Explore every episode of the podcast The Fifth Column

-Fairfield, CT. Nov 12th. Get tickets while you can

-We will have an Election Night livestream. Booze, guests, and probable disaster

-Our mystery guest didn’t couldn’t make it today. We won’t name names, but we’ll give you some subtle clues.

-Steve Witkoff discovered Vladimir Putin’s humanitarian side.

-Trump has some thoughts about Zelenskyy. andPutin gets a pass.

-Americans ranked their favorite countries. Where does Russia rank?

-A very stiff competition for the Senate’s biggest idiot and the “Not One Inch” myth

-the dumbest man in the Senate meets the dumbest man in media

-Donald Trump and his love of men

-Midterm Madness

-Vivek vs. Amy Acton, and the attack ad from hell.

-The tone and tenor of American politics is somehow worse than ever

-Alina Habba, Ric Grenell, and the alleged $50 million pardon racket.

-JD Vance answered a question about corruption. Ten thousand weasels applauded.

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

JOIN US: https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html

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We are doing a live show in Fairfield, CT on November 12th. You should come. Details below.

-Jacob Siegel on raising his kids in Israel

-Who benefits from a fractured US-Israel relationship?

-JD Vance had endorsements to spare, just not for Netanyahu

-Israel prepared for life without America’s special relationship

-An entirely natural detour to France

-French…

The guys put America’s most famous political forecaster, Nate Silver, to work… separating real electoral shifts from political noise, and confronting the uncomfortable possibility that everyone is just guessing.

-The House leaned Democratic, the Senate was a toss-up…then came Labor Day

-The first thing Nate Silver does every morning

-$4.50 gas, AI data centers, and T…

Yes, we want accolades. Yes, we’re shamelessly asking for your vote:

VOTE for The Fifth Column as the Best News & Politics Show

Yemisi Egbewole is here and we will figure out how to pronounce her name….next time

-A Democratic consultant defending Fox News out of the gate

-Was Mike Lindell ever really a crackhead?

-Ladies and gentlemen, the new White House press secretary, Katie Zachariah

-Did we fuck Scott Jennings?

-How does a WH press secretary actually prepare?

-Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $100,000 AmEx problem

-James Talarico’s imaginary stay in an Ohio psych ward

-the art of standing out among 435 members of Congress

-Abdul El-Sayed vs Mike Rogers in Michigan

-Jon Ossoff and the case for normal Democrats

-JD Vance’s interesting definition of socialism

-Midterm Madness on Zachariah, Alaska, and Michigan

-Trump gets it right on data centers. Until he doesn’t.

-Brian Kilmeade stands up for Ukraine against Rachel Compost Duffy

-Come watch us live in Connecticut!

-What exactly is Third Way?

-Yemisi’s heresies on crime and climate

-Immigration and the Jamaican-Nigerian experience

-Kmele and the Blacks of Connecticut

-Where is the Democratic Party headed, and how much does the DSA matter?

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

JOIN US: https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html

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“There are no ordinary lives and everyone has a story”

-Sam Roberts’ father takes him to see the Rosenbergs’ funeral

-Fifty years in journalism and an unexpected career writing obituaries

-Anna Nicole Smith and the brutality of British obituaries

-Charlie Rangel’s complicated legacy

-Who deserves a New York Times obituary?

-Writing Rudy Giuliani’s obituary b…

Did we mention we’re nominated…did you vote yet? If not, what in the actual fuck is your problem?

-all the bad words are here

-come to Fairfield on November 12th! (https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html)

-Trump in Nebraska….always a good sign for Republicans

-Anal sex, picnics, breakfast in bed, lobster

-Europe is melting! (still)

-who will replace Macron?

-France’s immigration problem

-Sweden discovers gun crime

-America, the assimilation machine

-meritocracy is fucking fantastic

-questions are bad when ethnicities are in front of them

-Vivek, the big guy and the worst swing in baseball

-Midterm Madness where candidate quality counts

-if you had to arrest one person at the New York Times…

-MAGA-curious CBS boss and The Daily Beast

-Theo Von discovers socialism

JOIN US: https://quickcenter.fairfield.edu/2026-27-season-calendar/lectures/the-fifth-column-podcast.html

The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show. PLEASE HELP US TAKE HOME THE GOLD (or whatever the statue is made of, assuming there is one).

