#428 - Poundtowns and Political Pilgrims

* Stirewalt on calling Arizona for Biden and the Dominion lawsuit

* On getting fired by Fox News

* How journalism collapsed

* Sean Hannity is not a conservative (he’s a Republican)

* The Joe Manchin effect

* This wouldn’t have happened under Roger Ailes

* Overestimating the media’s influence

* The inevitable conversation about mis- and disinformation

* Would Chris cancel Alex Jones?

* Cruz v. Carlson: the most excruciating interview ever?

* Will Reaganism return??

* Post-game: lab leak lollapalooza

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

* Konference Kmele

* The most Jewish podcast in America?

* Arguing an overcorrection

* Michael Jackson, social conservative

* Kmele sends Angela Davis a SASE

* Slavery, King Cotton, and fighting with NHJ

* The two books on slavery Moynihan mentioned

* Listener question about maybe working for a racist conspiracy theorist

* More thoughts on big boy mannequins

* Clip from Ethan Suple…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

* Apocalypse apparel

* No country for fat men

* Singal white journalist 

* A left-wing Matt *Walsh* stan 

* Books don’t make a man

* Kancel Kmele Pls

* On Mistaken Misgendering

* Dippin toes, stepping on rakes

* A message from Julia (TBC)

* Moynihan engineers a Fifth Marriage

* The zaps of SSRI withdrawl…

* Burning down the house - followed by  

* A listener wonders: were my Italian grandpa…

* Moynihan’s hobo disaster

* KMW, disinformation queen, stops by for a few, tells us how she broke her kneecap

* KMW: The Fifth is staffed by crotchety scare-mongering old dudes (Ed. - This is disinformation)

* So why *is* KMD the disinformation queen?

* Wait, what does “disinformation” even mean??

* The movie Contact is pretty libertarian

* Killing old people, dead crank doctors, and libertarian Rachel Welch

* According to hundreds of stupid people, the New York Times is a hate group or something

* Religious TRUTH replaces reasoned debate

* Nothing is real and everything you say is killing people

* Moynihan’s Caribbean plea………

* And so much more!

* How Jamie ended up writing about Armie Hammer

* So what *is* the Hammer story anyway?

* How the motivated reasoning media ignores inconvenient inconsistencies

* Is there a path back from an utterly destroyed reputation?

* How Jamie’s book Secret City informed his reporting

* Heroes and homophobia

* So is it true what they say about James Webb?

* The Lavender Scare and Joe McCarthy

* Who was worse, JFK or RFK?

* Would anyone care about Larry Craig in 2023?

* Why was Moynihan at a political event in Florida?

* SMDH at the FUBAR SOTU

* A bit about those Twitter hearings…

* And so much more!

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

* Armie of the damned

* Jamie Kirchick’s piece on Armie Hammer

* The Robin DiAngelo of Sports

* Ethan’s piece on “DEI man” Richard Lapchick

* The question that ended Ethan’s interview with Lapchick

* The NBA’s Foreskin Ceiling

* “In this day and age…”

* Maverick Carter isn’t going to hire you

* That shocking 1976 PBS documentary about racism in Queens

* Kids don’t like sports any…

* The George Wallace travel app

* The genius and utter stupidity of WEB Dubois

* That disgraceful Dubois obit for Stalin

* A copy of the Conservation of Races book

* Len Downie’s rotten, horribly written piece about objectivity in news

* Jeff Gerth’s really good piece about Trump-Russia coverage

* Remember Hamilton 68? Bush 911? Heaven 17?

* Hunter’s sexy jobs program

* Did anyone notice that Ol’ Joe said that weird lie again?

* Racist tax robots

* What’s good for me isn’t good for thee, silly poor person

* Welcome to WhiteFolksIsBad.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

* A famous Texas hat

* Kmele’s Twitter beef with a former guest

* The tragedy in Memphis, the predictable response

* Ubiquitous white supremacy

* Don’t even read Mark Twain aloud

* A listener speculates on Kmele’s “blackness”

* Back to Texas: they are just nice people, says Moynihan

* Name this listener’s baby

* The etymology of “Kmele”

* Nicola Sturgeon splutters when asked about …

A sober first segment about war and death is interrupted by our chaotic and fatphobic friend Ben Dreyfuss, who joins the Fifth to discuss his insane Twitter account and why he keeps making people really mad.

* We haven’t seen many of these Oscar movies

* German Leopards for Ukraine

* The arrival of “Jaws star Richard Dreyfuss' actor son Ben, 36, [who was] slammed for saying he'd never have sex 'with a fat person’”

* That Daily Mail article / We read Ben some of the comments

* Wait, why did Ben get fired from Mother Jones again?

