-Most roads lead back to Prague for Matt Welch

-about that letter…six paragraphs, $5 million in free publicity and Harper’s back in the mainstream

-It was NAFTA, not woke, that elected Trump. Or was it?

-Illegal immigration is a wage issue

-Who still believes free trade is the answer to everything?

-Vietnam made …

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-Moynihan out, Jesse Singal in

-Barry Weiss hired everyone except Jesse

-The Prince of Science re-enrages everyone (or at least Rand Paul)

-Gell-Mann amnesia and the collapse of institutional trust

-The media needed a COVID daddy

-An OpenAI model escaped the sandbox

-The analogy of the paperclip machine and how it consumed the universe

-Cambridge protected alleged plagiarist Jason Arday

-Midterm Madness, Ohio governor race version

-Kmele feels that LeBron will never love him but he doesn’t want to talk about it

-Three grown men relived their greatest pickup games

-Kmele wanted the gods back in The Odyssey

-Mamdani Mart promised groceries at 30 percent off

-Billy Bob Thornton returns from hell in White Knight (a Kmele Foster joint)

-Nazi dinosaurs stalked Jews through Schindler’s Park

-Jesse discovered second-order effects

-Not every strange obsession with Israel was antisemitism

-Rent stabilization has worked great for millionaires

-No French goodbye for Kmele

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

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Facebook: @thefifthcolumn

Wanna hear a nice story?

So, we’ve been going to Cooperstown every year since 2022 to watch the induction ceremony at the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s a fun four-day weekend, with museum visits, lake swimming, VFW bar drinking, and the world’s most wholesome lil’ parade, in which four or five dozen Hall of Famers put-putt in the back of pickup trucks down the tiny Main Street, waving to crowds that are maybe three deep on each side. This year for the first time I brought along the youngest offspring, who’d long wanted to go.

Upon her first visit to the museum, and therefore the new (and newly refurbished/expanded) museum store, Coco wanted one thing: A San Diego Padres cap. Not because she’s a traitor to her ancestral responsibilities of being an Angels fan (no matter how passive), but because it’s her way to honor and remember her late Uncle Larry, who died six years ago. Larry, a baseball player, fanatic, and coach (whose ashes may be illegally scattered on a certain college ballfield), had lived in San Diego for two decades-plus, and converted to the local Padre faith.

So the next day, after the aforementioned lake-swimming and VFW-drinking, we turtled up to Main Street for the parade. Now it’s true that most of the time Coco toggled between boredom and mortification at Uncle Bill Schulz’s curious behavior there, like when he attempted to hurl a baseball card at Harold Baines:

But, one of the charms of the exercise is when a half-dozen or so players, always led by Cal Ripken, dismount from their trucks and work their way back up the parade lines, signing autographs. This year among that handful was a guy who pitched 16 years for the San Diego Padres, Trevor Hoffman. Coco was obviously wearing her SD cap….

We are not a family much interested in autographs, but c’mon, man. Two sweet girls in pole position generously parted ways and invited Coco in. Uncle Bill leaped into action, shouting elaborate lies at the fantastically-haired Hoffman (“I’m her father! She’s the biggest Padres fan ever!”, etc.). Slowly, he worked his way to my daughter, and then did a remarkable thing—just stood there with her for 90 seconds plus amid the clamor, engaging in conversation, busting her chops about her Mike Trout shirt, and writing a whole damned novella on the inside brim of her cap. Then he made sure to wave us over to take the pic you see at the top. It was really, really nice. Later, I learned from my sister-in-law that my niece went to pre-K with Trevor’s son.

At the ceremony the next day, with Coco earlier having been ported to summer camp, we did our usual bluff-top canopy/grilling/observing of the inductees, including roll-call intros for the returning HoFers. Besides the usual lusty booing of Commissioner Rob Manfred, the loudest noise from our camp was cheers for Trevor Hoffman.

The only drawback to the whole chill weekend? We didn’t run into any of you people! I mean, except for the ones inside the tent. Come out next year! You’ll be glad you did.

* OK, enough National Pastiming. Here’s a cupla CNN clips of Kmele last week:

* And here he is on Tangle talking about Donald Trump’s election claims:

* Glad y’all enjoyed Moynihan’s interview with the great historian of China, Frank Dikötter. Here’s a free clip of the two of them discussing the Sinophilia of Hasan Piker:

* Nice reviews also for my Maggie Haberman interview. Here’s the New York Times reporter and Regime Change co-author explaining, re: Trump, that “he’s been calling me ‘Maggot’ since February of 2022.”

We talked a bit at the end about Haberman’s famous journalist father Clyde. Here he is, explaining why his 1966 firing by the Times was the correct decision.

* Brian Huber swears this is his “last request until Autumn,” so let’s have it:

I know this is HoF weekend, so I’m sending this to you early. I now have a link for booking the hotel at a group rate. So here’s a poster image and the link if you want to put it in the Firehose.

Book your group rate for Unofficial Fifth Column Meetup

Emphasis on “Unofficial”!

* Comment of the Week from Spencer Burnstead:

That’s a man who is certaintymaxxing.

Sendoff: Frederick Anthony Picariello Jr., a name you never heard of, died Friday of bladder cancer at age 89. If you know his work at all, it’s under the name Freddy Cannon, which his record company slapped on a recording of the singer/songwriter’s first rock & roll single, 1958’s “Tallahassee Lassie.” That top-10 hit was, according to the New York Times obit, “his favorite song, in part because it began with a poem, ‘She’s My Rock and Roll Baby,’ written by his mother, Antoinette (Rosetti) Picariello.” The Chuck Barris-penned number “Palisades Park” was a bigger hit at #3, and definitely influenced the Beach Boys, but “Lassie” was one of those things that just hit certain people a certain way at a certain moment, which is why there would eventually be covers by the Stones, Tommy Steele, Fleetwood Mac, and the Flamin’ Groovies. Also: “Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine in 1995 that the song had partly inspired his writing of ‘Brown Sugar.’” Cannon was a goofy dancer and nobody’s matinee idol, and his career soon petered out, but he was able to eke out a living on the oldies circuit, and was releasing new music as recently as this year. In this clip, one of so very many Cannon appearances on American Bandstand, our Italian rockabilly stallion unwittingly demonstrates that certain audiences cannot, under any circumstances, keep a beat.