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Marshall spent 25 years covering oil and gas at Raymond James before retiring this week. He joins the guys to explain what’s actually driving prices higher, why diesel matters more than most people realize, and how war, refinery outages, and shrinking reserves have left the global energy market with very little room for error.

Also, is Marshall the real

…and Moynihan discusses Harvard’s artist in residence. Also, we’ve been nominated for something! vote for us in for the Signal Awards!

-Kmele’s Cross-Country Trail of Tears

-Trump Praises the Latinos

-Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble

-Coming Soon: Jason’s Weird Fetishes

-Trump Talks to Time

-The Weave We Go

-No Fatties, No Trannies, No Weirdos

-It’s Worse Because It’s Worse

-Saving Western Civilization, One Taxpayer-Funded Ad at a Time

-Sen. Eric Schmitt’s Awesome Week

-The Indian Question

-Roxane Gay, Harvard Medical School Artist in Residence

-Midterm Madness: New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio and L.A.

-How Not to Hijack an Israeli Plane

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

The Fifth Column is in the running for Best News & Politics show. PLEASE HELP US TAKE HOME THE GOLD (or whatever the statue is made of, assuming there is one).

ALSO: Vote for The Moynihan Report for:Best video podcastBest guest (William Shatner)Best episode

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Finally, a break from politics and a discussion about…love. If you like Sarah, check out her podcast with friend of The Fifth Column Nancy Rommelmann Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast

-Sarah is back on the wagon (not really!)

-The married man, the younger man, and the New Orleans homicide detective

-Women’s tears are a recording device

-Kavanaugh, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves

…

-being gay, doing drugs, that’s the Szeps life

-Moynihan’s anti-Australian bigotry

-the Lupita Nyong’o pronunciation challenge

-Why is daddy wearing boobs?

-this actor can play any ethnicity

-Josh’s dad, the George Costanza of Australia

-UN Clip-o-rama

-in defense of the UN, sort of

-can America afford to piss off all its allies?

-Greta Thunberg goes to the Rena…

-Pakman is a fan of this show. Will he regret saying this?

-Kmele’s cult-adjacent upbringing

-Pakman’s Argentina upbringing

-Macklemore, Robert Kraft and the limits of independent media

-Do people actually control their media diet?

-Nick Fuentes, Fishback and Twitter not being real life

-Pakman puts himself at the tip of the junk food pyramid

-Should The Fifth…

And is he gonna get that press secretary job or not?

-Jennings the teetotaler

-wtf happened to Moynihan’s hair?

-Jennings’ working-class Kentucky origin story

-back when Kentucky + West Virginia were swing states

-Rush Limbaugh + Paul Harvey University

-what would Rush make of $9K for stay-at-home moms?

-what kind of Republican is Scott Jennings anyway?

-why is Trump so unpopular?

-tariffs, potash + the new Republican orthodoxy

-the Greenland victory (?) lap begins

-Scott’s muscular Republicanism meets the universities

-Van Jones vs. his own side

-Trump vs. CNN and the White House press pool

-Scott Jennings, future press secretary?

-Trump + Mamdani, together again

-Texas gets way too interesting

-Georgia gets weird

-trying to have the one pundit take nobody else has

-do not get in Scott Jennings’ personal space

-does Trump have a corruption problem?

-Trump crypto + the Kentucky coffee can

-whatever happened to Republican “family values”?

-Mitch McConnell is alive

-has Tucker left the MAGA coalition?

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 is a viewer/listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Tyler Austin Harper, staff writer for The Atlantic and co-host of the Time To Say Goodbye podcast joins Michael C. Moynihan & Matt Welch to talk about extreme fishing, picking socialsts as your fighters, and his recent pot-stirring essay “Why I quit the tenure track.”

•It’s morning in America, or is it Japan?

•The Night Fisher

•Worse than Al Qaeda•A pro-America leftist

•Why Tyler Austin Harper quit the …

-Simplify, simplify, simplify…

-Do people like Jim as a boss?

-The two things to screen for in prospective employees

-The humility of Mike Allen

-AI and the newsroom

-The way you consume news is about to completely change

-Are we at the Napster stage of AI?

-The demand for local news didn’t die

-DEI without the corporate activism

-Axios refuses to take a stand

-Moynihan’s Vice postmortem

-Jim used to be a hothead. Mostly.

-AI might kill us. Why it matters

-Kmele vs. the AI doomers

-Hugging Face and the runaway AI problem

-Stuxnet was the dumb version

-Midterm Madness goes off-script

-Who should actually be Person of the Year?