* Will there ever be a deal-breaking sex scandal again?

* Peter Falk, gay icon?

* An important conversation about Rocky

* Trump can come back to Facebook

* The government is suing Google

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wethefifth.substack.com

* Santos: Hotter as a lady?

* Hunter is a shitty person who makes shitty art

* Kmele shuts down a Netflix indoctrination session

* Georgia: Stupid people play stupid games and win stupid prizes

* A shooting in LA

* Another shooting in LA

* A tribute to a listener

* More on Cormac McCarthy (and Camus and Sartre)

* Objecting to Douglas Murray

* On the weirdness of the Phantom of th…

* Release The List

* Crosby, Not So Great

* A Few Nights In Chicago

* Squashing Racism ($5 Million at a Time)

* Reparations and the US Constitution

* A Seat at the Table

* Hereditary Culpability and Entitlement

* Manhattan Beach

* Daily Wire vs. Mug Club

* Drew Carey 🖤 CDC

* “We ain’t gonna talk bout dem papers (so y’all can quit asking)”

* Debt Limit Hold’em

* The Anti-Woke Caucus

* Florida’s “Objective” Nonsense

* What Students Deserve

* “If We Lose, You Lose”

Recorded: 1/19/23

Published: 1/20/23

* The Corvette Papers

* “So my friend gets arrested for murder in South Sudan…”

* No sex please, he’s British

* The times, they have a’ changed

* From Belfast to Pyongyang

* If I Did It: Eichmann versus the neo-Nazis

* Russophilia, left and right

* America: a net exporter of bad ideas

* Is there a war on the West?

* Douglas’s new podcast, Uncancelled History

* In defense of Lincoln and Churchill

* Regrets, I’ve had just…one

* Disqualifying Kant and Hume

* That idiotic USA Today piece cited by Matt

* And so much more!

* Former Rep. Justin Amash was on the floor during the leadership fight??

* Brian Lamb question: What does the speaker actually do?

* And what do the Gang of Twenty actually want?

* Rep. Amash: Kevin McCarthy “isn’t that bright” and “will do whatever it takes to maintain power”

* Why the system is broken and how it got that way

* Congress is becoming more European

* Reminder: Amash created (and named) the Freedom Caucus

* Are you really putting yourself forward to be speaker?

* The whole system is broken. And all the other speaker options are reflections of this brokenness

* The NYT and “ultraconservatives”

* The Ukraine objection exception

* A qualified defense of the execrable Skip Bayless

* Idiots deciding who gets to speak

* Subway Protocol

* Lying, Liar

* Flooding the Zone

* Modest Proposal

* The Real Corn Pop

* Domestic Disturbance 

* Buffalo Electronics

* Trump Tapes

* Moynihan is cold

* Welch isn’t paying attention

* Kmele coins a good one (for the third time)

* Dank Meme Party

* After Trump

* Read This. Read That.

Recorded: 12/29/22Published: 12/30/22

* Sweet Baby Jesus

* Ted Cruz 🖤’s Striper

* Dress for the Job You Want

* Defensive Capabilities + Fiscal Profligacy

* The Worst Possible Scenario

* Criminalish Betrayal

* Worse than Watergate?

* Presidential Travel Rewards

* The Stanford Grammer Experiment

* Demanding or Entitled BIPOCs

Recorded: 12.21.22Published: 12.22.22

* Irish Israeli

* France vs Morocco

* That Marriage Act

* Biden Told The Truth That Time

* What Republicans Won’t Do, But Ought to

* They’re Actievly Trying to Kill us

* Leaving Twitter (Because I’m Oblivious, For the Children)

* Doxxing*** Elon’s Plane?

* MTG (Would have won!)

* Jan 6th Prosecutions

* Maced

Recorded 12.14.22Published: 12.15.22

Recorded on Sunday afternoon, this now-vintage episode was consider lost forever, after a certain Fifth Columnist discovered that he still doesn’t understand how computers, cameras, and microphones work. Well….lost until we (i.e. Moynihan) found a weird backup copy of the episode on the Twitch servers! So…a few days late, of variable quality, and now available for download:

* Back to the “Twitter files,” reluctantly

* Everyone loves Joe McCarthy

* Yet another James/Jim Baker

* The pointlessness of trying to control speech

* The Times pickets

* The Times returns, writes an absurd article about Cuba

* A Michael Jackson hagiography on Broadway

* Yes, we have to talk about Kanye West Ye Kardashian again

* Verdict: The man is not well. And is an anti-Semite

* Kmele is sad. Matt is not.

