The Fifth Column

There’s some discussion of parenting. A tiny bit about the Oscars. And a bunch about the triumph of conspiracy culture. But this is mostly a subscriber-only episode about the Zelensky debacle and the ongoing U.S. foreign policy realignment. So why bother with bullet points?’

* Trump’s maturity

* Trump’s deal making

* Trump and NATO

* Trump vs. Europe

* Trump and Taiwan

* A price on Bolton’s head

* Is he a neocon?

* The traffickers of the Fifth Column

* The genius of Bill Belichick

* Those Boston boys aren’t so terrible after all

* Nick v. Stewart

* Democracy died in the light!

* The WaPo freakout

* The press pool freakout

* No one believes in anything, part 387

* The “Epstein files” will contain nothing of interest

* A “Roman” salute that no one noticed

* MSNBC is apparently racist

* A live event in NYC!

* RIP Roberta

* What’s the “woke right?” No idea.

* MAGA Brooklyn

* Reform Party 2000!

* Nadia didn’t pay, so…

* But does it vindicate the collusion narrative?

* Eli Lake’s “Framed and Guilty”

* The Great Negotiator

* The rise of AfD…and the end of Europe?

* Kmele and Kanye (“He’s a NAZI, Kmele, a NAZI…”)

* Moynihan’s memory

* Drinking with Team Uterus

* Matt vs. the Gremlins

* He lasts about 20 minutes

* Subscribe to the pod so he can stay at normal hotels that don’t use Compuserve

* Two minutes of Kayne and the Yahud

* Everything is a lie

* Free speech king goes Russiagate

* Trump’s Ukraine disgrace

* Allies and Axis 2.0

* Here DOGEy DOGEy DOGEy

* Misunderstanding democracy

* The animals of Hamas

* Inhumanity makes one inarticulate

* 😡🐰🥚

* If this plane crashes, it’ll just be ‘Steve Wozniak, Allen Iverson, and some other people’

* Murder motel in Huntington Beach

* Marvin Gaye's confession

* A shot, a beer, and Paddington 3

* Brexit, bananas, and robber outfits

* Not their best. But sort of.

* The New York Times’s dumb report from Europe

* Does Vance have a point?

* Ukraine negotiations without Ukraine

* A bunch m…

So we took a few days off. We deserved it. Sort of. And after all, there were pilots to filmed, kids to be cared for, conferences to attend. Indeed, on Friday we gave a talk at a wonderful University of Florida conference on America’s love of bullshit. But we begged off from the proceedings for an hour to record an episode. Because we love you guys. And because we needed to discuss Pete Hegseth, beer bongs and Goldschlager luges, Elon’s weird kids, the future of DOGE, the future of Ukraine, Islamism, and Serena Williams. And a few other things besides…

* The hockey plumber

* A very brief return to tariffs

* Let’s fight the drug war again! Yay!

* Neocon Don wants to make Gaza great…for the first time

* This is a very, very bad idea

* Like…an extraordinarily bad idea

* The 80-20 issue

* Lia’s standup special

* 60 Minutes in the docket

* “Restoring freedom of speech”

We asked ChatGPT to give us some titles for this episode. Turned out to be a pretty decent précis of the discussion…and the last one is particularly good:

"Tariffs, TikTok, and Toe-Kneading Terror"

"Mary Poppins: Feminist Propaganda & Economic Illiteracy"

"Avocados vs. American Fish: The Dumbest Trade Debate Ever"

"Trump’s Tariff Tantrum: The Art of the Du…

* First class mud hobbit

* At the 80th in Poland

* An executive flurry

* The interrogation of RFK

* In defense of pharma

* The interrogation of Kash Patel

* Give us Greenland, Part 32

* Overreach on DEI?

* Frozen budgets

* Getting the win

* Is *this* the art of the deal?

* Why were the JFK/RFK/MLK files held back?

* And what will we find therein…

* The most annoying Kennedy

* Trusting Deepseek

* Has the press learned its lesson?