-Too much Trump porn at the New York Times?

-Jim simplifies Trump’s three biggest precedent breaks

-Why Trump does it anyway

Read Simplify: Do 50 Percent More with 50 Percent Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz

(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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-RIP Andrew Wimsatt, a true friend of the show and beloved member of the Fifth Column community

-And in lighter news, it’s the 25th anniversary of 9/11

-Trump’s 9/11 story

-Why we’re called The Fifth Column

-When Matt Welch welcomed us to war

-Moynihan moved to New York on September 10, 2001

-How much of your memory of the day is actually real?

-Mary Beard and other “the US had it coming” takes

-Little Eichmanns and the root-causes Olympics

-Did we win the War on Terror?

-You get $5,000! And you get $5,000!

-Midterm Madness and the two Dan Sullivans

-Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP speedrun to zero

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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As well as Epstein, and the conspiracy theories that refuse to die

-the most famous person from Troy, NY?

-shut your whore mouth, Producer Jason

-we actually do have a serious guest today

-a radical re-purposing of the Justice Department

-James Comey and the seashells

-lowercase justice

-Tom Homan and the $50,000 CAVA bag

-Abscam and the lost art of government …

Jim is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Wall Street Journal columnist

-The tractor beam of sexuality

-James B. Meigs is here

-Tucker Carlson is just asking questions. He’s less interested in the answers

-It’s 9/11 season. Call in the OG debunker

-Jet fuel didn’t have to melt steel

-Death threats for… Popular Mechanics

-Tucker finds Israel in the JFK files

-Revisiting Loose Change, 20 years later

-Conspiracy theories thrive in the ruins of journalism

-Data centers or, hear us out, server farms

-The mailbag interrogates Mr. Science Man

-Hugging Face and the AI agents chatting amongst themselves

-Midterm Madness goes to Texas

-Talarico vs. Paxton, somehow a toss-up

-Flock cameras solve crimes. They also know where you’ve been

-Nature, Jason Arday, and the death of fact-checking

-UFOs are real. The aliens remain elusive

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 viewer/listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Look who decided to come back for this episode! (for the visually impaired, it’s the one and only Kmele Foster)

-A Caribbean anti-colonial fantasy

-A gay Lady Chatterley’s Lover… and hockey

-Oh, Milo

-Because it’s funny. It’s a joke

-Milo, the Tates, and the “it was all a bit” defense

-ICE, deportations, and discovering empathy the hard way

-He gave as good as…

Holy shit, The Moynihan Report has RETURNED.

Watch the episode, subscribe on YouTube, and sign up for Moynihan’s Substack while you’re at it.

Now, back to the Fifth:

-why you have to watch this podcast

-Sanna Marin…for the policy

-Finding Kmele Foster

-Welch returns from Montreal to report that the French lost

-life in the time of Trade War

-NPR finally solves reparations

-tariffs, hockey sticks, and remedial economics

-JD Vance is still not funny

-Polymarket bets on Canada

-Tucker discovers Christian Russia

-Clip Roulette returns

-Tim Curry, Richard E. Grant, Producer Jason’s inexplicable defense of Hudson Hawk

-Bret Weinstein solves the Charlie Kirk assassination

-Ana Kasparian keeps making new friends

-Mamdani, Muhammad and the death of secularism

-a bit more Clip-O-Rama

-Tuck and the Short King discover 107 million illegal immigrants

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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How does Semafor make money and what is the best magazine in the world? Well…why don’t you smash that subscribe button and/or whip out that credit card if you want the real insider information from media’s best?

-Karen Attiah and the Charlie Kirk quote that wasn’t real

-Firing people for tweets + the last good account on Twitter

-Why is Semafor worth so mu…

Stephanie Slade’s new book, Fusionism: Liberty, Virtue, and the Future of the American Right, is available for pre-order now!

-J.D. Vance seizes the means of production

-Let’s define “conservative” in case you forgot

-So what the hell is Fusionism?

-From free markets to owning the libs

-Cultural resentment > economic anxiety

-Is there a reset after Trump?

-Whe…

-Greetings…oh, fuck

-Welch has a bone to pick with Ben Dreyfuss

-Clip Roulette

-Tucker and the Demon Bomb

-Jason Arday, martyr?

