston, as annoying as they are, they hold onto their history a lot better than this city.”

* Hit it & quit at the James Brown House!

* Semiquincentennial junketeering

* Ken Burns, anarchist

* Is Bill really recommending this Ann Coulter book? (Bookshop / Amazon)

* George Washington’s Hair: How Early Americans Remembered the Founders, by Keith Beutler (Bookshop / Amazon)

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-The NYC Rolling Hobo Express

-An Enthusiastic Armada Full of Speed and Violence

-Iranian Death Toll Discourse and Roger Waters Still Sucks

-The Donroe Doctrine and the Near Abroad Dodge

-Everyone’s Favorite Powder Keg

-A Norwegian, A Rat Bag, and a Lunatic

-A disgusting thing to say

-Noem’s Bellebolent Hypotheticals

-Stephen Miller’s Basement Lotions and the Little Rogaine Carpet

-Fingerers, Reach-Arounds, and Reaganite as a Slur

-Anne Cool-ter

-Fuck You Jonathan

-Mehmet Oz, P.I.

-Ye’s apology ad and the uncanny valley of writing

-One from the Mailbag

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifthdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a reader-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

-A huge TACO Tuesday

-Survival of the Spineless

-Low-level insurgency infrastructure

-Astroturf panic and the suspicious run to Walgreens

-The problem with punching Nazis

-Walz and Trump finally talk

-Fuck you, Ted

-The Great American Slur Revival

-Short king Bovino and the self-inflicted smoke bomb

-Democracy Dies in Payroll

-World’s Biggest Russophobe Longs for…

One topic in the news. One quick podcast on that single topic (rather than just texting each other about how certain media figures are vulgar, stupid, and morally depraved). Welcome back to the Fifth Column One Hitter!

In the hours after ICE shot and killed Alex Pretti, we gathered at the studio to sit down with Peter Moskos: former police officer, current John Jay…

•Don Does Davos•I Would Do Anything for Greenland (But I Won’t Do That)•Even MAGA Thought the Norway Text Was Fake News•The Danes’ Historical Resistance to Fascism•A Lament for the Belgian Congo•Cutting a Greenland Cake, and the Epidemic of Stupidity•Who the Fuck Is “We”?•Congress Could Do Something That Isn’t Impeachment•Shame Doesn’t Work•Past the Point of Passivity•Punching a Transtifa Baby•Macron and Those Beautiful Sunglasses•Carney Invokes Václav Havel: Rupture, Not Transition•Middle Powers, Beta Powers•Soleimani in Iceland•China Is Asshole•The Man Is Fucking Old and Loves His Prizes•Breaking: Strange Victory, Strange Defeat•Letter Bag: Minneapolis•Get Out of the Fucking Churches•The Abbott & Costello Theory of Government

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifthdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 8PM EST.

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Chuck Klosterman’s new book, Football is out now! (See also The Nineties, and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs)

-The music-doc cinematic universe, featuring Billy Joel and Japanese Jimmy Page

-Moynihan missed the Morrissey cover-band boat

-How to actually say Klosterman

-From pop culture to America’s most popular TV show

-It had to be football: the one exception …

Two hundred and fifty years ago this very day, a gallant-strolling cat named George Washington convened in Cambridge about as high a level Patriot meeting as you could muster: John Adams, two major generals, five brigadier generals, and arguably the most connected man among the Boston rebels, Joseph Warren. There, the commander in chief persuaded his War Council of the “indispensible necessity of making a Bold attempt” to kick the goddamned Redcoats out of Boston.

That plan, successfully executed seven weeks later, relied on three precursor acts of Yankee derring-do. Ranked in reverse chronological order, they were: 1) Henry Knox’s noble train of artillery, moving 60 tons of British cannon & artillery 300 miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston; 2) the rebel capture of Fort Ticonderoga before that, by Benedict Arnold, Ethan Allen, and the Soggy Bottom Green Mountain Boys; and 3) the legendary, gunpowder-saving, militia-rallying warning from arguably the second most connected man in revolutionary Beantown, Paul Revere. Who probably wasn’t invited to the War Council meeting because ... he wasn’t a gentleman.