-Frank Dikötter is kind of Dutch, but not really

-Writing the definitive history of Maoist horror

-Edgar Snow a…

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-Kmele sizes Chris up and… is this podcast 10% gay?

-From Fox, to ABC, to CNN

-Did the media make Trump president?

-Celebrity, discontent and everything the media missed

-Being right about what’s wrong

-The duopoly is killing us. DSA isn’t helping.

-Cuomo, Cuomo and Cuomo Crime Time

-Scott Jennings, JD Vance and the rewards of picking a side

-The media discovers capital-T Truth and loses its curiosity

-Trump’s corruption and the limits of whataboutism

-Mario Cuomo should have worn a toga

-Voters don’t want the flaws. They want the disruption.

-There will be more political violence

-Matt Lauer crosses the street to express his condolences

-Broadcasting from the basement and losing an identity

-Illegal immigration and its convenient distortions

-Tucker, Fredo and Mike Tyson

-Kmele can take Joe Rogan. Chris has notes.

-AOC gets savvier; Kmele would prefer an accounting

-I don’t make mistakes anymore. They’re just lies

-COVID couldn’t transcend the culture war

-Midterm Madness

-the first presidential candidates that Matt Welch, Chris Cuomo, and Kmele voted for

-Andrew Cuomo and the outsider problem

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

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-yes, he superglues the gold fixtures in the Oval Office

-Maggie Haberman and her very irritating competitor Jonathan Swan

-Project 2025 and Stephen Miller’s search for lawyers who would get to “yes”

-what needs to be in the paper as soon as possible… a…

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I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the most interesting fact-checks I came across of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey came not from the brainworms-addled anti-Woke pre-trashers still marring social media, but from, erm, my own daughters. “Circe was too chopped,” said the teen. “You wouldn’t even know that Odysseus was like Athena’s protégé!” complained the tween.

Turns out the kids, quite outside my influence, didn’t need The Dark Knight director consume their own bastardized versions of the literary patrimony of the West. There’s the Percy Jackson books and films, George O’Connor’s Olympians graphic novels, And a pretty fantastic story of a project you may not have heard of called EPIC: The Musical.

Per Wikipedia, EPIC is “a nine-part series of album musicals (referred to as ‘sagas’) written and produced in their entirety by Puerto Rican actor and singer-songwriter Jorge Rivera-Herrans. This musical project, released between 2022 and 2024, is a sung-through adaptation of the Ancient Greek epic poem Odyssey by Homer and takes inspiration from different musical genres as well as modern musical theater, anime and video games.” What’s cool is that Rivera-Herrans wrote the songs, then built and crowd-funded and fan-sourced the productions from the bottom up, auditioning singers on TikTok, encouraging anyone to make their own animations, then plucking the best, of whatever different styles, as Canon.

Coco says EPIC is more true to the source material than Christopher Nolan. She recommends the songs “Puppeteer” and “Open Arms,” but you could also just watch the whole damn thing:

* Speaking of highbrow, in this week’s back-from-the-dead Mailbucket, I lamented the online absence of the classic 2000 Adam McKay-filmed SNL short “The H is O,” in which bro-han pickup artist Ben Stiller is goaded into scoring … Glenn Frey. As played by Will Ferrell. Alert listener Iris promptly found the link, and now I shall tempt the gods by attempting to embed:

* IMPORTANT MUSICAL CORRECTION. On Episode #566 I made the regrettable error, pointed out by many of you, that American heroes Cheech & Chong had a song called “Beaners.” In fact, the song was “Mexican Americans”; “Beaners” was more a work in progress:

* OK, OK, news of the week. Those of you back-of-the-planers who think you didn’t needed to listen to the full Bret Stephens episode just because the naked-Trotskyite Mexican grandma stuff was in the opening bit, well, you missed what many in the Comments hailed as a top-10 show. Plus, the part where the New York Times columnist straight-up called J.D. Vance an anti-Semite:

Oh, and about Bret’s grandma….

He wrote about her at length six years ago. Sample:

She also rented an apartment on Barrow Street under an assumed name. Ostensibly, it was meant to be a studio where she could work on her painting. But, as she delightedly confessed in an interview more than 50 years later, its real purpose was to “learn certain things, sexually, so I could teach my husband” to become “a little more capable in that field.” […]

And there was the time she rented out her Acapulco home for $25 a week to Norman Mailer, sometime after “The Naked and the Dead” had made him a literary sensation. During his stay Mailer busted down a door in a drunken rage, assaulted his girlfriend, arranged to watch a sex act performed on a donkey and finally — this is the part that seemed to scandalize her the most — stiffed Annette on the rent and the maid on her pay. […]

Growing up, I knew I had a very unusual — if sometimes narcissistic — grandmother. A memory from when I was about 12 or 13, having a lunch of leftovers in her apartment in Mexico City:

“Bret,” she said, deadpanning it, “When sex is good, it’s really good.”

“Uh, OK, Grandma.”

“And when it’s not as good — it’s still pretty good.”

* Let’s clean things up. Here’s a clip of Moynihan on Uncomfortable Conversations w/ Josh Szeps, headlined “Michael Moynihan on Socialism, ICE & Lindsey Graham’s Butthole”:

* More on the late South Carolina senator’s preferences from pal Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347 and #394):

Was Lindsey Graham gay? As the author of a book about the history of gay Washington, D.C., it’s a question I’ve been asked frequently for years, and even more so since his sudden death last weekend. The South Carolina Republican’s lifelong confirmed bachelorhood, vocal intonation, and Southern dandy demeanor (if not sartorial choices) prompted many to conclude that he was, as they say in that part of the country, “light in his loafers.” Graham’s repeated attestations to the contrary had zero effect on those invested in the narrative that he was. Only about the matter of J. Edgar Hoover’s rumored cross-dressing (for which there is some circumstantial but no direct evidence) am I questioned more.

