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

A double-album worth of great content this week. Start off with Moynihan talking to Matt and Kmele about his Free Press piece charting the collapse of Vice and him forthcoming piece charting the collapse of the Black Panther Party. Then the lads chat about the weirdness of the New York Trump trial, Israel in Rafah, and lots more. And stick around for Kmele’s conversation with the Lennon-McCartney, the Lieber and Stoller of podcasts, Matt Boll and Andy Mills, the duo who brought you The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, among other modern audio classics. They’re back with a new series called Reflector, a “show about the strange experience of being human.” We don’t know *exactly* what that means, but we absolutely guarantee that it will be a work of unparalleled brilliance. Check out episode one here.


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

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

* The LP snoozer
* Remembering that lady who said that gross thing about kids
* You will never play in the NBA, baby
* Zone of Interest redux, briefly
* The Ann Landers portion begins
* Should I stop being an academic and become a cop who lurks on dating apps?
* The anti-Semitic date
* I can’t be brave and call bullshit. So what do I do?
* Well, it all depends
* How to talk about…

* The most serious race controversy of 2024: that lady basketball player
* “I mean, I've been a huge fan of Blackpink for years and I've never heard a single one of their songs.:
* Snek and the Supreme Court
* Everyone's wife is Ginny Thoma
* The defense rests
* Local news and crappy journalists
* In defense of…Marilyn Mosby?
* Israel and the ICC
* Enter Sibarium: the UCLA Medical School controversy


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

* At a party
* At Fenway
* Losers (which is apparently already a show)
* Jake, Dana, Donald, and Joe
* Cui bono?
* How Joe wins
* How Donald wins
* The NY trial continues…
* Mitt Romney would pardon DT
* “Attacked our legal system”
* The new Noem
* Post-Donald, where does the party go?
* How goes it in Ukraine?


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

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…

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