-The Jonah Lehrer comparison

-The Samantha Power mic disaster

-Fuck you Joaquin

-John Mearsheimer, Stephen F. Cohen and the Russian apologists

-Ukraine didn’t go away

-Trump, Kim Jong-un and the South Korea war games

-Midterm Madness / Polymarket, wha happen?

-Median Strategies and the fake poll

-Adam Bonica, Marc Elias and scamming the elderly

-Is Cuba a dictatorship? Apparently a difficult question

-The Padilla Affair / Slobo Googling

-Theft as a “biological need”

-Chocolate City

-Stay tuned for más Moynihan Report

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

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We’re joined by former ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran, who now publishes Real Patriotism with Terry Moran on Substack and hosts a podcast of the same name on YouTube.

-Terry reads that tweet

-Fired, suspended, non-renewed…whatever

-Any regrets?

-Network news is dying and everyone’s jumping ship

-The 9/11 flag-pin controversy

-Hire more people who voted for Trump

-Why not …

-Kmele is out of Adderall

-Did anybody actually watch this Tucker and Hunter interview?

-“Montrosity” and other difficult words

-The adventures of Proximity Hong

-The curious case of Jason Arday

-Is there any chance Jesse Singal is racist?

-AOC discovers Woke 1.0 was crazy

-Shane Gillis and the conspiracy of enforcing things nobody believed

-Thank you, Thom Tillis. Also, fuck you.

-Funding the other side’s whackos

-Mamdani declares war on Amazon

-A general rent strike. Over one cockroach.

-David Remnick meets the DSA

-Kmele gets swarmed by the Hasan bots

-So, how great was Mao?

-Midterm Madness and the 2028 Democratic sweepstakes

-Clip Roulette

-Kmele tries to explain himself. It does not help.

-Can America get at least a busted Boris Johnson?

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

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-a pre-obit for the esteemed David Frum

-involuntarily unionized at The Atlantic

-spy novels, bureaucrats and expense reports

-turning down Bill Buckley’s golden ticket

-prosperity, security and how quickly it can all disappear

-Frum is forever a man of 1989

-God makes you lucky, then convinces you you’re smart

-Tucker Carlson was always capable of many things

-falling flat on your back isn’t progress

-the Michigan Senate choice from hell

-Democrats discover Trump’s permission structure

-Midterm Madness in Michigan

-the polling industry has a phone problem

-politics for people who can afford to lose

-“I saw you coming so I could stop you”

-immigration restriction without the Trumpism

-fascism has the better sales pitch than communism

-what Donald Trump loves besides himself

-the conservative future Frum got very wrong and other reflections

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

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Michael Moynihan has returned from his Italian sojourn where he barely escaped arrest…

-Moynihan has the clap or something

-Who exactly is the demographic for this show?

-Moynihan’s European vacation involved bus karaoke, too much drinking, and now the shakes

-Matt went to Cooperstown with Bill Schulz…

-The forgotten insanity of the Peekskill riots

-Paul Robe…

So that’s where these Genius Grants come from…

-Most roads lead back to Prague for Matt Welch

-about that letter…six paragraphs, $5 million in free publicity and Harper’s back in the mainstream

-It was NAFTA, not woke, that elected Trump. Or was it?

-Illegal immigration is a wage issue

-Who still believes free trade is the answer to everything?

-Vietnam made …

Jesse Singal of Blocked and Reported and Singal-Minded fills Michael Moynihan’s special diabetic chair to discuss Fauci’s diaries, broken institutions, runaway AI, LeBron and Mamdani Mart.

-Moynihan out, Jesse Singal in

-Bari Weiss hired everyone except Jesse

-The Prince of Science re-enrages everyone (or at least Rand Paul)

-Gell-Mann amnesia and the collapse of institutional trust

-The media needed a COVID daddy

-An OpenAI model escaped the sandbox

-The analogy of the paperclip machine and how it consumed the universe

-Cambridge protected alleged plagiarist Jason Arday

-Midterm Madness, Ohio governor race version

-Kmele feels that LeBron will never love him but he doesn’t want to talk about it

-Three grown men relived their greatest pickup games

-Kmele wanted the gods back in The Odyssey

-Mamdani Mart promised groceries at 30 percent off

-Billy Bob Thornton returns from hell in White Knight (a Kmele Foster joint)

-Nazi dinosaurs stalked Jews through Schindler’s Park

-Jesse discovered second-order effects

-Not every strange obsession with Israel was antisemitism

-Rent stabilization has worked great for millionaires

-No French goodbye for Kmele

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 listener-viewer supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Frank Dikötter is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and one of the foremost historians of modern China. His research in overlooked and restricted Communist Party archives has transformed our understanding of Maoist rule.