* The forever-hawk also came up on this week’s Reason Roundtable:

* Speaking of Reason, my colleague Jacob Sullum got some well-deserved love this week from Mediaite, in a piece titled, “Reason Magazine Comes Out Swinging Against Confirming Todd Blanche as AG: ‘Brazenly Corrupt.’” I’m cited/quoted near the end. From that:

Another Reason contributor, editor at large and former editor in chief Matt Welch, has also used his column space to excoriate Blanche, featuring him prominently in an article titled “The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers.”

Mediaite asked Welch, from his perspective as the magazine’s former editor-in-chief, about the libertarian take on such issues. For libertarians, replied Welch, there is a strong interest in “power,” specifically the “critique” and “suspicion” of how it is exercised and imposed. […]

[T]here is … a negative side when we see a “cronyist machine trying to politicize what should be nonpolitical,” using government agencies to go after the president’s enemies and political opponents.

“This is appalling from a libertarian point of view,” said Welch, and these problems had only gotten worse “comparing Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0.”

It might be “inconvenient” to have these problems pointed out for the libertarians who voted for him and support some of his agenda, but ignoring that is “not our job as journalists.”

This current administration is “corrupt in a way that we just have not seen, and we need to confront that,” Welch concluded.

* Kmele and the Tanglers this week talked about cyclosporiasis, public health, and suchlike:

* Wait, what fresh hell is this??

Well, it’s an advertisement for the first-ever live show by one of our illegitimate-baby podcasts, Ask a Jew! Chaya Leah & Yael are for some reason going to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on Aug. 10, inviting on past Fif’ guest Nadav Eyal (#382, Members Only #305). Tix here. Also! The extremely unauthorized Fifth Column Dallas Meetup Convention Thingie is on for Nov. 13-15, deets & more questionnaires here.

And a reminder that on Nov. 4-6 we will be podcasting from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Soapbox 26 conference in Philadelphia, along with fellow speakers Sarah Isgur (M.O. #314), Noam Dworman (#549), David French (#191, #325, #365, #555) Nick Gillespie (Special Dispatch #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276), Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and Ilya Shapiro (#361), for starters. Make sure to use the discount code FIFTH to save $50 on tickets.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

A Spanish-language film set in Mexico might not be what you’d expect from the British director of Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, but with its blend of grittiness, humor, and a touch of the surreal, Highway Patrolman fits right in with Alex Cox’s oeuvre. Youthful Pedro Rojas (Roberto Sosa) is a newly minted member of the national highway patrol, much to his father’s dismay. Assigned to a rural area of northern Mexico, Pedro’s idealism is eroded by each passing day’s danger, graft, and boredom. His life then takes a turn for the better (or does it?) when he marries Griselda, a domineering farmer with a willingness to overlook his drinking and dalliances, so long as he keeps bringing home the kind of cash that only a corrupt cop can swing. Pedro’s appetite for cash and increasing hubris complicate his life, yet this is no clean morality play: it’s one of those rare films in which you really don’t know what’s going to happen next, and that alone makes it worth watching. Stream on the Criterion Channel; buy the the BluRay; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Richard:

I subscribe every month for the “are we recording this part” 🤣🤣🤣

Sendoff: Jennifer Precious Finch was a badass Gen X punk rock art girl, who died of brain cancer Saturday at age 59. She was the bass player for L7 during the band’s glory days, back when punk rock was magically becoming mainstream. Played in a mid-‘80s band with Courtney Love, dated Dave Grohl, flipped back and forth between L.A. and Seattle, taking quality alt-rock photos along the way. Did I see L7? Don’t think so, but you can never rule it out. They were universally understood to be dead cool, back when people were still leery of such things. Finch leaves behind many admirers, some other rock projects, and a bunch of songwriting credits, including this one:

-Bret’s naked grandmother and the Trotsky/Diego Rivera/Frida Kahlo connection

-The family saga of Stalinists, refugees and Reagan Republicans

-Learning to love America through tap water and cops you don’t have to bribe

-Belgium, a sick little, horrible place

-America, land of late bloomers

-The socialist Sweden Bernie remembers no lon…

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Newer subscribers may be puzzled by this word “Mailbucket,” let alone to learn that there have been 21 of the bastards before this morning. Well, thing is, sometimes (as in the past half-year) your Bucketeer in Chief gets busy! What normally happens is that once a month or so around these parts our in-box becomes over-swollen with quality missives providing valuable insight, sometimes at unreadable-on-the-pod length (though it’s true we also haven’t really been doing traditional Mailbag episodes lately either), and when the bounty becomes too much to not share, we, uh, not unshare!

At such junctures I will lightly edit the things, insert links as necessary, respond when so moved in italics, et voilà!

This fresh batch includes local views on nationally controversial elections, the world’s most obvious/Fiftastic Rich Man/Poor Man joke, some Worst Songs nominations, and more. The next installment will come sooner than five months!

From: Scott

Subject: Mainer Report on Platner

Date: July 11, 2026

Hi!

Thanks for the episode w/Kat on Platner.

I live in Maine and thought I’d nonconsenually share my experience of Platner and the folks who support him. I work construction (but also went to NYU) so the people I encounter are both working class and not.

The only folks who have Platner’s signs on their lawns are educated, upper class elitists. The lady who showed up at my house to “win” my vote for Platner was a 60+-year-old retiree driving a brand new EV. I’ve never heard any of my working class friends even mention him. I’m not entirely sure they know who he is. But even if they do, he doesn’t resonate with them enough to warrant a conversation.

