The Fifth Column

Kash chugs it back with the toothless champions

Trump and his locker room talk with the boys

State of the Union and the Six Year Itch

A uniquely conspiratorial moment in an already conspiratorial nation

PizzaGate nostalgia hour

Fact checking dies in public

A laundry list of made up shit that’s not even close to being true

Baby-eating melodrama meets Beetlejuic…

* Damon Root’s book Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court

* Basic civics, reintroduced

* Root’s mood in five words

* What becomes of this useless Congress?

* Why not 9–0? Root on the three dissenters

* The “major questions doctrine” translated

* Profiles in inconsistenty

* Doesn’t matter! Trump will “destroy your country” either way!

* The hangover

* Gorsu…

-The dork Star Wars cantina of famous biographers

-Jefferson’s hypocrisy and the impossibility of paragon standards

-Lincoln was not an abolitionist

-The Howard Zinnification of American history

-Ambiguity as the ideological propagandist’s mortal enemy

-The true (New Testament) saint of America

-George H.W. Bush’s blunt admission

-This president would cut your throat for a vote, then be the first to call 911

-Exhaustion as a strategy, and the establishment’s failure to meet the moment

-Autocratic narcissism and the turn toward political sadism

-Despair is a sin

-Political loss as seasonal, not existential

-What will the next side do with inherited expanded executive power?

-14th Amendment redemption clauses as high-level nerd porn

-Amusing ourselves to death in a visual-media politics

-Katie Britt’s private doubt, and the ecosystem that manufactured it

-Lincoln couldn’t write a bad sentence; Reagan could land the line

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

Buy Jon Meacham’s anthology, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Bookshop | Amazon)

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-Please say hello to our new Sunset Park neighbor

-The American Chávez

-The Nobel Prize Grudge

-The Dictatorship That Remained

-Political Pilgrims and Failed Experiments

-Maria the Maid and the, “Gay Marriage Lady” slur

-A Masterclass in Macro-Failure

-The Media Pioneer

-The Illusion of Democracy

-Economic Voodoo

-The “Police” StrategyGet William’s book, Things …

For Christmas 2024, I was gifted Robert Sullivan’s delightful My American Revolution: A Modern Expedition Through History’s Forgotten Battlegrounds. I devoured it within 24 hours. It is no exaggeration to say that the book is responsible as anything else for this little Semiquincetennial miniseries you are (hopefully!) enjoying.

As you will hear in this episode, Sullivan at the time of publication (2012) was not unlike I am now – a south Brooklyn writer dude & dad in his mid-50s who enjoyed walking around and noticing that whole neglected swaths of the neighborhood were actually important sites during and after the Revolutionary War. The spirit of the book, and hopefully this miniseries, is that there is zero shame, only the upsides of discovery and delight, in choosing to enjoy the history all around you. In fact I’m pretty sure Producer Jason used Sullivan’s example to make a (mostly disastrous) crossing of the Delaware this past Christmas….

Please buy the book! You’ll enjoy it, and more good sales = more good guests. And enjoy a conversation about Brooklyn’s Revolutionary past, forgotten corners of the war, and how places keep (or lose) their history over time.

* “Weird” is in the eye of the beholder

* Books as ideas you can’t shake off

* Watching the Bicentennial tall ships come in

* Dad was a printer; son uses flip-phones

* The “craziest war crime burned in American memory”

* “You get so much from being away from a place”

* Every historical memory dies, baby that’s a fact

* You can’t just take a boat across New York Harbor?

* Book-organizing secret: The calendar

* The forgotten Battle of Golden Hill

* Hercules Mulligan: Thinker, tailor, Revolutionary spy

* The “coldest winter on record in North America”

* Pro-Philly historical bias

* The “only meteorologist to have a battle named after him in Italy”

* Stolen poetical valor

* America’s forgotten Dunkirk

* WHERE ARE THE GOWANUS BONES?

* Perennially underrated spontaneous mutual aid

* The Invention of George Washington, by Paul K. Longmore (Bookshop | Amazon)

* The Revolutionary-era books by William Hogeland (Amazon)

* The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (Bookshop | Amazon)

Intro sequence by the one and only Arch Stanton!

Outro music (audio podcast only) by the great Eli Lake!

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-John Bolton, Olympic Curling Hawk

-Arguing with the 60s Since 1970

-I’m kind of a Libertarian (Minus the Defense Part)

-Iraq was actually kind of perfect

-Federalist Papers as Foreign Aid (or maybe porn would suffice)

-The Arab Spring Brain-Break

-Afghanistan is Not Exactly a Nation

-Regime Change, Case-by-Case

-The Forward Defense of New Jersey

-Ukraine and the Gray Zone Trap

-The Nuclear Press Release

-Tucker Carlson wants you to be scared of this man

-Trump’s Real Estate Foreign Policy

-The Face of the Regime in Venezuela

-The President’s Retribution…. and how worried should the Ambassador be right now?

-Who Will Take Him Down First?

-Tulsi Gabbard’s Intelligence Clown Show

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 reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow The Fifth Column

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-The Invertebrate Caucus

-The New Tax Party

-Ruby Ridge and Waco Redux

-The Last Man Standing

-The Crypto Appearance Problem

-Government as a Mob Vig

-The Fairness Trap

-The Colombia Save, or how Rand prevented a military escalation by sending a quick text message to the President.

-Epstein Transparency Collateral

-Is Trump still “the best president of his lifet…

A deeply serious and important conversation over some listener-provided Scotch about the Super Bowl halftime show(s), the death of ad copywriting, dunking in the WNBA, pond skating, and the other Moynihan Report.

•Oh good, Kmele started drinking early

•About that game…

•The horrible stereotypes in that halftime show

•He bangs

•The Canadian caravan

•Malfunctio…

John Avlon stops by only to learn he’s also in the Epstein files, why the Daily Beast should’ve sold dick pills, and why we need to rebuild guardrails on what some call “stolen land”

* Where John is surprised to learn he’s in the Epstein files and suddenly remembers he has plans not to be here

* The Ceaușescu of Long Beach

* Moynihan actually voted for this guy!

* Georgia, the FBI, and the Trump 2.0 purity test industrial complex

* Asking for a friend who keeps wondering, “are US elections legit?”

* This is not a libertarian podcast

* The original sin is hyperpolarization

* Tucker at CPAC, the heretic hunters, and the sound of the crowd turning

* Give the left/right base what it wants and watch your incentives rot

* We should have sold dick pills at The Daily Beast and funded a small country

* The hell with the guardrails, we want our conspiracies god dammit!

* Oral culture wins, written culture loses, and the Washington Post dims the lights

* How can we do this podcast “on stolen land?”

* What happened to Rudy Giuliani?

* The Traveling Wilburys of Government

* Asymmetric polarization and why the crazies are not equally distributed

Get John’s latest book, Lincoln and the Fight For Peace (Bookshop | Amazon)

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 reader-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

• Moynihan and Welch are in the Epstein files

• A very indiscriminate and humiliating dump

• Bannon & Epstein

• Black boxes over kids, and the express train to Satanic Panic

• Embarrassment is no reason

• Moynihan’s Melania Review

• Billie Jean is not my brother, but Jimmy Carter is my mother

• That’s an awfully small ring to kiss for such a wealthy man

• Move …