The Fifth Column

Kmele got a new baby!

Welch is doing -- something.

And a disheveled, bleary-eyed Moynihan checks in from Europe -- where he's been bouncing between checkpoints and bunkers in Ukraine. The dude is earning his WHOLE paycheck this week.

Recorded: March 14th, 2022

Published: March 15th, 2022

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• Does the media have this conflict wrong?
• The privatization of protest
• Europe shutting down shitty, Kremlin-funded media
• Wait, did Matt Taibbi just say he was warming to intervention?
• Verdict: unclear
• No due process for shitty, Kremlin-funded oligarchs
• America's overlooked role in the beginnings of Putinism
• Could Russia have been democratic?
• Mearsheimer and the interminable NATO debate
• The narcissism of Twitter war tourism
• Taibbi post game
• On Biden's SOTU speech
• On the forgotten trade wars

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With Kmele waiting for his son to arrive and moving into his new East Coast digs (or something), Welch and Moynihan again find a temporary replacement. This time the honor is bestowed upon Jamie Kirchick, senior fellow for the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council and author of the forthcoming book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. Bullet point topics for this episode seem unnecessary because....lotta Ukraine. With a bonus digression into Jamie's recent piece on Sohrab Ahmari and the right's lurch towards "national conservatism." Enjoy.

Also: another Patreon coming at the end of the week. So go sign up.

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Guest: Jeffery Sachs, Lecturer in Politics @ Acadia University

• A Huge School Board Recall in San Francisco (With National Implications)
• A Proposed Ban on Talking About *Gay Stuff* w/ School Kids (In Florida, Of Course)
• A Contoversial Federal Crackdown on Protesters in Canada (Swastikas! Swastikas! Swastikas!)

Is there more? Maybe 😏

Recorded: Feb 17th 2022

Released: Feb 18th 2022

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Kmele's on a plane back East, where he shall remain and where the Fifth will increasingly ditch Zoom for in-person recordings. Yay. Filling in for Comrade Foster this week? Journalist, author, inventor, CNN contributor, mother of three, and all around swell gal, Mary Katherine Ham!

• The triumph of the stupid
• The stupid Washington Post
• Hating friends with stupid politics
• Mary Katherine, like Switzerland to her ex-friends
• The right after Trump
• Unharassed by Ailes
• When Hammer and Moynihan met
• Revisiting MKH’s reporting on the Tea Party town hall madness
• More on Hitler’s truckers 
• Broken risk analysis: MKH on schools, masking, and Covid culture wars
• Masked and anonymous
• Does Dave Chappelle hate the poor?
• Don't influence the normies 
• The electoral power of hypocrisy
• Sports bras, shaming, and misinformation
• And so much more!

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Our favorite Danish intellectual returns! After a three-plus year absence, Jacob Mchangama is back on the Fifth, this time promoting his amazing new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, which P.J. O'Rourke calls "best history of free speech ever written and the best defense of free speech ever made." We tend to agree. The lads make quick work of a bottle of sake and still manage to blather about...

• The state of free speech in Europe
• Joe Rogan and the crisis of speech
• Many of history's heroes of free speech were kind of shitty on free speech
• It always comes back to Nazis
• The Weimar fallacy
• Hanged for speech. Really, really bad speech
• The sheep theory
• Jacob brings up Nazis again
• Tell the moon about the crying room
• The most powerful engine for social change
• Free speech is a powerful engine *against* racism
• Two islamists realize they were wrong about free speech

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A freebie for the great unwashed, cheapskate masses. A little...ummm....looser than the free feed pod. And note that Moynihan's car was stuck in the snow just moments before recording, so he's slightly more unhinged than usual. When contacted, he apologized profusely and said "had I known you were releasing this to the freeloaders I wouldn't have said all of those things that I totally believe but make people pay to hear..." -TFC

Snowstorms. People moving. Daughters acting crazy. Fiona Hill. Lots happening in the Fifthdom, but the lads got together this afternoon for a shouty, everyone-is-insane rant fest. The following topics were soberly discussed:

- To save democracy, it must be destroyed

- A left-right synthesis! Let's all abandon principles!

- 16 free speech help lines

- Oprah: The OG Joe

- Jenny from the U of G

- Smooth brown something

- We need to talk about Rogan

- We need to talk about (Ilya) Shapiro

- Welcome to Georgetown...now into the penalty box, you racist!

- A warning label for everything

- A magic word supercut!

- Canadian truck driving Nazis?

- The Thousand Beer Reich: 14 out-of-shape Nazis stand on an Orlando bridge

- Patti for SCOTUS

- And much, much more....

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Almost a year after being run out of Slate for possession of an unpopular opinion, journalist and podcaster Mike Pesca joins the Fifth for his first post-controversy conversation on how it all went down, when banal opinions became "harassment," and what we can expect from the The Gist 2.0.

• Is Kmele being prioritized for Covid treatment? Because, ya know...
• Mike Pesca gets pushed out of Slate (for referencing, but not saying, a magic word)
• Bull Connor's boss, Steve
• A "harassment-worthy" opinion
• Was anyone brave and did they call bullshit? Ummm...
• N-words and Mohammad cartoons
• Insert $5 for more podcast
• Kmele's Kovid fog
• The roughest period of Mike's life, ever
• The new, new journalism
• Hating Joe Rogan
• You don't have the truth, journalists. But you can get there
• The Gist's approchal
• Moynihan likes The Gist. Except that one episode...
• The media is atomized. Or maybe balkanized
• Coleman is a good rapper
• Don't catastrophize the normal

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• Kmele at Hereticon
• Fallibility vs. Fundamentalism
• A Time to Choose
• In Your Heart You Know He's Racist
• Gerrymandering for Good
• Credibility, Transparency
• Ignoring Alex Jones
• Arguing with Alex Jones
• The One Thing Americans Agree On...
• ...It's All Going to Shit
• Alex Jones' America
• Idiots Wrote This

Recorded: Jan 13th, 2022

Published: Jan 14th, 2022

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He's brilliant. He has a Pulitzer Prize, And he's totally jacked. New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg, who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and could definitely kick your ass, joins the Fifth to reflect on the riot, coup, insurrection, revolution, putsch, mass hate crime...whatever you want to call it. But hang around after the Rosenberg Coup Hour for a freewheeling postgame meditation on legal crime in New York City, upbraiding Moynihan for his bad parenting skills, and the secret ghostwriters behind Kmele's Twitter account...

*Note: It's someone else's fault, obviously, but allow us to extend a half-hearted apology for the slightly subpar (occasional but not terrible) audio quality on one of our mics. If this was a Patreon episode and you forked over cash--which you really, really should do--our regrets would be far more groveling and effusive. But you skinflints and freeloaders can just deal with it....

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