440 episodes
The Fifth Column Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch
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4.6 • 2.6K Ratings
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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
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#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 -
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 … -
#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 -
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… -
#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 -
Members Only #207 - Columbia Breakdown: Next Stop Baader Meinhof?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com
* Swedish breakdown
* Columbia breakdown
* The continued rise of American extremism
* The politics of “genocide”
* The politics of propaganda
* Chicago expectations
* A newborn in the Fifdom
* Our Batya episode
* Trusting anti-trust?
* The NPR excel spreadsheet
* Books on McCarthy
* Three best presidents?
* The Watergate conspiracy is at least fun to believe
Customer Reviews
Hilarious
First discovered these guys on YouTube Megyn Kelly Show. Always entertaining!
Not even worth a hate listen
Predicable anti woke hand wringing. Typically describe some one not holding their opinion as dumb college kids and rarely reflect on any of their own clearly awful opinions on supporting the Iraq war while championing Israel’s invasion. Also Michael has a weird obsession with AOC that seems parallel that of a spurned lover. Sad.
Did I change or did you guys?
I’m not sure which but for a very long time this podcast has been such a voice of reason; a place where events and ideas are discussed and debated in good faith, representing each side fairly, and with an appropriate amount of levity to keep things interesting. I could listen to you guys present and debate challenging topics and learn while I clarified where I land, laughing all the way. It was so refreshing. But lately it’s become more snark than informative or enlightening discussion. I’m not saying you need to be the end all/be all for your audience but something seems to be missing. The takes seem to be more and more just judging from a distance and making fun of certain people/perspectives rather than engaging with the meat of the opposing arguments so the audience can learn what you know as journalists. The Russia/Ukraine war is a good example of this. Perhaps I missed an episode where you hashed this out but from the beginning it’s been a very overt “obviously Russia is in the wrong and Ukraine is in the right” type certainty without explaining why the dissenting views and all the various historical evidence supporting said views should be dismissed. It’s been many months since I’ve been able to get through a whole episode without turning it off bc it’s not really helping me understand the local and global landscape the way it used to.