039 'Tragedy in Berlin, About That New Cold-ish War, Obama's Failures and Successes' - The Fifth Column

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* Deion’s audacious blackness

* Kevin McHale’s audacious whiteness

* Serious Hasan’s baby is covered in cocaine

* What everyone hates most is a racist, anti-Asian wolf

* Cutting the razor wire because…why not?

* Immigration in Europe is different

* DOWTCHA BOY! The (Irish?) origins of Jamaican Patois

* Is Matt the Harvey Weinstein of the Fifth?

* Guess what? There was more to t…

* The sartorial excellence of the Pennsylvania Senate delegation

* “Pooping on their shoes”

* Kilmeade v. Rosendale (that’s his name)

* Kendi and the disappearing millions

* Want to demonitize one of your enemies? We have an idea!

* A threatening letter from Lady Orwell DBE

* The ACLUization of everything

* Trump on the Meet the Press

* Broadcast needs to “lend democracy a hand?”

* Biden is just getting worse

* Ron slides further…and new New Hampshire numbers

* Defeatism and elitism, mixed

* The “moral clarity” darling of 2023: Christiane Amanpour

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* Bob Geldof is the hero of this story

* She isn’t the pantless one

* Catholics, Kmele and your “best religious experience”

* Nick and the Burn

* Jamaican names / Wes Anderson movies

* Revisiting Less Than Zero

* The Hollywood Party v. Walt Disney

* A listener has an Amy Cooper question…

* The Kendi Center kind of shuts down

* NOI in our imagination

* Whitedurans wonder what to do ne…

* 36 year-old grandmother vapes, feels up Democrat

* Shanah Tova!

* Russell Brand, who Moynihan wrote about in 2014, is accused of rape

* They are coming after the truth tellers, maaaaaannnnnn

* Revisiting Hunter’s indictment

* Breaking: Biden is confused and sleepy

* Trump v. Kelly

* I’m the president, so it’s legal…

* Ron’s compounding troubles, plummeting poll numbers

* Preemptive skepticism

* Hasan Minaj is an unfunny fraud

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As Moynihan explains in the intro, this is the Zoom recording from this month’s Second Sunday broadcast. Basically, it’s the difference between a soundboard and audience bootleg. But so it goes. So no bullet points this week—enough time has already been spent on this episode—other than to say that Ben Dreyfuss shows up and we talk about Danny Masterson,…

* Every city is a nightmare

* Airbnb banned—but hotel rooms are now free!

* Pedro glues his feet to the floor, Moynihan discovers climate change

* It’s the end of New York as we know it (and Mayor Adams feels not so fine)

* None of this is sustainable, btw

* “BIPOC” residents in Chicago are angry

* Nikki rising, Vivek shrinking

* Enrique Tarrio, black white supremacist, gets more time than Mr. American Taliban

* The DOJ understands why an activist guy murdered a non-activist guy

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* RIP to The Big Dick

* Lawyer, capitalist, wiseass, politician … publisher?

* Remember those moderate-Republican big-city mayors from the ‘90s?

* The bottomless treachery of Singapore Gray

* Two hobos get invited to Brentwood

* Don’t. Take. The. Money.

* The master and the LSD margaritas

* Pleading guilty to hating dull newspapers

* The New York Sun opening

* When you refuse to de…

Let’s abandon the usual bullet points and instead provide a few relevant links. The lads sit down with Swedish writer and historian Johan Norberg to discuss his forthcoming book The Capitalist Manifesto; his report on Sweden’s Covid response; his almost-a-book The Mirage of Swedish Socialism: The Economic History of a Welfare State; and that time, twenty years ago, when he first came across Moynihan wandering around Stockholm, clutching a book about filthy commies.

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* Elvis Costello’s dad is the best dancer

* Orthodox Shyne

* Jamaicans vs….ummm…non-island people

* Close enough

* The race blob

* The Australia craze / Jacko

* Gross Steven Segal songs

* “The molester Rolf Harris?”

* Revisiting the dumb debate

* Ron, Vivek, et al

* In praise of Gary Becker (and his family)

* OJ Simpson: Slashing government spending

* Moynihan’s baggage has shifted on this…

* Best mugshots of all time (Winner: 70s Larry King)

* Who won the dumb debate

* No, the agenda is a hoax

* Nikki…pretty, pretty, pretty good, actually

* “Let’s not look backwards”

* One of the most deranged policy suggestions…

* The debate over Trump prosecutions

* Did Trump sound sane compared to Tucker?

* What happened to Pesca’s podcast “Not Even Mad” podcast?

