The Fifth Column

In celebration of the Fifth’s triumphant move to Substack, the lads decided to do a live show in New York City, with the two most New York City guys they could find. But that live show in New York Ci…

Another two-parter: the first half with our new favorite lefty Lara Bazelon, professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, journalist, feminist, novelist, controversialist. After Lara l…

We’re unlocking this subscriber-only podcast, recorded back in January, just to give you freeloaders a taste of what lurks behind the paywall. It’s not only those amazing bonus episodes, wherein the …

- Mean Babies w/ Pink Eye

- Tity Boi

- Dangerous Misinformation

- Show Tunes

- Cinco de Mayo

- Live From New York, Again

- Apartheid Daydream

- Combating Misinformation

- The Sims 2

- Anatomy of Tribal Hyster…

• Ulysses for kidz
• Stop complaining. It's a secret.
• It's all over, folks. Barack solved misinformation
• The Fairness Doctrine was dumb then. It's even dumber now
• BTW, they're *all* liars
• Defining misinformat…

- A Very Bad Week

- Best, Final

- Like, Literally the Holocaust

- F*ck You Money

- Narrative Malfunction

- Round the Water Cooler

- How America Got Stupid

- Going Solo

- Automotive Analogy

- Expanding Nato, …

- Take Em' To Church

- Okay, Groomer

- How "Lion King" Made Kmele Trans

- Troll Culture

- Mr. Cooper's Pronouns

- Elon's New Gig

- BLM House Flippin'

- The Purpose Driven Journalist

- Louie CK and The Larger…

• Slappy White and the Hot Takes
• Birthdays Was the Worst Days: Six Years of the Fifth
• Hey Twitter World (The Ballad of OJ Simpson)
• Jon Stewart’s excruciatingly dumb show on race
• A Ben Dreyfuss tweetstorm
• Am…

• On casualties, causation, and delusion
• Is there a risk of overcorrection in Ukraine?
• Sanctions, free trade, and nukes
• The power of historical grievance
• Kmele and Matt...disagree on corporations taking si…

Kmele got a new baby!

Welch is doing -- something.

And a disheveled, bleary-eyed Moynihan checks in from Europe -- where he's been bouncing between checkpoints and bunkers in Ukraine. The dude is earni…

• Does the media have this conflict wrong?
• The privatization of protest
• Europe shutting down shitty, Kremlin-funded media
• Wait, did Matt Taibbi just say he was warming to intervention?
• Verdict: unclear
• No d…

With Kmele waiting for his son to arrive and moving into his new East Coast digs (or something), Welch and Moynihan again find a temporary replacement. This time the honor is bestowed upon Jamie Kirc…

Guest: Jeffery Sachs, Lecturer in Politics @ Acadia University

• A Huge School Board Recall in San Francisco (With National Implications)
• A Proposed Ban on Talking About *Gay Stuff* w/ School Kids (In Fl…

Kmele's on a plane back East, where he shall remain and where the Fifth will increasingly ditch Zoom for in-person recordings. Yay. Filling in for Comrade Foster this week? Journalist, author, invent…

Our favorite Danish intellectual returns! After a three-plus year absence, Jacob Mchangama is back on the Fifth, this time promoting his amazing new book, Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Soci…

A freebie for the great unwashed, cheapskate masses. A little...ummm....looser than the free feed pod. And note that Moynihan's car was stuck in the snow just moments before recording, so he's slight…

Almost a year after being run out of Slate for possession of an unpopular opinion, journalist and podcaster Mike Pesca joins the Fifth for his first post-controversy conversation on how it all went d…

• Kmele at Hereticon
• Fallibility vs. Fundamentalism
• A Time to Choose
• In Your Heart You Know He's Racist
• Gerrymandering for Good
• Credibility, Transparency
• Ignoring Alex Jones
• Arguing with Alex Jones
• The One Thi…

He's brilliant. He has a Pulitzer Prize, And he's totally jacked. New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg, who was at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and could definitely kick your ass, joins the Fi…

• A Covid Christmas
• A Merry Kwanzaa
• Before you eulogize the dead, I have stupid tweet you should consider
• Matt sort of emptywheels Harry Reid
• Planes, Trains, and superspreader events
• Yes, there are no test…