* Wild guess: Ye is unfamiliar with Theodor Herzl

* Note: some people with bad views used to have not so bad views

* Remember “slavery was a choice?” That was pretty dumb

* Is Kanye making people '“unsafe”?

* Matt Taibbi releases internal Twitter comms on the Biden laptop

* Journalists: this is the wrong type of journalism

* These numbers seem pretty fake

* Too many people are interested in politics

* Hakeem “the Dream” Jeffries

with/ Ethan Straus of House of Strauss (on Substack)

* Does the NBA Have an Antisemitism Problem?

* They control the media, our podcast, and the NBA!?

* Wait, who isn’t Jewish?

* “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Hitler”

* Baseball + The John Birch Society

* Stolen (Jewish) Valor

* “More than an Athlete” / Lebron “gettin’ that Jewish money” James

* Divide & Sponsor

* Was (Is) Twitter Pushing Hysteria

* But is it antisemitism? (Does it even matter)

* Identitarianism, Judaism, and antisemitism (real and imagined)

* How to Talk about “Jewish Supremacy”

* The Truth about Black Hebrew Israelites

* Threat Inflation (and What if they’re right)

* THE NHL(GBTQIA2S+)

* Why the NBA 🖤 Crypto

* The World Cup

* Why Can’t You All Be As Brave as Ben Collins!?

* An Actual Hero

Recorded 11.22.22Published 11.23.22

Rejecting twelve hours with the commoners in coach, Kmele remains stateside while Moynihan and Welch make goyish aliyah in Israel. Wandering from the Egyptian border in the South all the way up to Trump Heights in the North, the lads are introduced to one of Israel’s most famous journalists and big thinkers, Nadav Eyal, author of Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising Against Globalization. Eyal graciously joined the Fifth at a recording studio in Tel Aviv for a very deep, very nerdy chat about whether or not the world is collapsing and if the midterms are a harbinger of a changing culture, desperate to move beyond the national populist moment.

As we wind down, Eyal gives his verdict on the Energizer bunny of Israeli politics, incoming Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and the worrying rise of his racist nutbag coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir. After Eyal frees himself from the Fifth’s clutches, Welch and Moynihan stick for a few extra minutes to talk about Jewish girls with guns and why Dave Chapelle thinks they might control Hollywood.

No Red Wave. No Blue Wave. No Fascist Takeover. No Democracy Dying in Darkness. The 2022 midterm elections came; they’ll take almost a month to sort out (including a runoff in Georgia) — but things are generally about as bad (and good) as they were before the election.

Moynihan returns from the field, where he was covering the race in Florida.

Welch and his family are momentarily clear of any exigent health emergencies.

And Kmele taps in from Austin, Texas.

* The Libertarian Moment?

* To Start A War

* Weapons of Mass Delusion

* Pelosi Attack

* Definitely Not Bothsidesing

* Voting For Anyone Else Is a Vote Against Democracy

* The Gravity of Things

* Reddit profiling

* A Few Parting Thoughts

Recorded: 11.2.22

Published: 11.3.22

* Power Strip

* A Victory for Equity

* Surveying the Midterms

* Fetterman’s Debate Disaster

* The Mystery of the AIDS Quilt

* The People vs Jim Eagle

* Eminent, Indefatigable Election Fraud

* Yarvin - The Mastermind

* Black Lives Redux

* I Miss The Old Kanye

* “Whatabout!?” MSNBC Montage

* Antisemitic Calypsos

* Antisemitic Hip hop

* Crosby, Stills and Ugh

* T Boz Lives

* From Ken Burns to Colorblind

* African Apologia

Recorded 10/26/22

Published 10/28/22

* Moynihan has COVID (Again)

* Another NYC Covid Spike

* “Dangerous New Levels of Misinformation”

* The Kids Are Actually All Right (but they’re mostly not getting vaccinated)

* No Apologies for #DeathSantis

* Ladies Who “Lead” (and cry about it)

* Red Wave, Blue Wall, Purple People Eaters

* Moynihan’s “Free Smoke” Preview

* Republican Skullduggery

* Yes, And, [ Deepest Possible Sigh ]

* The “AOC to Nazi” Pipeline

* Trust in Media… still virtually non-existent

* The Sycophants and Cynics Coalition

* YouTube is Kinda for Snuff Films (but don’t mention suicide or possible vaccine side effects)

* Censorship is BipartisanPlus: Nat Con Paradise, Matt’s Latest Thing, Finding the Right Photo, Free Ads, and more

Recorded: 10.19.22Published: 10.20.22

The lads are all around the same table in New York City! And LA Times journalist Gustavo Arellano calls in at the top of the show to explain why the President is calling on four local politicians in L.A. to resign.