-Frank Dikötter is kind of Dutch, but not really

-Writing the definitive history of Maoist horror

-Edgar Snow a…

We talk about what the media still gets wrong about Trump, what losing CNN did to him, and why he believes more political violence is coming.

-Kmele sizes Chris up and… is this podcast 10% gay?

-From Fox, to ABC, to CNN

-Did the media make Trump president?

-Celebrity, discontent and everything the media missed

-Being right about what’s wrong

-The duopoly is killing us. DSA isn’t helping.

-Cuomo, Cuomo and Cuomo Crime Time

-Scott Jennings, JD Vance and the rewards of picking a side

-The media discovers capital-T Truth and loses its curiosity

-Trump’s corruption and the limits of whataboutism

-Mario Cuomo should have worn a toga

-Voters don’t want the flaws. They want the disruption.

-There will be more political violence

-Matt Lauer crosses the street to express his condolences

-Broadcasting from the basement and losing an identity

-Illegal immigration and its convenient distortions

-Tucker, Fredo and Mike Tyson

-Kmele can take Joe Rogan. Chris has notes.

-AOC gets savvier; Kmele would prefer an accounting

-I don’t make mistakes anymore. They’re just lies

-COVID couldn’t transcend the culture war

-Midterm Madness

-the first presidential candidates that Matt Welch, Chris Cuomo, and Kmele voted for

-Andrew Cuomo and the outsider problem

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

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Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, co-written with Jonathan Swan, is out now.

-yes, he superglues the gold fixtures in the Oval Office

-Maggie Haberman and her very irritating competitor Jonathan Swan

-Project 2025 and Stephen Miller’s search for lawyers who would get to “yes”

-what needs to be in the paper as soon as possible… a…

-Bret Stephens, Mexican?

-Bret’s naked grandmother and the Trotsky/Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo connection

-The family saga of Stalinists, refugees and Reagan Republicans

-Learning to love America through tap water and cops you don’t have to bribe

-Belgium, a sick little, horrible place

-America, land of late bloomers

-The socialist Sweden Bernie remembers no lon…

-The many sins of fattie John J. Cafaro

-The Moynihan Report will return

-Hand jobs and the intellectual life of West Hollywood

-Release the Welch canceled-songs playlist

-The Iran deal is dead. The war is back.

-Why did Iran blow it up? Why does a dog lick his balls?

-Air power has never toppled a regime

-The anti-globalists discover the Strait of Hormuz

-Israel’s secret Ahmadinejad project

-In partial defense of the late Lindsey Graham

-Politics is gross. Stop loving politicians.

-Fellating is best done behind closed doors

-“There is no they. There is only we. And we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

-Midterm Madness comes to Michigan

-Haley Stevens brings a little bit of stick-it-to-’em

-Is this DSA thing real?

-Colorado nominates a man who first killed at seven (he thinks)

-Two fatal ICE shootings in two weeks

-Ann Widdecombe is murdered. Britain shrugs.

-Kmele attempts the Caitlin Clark/data center crossover. It does not land.

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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Robert Wright’s new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, is out now (Bookshop | Amazon)

•“Conference” = group sex

•21 years of successfully avoiding podcast wealth

•Interviewing the godfather of AI

•A tiger and a rattlesnake

•Matt gets quizzed on LLMs

•The God Test

•The shock of vibe coding

•China and the superintelligence arms race

•Re…

The great Kat Rosenfield joins us to discuss the ongoing fallout from rape allegations against Maine U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner published Monday by Politico.

When you’re a star, they let you mispronounce their name.

•The Fifth Column (whiskey) sells out!

•America’s birthday month

•Loathing Graham Platner before it was cool

•The least weird thing about Platner

•The Times is on it

•A working class hero is something to be

A•bout that beard

•The flaws are a feature, not a bug

•We all know a guy like this

•Christine Blasey Ford enters the chat•Michael Tracey exists

•Kmele expresses skepticism•It’s not consensual, it’s DiGiorno•On second thought, let’s not play the Fuentes clip

•Michell Goldberg’s mea culpa

•Fruit baskets

•Midterm Madness… the Graham Platner edition

•Stephen King for senate? •Missing Moynihan

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-The Fifth Column whiskey racket begins

-Matt moves during a heat wave… Peter Meijer reports for duty

-Meijer, class traitor, explains the pied-à-terre tax

-Mayor Mamdani balances the budget, if you ignore the bailout

-Kmele gets Hayek’d

-Machine politics was bad, but graduate student politics is worse.