Anyway, all this is to say you’re mostly spot-on with your commentary. The people who want to vote for Platner moved here from other states and his apologists are all of a very specific ilk. I’ve seen the same folks cannibalize Al Franken and hold up “believe all women” signs at rallies.

But honestly, I don’t think Platner would have won anyway. The people getting excited about him were always going to go Dem anyway. This was always a losing battle because anybody not ideologically imprisoned was neutral to negative on Graham. Everybody here knows oysters are bougie shit and the idea he was a man of the Mainers was always too bitter a pill to swallow.

***

(Would only add to your excellent local testimony that while I agree that oysters are bougie shit [and also, just gross], it wasn’t always thus):

***

From: Sarah

Subject: NY-7

Date: June 30, 2026

Comrades,

Greetings from the “commie corridor” – a.k.a. a fairly fancy part of Brooklyn (for reference, I’m a stone’s throw away from the old Vice building, my kids go to gymnastics around the corner). As such, I guess my new congressional representative is Claire Valdez.

One thing to mention about her election is that Team Valdez had by far the strongest ground game of the candidates in this race, at least around these parts. Valdez canvassers came to my place at least three times, dropping leaflets twice when I wasn’t home (I accidentally answered the door the third time; that will teach me). Her people were also regularly out on street corners or at the farmers market trying to make her case in person.

By contrast, her competitors had a couple signs up in local bodegas but that was about it from what I could see. On election day, [Antonio] Reynoso’s people were outside my polling place (including outgoing Rep. Nydia Velasquez, looking pretty pissed) but Valdez had 2x the number they had. Julie Won (the only candidate not to lead with “abolish ICE and Israel too,” from what I could tell) sent me a text message the day after election day, reminding me to vote. Alas.

So there’s some element of old fashioned pounding-the-pavement/strategizing to actually get her name out there that must have had an effect, beyond everyone around here agreeing to seize the local Maru Coffee means of production.

Thanks and keep the episodes coming, I love how prolific you all have gotten, it’s hard to keep up!

(As you know but readers/listeners might not, this ground-game disparity was painfully evident with Zohran Mamdani as well.)

***

From: Mark D.

Subject: Episode 565 — Wolves

Date: July 8, 2026

Matt mentioned a love of wolves as a kid. If you’re still into wolves, check out American Wolf by Nate Blakeslee. Great book focusing on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. He tells some great wolf stories. He also tells both sides of the reintroduction story, getting the rancher and hunter side too. Wolves win in the end (mostly).

Rick McIntyre also has a decent series on Yellowstone wolves. He was the Yellowstone “wolf guy” for several years and retired 8-10 years ago (he’s mentioned often in Blakeslee’s book). He’s not the best writer, but he knows more about gray wolves than anyone in North America. Some of his books read like a compilation of field notes, so the writing isn’t compelling. But he can still tell some interesting stories.

(Thanks for the recs, Mark! I’m much less fanatic than I was as a brooding 4^th grader, but I love a good American animal-comeback story. The American Buffalo is one of my very favorites from Ken Burns….)

***

From: Rowland

Subject: Rich Man/Poor Man

Date: July 2, 2026

My fellow Americans,

I was thrilled two of my favorites from podcastistan came together when you had Adam Carolla on. And I was so glad you all discussed the Rich Man/Poor Man bit that Seinfeld loved. But I was practically shouting at my phone over the fact that the perfect tie-in to both shows never occurred to anyone. To add to the canon of RM/PM jokes I present you with.....

Never flies coach.

America is awesome. Soccer is OK I guess. The Knicks are world champions. MAGA is a leftist movement of people too stupid to realize it. And commies disguised as democratically-mandated thieves are bleeding-heart fascists. As dismaying as the rise of the DSA is, I’m not too worried when I consider they really haven’t thought their agenda through, have they? How are they going to confiscate the wealth of a heavily armed population, particularly after having abolished the police? Silly commies.

Happy 4th, guys. Keep up the good work.

(DOH!!!! My God, that is perfect. We will share with him.)

***

From: Joe

Subject: In Defense of the Hawks

Date: June 20, 2026

Hey Guys,

I just wanted to offer that the American Revolution is the biggest counterargument to Matt’s case against voluntary wars and I can’t blame any American who is rightly romantic about their founding trying to chase that high. I mean, the most notably counterexample produced the most free and prosperous country in the history of the world.

WHAT IF IT WORKED ONE MORE TIME MATT?

In all seriousness, Trump is the ultimate monkey paw president. He does so many things I’ve only ever dreamed a president would do and his execution on all of them with the exception of his SCOTUS appointments have been the worst version they could? Trump does such a good job at doing anything badly, it’s hard for me to accept him as your example of “SEE?!” Matt because I’m sure even Polymarket would agree that a bowl of mayonnaise would have got a MOU.

(I know this is all in good fun, but you have aroused the pedant. 1) The “voluntary wars” bit is from Moynihan, though I think it’s largely right. I might phrase it as *defensive* wars, meaning: Americans will always fight (and crush you) if you have attacked us, and we are most apt to support and in some cases join a foreign war if a comparative good guy has been invaded by a baddie. 2) The American Revolution is not a counterargument to that thesis! MFers attacked us, after having closed down our ports & commerce, and flooded the zone w/ Redcoats! Sure, it was a tad on the *audacious* side to go up against history’s largest-ever Navy/armada up to that point, but playing defense on our own soil, while the lobstahbacks were through their plunders flipping Loyalist regions to Rebel, is if anything a potent warning against empires relying on mere military superiority to pacify far-flung locals. And 3) Trump is hardly my example of “SEE?!” My examples of “SEE?!”, directed more at our consistently interventionist friends like John Bolton, are Iraq, nation-building in Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran.)

***

From: John S.

Subject: Patriotic Quirky people / Buying You Decor for the Studio

Date: June 11, 2026

Hi gents,

Paying subscriber (ding, ding, MFer!) and one of the original No Step on Snek emailers when that episode came out in 2024.