* Gustavo explains Spanish racial slurs

* Gustavo explains the racism of the LA City Council

* This is the logical endpoint for dumb identity politics

* We obsess over the race stuff at the expense of the naked corruption

* Punching dogs for social justice

* Matt is a cop-adjacent apologist

* Berlin is bad, but not is bad as it was in 1945

* A revolution with no solutions

* What the WaPo forgot to tell you

* Like almost everyone else in American politics, Hershel Walker believes in nothing

* Dear lord does Matt hate Margaret Sullivan’s book

* Adjectiving your way out of trouble

* The U.N. slaps down the Kremlin

* Reporting on Fetterman’s stroke is violence

* Also: subscribe to the Substack, you freeloader….

I am usually among the most allergic to broad, immutable-characteristic-based analyses along the lines of “The Crisis of Men and Boys.” Some of this is the usual self-loathing—Screw guys, especially if they’re 54-year-old baseball fanatics from California!, etc. But also, probably due to the extended influence of the man formerly known as Casanova Brown, I have seen too often the fact-bending, anti-individualist and too often punitive ideological temptations of sorting humans into various pens and making grand statements about the resulting statistics.

However! When tasked during a recent media appearance to have comments on The Trouble With Males, I stumbled across a stunning (to me) chart at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that the employment rate for dudes between 2001 and 2021 was down in every age bracket younger than 55, and up in every cohort after 55. Dramatic numbers, too—16-19-year-old males went from 50% to 36%; 20-24s from 82% to 73%, and so on. If we’re getting to the point where half of men have never worked before the age of 25, that’s a profoundly different America than some of us old farts grew up in.

So when I received a publicist email saying that the Bradley Prize-winning American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt had just come out with a brand new post-pandemic edition of his groundbreaking 2016 study Men Without Work, I leaped at the chance to talk to him about this subject that I cared not at all about just one month ago. Hoo-ray for the on-the-job learning!

Eberstadt, as you will soon hear, has a more interesting pedigree than your average math professor, with a wife who writes about the sexual revolution and identity politics, a sister who was in Warhol’s Factory, one grandfather who was Ogden Nash, and another who co-founded the CIA. And don’t worry, we also talk a bit about commies.

-- The myth of “full employment”

-- NILFs

-- “There is absolutely nothing good that comes out of this trend”

-- “Uncannily, weirdly, eerily regular”

-- “There's no country in the rich world that has had such a steep radical and continuing drop as the U.S.A.”

-- The Lost Decade, and the New Misery

-- Wealth without growth

-- The populist reaction

-- “They don’t do civil society”

-- Immigrants get the job done

-- California vs. Texas on immigrant welfare

-- Schmancy Bobbleman vs. the feminists

-- The ex-felon factor

-- They’re all on disability

-- We just did a national UBI experiment

-- Get a job, teens!

-- Does this also explain woke/cancel stuff?

-- We weren’t gonna let that Warhol connection slide

-- Nor the CIA grandpa

-- Charles Murray, Tim Carney, J.D. Vance

-- North Korea’s role in Russia’s failing war

* Only Fans is for Justice

* Internet Experts

* Not Even Not Fascism

* Right Wing Extremists Everywhere

* Blame The EU

* What You’re Really Afraid Of

* The Beyonce of Journalism

* Call of the Wild

* Lil Baby Offends

* Democratic Illiberalism

* Not That Big Lie

* Don’t Call It a “Ban” (Even If It’s A Ban)

* They Were Watching Baseball

Recorded: 9.28.22Published: 9.29.22

* Toddler Pestilence

* Death Defying Drives

* Naked Pool Slide (are you “The Big Guy”

* Russia, Ukraine, A wildly outdated PBX systems

* Trump’s Devolving Legal Situationship

* This Isn’t Political; Trust Me 🤞🏼

* Russia Hacked the Women’s March?

* Buses, Planes, and “Kidnapping” Stunts

* Maybe Build that Wall Now?

Recorded: 9.22.22Published: 9.23.22

Featuring:Thomas Chatterton Williams - Contributing Writer @ The Atlantic, Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow Hannah Arendt Center @ Bard College Adam Davidson - Co-Founder @ Planet Money, Contributing Writer @ The New Yorker*** “It amazes me that any straight, white dudes don't see the privilege we have. It's not subtle.” - Adam Davidson - via Twitter (8/20/22)Not a long tweet. And in the grand scheme of things, hardly an unusual opinion to encounter. Ordinarily, I fire off a reply —maybe there’s some pithy back and forth, but things more or less end up about where they began— until the next (pointless?) social media drama.But maybe we agree to talk instead? Probe a bit further. Perhaps even learn a few things in the process?