* It’s really hard to make a podcast where everyone disagrees

* Is the New York Times getting a bit more sensible?

* Blurring the lines between activism and journalism

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* San Francisco again

* Song of the South again

* TikTok NPC insanity

* Colombian Snow White, for the first time

* How Obama broke up with his girlfriends 

* Roger Stone on JFK Jr. And a bit on PressTV 

* Richy Rich of Richmond 

* The AnCap of Argentina

* If the lads of the Fifth could avoid the dumb outrage, would they ?

* Iran, Pakistan, American foreign policy

* Are we more polariz…

* A Moynihan intro on theft and “Jew face”

* Lara Bazelon on rap lyrics as evidence, January 6th prosecutions, RICO, prosecutorial insecurity and overreach

* Artists, characters, and belief

* A Title IX violation is worse than being convicted for robbery

* Lara’s new podcast

* Greg on Title IX bureaucracy and free speech

* The decline of the American university

* And much, much more

* Stay tuned for volume 2, in which Kmele and Moynihan field questions from college students!

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* RIP Robbie Robertson

* Yeah, so 30 minutes of music talk about The Band, The Doors being bad, listeners getting mad at us, Graham Nash in a book store, Mickey Jones, patriotic Bob, Barry Goldwater, and The Last Waltz. Sorry about that.

* I’m going to suggest that you weren’t denied entry into the exclusive club because you’re Asian

* But being an Asian-American…

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* Richard Hananananananania is very sorry

* He has changed. From last week.

* Handjobs against racism

* Lizzo, bananas, petards

* “Everything I do is consequential, baby”

* Chasing Fonzie the racist (Ed note: We can neither confirm nor deny this story)

* The thing that is true but one cannot say…

* Italy is a great but they’ll charge you a toll to cross the room

* Irish and Ital…

So this one is probably four days old now? But because of the shitty software we use—and the fact that our…ummm….editor is currently on vacation in Italy—it took some serious archeology to salvage the recording. But it sounds fine, it’s a good episode, and Moynihan isn’t at all annoyed about having to upload this from a beach in Forte dei Marmi. The lengths we will go to make you people smarter and happier…So no description. Just listen to the damn thing.

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* Matt hasn’t seen Oppenheimer

* Brittany Murphy is dead, probably from myocarditis. Kmele is surprised

* Found that anti-Qaddafi t-shirt

* That stupid interview on Democracy Now

* NHJ is America’s greatest historian

* Was Moynihan crying? (Moynihan responds: This is fake news)

* “But ackshually……..”

* Low key good and not great

* Richard (not Robert) Frank’s brilliant book

* The…

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* Kmele and the Dead

* Lia hates God

* RFK and the race virus

* A guilty verdict

* The Dersh and jury nullification

* The often referenced video of Dersh v. the Fink

* A listener retracts his “dickish email”

* An email about Boston and music

* Is Boston a “racist” city?

* Forgetting about bussing

* The Irish vs. the WASPs

* Moynihan unloads on idiot Vice executives

* This is a very summer episode. Soz.

* Moynihan, impanelled

* Implicit bias and your cup of coffee

* Chipotle paranoia

* We interrupt this program for a detailed Welch interregnum of the death of Milan Kundera

* Tracy Chapman is “honored” by Luke Combs’s cover. The Washington Post is alarmed

* Elvis was a hero to most, but he never…

* You didn’t write that song. The “community” did

* De La Soul is not Steely Dan

* Airbrushing music and film history will save the universe

* Actually Tintin in Congo is pretty bad….

* A dumb congressman says something dumb. Ho hum.

* A suggestion for a new Sokal hoax

* Cocaine, crack, and a question never asked of Biden the Younger

* Why Matt once bought $100 worth of crack

* Taking back a “clarification”

* Underhoused. Overhoused. Differently housed.

* Mayor Adams yells at a Holocaust surviving slave master

* Drinking coffee with pictures of dead cops

* Who lost the cocaine?

* Kamala speechwriter video

* The worst person in America is…

* That interesting piece about Kevin Kruze’s not interesting book

* The Fifth Column agrees: the 4th is pretty great…

* Immigration in Europe vs. immigration in the US

* Harvard and affirmative action

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* A sick podcast

* Revisiting Coleman and RFK

* Listeners yelling at Moynihan

* Some nice stuff about Moynihan

* A clarification from Moynihan

* (All of this is re: RFK)

* BTW, Sirhan Sirhan was really anti-Semitic

* The conspiratorial mind

* Are Birchers libertarians on meth?