Was walking through newly revitalized downtown Bristol, Connecticut, today and found Dark Moon, this delightfully quirky and fun gift shop. Thought you’d appreciate the flags and pocket guides advertised on the sidewalk! Inside has such an eclectic set of things of many life persuasions, but I loved the joy of celebrating America from all types of Americans. Why, we’re awesome, honestly. Now, can we do a crowdfunding campaign to get those pocket constitutions into every member of Congress? And can I buy you these flags for your studio????? Small price for all the enjoyable episodes.

Keep up the great work.

(Why yes indeedy, you CAN, nay MUST send those to the studios! Shoot me a personal email, and I’ll get you our mailing address. As for Congress, the Cato Institute already sends ‘em Constitutions!)

***

From: Shawn

Subject: The Retro Sex Pope and Bad Music

Date: June 3, 2026

Good evening gents,

I’m emailing from the city home to Matt’s murder hotel, Huntington Beach, while making dinner tonight. In my deep dive to throwback episodes I get to enjoy as a paid subscriber, I learned that Kmele is a sex pope, that I have to look forward to rethinking my distaste of the Doors, and that Michael would probably cost less than the therapist I refuse to get.

I want to agree and add on to Michael’s insightful claim that “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is the worst song in history, but add that it has competition, and want to get your take on the following 5 songs.

1. “What’s Up?” – Four Non Blondes

2. “We Built This City” – Starship

3. “The Heat Is On” – Glenn Frey

4. “(You’re) Having My Baby” – Paul Anka

5. “Barbie Girl” – Aqua

I’d add “Got My Mind Set on You” by Harrison but I respect the other 99.9% of his work too much for that. Please feel free to call me wrong, and add your own.

Love peace and chicken grease,

(First up, we done DID this exercise a year ago, son! And as seen there, one from your excellent Top 5 is in mine as well. Though as *also* stated there, everybody’s Worst 5 list always includes something I unironically like, which in your case is “Having My Baby.” The rule basically is that every song I heard in my parents’ station wagon is unimpeachable.

Follow-ons: 1) “Got My Mind Set on You” is near the top of any list of songs you didn’t know were covers. 2) You sure Harrison’s error rate is just 0.1%? Gone Troppo still exists, you know. 3) I was *gonna* say that at least “The Heat Is On” brought us the classic “The H Is O” SNL short, but … I can’t find that anywhere! Someone please discover & leave in the comments.

OK! Nice to be back ‘bucketing, and see you all again soon.)

-The Moynihan Report will return

-Hand jobs and the intellectual life of West Hollywood

-Release the Welch canceled-songs playlist

-The Iran deal is dead. The war is back.

-Why did Iran blow it up? Why does a dog lick his balls?

-Air power has never toppled a regime

-The anti-globalists discover the Strait of Hormuz

-Israel’s secret Ahmadinejad project

-In partial defense of the late Lindsey Graham

-Politics is gross. Stop loving politicians.

-Fellating is best done behind closed doors

-“There is no they. There is only we. And we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

-Midterm Madness comes to Michigan

-Haley Stevens brings a little bit of stick-it-to-’em

-Is this DSA thing real?

-Colorado nominates a man who first killed at seven (he thinks)

-Two fatal ICE shootings in two weeks

-Ann Widdecombe is murdered. Britain shrugs.

-Kmele attempts the Caitlin Clark/data center crossover. It does not land.

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

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There was always something intriguing about Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly Saturday from an aortic dissection at age 71. Or perhaps better put, people who are into politics disproportionately found Graham intriguing, whether because of his confirmed bachelorhood, his lacerating wit (so righteous and wicked when he was on your side, so hyperbolic and partisan when he wasn’t), or his neck-snapping heel-turn vis-à-vis Donald Trump. It was that latter journey—from withering critic to obsequious supplicant—that made John McCain’s erstwhile mini-me a Top 5 contender over the past decade for the political reality show What HAPPENED to That Guy?

I always found those green-room conversations weird. What happened to Lindsey Graham was the same thing, more or less, that happened to J.D. Vance, Based Mike Lee, the leadership (for a while, anyway) of the Libertarian Party, and maybe half the contributors to National Review’s “Against Trump” issue. Politicians especially, but also those in other politics-facing professions, are keenly interested in influencing the exercise of government’s massive power. The price of maintaining the ability to do so during the 45^th and 47^th presidencies has been a willingness to gratify Trump’s ego, often by kneecapping one’s own. There’s a reason why sworn ideological enemies and 2016 GOP primary humiliatees (totally a word) Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham elbowed one-another to be Donald Trump’s golf partner—each senator held strong geopolitical views that they wished to see reflected in policy.

The question of What happened to that guy is more personally comforting than its usually more pertinent corollary, which is: What happened to YOU? Why did you make the mistake of thinking that an elected politician who sometimes (even thrillingly!) overlaps with your policy preferences would not act like a typical politician seeking re-election? Katherine Mangu-Ward may be wrong about not voting, but she’s dead on with the other of her most foundational axioms: Never fall in love with a politician, they’ll inevitably disappoint you. You would think that this would be a basic standard among journalists. And you would be wrong.

* Which brings us to Graham Platner. You may recall on episode #554, New York Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg was so defensive of the (pre-sexual-assault-allegations) oyster farmer that she uttered the words, “Again, I kind of understand as I’m saying this, why somebody would find my belief, like, not credible, right? Like, why especially somebody’s who’s not kind of like not preordained, to be like a little bit sympathetic to his politics would not ever want to give him the benefit of the doubt. I can understand, I’m guessing that probably most of the people watching this think like that either you’re deluding yourself or your bullshitting us. Nevertheless this is really how I see him.” Well, fast-forward to this past Monday, when (as we discussed on #565) Goldberg criticized the people who looked the other way as Platner’s red flags accumulated, including herself. Here’s a notable passage:

Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse. […]

If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens space up for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape proper vetting.

Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics.

In other words (and by admirable confession), she fell in love with a politician, because of his charisma and dreamy politics. Now let’s go to another post-Politico reckoning from a recent Fifth Column guest, Sebastian Junger, who had written an enthusiastic profile of Platner just five weeks prior. Junger’s (very high) journalistic value is as a features/books author, not as a political commentator, so I won’t speed-bag everything in this passage. But there are some available lessons here seemingly just outside his grasp:

[A]long with the excitement, I think there was also a sense among supporters that the other shoe was going to drop, and now that it has, they can finally move on. I include myself in that category. The pity of this predicament is that people who were politically energized by his message — including a large majority of women in the New York Times comments section — found themselves at risk of appearing to be apologizing for a serial abuser. One friend told me that his ultra-feminist wife was devastated by Platner’s downfall, as were many of her female friends. She blamed it on “the Democrats.” […]

Platner represents the kind of economic populist that I believe America needs during a time of staggering corruption and income disparity, and I also resent the fact that such noble positions are now paired with sexual abuse. […]

[I]t’s vitally important to continue upholding the kind of anti-war, anti-corruption, anti-corporatist platform that Platner so brilliantly articulated. His is a strain of American populism that goes back more than a century and could just as easily fit a Democratic candidate as a Republican one. A lot of things can be extracted from Platner’s painful implosion, but perhaps the most important is the realization that most Americans crave economic justice. Our society has created a small number of grotesquely wealthy people, but we are somehow all discouraged from discussing that with our political adversaries. Platner’s brilliance was that he did not see that boundary; he saw no boundary except the one between the vast majority of decent, hardworking people and the political elites. If either party wants to salvage its corrupt and degenerate reputation, I would suggest listening to Platner’s campaign speeches. For many people — despite his massive failures — this man spoke the truth.

In other words, Junger overrode his own hunch that “the other shoe was going to drop,” because of Platner’s charisma and dreamy politics.

Does the journalistic/civic ability to detect bullshit only function when not in thrall to a candidate’s mellifluous political rap? It bloody well shouldn’t! I was never a Lindsey Graham fan, but he was besties with a senator I did like, John McCain. Because I’m at heart a basic-bitch journalist, I yielded to what so many other people in my profession did in 1999-2000, which was to fall hard for the beautiful loserdom of the Straight Talk Express. This led me to McCain’s captivating post-campaign memoir, Worth the Fighting For (co-authored, as all his books were, by Mark Salter), then the more ballyhooed Faith of My Fathers, after which I began noticing personal and ideological patterns, and massive gaps between perception and reality, that seemed to elude most everyone else in the star-struck press corps. The resulting work – newspaper feature, magazine cover, book – read as critical, because there was a lot of puncturing going on (including at the media!), though it was also an overdue attempt to treat him seriously as a thinker and political actor. The idea of thinking, “I like this guy, so I’m going to give him a pass on X, Y, or Z,” is as alien — and ultimately condescending — as thinking in Esperanto.

* OK, this is already long-winded, and we haven’t even got to my long Trump-corruption feature, so let’s pivot to video. First, Kmele talking Platner on CNN:

* Second, Kat Rosenfield talking Platner on the Fifth:

Kat expanded on some of those ideas over at her Substack.

* Third, Kmele talking Platner on Tangle:

* Hey, did you know Mike Pesca stopped The Gist after 12 years? Check out his final show, in which “Mike lays out his broadcasting philosophy: the importance of production values, the tradeoffs between chasing advertisers and risking insularity with paid subscriptions, and what makes for a great interview and great audio…. [O]ffers recommendations for what to listen to in a Pesca-free future, and reflects on where podcasting goes from here.” You can also find Pesca in our archives, on episodes #343, #418, & #467.

* OK, Trump-corruption o’clock. Reason on Thursday published twin features trying to wrap our arms around the scope of corruption in this second administration. My ever-meticulous colleague Jacob Sullum drilled down into some of the most egregious examples/attempts, whereas I worked back from whataboutism, starting from the most notorious example of corruption in U.S. history, and asking: In this category, how does Trump 2.0 compare? The answer was largely: Worse, much worse.

For those with short attention spans, you can read my Twitter thread. For those seeking a taste without clicking on anything, here’s three paragraphs:

Four days before Trump’s second inauguration, a company called Aryam Investments 1 signed a deal with the president-elect’s son Eric to buy a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial for a reported $500 million, half of it in cash up front. The Trump family received $187 million overnight, and the family of World Liberty Financial co-founder Steve Witkoff, who by then was already conducting sensitive Middle East diplomacy on behalf of the incoming president, received an additional $31 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Amazingly, the transaction was made in secret, revealed only one year later.

Did Aryam Investments have any pressing regulatory business in front of the U.S. government? Quite a bit, yes. The firm is owned by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the national security adviser for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), brother of the nation’s president, and head of the country’s $800 billion sovereign wealth fund. Tahnoon’s artificial intelligence company G42 had been prevented by the Biden administration from acquiring advanced Nvidia AI chips over national security concerns that it might share the technology with China. That was reversed with a bang in May 2025, when Tahnoon received what The Wall Street Journal described as “a coup for the U.A.E.’s ruling family”—an agreement from Washington to send the UAE 500,000 high-powered AI chips per year, including to the previously verboten G42. “Enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters,” the Journal noted.

So a foreign government official’s secret $500 million deal that personally enriched the president and his family, plus a key Mideast diplomat and his family, preceded by six months a massive regulatory reversal that will further enrich said official and his country. But that’s not all. In December 2024, Tahnoon’s asset management firm Lunate was one of two entities to inject $1.5 billion into the investment firm owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (who has co-led Mideast diplomatic initiatives with Witkoff). And we are still not done. Remember that aforementioned $2 billion Trumpcoin-denominated investment into Binance by the UAE company MGX in May 2025, just prior to the UAE chip deal? MGX is owned by none other than Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

Random question for the peanut gallery: I used to do audio versions of my Reason articles, sometimes w/ some extra jackassery. Would some of you like me to start doing that again?