-Bannon’s old Leninist fantasy, now available in DSA packaging

-Kamala Harris genuflects toward Mamdani-world

-MAGA wants the factories back. The robots have other ideas.

-Ro Khanna’s children: landed gentry

-Midterm Madness, Rocky Mountain High

-Melat Kiros justifies 9/11

-Scott Wiener gets yelled at for insufficient revolutionary fervor

-Stalinism, but make it customer-facing

-The revolution will be staffed by PhD candidates

-Speaking of revolution: happy birthday, America

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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Also: a serious discussion of the cinematic category known as “movies where they clearly came up with the title first.”

-The N-word trap at the Hudson Yards gym

-Joe Jackson dressed for the evil dad part

-Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound defense

-Richard Simmons slaps a cage fighter

-How to respond to an asshole

-Con Air, Face/Off, and insane ’90s movies

-Pr…

We are lucky to be joined once again by Executive Editor of SCOTUSblog, Sarah Isgur, and on a day when the Supreme Court gave everyone a lot to argue about.

-Trump loses, birth tourism maybe does not

-Anchor babies and America’s soccer future

-The 14th Amendment gets weird

-A color-blind Constitution, except when it isn’t

-Immigration is the culture war now

-Executive p…

-Welch enters his Charles Nelson Reilly era

-Laura Branigan, Happy Mondays, and songs you didn’t know were covers

-Puerto Rico’s revenge

-The cadres are closing in

-Reihan Salam and Larry Flynt

-DAC hits the media circuit and refuses to answer the easiest question in politics

-Aber Kawas explains 9/11, in a Miss South Carolina sort of way

-Vaporware word clouds masquerading as policy

-No borders, no prisons, no TSA PreCheck… no joke

-Nationalizing airlines, abolishing comfort, and calling it justice

-Mamdani’s machine, the DSA bench, and the Democratic Party’s growing nervous breakdown

-Polymarket vs. the polls

-The internet is not a socialist invention, no matter how hard socialists try

-Senate Republicans discover Trump skepticism several years too late

-The SAVE Act tantrum and the incredible courage of people who already lost

-Tucker, Trump, Iran, inflation, and the limits of MAGA obedience

-Peter Thiel’s terrifying secret network of people talking at conferences

-Moynihan goes to Dialog and accidentally joins the Illuminati

-Kmele reports back from the alleged cabal

-Bohemian Grove was cooler because at least you had to break in

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 listener/viewer 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

Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for MSNOW, a senior fellow at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, and co-director of its Afghanistan Assumptions Project. He also writes the Truth and Consequences newsletter. He is not the former fixer of Donald Trump.

-The correct Michael Cohen stops by

-Mamdani flexes in the primaries and three congress critters cometh

-DAC gets worse the more…

-Ethnicity as performance

-Manhattan politics with the president of the Manhattan Institute

-Dan Goldman orders coffee, receives moral instruction

-The many political personalities of Brad Lander

-Taxpayer-funded activism and the Office of Mass Engagement

-Mamdani and the borg beneath the campaign

-AOC, cadres, and disciplined political parties

-Gaza as the om…

-Kmele debuts his Sebastian Bach beach jeans

-The Iran deal is like the JCPOA, but a lot worse

-Lebanon sneaks into a U.S.-Iran deal

-Strait of Hormuz, 60-day promises, and negotiating with hostage-takers

-Why can’t the hawks ever learn?

-Ukraine brings the war home to Russia

-Drones, oil refineries, and the new cost of war

-Europe wakes up… sort of

-Meloni jabs her digits at Trump

-Polymarket checks the damage in Israeli politics

-as well as NY-13 and the rise of the DSA

-Hamilton Heights is Gaza now

-Mamdani’s little machine comes for Dan Goldman

-Gaza replaces BLM as the Democratic purity test

-The long-term problem with Mamdani economics

-Gavin Newsom vs. Trump’s DOJ

-The New York Times makes the Epstein suicide case

-Tucker, Trump, Loomer, and the inevitable reunion

-Baseball is gay in June

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 viewer/listener supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Batya Ungar-Sargon, host of Batya! on NewsNation, returns!!! And with a new book, The Jews and the Left, about antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and why so much of the modern left has made Jews the enemy.

