441 episodes

Your weekly rhetorical assault on the on the news cycle, the people who make it, and occasionally ourselves. Kmele Foster (Freethink), Michael Moynihan (Vice), and Matt Welch (Reason) talk and laugh and drink their way to at least quasi-sanity in a world gone mad, often with the aid of clean and articulate guests. Weekly Members Only subscription edition often comes with listener mail and professional-quality (if inappropriate) singing. Analysis. Commentary. Sedition.

wethefifth.substack.com

The Fifth Column Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch

    • News
    • 4.4 • 132 Ratings

Your weekly rhetorical assault on the on the news cycle, the people who make it, and occasionally ourselves. Kmele Foster (Freethink), Michael Moynihan (Vice), and Matt Welch (Reason) talk and laugh and drink their way to at least quasi-sanity in a world gone mad, often with the aid of clean and articulate guests. Weekly Members Only subscription edition often comes with listener mail and professional-quality (if inappropriate) singing. Analysis. Commentary. Sedition.

wethefifth.substack.com

    Members Only #210 - Odds, Bobs, Feminist Bank Tellers, and the Records That Changed Us

    Members Only #210 - Odds, Bobs, Feminist Bank Tellers, and the Records That Changed Us

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

    * Italian bootlegs
    * Warm Fanta
    * Drinking on your European vacation
    * The Comfort of Strangers
    * Pre-internet travel
    * Jake Siegel: a moderate dissent…and Fifth reaction
    * Probability and the feminist bank teller
    * What happens when people call you bad names in public
    * 9 times out of 10, they were rapping
    * Awful media critics
    * What would CH do?
    * Steve Albini
    * “And the songs that…

    • 20 min
    #454 - A Conspiracy So Vast (w/ Jacob Siegel)

    #454 - A Conspiracy So Vast (w/ Jacob Siegel)

    So many of you have written us demanding the return of Jacob Siegel that when word got to us that he was back in New York, we hunted him down and demanded that he submit to a *third* appearance on The Fifth. We discovered that Comrade Siegel, a gravelly voiced veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq and senior writer at Tablet, is hard at work on a book, an expansion of his already expansive essay “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century.” So we sat back in our chairs, asked a few questions, and basically handed the mic to Jake for an extended peroration on the Disinformation Industrial Complex, Trump’s foreign policy, why we should end American aid to Israel, and whether or not his unified theory of censorship counts as a “conspiracy theory.”
    We assume this one will provoke lots of listener mail. So agree or disagree, send it over and perhaps we’ll do a special “Responding to Jake” episode over at Substack.


    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethefifth.substack.com/subscribe

    • 1 hr 34 min
    Members Only #209 - Rotten (and Racist) in Denmark

    Members Only #209 - Rotten (and Racist) in Denmark

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

    * Shogun erasure
    * Revolutionary accents
    * A debate on Israel and a subsequent anti-Moynihan calumny
    * Alas, anti-Semitism is common in certain parts of the world
    * Pointing this out seems pretty obvious
    * The WAV file
    * My melanated baby
    * Teaching kids versus raising kids
    * Indoctrinating someone else’s kids into your way of thinking is some serious cult shit
    * Torturing …

    • 21 min
    #453 - No Step on Snek

    #453 - No Step on Snek

    * Children of the revolution
    * No journalists allowed!
    * The Italian Gadsden flag
    * Oh no, Matt Welch…no, no, no
    * In defense of …Al Sharpton?
    * Dead soul singers
    * The great Baby Huey
    * Forgiving student debt is insane
    * College is dumb but it makes economic sense…for now
    * The New York Times and NPR
    * Jihad rehab
    * Twitter welcomes another sexless fascist


    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethefifth.substack.com/subscribe

    • 1 hr 19 min
    Members Only #208 - Bananas Foster

    Members Only #208 - Bananas Foster

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

    * The Banana genocide
    * Professor, professor…let’s stick to the facts
    * A conspiracy documentary full of cranks and losers
    * 60 journalism professors find a story they cannot countenance
    * Listeners on ADHD and Adderall
    * RFK in CA
    * Nodding along with Lemon
    * How to talk to an Auschwitz survivor
    * The trickiness of memory
    * Two sets of rules
    * Peaceful protesters get a call fr…

    • 17 min
    #452 - The Strawberry Statement 2024 / The Eternal Adderall Shortage (w/ C.J. Ciaramella)

    #452 - The Strawberry Statement 2024 / The Eternal Adderall Shortage (w/ C.J. Ciaramella)

    A two-for-one offering from The Fifth: first, the lads discuss the ongoing student stupidities, free speech and protest, Kmele at TED, and how your views are probably pretty normal (ed. note: considering the full-court coverage of the Columbia intifada, it’s sort of surprising that no one is referencing this terrible 1970 film, written by Ad-Roc’s dad). And then, some bonus content with Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella, who joins to discuss the government war on Adderall, his own ADHD diagnosis, and why it took him two months to get his prescription filled.


    This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wethefifth.substack.com/subscribe

    • 1 hr 39 min

Customer Reviews

4.4 out of 5
132 Ratings

132 Ratings

BruBald ,

Bad accents

Needs more bad accents from MM.

Bazookabombadil ,

Very smart

They know everything that you’re supposed to know . No nuance just institutional snobbery

note nut ,

Insightful and predictive

I began listening to The Fifth Column a few weeks ago. I started with episode 1 and have now made my way through the first 62 episodes. Having lived through the events discussed within each episode it is both fascinating and compelling to contrast and compare the comments, predictions and insights with the retrospective knowledge of the events as they have actually unfolded. One of the best podcasts I have listened to. Thank you.

Top Podcasts In News

The Daily
The New York Times
Serial
Serial Productions & The New York Times
Front Burner
CBC
Global News Podcast
BBC World Service
The Decibel
The Globe and Mail
Modi's India: Understood
CBC

You Might Also Like

The Reason Roundtable
The Reason Roundtable
Blocked and Reported
Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie
The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie
The Glenn Show
Glenn Loury
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Free Press
Quillette Podcast
Quillette