* Moar Fifth Column YouTubery that I forgot to link to last week, beginning with Sarah Isgur on birthright citizenship:

* And Adam Carolla on Michael Jackson’s weird dad:

* Events! July 14 is an Epstein Files debate at the SoHo Forum in NYC between Michael Tracey (veteran of episode #105) and Marcella Szablewicz on the resolution: “The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has become a case of moral panic.” And Nov. 4-6 we will be podcasting from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Soapbox 26 conference in Philadelphia, along with fellow speakers Sarah Isgur (Members Only #314), Noam Dworman (#549), David French (#191, #325, #365, #555) Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276), Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and Ilya Shapiro (#361), for starters. Make sure to use the discount code FIFTH to save $50 on tickets.

* Speaking of Lukianoff, he had a Washington Post Op-Ed this week, headlined “The Trump Administration Is Cracking Down on Dissent. That’s Chilling.”

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

“This is Naotoshi Okada, he’s the CEO of Nikkei,” I would say by way of introduction. “And this is Spike.… Spike was in Three Kings.” Back when I worked at VICE, this was my favorite way to introduce VICE Creative Director Spike Jonze while giving tours to visiting journo types. It’s not that Spike hadn’t done more impressive things since then (or before), it’s just that he doesn’t get enough praise for his excellent performance as PFC Conrad Vig in this still-underrated film. Set at the end of the Gulf War in 1991 (see, another anniversary!), Three Kings follows George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube as American soldiers on a Bush-era update of Kelly’s Heroes. After failing to see much action in the fleeting conflict, the Americans would like to at least return home rich – and plan to do so by liberating a secret stash of Saddam’s gold bullion. Despite some predictably earnest editorializing (I mentioned George Clooney is in the movie, right?), it’s a sharp, funny, and highly stylized film with Norah Dunn doing her best Christiane Amanpour and the greatest use in any medium of a song by the rock group Chicago. Watch for free (with ads) on Pluto; buy the BluRay; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Shane:

Pouring one out for Graham while watching his highlight reel one last time:

Sendoff: Of course it’s Bonnie Tyler, but it’s not gonna be “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” even the eternally untoppable literal video version. But before we get to one of my favorite late-‘70s heartbreak songs, did you know that our Welsh chanteuse was not born with Rod Stewart-like pipes? Her first album, pre-vocal-nodes surgery, reveals a singer more in the Olivia Newton-John/Juice Newton lane, as you can hear on her first hit, 1976’s “Lost in France.” Anyhoo, I will confess to having a vulnerability for breakup songs circa 1977-78, since that coincided with many significant developments of my childhood (not least of which was finally getting my own room, and clock radio!), but I submit that this is still a banger, made complete by her weird Welsh vowels:

Greetings programs! Below find the link for this month’s Second Sunday, taking place LIVE on Zoom at 8PM EST.

Paid subscribers get the link below the fold.

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•“Conference” = group sex

•21 years of successfully avoiding podcast wealth

•Interviewing the godfather of AI

•A tiger and a rattlesnake

•Matt gets quizzed on LLMs

•The God Test

•The shock of vibe coding

•China and the superintelligence arms race

•Re…

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When you’re a star, they let you mispronounce their name.

•The Fifth Column (whiskey) sells out!

•America’s birthday month

•Loathing Graham Platner before it was cool

•The least weird thing about Platner

•The Times is on it

•A working class hero is something to be

A•bout that beard

•The flaws are a feature, not a bug

•We all know a guy like this

•Christine Blasey Ford enters the chat

•Michael Tracey exists

•Kmele expresses skepticism

•It’s not consensual, it’s DiGiorno

•On second thought, let’s not play the Fuentes clip

•Michell Goldberg’s mea culpa

•Fruit baskets

•Midterm Madness… the Graham Platner edition

•Stephen King for senate?

•Missing Moynihan

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What did you do during the Semiquincentennial, daddy? Over here, we paid our respects to Hamilton, Gallatin, American commerce, billowy tall sails, badass flyovers, crazy proximity to East River fireworks, and of course, non-king George:

* Kmele? He spent the Fourth like he spent all week: On CNN. Busty Wimsatt, per usual, has the receipts:

* On Thursday, I published a historically topical piece over at Reason titled, “Americans Will Never Shut Up or Do As We’re Told.” The opening conveys the greatest anecdote I’ve learned during the past two years of Revolution-maxxing:

In 1757, a full generation before the American Revolution, British soldiers in Albany, New York—the main military staging area for the French and Indian War—demanded that the local sheriff open up his jail to detain a town farmer accused of harassing nearby troops.

The sheriff, a physically unimpressive shoemaker in his early 30s named Abraham Yates, refused on the grounds that they had no legal writ. Yates complained about the marauding ways of the occupying forces to John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, who had recently been installed as England’s commander in chief for all of North America. After Lord Loudoun imperiously retorted that there was a war on, Yates filed a complaint against the commander to New York’s lieutenant governor, James De Lancey. That’s when things got spicy.

As recounted by the historian Russell Shorto in New York Archives magazine: “Loudoun approached Yates on the street and the two had a public confrontation. Loudoun said he had seen the letter Yates sent to the lieutenant governor and that it was filled with lies. Yates replied that every sentence could be proved. Loudoun had previously used the local jail for military purposes; he now warned Yates against discharging a military prisoner he had confined there. ‘Sir,’ Yates replied, ‘I have already discharged him.’ ‘By whose order?’ Loudoun demanded to know. ‘By the King’s writ,’ Yates responded. Loudoun then ordered the sheriff to stay daily within his sight—’and if you do not do I shall send for you with a file of muskets, with their bayonets fixed.’ The Albanians who were witness to the exchange must have thought that would be the end of it. Instead, the not terribly threatening-looking sheriff replied, ‘My Lord, I have no time to wait upon you. I have other business to attend.’ Loudoun, barely containing his fury, vowed that for Yates’s insolence he would turn his house into a hospital for wounded soldiers and the local church into an artillery storehouse. ‘I don’t know what you will do, My Lord,’ Yates replied coolly, ‘but I know you have no right to do it.’”

