I first met Ken Layne sometime in 1991, back when Vanilla Ice ruled the pop charts, the Soviet Union was still a thing, and Canadians still had a reasonable expectation of winning the Stanley Cup.

We have been collaborating and experimenting ever since -- a little newspapering here, some music there, various dot-com shenanigans, all of it in a spirit of …

-Matt Welch’s Caribbean identity crisis at Da Pig Beach

-The State of the Union aka a two-hour hostage note

-A greatest hits, lowest lights compilation for President Camacho

-The futility of “speeching” your way through a math-defying approval rating

-You can’t talk your way through a 38% approval rating

-Let the hockey boys drink

-Dan Crenshaw is allowed to be mad

-The RNC’s new guard of real fucking bozos and sycophantic dick-tots

-JD Vance as anti-corruption czar and populist beard for the crypto-regime

-Tariffs and The Gilded Age corruption engine, now with “ballroom fund” exclusions

-Drug prices are down 600%,….so do you owe me money?

-Moynihan screaming drug questions at his glitching phone

-Marxist Republicans and the gobbledygook of corporate housing bans

-Maybe let’s just abolish the State of the Union

-Dispatches from the Purple State: An interview with Senator Elissa Slotkin

-Stop kicking allies in the teeth to play grab-ass with dictators

-Walking out on Lindsey Graham’s Danish disdain

-AI thinks Moynihan is a neo-folk neo-Nazi

-Four years of war and Ukraine gets a one-sentence hand wave

-Anthropic vs. Hegseth: Code is speech until the Pentagon wants a frictionless kill-switch

-We tried collectivism once. Everyone starved. The end.

-Gemini identifies the mystery caller as Friedrich Nietzsche, chimney sweep

-About that BBC BAFTA N-Word Drama….

-“You’re acting like Israel” is the ultimate Park Slope breakup trump card

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel NOW.

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Kash chugs it back with the toothless champions

Trump and his locker room talk with the boys

State of the Union and the Six Year Itch

A uniquely conspiratorial moment in an already conspiratorial nation

PizzaGate nostalgia hour

Fact checking dies in public

A laundry list of made up shit that’s not even close to being true

Baby-eating melodrama meets Beetlejuic…

(Note: For those of you that want to stare longingly at Damon Root, don’t despair…the video version is forthcoming!)

* Damon Root’s book Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court

* Basic civics, reintroduced

* Root’s mood in five words

* What becomes of this useless Congress?

* Why not 9–0? Root on the three dissenters

* The “major questions doctrin…

-The dork Star Wars cantina of famous biographers

-Jefferson’s hypocrisy and the impossibility of paragon standards

-Lincoln was not an abolitionist

-The Howard Zinnification of American history

-Ambiguity as the ideological propagandist’s mortal enemy

-The true (New Testament) saint of America

-George H.W. Bush’s blunt admission

-This president would cut your throat for a vote, then be the first to call 911

-Exhaustion as a strategy, and the establishment’s failure to meet the moment

-Autocratic narcissism and the turn toward political sadism

-Despair is a sin

-Political loss as seasonal, not existential

-What will the next side do with inherited expanded executive power?

-14th Amendment redemption clauses as high-level nerd porn

-Amusing ourselves to death in a visual-media politics

-Katie Britt’s private doubt, and the ecosystem that manufactured it

-Lincoln couldn’t write a bad sentence; Reagan could land the line

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

Buy Jon Meacham’s anthology, American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent, and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union (Bookshop | Amazon)

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-Please say hello to our new Sunset Park neighbor

-The American Chávez

-The Nobel Prize Grudge

-The Dictatorship That Remained

-Political Pilgrims and Failed Experiments

-Maria the Maid and the, “Gay Marriage Lady” slur

-A Masterclass in Macro-Failure

-The Media Pioneer

-The Illusion of Democracy

-Economic Voodoo

-The “Police” StrategyGet William’s book, Things …

For Christmas 2024, I was gifted Robert Sullivan’s delightful My American Revolution: A Modern Expedition Through History’s Forgotten Battlegrounds. I devoured it within 24 hours. It is no exaggeration to say that the book is responsible as anything else for this little Semiquincetennial miniseries you are (hopefully!) enjoying.

As you will hear in this …

-John Bolton, Olympic Curling Hawk

-Arguing with the 60s Since 1970

-I’m kind of a Libertarian (Minus the Defense Part)

-Iraq was actually kind of perfect

-Federalist Papers as Foreign Aid (or maybe porn would suffice)

-The Arab Spring Brain-Break

-Afghanistan is Not Exactly a Nation

-Regime Change, Case-by-Case

-The Forward Defense of New Jersey

-Ukraine and the Gray Zone Trap

-The Nuclear Press Release

-Tucker Carlson wants you to be scared of this man

-Trump’s Real Estate Foreign Policy

-The Face of the Regime in Venezuela

-The President’s Retribution…. and how worried should the Ambassador be right now?

-Who Will Take Him Down First?

-Tulsi Gabbard’s Intelligence Clown Show

Prefer to watch & chat live with other members of the Fifdom? This episode premieres over on our YouTube channel at 12PM EST.

The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Follow The Fifth Column

YouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn