The Fifth Column

-Joe Kent’s weird texts and the “Israel did Iraq” brainworm

-The Jews are so fucking clever

-Iraq 2003, back from the dead yet again

-There’s always a new monster to destroy

-Iran, nukes, and the problem with crazy people holding civilization hostage

-A Ron Paul guy with a war boner

-Don’t you realize you’re losing America?

-Norman Finkelstein has no phone

-Mearsheimering, Robert Pape, and the incentives to go full crank

-Megyn Kelly, the anti-Israel turn, and the warm bath of total nuttiness

-Mark Levin’s penis size enters the chat

-Louis CK and a Michael Barbaro hit job

-the origin of Tough Crowd

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

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-Gov. Chris Christie debrief

-Kmele nearly dies after seeing the new hidden painting on set

-K-Pop Nazi Hunters and Sinners

-Joy Reid says America is basically Iran now

-Straight from The Communist

-Lights out in Cuba

-The Gains of the Cuban Revolution

-”I got my job from the New York Times”

-The old broken Cuban system finally starts to crack

-Hasan Piker talks…

-Gov. Chris Christie says Kmele has no excuse

-Getting drunk with Colbert

-No drugs, ever

-RFK Jr.’s drug use

-The only things Trump believes in

-something is a little off about John Kasich

-Olivia Nuzzi is a Freak, Crumb Cake edition

-Michael Barbaro tried to take the Gov down with food

-Bon Jovi, Bruce, and New Jersey loyalty tests

-The Little Marco Florsheim Fib

-The ultimate Kushner lore, aka The Prostitute, the Motel, and the Alarm Clock

-Profiles in cowardice, Republican edition

-The biggest threat to Democracy according to Chris Christie

-The case for letting Republicans lose badly

-Why Democrats keep blowing it

-Debate prep with Trump and being with him when the Access Hollywood tape dropped

-This is what Hillary should have said

-Chris Christie insists Bruce Springsteen likes him now

-That Obama Sandy cold embrace

-Bill Clinton will hold your hand, stroke your wife’s elbow, and you’ll fucking like it

-W, Barbara, and elite family-level savagery

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

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He also weighs in on populism, inequality, private credit, and why a country can be prosperous on paper while still feeling bleak to the people living in it.

-“Blankfein hates minorities”

-the economy is strong, unless you don’t own anything

-get a grip, it’s not 1968

-semi-charmed kind of life

-from Russia to China, the cycles come fast

-where are the Hayeki…

From the multiverse to time travel to bad studies and internet “experts,” and then all the way to metaphysics and belief, Sean Carroll explains why modern life makes everyone sound so sure about things they barely understand.

-Moynihan is genuinely unnerved by space

-a theoretical physicist’s favorite music is prog rock, which seems about right

-what a physicist reads…

Hooman Majd comes from a family that reads like a parable about modern Iran: a grandfather who was an ayatollah, an uncle who worked for the Shah, and a folk-singing aunt. Everyone’s family has a version of this, right?

-Iran is a tragedy

-the sense of triumph has already faded

-is Hooman happy the Supreme Leader was killed?

-Trump’s motive: regime change, or only regime adjustment?

-a ring of fire around Israel

-hijab mandates, strict social rules, and the morality police using facial recognition

-did the 1979 Islamic Revolution fail on its own terms?

-MEK is a cult

-is there room for a homegrown anti-regime revolution, or does war smother it?

-who ends up in the IRGC?

-the girls’ school bombing, and the propaganda machine

-internet shutdowns, VPN life, and tweeting through a war

-if you want to be an authoritarian, you cannot tolerate a free press

-how to consume war info without getting played

-outlets reporting on the new Ayatollah

-sanctions: efficacy, blowback, and who they actually punish

-Can Iran function like a normal state, and can it have workable relations with Israel?

-Oct. 7 and Iran’s role

-concerns about civil war

-the mullah stereotype

-“translating” for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

-death threats, anonymous phone calls, and “don’t ever come back”

-defending against charges of being a regime apologist

Buy Minister Without Portfolio: Memoir of a Reluctant Exile (Bookshop | Amazon)

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

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-Matt takes off his glasses, Kmele panics

-Moynihan is furious we started a war during his aggressive vomiting window

-The Great Unwrapping of Liberated Iranian Women as the most convincing reason for war

-Marco Rubio sells the rationale in Möbius-strip logic

-the Dee Snider Doctrine

-The Death of the War Powers Resolution

-Is Rep. Anna Paulina Luna serious r…

Journalist Nadav Eyal joins Welch and Moyniahn to game out the Iran strikes, why Gaza’s endgame is still murky, and why the “no boots on the ground” promise matters more than most hot takes admit.