-JD Vance, Tucker, and the anti-Israel right

-The Iran deal, Rubio’s silence, and Trump’s trial balloon

-What Batya got wrong about the war

-Could Trump have sold the war better?

-The Knicks give New York its greatest night in years and OG makes his MVP case

-Valid destruction or peaceful rioting?

-A brief detour through America’s dumbest college mascots

-Dave Chappelle and Shane Gillis give Moynihan a perfect Comedy Cellar night

-Kmele roots for the Spurs, but only to punish Knicks fans

-Spike Lee has been on the court long enough

-Which celebrity row courtsider gets booed?

-Mamdani gets into the affordable soccer jersey business

-The World Cup comes to New Jersey by boat

-Introducing Midterm Madness

-LA’s mayoral race and the Spencer Pratt stolen-election fantasy

-California’s governor’s race and the strange usefulness of market signals

-The race to watch

-Platner’s character problem is not going away

-Jodi Kantor explains when MeToo does and does not count

-Bill Pulte gets pulled, Jay Clayton gets nominated

-A fully fledged disgusting party on a federal level

-UFC 250 comes to the White House because this is who we are now

-Bullshit, postmodern Trumpism, and the infinite lies

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

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Throughout this entire interview, Ana remains furious that our office was stocked with whiskey, but only half a bottle of white wine and absolutely no pizza.

-The White House press corps just takes it

-Kristen Welker gets the Trump treatment (and would Trump have tried that with Tim Russert?)

-Ana Navarro is here, from one of them Mexican countries

-Charles…

Noah’s new book is Blood and Progress… not to be confused with “Blood and Soil,” a phrase Moynihan has been muttering to himself around the office.

-A book squarely in the TFC wheelhouse

-The teens, the twenties, the sixties, the seventies, and now

-The forgotten history of left-wing violence

-Italian anarchists and “propaganda of the deed”

-Is Noah handwavi…

-a dog is on set and Kmele should be wearing a helmet

-Bernie Sanders wants to collectivize AI

-The boys bask in the warmth of collectivism

-Never trust a politician giving something back to “the people”

-The centrist Democrat goes missing

-It’s still a Nazi tattoo, goddammit

-Character is out. Winning is in

-Andy the Ogre Ogles has thoughts on the gays and Ted Cruz answers the question and keeps walking

-A few more problems for the Oyster Man from Maine

-Welch was the victim of a French flag hate crime

-Speaking of Nazis, let’s talk about Bari Weiss

-Scott Pelley defends democracy from the new guy and privileged peacocking at CBS

-Ali Velshi feels weird about America’s birthday

-Defending America through the Bob Crane story

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a viewer/listener-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

Chris Murphy’s book, Crisis of the Common Good, is out now

-Murphy opens his book by dunking on his son’s NHL prospects

-Pitching the common good

-Trump is not the disease. He’s the symptom

-Buy more stuff, feel worse, repeat until democracy collapses

-Kids, phones and the algorithmic hell machine

-Congress wants to regulate tech. Congress may want to log on first

-Can In…

Be sure to check out Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps, Australia’s greatest podcaster and interviewer, which apparently counts.

-90 minutes of Kmele cleaning his glasses

-Josh is on drugs now

-RIP Jack Karlson, hero of democracy manifest

-we will be referring to limp penis throughout this show

-Erect until the end

-Kmele doesn’t really know the Beach Boys

-Who is the best Australian to ever …

Check out Ben Rhodes new book: All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches

-Ben Rhodes, wounded ’90s Knicks fan

-Are we winning in Iran yet?

-what should the President do with Iran right now?

-Sanctions suck, mostly

-Cuba and the Obama opening

-Libya and the regime-change trap

-Kosovo worked-ish

-Responsibility to protect yourself from over-learning lessons

-Rhodes wants institutions, not impulse wars

-Is Ben Rhodes Tucker-adjacent?

-Soft power, hard questions

-Navalny didn’t want America’s money

-When Reagan said “Evil Empire”

-Reagan also change his mind

-Moynihan accuses Rhodes of America pessimism

-Ben says it’s because he loves America

-Private equity killed the vibes

-Nostalgia-nomics

-The left-populist temptation

-JD Vance talks pretty

-National identity without a monoculture

-Ben Franklin and the virtue of doubt

-Experts are annoying but sometimes useful

Read All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches

(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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