ANALYSIS.
COMMENTARY.
SEDITION.
Picking apart the news cycle, interrogating their guests, and always imbibing responsibly.

The Podcast
Kmele Foster, Matt Welch & Michael Moynihan
What happens when the Editor at large of Reason, a national correspondent from Vice News and a partner at Freethink Media made a podcast.
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OUR PATREONEpisodes
* Tina, RIP. Bill Lee, RIP.
* Zone of Interest
* DeSantis announces
* Tim Scott announced too, btw
* An increasingly crowded and unimpressive field
* Our old pal Ethan Strauss joins
* Why does Joe keep saying that…thing about Iraq?
* “Trump is sharper than Biden”
* An interregnum on Ike Turner
* Ethan’s piece on Glen Kuiper
* The American employment gulag: exiled forever
* Paying indulgences
* Is it ok to boycott brands for not having the right politics? A debate
* Cruising, the gay Casablanca / Donnie Moore, baseball’s Ike Turner
* Bonus blathering about Basketball
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/subscribeMembers Only #165 - In Memoriam
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* RIP Martin Amis (and Andy Rourke and Jeremy Clarke)
* A reading list: Money. London Fields. Zone of Interest. (Note: these all appear to be sold out on Amazon)
* On Orwell and D.J. Taylor’s new biography
* The Citibike “Karen” and her “white tears”
* Online vigilantism
* Salman Rushdie’s return
* Why’s there no challenge to Biden from The Squad?
* The…
* “Zero-to-insane in the first three minutes”
* The terrible 2024 election
* The right’s bizarre infatuation with RFK Jr.
* The immigration crisis in NYC
* The cruelty isn’t always the point
* How the average American thinks about illegal immigration
* Eli Lake joins to wish us all a Happy Durham Week
* Takeaways from the Durham Report
* The “heroes of democracy” are, in fact, the villains of democracy
* David Frum’s Atlantic piece
* Eli on Robert Kennedy Sr., the cop
* Diane Feinstein, John Fetterman, Joe Biden
* That insane LA Times piece (that we will talk about more later)
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#406 - Killing Kaitlin Kollins
* Charging the Islip Strangler
* Moynihan’s weird bias
* A bad WSJ podcast
* The Trump townhall
* Rating Kaitlan Collins
* Journalists who hate journalism
* The not Desantis response
* Tucker’s Twitter take
* Can he succeed?
* Killing [TK], A Series
* Sorry, but that guy you hate is actually really smart
* That amazing Firing Line destruction of Leander Perez
* Our grim election / memories of 1968
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/subscribeMembers Only #164 - Smooth Criminal
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* Che jumps on the third rail
* Unaliving all the bad words
* Throat clearing Suedehead
* Let’s come to a conclusion before we know anything, ok?
* Another pretendian
* You guys are like Glenn Beck too, you know
* Nonsense talk about Western science from a nonsense person (and that insane Zoom intro mentioned by Moynihan)
* Michael Jackson’s doll isn’t ok
* A supermarket encou…
* A homicide at Broadway-Lafayette
* Crazy strangers on a train
* The dumb racialization of a tragic death
* The “delightful” and violent Michael Jackson impersonator
* Amazon’s Afrika Bambaataa impersonator goes to Cuba
* On Tucker’s identitarian texts
* Fox News’s leak war
* The Daily Show’s 81% rating collapse
* So many shitty late night talk shows
* You won’t notice the writer’s strike
* Hating the Correspondent’s Dinner is as boring as the Correspondent’s Dinner itself
* Gas stoves and Australian vapes
* Adderall nightmare updates
* Send pics
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/subscribeThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com
* Moynihan on Maher
* Los Angeles is a weird place
* Kmele in Chicago with Nirvana’s producer
* The mechanics of Hollywood that we don’t understand
* AA and Scientology
* A hockey disaster
* We need more “black” hockey players
* A listener on Father Coughlin and Ayn Rand
* RIP Wes’s mom
* First class talk
* A listener in defense of MMA
* Holy shit this Danny Aiello response video
* Holy …
We’re back with one long episode in two cracking segments. First up, Welch and Moynihan (Ed. note: Kmele is currently peering through a telescope on the South Side of Chicago or something) catch up on all the stupid news of the last week, including…
* The news of certain…errrr……media layoffs
* Defenestrations at Fox News and CNN
* The “they-ificaton” of Tucker Carlson
* The bizarro world of Robert F. Kennedy Jr
* Lil’ Bobby: Prosecute people I disagree with
And then it’s an hour with return guest Ben Smith (his third appearance, we think?), editor-in-chief of Semafor, former editor-in-chief of Buzzfeed News, and author of the new book Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. No explanation needed. It’s good. You’ll like it.
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/subscribeMembers Only #162 - Jon Ronson on Neo-Nazi Debutantes, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and 'Platforming' Alex Jones
He first came on to talk about a suicide in the porn industry. Then he came back to help us explore the origins of our roiling culture wars. And now Jon Ronson returns for his third one-on-one conversation with Michael Moynihan, this time to discuss The Debutante, his brilliant new podcast about high society neo-Nazis, bad swastika tattoos, Throbbing Gr…
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