The Fifth Column

Robert Wright’s new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, is out now (Bookshop | Amazon)

•“Conference” = group sex

•21 years of successfully avoiding podcast wealth

•Interviewing the godfather of AI

•A tiger and a rattlesnake

•Matt gets quizzed on LLMs

•The God Test

•The shock of vibe coding

•China and the superintelligence arms race

•Re…

The great Kat Rosenfield joins us to discuss the ongoing fallout from rape allegations against Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner published Monday by Politico.

When you’re a star, they let you mispronounce their name.

•The Fifth Column (whiskey) sells out!

•America’s birthday month

•Loathing Graham Platner before it was cool

•The least weird thing about Platner

•The Times is on it

•A working class hero is something to be

A•bout that beard

•The flaws are a feature, not a bug

•We all know a guy like this

•Christine Blasey Ford enters the chat•Michael Tracey exists

•Kmele expresses skepticism•It’s not consensual, it’s DiGiorno•On second thought, let’s not play the Fuentes clip

•Michell Goldberg’s mea culpa

•Fruit baskets

•Midterm Madness… the Graham Platner edition

•Stephen King for senate? •Missing Moynihan

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-The Fifth Column whiskey racket begins

-Matt moves during a heat wave… Peter Meijer reports for duty

-Meijer, class traitor, explains the pied-à-terre tax

-Mayor Mamdani balances the budget, if you ignore the bailout

-Kmele gets Hayek’d

-Machine politics was bad, but graduate student politics is worse.

-Bannon’s old Leninist fantasy, now available in DSA packaging

-Kamala Harris genuflects toward Mamdani-world

-MAGA wants the factories back. The robots have other ideas.

-Ro Khanna’s children: landed gentry

-Midterm Madness, Rocky Mountain High

-Melat Kiros justifies 9/11

-Scott Wiener gets yelled at for insufficient revolutionary fervor

-Stalinism, but make it customer-facing

-The revolution will be staffed by PhD candidates

-Speaking of revolution: happy birthday, America

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

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a viewer/listener 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

Also: a serious discussion of the cinematic category known as “movies where they clearly came up with the title first.”

-The N-word trap at the Hudson Yards gym

-Joe Jackson dressed for the evil dad part

-Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound defense

-Richard Simmons slaps a cage fighter

-How to respond to an asshole

-Con Air, Face/Off, and insane ’90s movies

-Pr…

We are lucky to be joined once again by Executive Editor of SCOTUSblog, Sarah Isgur, and on a day when the Supreme Court gave everyone a lot to argue about.

-Trump loses, birth tourism maybe does not

-Anchor babies and America’s soccer future

-The 14th Amendment gets weird

-A color-blind Constitution, except when it isn’t

-Immigration is the culture war now

-Executive p…

-Welch enters his Charles Nelson Reilly era

-Laura Branigan, Happy Mondays, and songs you didn’t know were covers

-Puerto Rico’s revenge

-The cadres are closing in

-Reihan Salam and Larry Flynt

-DAC hits the media circuit and refuses to answer the easiest question in politics

-Aber Kawas explains 9/11, in a Miss South Carolina sort of way

-Vaporware word clouds masquerading as policy

-No borders, no prisons, no TSA PreCheck… no joke

-Nationalizing airlines, abolishing comfort, and calling it justice

-Mamdani’s machine, the DSA bench, and the Democratic Party’s growing nervous breakdown

-Polymarket vs. the polls

-The internet is not a socialist invention, no matter how hard socialists try

-Senate Republicans discover Trump skepticism several years too late

-The SAVE Act tantrum and the incredible courage of people who already lost

-Tucker, Trump, Iran, inflation, and the limits of MAGA obedience

-Peter Thiel’s terrifying secret network of people talking at conferences

-Moynihan goes to Dialog and accidentally joins the Illuminati

-Kmele reports back from the alleged cabal

-Bohemian Grove was cooler because at least you had to break in

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

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a listener/viewer 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

Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for MSNOW, a senior fellow at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, and co-director of its Afghanistan Assumptions Project. He also writes the Truth and Consequences newsletter. He is not the former fixer of Donald Trump.

-The correct Michael Cohen stops by

-Mamdani flexes in the primaries and three congress critters cometh

-DAC gets worse the more…

-Ethnicity as performance

-Manhattan politics with the president of the Manhattan Institute

-Dan Goldman orders coffee, receives moral instruction

-The many political personalities of Brad Lander

-Taxpayer-funded activism and the Office of Mass Engagement

-Mamdani and the borg beneath the campaign

-AOC, cadres, and disciplined political parties

-Gaza as the om…

-Kmele debuts his Sebastian Bach beach jeans

-The Iran deal is like the JCPOA, but a lot worse

-Lebanon sneaks into a U.S.-Iran deal

-Strait of Hormuz, 60-day promises, and negotiating with hostage-takers

-Why can’t the hawks ever learn?

-Ukraine brings the war home to Russia

-Drones, oil refineries, and the new cost of war

-Europe wakes up… sort of

-Meloni jabs her digits at Trump

-Polymarket checks the damage in Israeli politics

-as well as NY-13 and the rise of the DSA

-Hamilton Heights is Gaza now

-Mamdani’s little machine comes for Dan Goldman

-Gaza replaces BLM as the Democratic purity test

-The long-term problem with Mamdani economics

-Gavin Newsom vs. Trump’s DOJ

-The New York Times makes the Epstein suicide case

-Tucker, Trump, Loomer, and the inevitable reunion

-Baseball is gay in June

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

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a viewer/listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, host of Batya! on NewsNation, returns!!! And with a new book, The Jews and the Left, about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and why so much of the modern left has made Jews the enemy.

-JD Vance, Tucker, and the anti-Israel right

-The Iran deal, Rubio’s silence, and Trump’s trial balloon

-What Batya got wrong about the war

-Could Trump have sold the war better?