-Zen and the Art of Strategic Surprise

-Everyone who’s anyone in the region knew this was going to happen.

-Why the US was convinced this was a good idea

-Death to America…

I first met Ken Layne sometime in 1991, back when Vanilla Ice ruled the pop charts, the Soviet Union was still a thing, and Canadians still had a reasonable expectation of winning the Stanley Cup.

We have been collaborating and experimenting ever since -- a little newspapering here, some music there, various dot-com shenanigans, all of it in a spirit of adventure, learning, and hijinks. Ken has written novels, launched radio stations/TV-production studios in Macedonia, created one of the first native online news sites, flitted in and out of the Gawker empire, then, most enduringly, left the digital world behind with a terrific quarterly Mojave publication (and later book) called the Desert Oracle. This in turn became one of my two favorite podcasts, a spooky and learned and quite musical campfire-talk, described herein as “bioregional about the place, the geology, the animals, the folklore, and especially the people who’ve lived there over recorded history and the bad things they’ve done.”

Ken, as you will hear, is a natural storyteller who’s always weaving history and religion and literature and charismatic animals into conversation, with a particular eye for the not readily explicable. I was thrilled to hear he was creating a Desert Oracle offshoot called The Eldritch Republic, focusing on “strange tales of America,” so invited him on The Revolutionaries to talk about the key role that providence played in 1775-76, and how George Washington was father not just of our country, but of the foxhound. Enjoy!

* Media isn’t local anymore

* Printed media isn’t in business anymore

* Highway 247 revisited

* Big Hairy Monsters (that aren’t named Ken Layne)

* Absolutely respectful to the monster

* “As soon as I could drive, I was out in the desert, I was reading Edward Abbey”

* Buy Desert Solitaire

* Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, Mary Hunter Austin

* No more Heritage Reports

* Shrooming at the Nixon Library

* The esoteric side of American history

* “They don’t fit into our sad era, which is the Era of Disenchantment”

* “So you might ask somebody who lives in Providence, Rhode Island: What’s the name of your city mean? And they might not know.”

* Mountain people: superior rifles

* New Englanders: rough, dumb, impetuous

* Everybody: drinking

* The brilliant, self-made, well-fed Henry Knox

* Washington: Instrument of Providence

* The Maryland 400 are our Sparta 300

* Surrounded by water on three sides by the world’s biggest Navy, which has never lost

* The Gods send a secret fog

* Benny boy Talmadge!

* “I like dogs. I’m a male of the species, and an American”

* Montgomery’s loyal (if side-switching) dog Rebel

* “Father of not just the country, but of the American foxhound”

* “I made a list, a historical list”

* Moxie, Vulcan, Ragman, Sweet Lips, Tippler, Drunkard, etc.

* “There was a dog named Satan at the White House”

* 1776, by David McCullough (Bookshop | Amazon)

* John Adams, by David McCullough (Bookshop | Amazon)

* Why the Internet was invented

-Matt Welch’s Caribbean identity crisis at Da Pig Beach

-The State of the Union aka a two-hour hostage note

-A greatest hits, lowest lights compilation for President Camacho

-The futility of “speeching” your way through a math-defying approval rating

-You can’t talk your way through a 38% approval rating

-Let the hockey boys drink

-Dan Crenshaw is allowed to be mad

-The RNC’s new guard of real fucking bozos and sycophantic dick-tots

-JD Vance as anti-corruption czar and populist beard for the crypto-regime

-Tariffs and The Gilded Age corruption engine, now with “ballroom fund” exclusions

-Drug prices are down 600%,….so do you owe me money?

-Moynihan screaming drug questions at his glitching phone

-Marxist Republicans and the gobbledygook of corporate housing bans

-Maybe let’s just abolish the State of the Union

-Dispatches from the Purple State: An interview with Senator Elissa Slotkin

-Stop kicking allies in the teeth to play grab-ass with dictators

-Walking out on Lindsey Graham’s Danish disdain

-AI thinks Moynihan is a neo-folk neo-Nazi

-Four years of war and Ukraine gets a one-sentence hand wave

-Anthropic vs. Hegseth: Code is speech until the Pentagon wants a frictionless kill-switch

-We tried collectivism once. Everyone starved. The end.

-Gemini identifies the mystery caller as Friedrich Nietzsche, chimney sweep

-About that BBC BAFTA N-Word Drama….

-“You’re acting like Israel” is the ultimate Park Slope breakup trump card

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

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

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YouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn