The Fifth Column (A Podcast)
The Fifth Column
344 w/Jacob Mchangama "Speech, Sheep, and a Crying Room"
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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 Social Media, which P.J. O'Rourke calls "best history of free speech ever written and the best defense of free speech ever made." We tend to agree. The lads make quick work of a bottle of sake and still manage to blather about...


  • The state of free speech in Europe

  • Joe Rogan and the crisis of speech

  • Many of history's heroes of free speech were kind of shitty on free speech

  • It always comes back to Nazis

  • The Weimar fallacy

  • Hanged for speech. Really, really bad speech

  • The sheep theory

  • Jacob brings up Nazis again

  • Tell the moon about the crying room

  • The most powerful engine for social change

  • Free speech is a powerful engine *against* racism

  • Two islamists realize they were wrong about free speech



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The Fifth Column (A Podcast)
The Fifth Column
Your weekly rhetorical assault on the on the news cycle, the people who make it, and occasionally ourselves. Kmele Foster (Freethink), Michael Moynihan (Vice), and Matt Welch (Reason) talk and laugh and drink their way to at least quasi-sanity in a world gone mad, often with the aid of clean and articulate guests. Weekly Members Only subscription edition often comes with listener mail and professional-quality (if inappropriate) singing. Analysis. Commentary. Sedition.