* Taking photos of yourself smoking crack

* Matt tells a story about…something

* Etc, etc, etc

Our old pal Damon Root, author of Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court, stops by to explain why the world is ending and racism won and all new websites will be homophobic and paying your debts is fascism or something.

So yeah, the lads discuss the court, affirmative action, student loans and how to eat your gay website cake. Enjoy.

The great Coleman Hughes sent a pained email. Like many Americans angry about various stupid and sinister government Covid policies, he was now feeling the gravitational pull of a warbly-voiced political outsider from a family of consummate political insiders. He was, of course, starting to fall for Mr. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. To be clear, this wasn’t a full-throated endorsement of Kennedy but, Coleman averred, an understanding where his ever-expanding legion of supporters were coming from. And after all, Kennedy was making some good points, no?

With Matt Welch having left to join the Wagner Group, Moynihan and Kmele sent a flurry of furious messages and extended an invitation. Dear Coleman: be this week’s guest co-host! Because if we acted now, perhaps we could at least slow any potential descent into...no, no, no. We couldn’t sit idly by as another friend joined the Kult of Kennedy. We invited…he accepted. It was time for an intervention…

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Another live Zoom for our handsome, brilliant, and generous subscribers (hence all the weird asides responding to a fast-moving live chat). A few topics covered:

* Kmele on Juneteenth

* Rush and nerds and whites and wizards

* RFK and Rogan and debate

* Being brave and calling….

* RIP Cormac McCarthy

* James Randi “platforming” Uri Geller

* Vivek’s Russia stuff

* Yalta and …

Fresh from his campaign stop in front of a Miami courthouse, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy stops by the Fifth’s Chinatown studio to very politely argue with Welch and Moynihan about a whole bunch of stuff. Including:

* The donor class

* What kind of conservative is Vivek?

* Populism and free trade

* A peace plan for China and Ukraine

* The Trump indictment

* Would Vivek take a position in a Trump

* Vivek leaves, the lads have a tipple

* Not many randos this time

* Matt and Moyn on the Trump indictment

* Wait, did Moynihan just say…free Assange?? (He did!)

* More 2024 nonsense

* Chris Christie is serving his purpose

* Moynihan tries to decode an ever more complex flag

Matt, Moynihan, and Kmele assemble in Chinatown to mull over another Trump indictment. No need for bullet points for this one because beside the predictable digressions into muscle-bound gay birders and homophobic Blue Jays, it’s a lotta Donald. So without further ado…

And don’t forget: for the price of one very large coffee, you can help feed the children. Specifically our children. Who are very sad. And very malnourished. And very disappointed in your cheapskatery. For shame.

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Despite being in a car in the city of Dnipro, journalist Tim Mak joins Michael Moynihan to talk about leaving NPR, moving to Kiev, and starting The Counteroffensive, his new Substack dedicated to reporting the Ukraine War. A few of the topics covered:

* Tim arrived in Kiev the night the war started

* Going back to Ukraine—and going independent

* Why so many on t…

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* Ground control to Tucker C.

* Episode one of the Bonkers Conspiracy Files

* Also, we know what happened to that dam in Ukraine

* But back to the white supremacist aliens…

* Did the California senate pass on of the dumbest bills of all time?

* Root causes and robbing Walgreens

* Moynihan loves rooftop Koreans, thinks baby Matt should have been shot in his adorable littl…

* Kmele is moving to a place where everything is free

* ChatGPT is a fabulist

* Moynihan’s new Orwell piece

* Wikipedia v. AI chatbots

* The assassination of (our) Kennedy

* Random gossip columnist: Jamie Foxx was murdered by Pfizer

* A better America: when Rick James met Linda Blair

* BTW: Tupac Shakur was very dumb. And very violent.

* Keeping people with dumb politics out of the various halls of fame…

* Pride warz….

* Root causes and Bud Light and Target and….

* Inconsistent baseball atheism

* But you like these old skool book bans

* The debt ceiling deal

* Biden meets a sandbag

* Kamala wages war on…racist home appraisers

* Congrats, you ridiculous failures!

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* Stan Jonathan vs. Pierce Bouchard

* The Lia Thomas of Pickleball

* Owning a house sucks

* “Lia has these books”

* Kmele loves Thoreau

* Matt hates Thoreau

* Feinstein and elder abuse

* “…to function”

* On gas stoves and gesture science

* C.S. knows someone with dumb ideas

* Robert Murdoch controls your brain

* Legislating curricula

* Huey Newton and Eric Clapton

* 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

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* RIP Martin Amis (and Andy Rourke and Jeremy Clarke)

* “Pussies are bullshit”

* 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)

* 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

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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

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* 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 …