I first learned about how strangely underrated and quintessentially American Paul Revere was last April by listening to a couple of sidebar episodes of Jack Henneman’s great The History of the Americans podcast. Henneman, not just a listener of The Fifth Column but a Never Fly Coacher, had to kind of cheat to do the Revere episodes, because his pod, which just celebrated its five-year anniversary, goes so meticulously through the timeline of “vast early America” that his most recent episode still only gets us to the 1680s. (Not that I’m there yet; this truly is a podcast you want to start from the beginning.)

We’re honored to have Jack for our second installment of The Revolutionaries miniseries; to talk both about Paul Revere and also his own fascinating backstory of how a successful “corporate tool” ends up doing the Mother of All retirement/Covid-madness projects, and why he’s so mad about “presentism.” Enjoy!

* The voice that puts me to sleep

* “In September of 2020, we were all still more or less losing our minds”

* England has one, why don’t we?

* Blue highways, dive bars: See America, people!

* Presentism: Bad, corrupting, cheap, boring

* “You will develop a real humility about how you look at the world that you live in”

* The insane story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

* Paul Revere, with or without the Raiders

* “Every red-blooded American should read” David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride

* “This almost uniquely early-American American”

* An artisan is not a gentleman

* Cock-blocked by George W.

* The “walking LinkedIn guy” of rebel Boston

* A “lower talk-to-do ratio”

* Thomas Gage was actually kinda lenient?

* Dude’s on horseback

* Tattooed on Moynihan’s broken nose

* The powder alarms

* Whigs almost flipped

* “Some of the ethnic mix that gives Boston that reputation came subsequently to 1775, okay?”

* That amazing (and presentist!) poem

* “How Longfellow Woke the Dead”

* He “really hated politics, but he also hated slavery”

* “It presented Revere’s ride as an individual effort act of individual heroism. And it really wasn’t. The remarkable thing about it was quite the opposite.”

* Brown Beauty, “one of the great equine heroes in American history”

* Sorry, William Dawes fanboys

* “I don’t mean to mock anyone’s ancestry, but.…”

* Important junk in that trunk

* Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, by Samuel Elliot Morrison

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-Good Movies We’ve Never Seen

-Raw Dog Minerals

-Moynihan Responds to a Cunty Troll

-The Reckoning We Didn’t Have

-Renee Good, a Week Removed

-These People Have No Constitutional Knowledge

-The MST3K of ICE Videos

-The Sanctuary City Devaluation

-Iranian Violence Spectacle and thoroughly verifying the dead

-Weaponized DOJ: Now Featuring Powell and a Reporter Raid

-The Walter Cronkite of This Generation

-Low-Bar Journalism

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifthdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn

-Who Remembers the Armenians? (The Fresno ones)

-The One Good Decision Gavin Newsom has made

-Who Remembers Amy Cooper? (The Central Park one)

-When Facts Become Partisan Coded

-Journalism vs. Activism

-Matt Welch Is Buffy St. Marie

-Broken LA Dreams

-The Actual Way to Pronounce Cenk Uygur

-ICE’s Shock and Awe Theater is no longer an act

-The Pendulum on Immigra…

We’re joined by Josh Barro, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times and host of the Very Serious and Central Air Substack

-Feldstein, Leibowitz, Berkowitz, and White Nationalist Moynihan

-The Nancy Pelosi Riot, 5 years later

-An ICE shooting in Minneapolis

-Morally disgusting and electorally advantageous

-Marco Rubio’s Spine Transplant

-Memory-Holing Anarchy

-The Warmth of Collectivism

-Rent Control Suicide

-Affordability In Davos

-The NY John Lindsay Pretty Boy Republican Problem

-Greenland Extortion

-Maduro Snatch and Grab

-Black Elliott Abrams

-Are straight people okay?

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifthdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

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