The Fifth Column

* A homicide at Broadway-Lafayette

* Crazy strangers on a train

* The dumb racialization of a tragic death

* The “delightful” and violent Michael Jackson impersonator

* Amazon’s Afrika Bambaataa impersonator goes to Cuba

* On Tucker’s identitarian texts

* Fox News’s leak war

* The Daily Show’s 81% rating collapse

* So many shitty late night talk shows

* You won’t notice the writer’s strike

* Hating the Correspondent’s Dinner is as boring as the Correspondent’s Dinner itself

* Gas stoves and Australian vapes

* Adderall nightmare updates

* Send pics

* Moynihan on Maher

* Los Angeles is a weird place

* Kmele in Chicago with Nirvana’s producer

* The mechanics of Hollywood that we don’t understand

* AA and Scientology

* A hockey disaster

* We need more “black” hockey players

* A listener on Father Coughlin and Ayn Rand

* RIP Wes’s mom

* First class talk

* A listener in defense of MMA

* Holy shit this Danny Aiello response video

* Holy …

He first came on to talk about a suicide in the porn industry. Then he came back to help us explore the origins of our roiling culture wars. And now Jon Ronson returns for his third one-on-one conversation with Michael Moynihan, this time to discuss The Debutante, his brilliant new podcast about high society neo-Nazis, bad swastika tattoos, Throbbing Gr…

We’re back with one long episode in two cracking segments. First up, Welch and Moynihan (Ed. note: Kmele is currently peering through a telescope on the South Side of Chicago or something) catch up on all the stupid news of the last week, including…

* The news of certain…errrr……media layoffs

* Defenestrations at Fox News and CNN

* The “they-ificaton” of Tucker Carlson

* The bizarro world of Robert F. Kennedy Jr

* Lil’ Bobby: Prosecute people I disagree with

And then it’s an hour with return guest Ben Smith (his third appearance, we think?), editor-in-chief of Semafor, former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, and author of the new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. No explanation needed. It’s good. You’ll like it.

* Kmele MC’s the FIRE Gala

* Killer Mike blows the roof off the joint

* This is a hangover episode

* A celebration of FIRE, the great Harvey Silverglate, and various other heroes of free speech

* What cable news network has created this climate of hate….in Japan

* If only we could prevent shitty speech, we would be on a forward march to utopia. Right?

* The temptation, on both the right and left, to not “do the work”

* The EU will control ChatGPT and all will be great

* The forever instinct to “disappear” bad ideas

* That very expensive Fox-Dominion settlement

* The never-ending madness in Chicago

* Root causes: A Pantone chart and a CPA

* Kmele, Fruit of Islam

* Via Chicago

* Dominion lawsuit stuff again

* Biden and America’s favorite bearded terrorist Gerry Adams!

* Kmele’s Dominican son?

* The life and work of complete psycho Leonard Jefferies

* What do you all think of Amy Wax?

* Peter Popoff and James Randi

* A biracial question from a drunk biracial lad

* Prince’s dirty songs

* Discomfort and historical memo…

* The arrest of Jack Teixeira

* The bad showoff

* Not a source, not a Snowden

* How serious is the Teixeira leak?

* Sorry, but the NYT and WaPo did the *correct* thing

* The Tennessee 2 1/2: a plague of theater kids with dumb ideas

* That really bad and embarrassing shout-and-holler preacher impression

* That really bad and embarrassing Michael Steele clip

* That really bad and embarrassing Andrea Mitchell clip

* And a really bad and embarrassing Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet

* Democracy wasn’t failing. It was working

* I mean, at least Reverend Wright was good at it

* So what the hell is happening in France?

* That Trump-Tucker interview was insane

As an Easter and pesach mitzvah to America, we’re gifting this Member Only episode to all y’all…considering that we were on vacation and had no intention of recording it, it’s just Matt and Moyn, and they cover just one dumb subject. An annoyed text exchange about this whole “Clarence Thomas’s friend Harlan Crow loves Hitler” nonsense precipitated this recording, which also exists so we could resurface a relevant listener question from Members Only #152.

* The Rolling Stone article Matt mentioned (note the illiterate subhead which also bizarrely suggests one would have to “smuggle” statues of overthrown dictators out of “regimes”)

* That Washingtonian article Matt mentioned

* That tweet Moynihan couldn’t find

* Goldberg and French chime in

* A clip from a February Members Only episode in which the lads are asked about Nazi butter knives

Live in front of a crowd of five exhausted crew members, broadcasting from a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in midtown Manhattan (we’ll explain later), it’s another of those *forgive us father, for we are deep in our cups* episodes.

So take it all with a rather large rock of salt:

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, RIPThe philosemitic film festival Peter Sellers was, in fact, Jewish (Sameach Pesach, btw)Ugh. We have to talk about the Trump arrest.The door wasn’t held. America is in crisisThat Trump speechSo who’s winning?There’s bit of the führerprinzip in there, eh?Political earthquakes in Wisconsin / Chicago A qualified defense of JuniorA qualified defense of Don Lemon?Birding while black

* What was Kmele talking about? You’ll never know….

* Jewish basketball, Max Schmeling, European baseball players with consumption

* Matt Welch was about to be Paul Castellano’ed

* Are you a member of the UAE royal family? Get Moynihan on Emirates

* The unsavory Italian members of the family

* The knock-on effects of the Trump indictment?

* Melania’s forgotten about parents