So I broke into the Palace with a sponge and a rusty spanner

With the Right Honorable Matt Welch ensconced in a posh Beverly Hills hotel, prepping to shock and sicken America with yet another appearance on Real Time, Kmele and Moynihan got on the horn to discuss the death of corgi-loving colonialist Queen Elizabeth II, moronic “anti-colonialist” Twitter, Bannon’s perp strut, Moynihan’s unwitting mentor, phantom racist volleyball fans, and an unarmed man shot in the back who wasn’t unarmed or shot in the back.

Against a blood-red backdrop, President Biden gives an urgent campaign speech, warning that America is becoming semi-Nazi Germany, Donald Trump is partial Hitler, and our almost democracy is on the precipice of kinda revolution. The lads watch the speech and say lots of really smart things. But before they discuss the end of America, Kmele forces a conversation about Michael Jackson’s Thriller. He has a theory. Moynihan and Welch are…skeptical.

* Zuck Talks w/ Rogan

* Student Loan Forgiveness

* Who Cares if It’s Democratic

* WashPo: “It’s Regressive!”

* The Redbox Test

* Student Debt is immoral

* Moynihan in an elevator w/ Harry Styles

* Oh, my god, they fired Brian (You bastards!)

* The Jim Jones of Journalism

* NBC “News”

* The Many Papers of Donald Trump

* That NPR Voice

* Ben Shapiro Goes to a Conference (Hilarity Ensues)

A few weeks ago, with Matt Welch bleeding out of his ears and supposedly forbidden from flying, Kmele and Moynihan hopped a plane to a post-apocalyptic hellscape called “San Francisco” to kibizt with their new benevolent overlords at Substack. Unlike the boring prigs at Patreon (whose “Trust and Safety” commissars never even returned our calls), Substack rather generously hosted the Fifth crew for drinks, drinks, some more drinks, and a live show at company HQ.

In Matt’s stead, the lads called up FOTF (Friend of the Fifth - ed.) Lara “Che” Bazelon, a local law professor and communist revolutionary, and Substack co-founder* Hamish McKenzie, a reactionary publisher of fake news. They discuss San Francisco, the state of the media, the future of free speech, and much, much more. Enjoy.*Note: We previously referred to Hamish as CEO of Substack. He is, we are reliably informed, the 'chief writing officer,' which sounds to us like a fake job. As such, we now have significant doubts he even works at Substack and suspect he's never even been to New Zealand (which he told us “is the country where Kyle Minogue and Yahoo Serious are from”).

Many urgent matters loom large in this dispatch.

How did boxes full of TOP SECRET documents turn up a Trump’s Mar-a-lago compound?!Could be an honest mistake… Few moving labels get mixed up; nuclear secrets turn up in a Florida man’s safe. Maybe a box full of Melania’s bawdiest intimates gets serendipitously misdirected to the National Archives.Could America be so lucky?Could Trump be selling state secrets to the highest bidder?Could the “Deep State” be up to no good?Is there a clearance sale at the Banana Republic?We’ve got margaritas, Sativa, a burning desire to sort this 💩 out — and Eli Lake is a responsible adult whose laptop definitely won’t run out of power mid-podcast.Recorded: Aug 11, 2022Published: NOW

It's among the most unusual and noteworthy congressional primary races of 2022. For a surprisingly long stretch, Michigan's third district has been home to a uniquely independent brand of republican congresspersons. But after Peter Meijer (R) narrowly lost his primary race this week, MI-3's respectability streak is no more.

Congressman Meijer's party largely abandoned him. The former President still really hates him. And Democrats spent $435,000 to help boost his MAGA-loving opponent's sparse media profile. Meijer joined us to break down the race, spill a little tea about his soon-to-be-former-colleagues, and share some high/lowlights from his all-too-brief time in office.Recorded: Aug 3, 2022Published: Aug 4, 2022

w/ John McWhorter and Glenn Loury

- No Moynihan, No Welch- Progress or Pesmissim- Campus Culture- Culture Warriors- Gaslighting + Reactionaries- DEI Obstacles- Overstatement and Bravery- Dignity + Individualism- Race as Ethnicity- All in Bounds- Pride, Honor, Shame- “Tolstoy is Mine. Dickens is Mine.”- Everything is permissible to meRecorded: 6/14/22Published: 7/24/22