#427 - Is Cancel Culture Cancellable? (w/ Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott)

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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 …

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.

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…

* Kmele MC’s the FIRE Gala

* Killer Mike blows the roof off the joint

* This is a hangover episode

* A celebration of FIRE, the great Harvey Silverglate, and various other heroes of free speech

* What cable news network has created this climate of hate….in Japan

* If only we could prevent shitty speech, we would be on a forward march to utopia. Right?

* The temptation, on both the right and left, to not “do the work”

* The EU will control ChatGPT and all will be great

* The forever instinct to “disappear” bad ideas

* That very expensive Fox-Dominion settlement

* The never-ending madness in Chicago

* Root causes: A Pantone chart and a CPA

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* Kmele, Fruit of Islam

* Via Chicago

* Dominion lawsuit stuff again

* Biden and America’s favorite bearded terrorist Gerry Adams!

* Kmele’s Dominican son?

* The life and work of complete psycho Leonard Jefferies

* What do you all think of Amy Wax?

* Peter Popoff and James Randi

* A biracial question from a drunk biracial lad

* Prince’s dirty songs

* Discomfort and historical memo…

* The arrest of Jack Teixeira

* The bad showoff

* Not a source, not a Snowden

* How serious is the Teixeira leak?

* Sorry, but the NYT and WaPo did the *correct* thing

* The Tennessee 2 1/2: a plague of theater kids with dumb ideas

* That really bad and embarrassing shout-and-holler preacher impression

* That really bad and embarrassing Michael Steele clip

* That really bad and embarrassing Andrea Mitchell clip

* And a really bad and embarrassing Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet

* Democracy wasn’t failing. It was working

* I mean, at least Reverend Wright was good at it

* So what the hell is happening in France?

* That Trump-Tucker interview was insane

As an Easter and pesach mitzvah to America, we’re gifting this Member Only episode to all y’all…considering that we were on vacation and had no intention of recording it, it’s just Matt and Moyn, and they cover just one dumb subject. An annoyed text exchange about this whole “Clarence Thomas’s friend Harlan Crow loves Hitler” nonsense precipitated this recording, which also exists so we could resurface a relevant listener question from Members Only #152.

* The Rolling Stone article Matt mentioned (note the illiterate subhead which also bizarrely suggests one would have to “smuggle” statues of overthrown dictators out of “regimes”)

* That Washingtonian article Matt mentioned

* That tweet Moynihan couldn’t find

* Goldberg and French chime in

* A clip from a February Members Only episode in which the lads are asked about Nazi butter knives

Live in front of a crowd of five exhausted crew members, broadcasting from a suite at the Ritz-Carlton in midtown Manhattan (we’ll explain later), it’s another of those *forgive us father, for we are deep in our cups* episodes.

So take it all with a rather large rock of salt:

Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, RIPThe philosemitic film festival Peter Sellers was, in fact, Jewish (Sameach Pesach, btw)Ugh. We have to talk about the Trump arrest.The door wasn’t held. America is in crisisThat Trump speechSo who’s winning?There’s bit of the führerprinzip in there, eh?Political earthquakes in Wisconsin / Chicago A qualified defense of JuniorA qualified defense of Don Lemon?Birding while black

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* What was Kmele talking about? You’ll never know….

* Jewish basketball, Max Schmeling, European baseball players with consumption

* Matt Welch was about to be Paul Castellano’ed

* Are you a member of the UAE royal family? Get Moynihan on Emirates

* The unsavory Italian members of the family

* The knock-on effects of the Trump indictment?

* Melania’s forgotten about parents

* Well, it feels good to various MSNBC hosts, late-night comedians, and resistance types

* We don’t *know* how it feels

* Because no one wants to admit that we *don’t know* very much

* It’s all about race, actually

* That NPR interview with Al Sharpton

* The opposite of Alan Dershowitz

* That weird AI letter

* Fox News, Dominion, and brainy rooms

* Random thought on John Walker Lindh

* Random thought on Adderall and the drug war

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* Tupac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur

* The adorable and execrable Dean Reed

* The worst article The Atlantic has ever published

* Champagne dreams and Fifth Column nightmares

* Trump in Waco

* Insulin girl!

* That guy cutting your hair is definitely Russian

* Georgian helicopters

* Schultz and Lula and Russia

* Stop saying “lived experience”

* That hideous school shooting

* Whatever happ…

On Monday night, to a packed house of white supremacists and neo-fascists, Kmele debated the awkward proposition “Are we too obsessed with race?” Moynihan and Welch attended. They were amused and ultimately confused. So the lads unpack just what on Earth they witnessed. After thirty minutes of conversation about drunk Fifth fans and race-obsessed weirdos, they move on to more important subjects like Trump vs. Stormy and DeSantis, the proliferation of illegal weed dispensaries, the acquisition of expensive telescopes, an ESG rule that is DOA, and why throwing hot dogs at communists is a heroic act.

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We’re still not sure if it was Peru or Chile or Gabon, but regardless…Kmele is back from his equatorial conference…but…is even really needed?? Why, yes, he is! Because in this totally sober, totally discursive Members Only pod, the lads touch on the most important subjects paralyzing the world today: Lenny Kravitz, kids birthday parties, Hilaria Baldwin…

We do it for you, people. We don’t necessarily want to, but we do. Because you need it. In times of national crisis, the Fifth will forgo all the fun stories so we can tackle the important, necessary stories. It’s time to take your medicine, citizens of Fifdom, and allow Allison Schrager, economist and Bloomberg News columnist, to womansplain just what is ailing the American economy and why the bros and their stupid bro banks are collapsing. According to Schrager, all the people you hate are, in fact, to blame.

And after releasing Allison, Welch and Moynihan stick around to discuss Joe’s gay epiphany, the moron students of America’s top university, and why being anti-bothsidesism might be homophobic. Enjoy.

Oh. And subscribe to the Substack and get an extra episode every damn week (plus lots of other stuff…like the privilege of yelling at us in the comments).

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* Kmele at a Konference? Yup!

* Moynihan spills a wee bit of tea about an old job 😬

* The New Trump U

* Commie spies

* The DeSantis strategy

* Matt’s baseball digression (on rule changes and the WBC)

* This is a very good series

* That Twitter Files circus on Capitol Hill

* So this is exactly what we were talking about re: purity tests

* Don’t identify as anything….

* So very much…

It’s just like old times! Because the boys are back in town, recording together in an actual studio, andpregaming with listener-provided booze. So…yeah, things were pretty rough going in…Sorry about that.

* We try to answer the age old question…

* A handful of some, maybe, constitutes a New York Times trend

* Let us, as men, explain something to you…

* The sexual decline and fall of the podcast bro

* “It’s not because you’re a woman. It’s because I’m an asshole.”

* Does anyone at Fox believe anything?

* Do these January 6th videos change anything?

* Note: my autocorrect knew how to spell “Dolezal”

* A very brief Covid digression

* And so much more!

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* Puerto Rican passports

* Nothing works in New York

* Jimmy the Deregulator

* Fistfight Airlines

* Kmele and Andrew Schultz at Brown

* So what about Chris Rock’s Netflix special?

* The travails of a listener’s white wife

* In praise of Matt and Trey

* A “national divorce” is dorm room, edgelord bullshit

* The loss of Mayor Pepe

* Number #9 dream