The Fifth Column

* The Bill Bixby of East Egg

* Figure it out, people

* Solitude: City vs. Country (not a reference to the Jonathan Richman song, btw)

* Allemansrätten and who makes the most money in your postal code

* Jawohl CHEF!

* Banning internships will help the poor

* “Worse than Watergate” and the Ballad of G. Gordon Liddy

* How does one start restoring a car

* The brilliance of our mod…

UPDATE: The initial version of this episode was missing two audio clips, both of them featuring exceptionally stupid people saying exceptionally stupid things. To be honest, you were be better off not hearing either of them. But the episode has been corrected, the punishing stupidity included, and now you’re worse off…

* Notes from a live event (going live later today)

* Fifdom represents

* Spotify exposes!

* RIP Swampy

* India, Pakistan, and the American retreat

* Ending power, hard and soft

* Marjorie Taylor Chomsky

* Israeli endgame

* Portnoy’s NYT complaint

* Piers Springer and the forbidden word

* Don’t give money to meth head Nazis who yell at babies

* Tickets for tomorrow’s Moynihan-moderated debate at the Village Underground can be purchased here! And subscribe to the Moynihan Report YouTube channel!

* Winnipeg land acknowledgements

* Prison competition

* Tariffs for erotic French movies

* Traitorous Hollywood not paying enough to make movies

* A listener wants to talk about Steph Curry

* Rare books

* Lying on the fact…

They’re all back. And they recorded a very fun, very long one…during the day…to minimize drunken regrets. So many topics are covered—the Koch brother, the last episode, bad interviewers, bad manners, the strange new media, the strange new Ukraine strategy, exit Walz, etc—that we might as well dispense with the usual bullet points and just get right into it…Enjoy!

Moynihan couldn’t make it (we don’t know where he is, but if you see a shirtless man yelling at a parking meter in lower Manhattan, please let us know). In his absence, Kmele and Welch cover a wide swath: alien oceans and scientific hype cycles, the collapse of local journalism, the rise of YouTube basketball nerds, and why Luka Dončić is the people’s MVP. They also wade into darker waters—federal crackdowns on campus speech, student visa censorship, and the increasingly authoritarian posture of Trump 2.0.

Plus: reader mail, a reluctant defense of David Hogg, a rant about scams and AI voice fraud, and a minor audio glitch that might actually be evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Errr….This one gets pretty heated. But we’re all still friends! We think. And Moynihan is now sober and his blood sugar is back to normal, so there’s that too. Either way, hats off to Batya for braving another episode with three people who disagree with her on pretty much everything. We talk Tariffs, Trump, lawfare, Ukraine, and everything in between.

* The Hungarian dentist and the prostitute theory

* Your TV wife sees Hitler all the time, no?

* Facilitate…

* Dinners with politicians

* A digression on Big Star (FYI: "Holocaust”)

* Elder scams

* Apple Watches and proof of life

* Back to Rogan and Murray

* A trip to Libya for a copy of the Green Book

* #9 Fifth Dream

* Doing an impression of a smart person / Paul believes

* A theory …

On May 11, 2020, as I was navigating personal collapse (“it’s been a really shitty two months,” I said on an interesting-to-listen-to-now Special Dispatch #20), my two daughters were wrestling unhappily with Zoom school, and all three of us lads were in the process of buying Covid cars, I came across a Wired article that landed like a Cher-style open-ha…

Moynihan is out with a “tooth thing” (which sounds lame, but is allegedly a “painful,” “very serious” dental emergency that definitely doesn't involve a tall, attractive blonde woman). Fortunately, our pal Jesse Singal (Blocked and Reported, Singal-Minded) is along for the ride, and outlines the plans for his heroic crusade to save THE REPUBLIC by beefing with JD Vance on X. We dive into Trump 2.0’s extra-constitutional improvisations, fail to steer clear of trade policy, and search desperately for a silver lining in our late-capitalist, national-populist, increasingly surrealist Idiocracy. Also in the mix: a little Elon drama, libertarian coping strategies, various flavors of executive branch lawlessness, and a surprising outbreak of informed optimism about the future.

* Tooth decay, high-end prostitutes, and podcast logistics

* Jesse Singal enters the chat (possibly still mid–Twitter beef)

* Deportation by executive vibe

* Due process is for losers

* When JD Met Jesse: A Very Sexy Love Story (by Selena Montgomery)

* The most important internet slap-fight in American history

* Hotel El Salvador: now accepting unwanted Americans

* Bannon’s “flood the zone” plan meets sheer incompetence

* Shouting at Bill Hemmer

* Campus protests, free speech, and DHS interns with tasers

* Jesse accidentally agrees with libertarians?

* And can Jesse say one nice thing about JD Vance? (And, “Thank you”!?)

* To the Moon, and Mars, and WHERE ELSE BEYOND

Is this episode 500?? Well, not really. Likely a bit higher. There have been some numbering convention mixups over the years and we’ve also recorded almost 300 paywalled episodes (yes, you should subscribe now, ya skinflints). But let’s just pretend it’s 500 and say…happy 500th episode, Fifth Column!

* Waymo through skid row

* The dumb right

* Dead cats bounce

* They took brown doublewides from us

* Nixon, but in the open

* Where are the Dems?

* Besides magic

* The DEI trade off?

* The sweet meteor of death episode