* Reminder, also from Thursday, that you can watch/listen to the whole run of The Revolutionaries in one shareable place!

* Virginia Postrel, a Fifth Column guest from so long ago that the headline was “Brexit, Benghazi, the BET Awards,” had a terrific piece this week over at Liberty Fund on America’s revolutionary reconsideration/harnessing of that contentious human trait of ambition. Here’s a longish excerpt:

An Anglican homily—dating to 1571 but still in print as late as the nineteenth century—defined ambition as “the unlawful and restless desire in men to be of higher state than God hath given or appointed unto them.” Ambition was a grievous offense, springing from “Luciferian pride and presumption.” Virtuous Christians knew their place. The leaders of the rebel colonies were, in this view, treasonous sinners.

The drafters of the Declaration of Independence understood the stigma. They changed its first sentence to make it less provocatively ambitious, historian William Casey King argues in Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft read, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained….” That formulation skittered dangerously close to articulating a desire to be higher than God ordained. Avoiding the reference to hierarchy, the phrase was softened to “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another….” (Emphasis added.) The new formulation subtly suggested that the two parties were previously equal partners rather than conceding—and hence challenging—the mother country’s superior status.

It was, of course, the next sentence of the Declaration that became the fundamental tenet of the American creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This was a statement of liberal political philosophy, embedded in intellectual history. But the principles of the Declaration quickly became something more: a cultural force shaping the lives and expectations of ordinary Americans who would never read John Locke or encounter the concept of eudaemonia.

That culture had political ramifications. In northern states, successful campaigns for the abolition of slavery arose after independence, affirming the public doctrine of liberty. Responding to demands for equality, states throughout the union extended suffrage to almost all white men and, in some places, to free blacks as well. By the early nineteenth century, a higher percentage of Americans enjoyed the right to vote than in any other time or place to that date. Among the enfranchised were servants, apprentices, and sons still under their father’s roofs. […]

Even as it embraced ambition, America’s emerging culture rejected the inferiority of “private occupations and pursuits.” Although universally admired, George Washington was not the quintessential new American. The dignified, self-fashioned gentleman of fine manners and landed estate, who married up and channeled his ambition into an army career—that most traditional and hierarchical of outlets—was an icon, not a role model. In his Farewell Address, Washington referred five times to ambition, always as a danger to the union.

The exemplary American was instead Benjamin Franklin, the runaway apprentice, newspaperman, entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, postmaster, and founder of a local fire department, library, hospital, and university. Franklin represented what could happen in [Adam] Smith’s ideal of a society “where every man was perfectly free both to chuse what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper.” Genius would reveal itself. Nor were such polymathic talents the only ones valued in the new republic. Allowing countless individuals the freedom to piddle for little prizes—using their knowledge, creativity, and energy to address discrete problems and local concerns—built the nation.

* Cleansing Bicentennial psychedelia break, care of La Postrel’s successor:

* Speaking of Nick, wanna see what The Reason Roundtable looks like when taped in The Fifth Column studio? Here ya go:

* Chat of the Week comes from Dacia:

I stood in the middle of the street with my dog and sang the Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful by myself with fireworks going off all around me. No one heard me, but I felt pretty damn patriotic. Been waiting for 250 since I was a kid, and all the fireworks and pomp gives me hope that this nation, despite all the infighting and muckery, is an amazing place and I am lucky to be here right now, experiencing all of it. Happy 250, everyone.

* Events! July 14 is an Epstein Files debate at the SoHo Forum in NYC between Michael Tracey (veteran of episode #105) and Marcella Szablewicz on the resolution: “The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has become a case of moral panic.” And Nov. 4-6 we will be podcasting from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Soapbox 26 conference in Philadelphia, along with fellow speakers Sarah Isgur (Members Only #314), Noam Dworman (#549), David French (#191, #325, #365, #555) Nick Gillespie (S.D. #72, #379, M.O. #251, #551), Greg Lukianoff (#216, M.O. #183, #427, M.O. #276), Jacob Mchangama (#102 & #344), John McWhorter (#84, #121, #188 & #366), Matt Taibbi (#226, #348), and Ilya Shapiro (#361), for starters. Make sure to use the discount code FIFTH to save $50 on tickets.

* Time for Producer Jason’s Video Vault!

2026 is riddled with anniversaries: the 250th anniversary of the U.S.A., the 10th anniversary of The Fifth Column, and the 35th anniversary of The Replacements’ last show. One milestone that I celebrated a bit more quietly was the 35th anniversary of Hudson Hawk. I say quietly only because there are so few people willing to celebrate a film that was despised by audiences and reviled by critics, after having been conceived by Planet Hollywood co-founder Bruce Willis. But back in 1991 when I headed to the theater on opening weekend, I was blissfully unaware of the reviews and far removed from any concern over the film’s financials, so what I saw up on that screen was one of the ballsiest movies ever made. From the casting (Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard, James Coburn), to the conceit (cat burglars who time their robberies by singing old standards), to the cartoon physics (you’ll see), it’s the kind of movie that could only be born of ego and hubris. As Grant wrote of the experience, “Standing about in ‘Vargas-girl’ high heels, crotchless leather panties, brassiere, stockings, and lipstick, like a lost member of some touring Rocky Horror Show is the exact moment that I know–beyond all reasonable doubt–THAT THIS MOVIE IS A ONE-WAY TICKET OUT OF MY MIND.” Watch free on (with ads) on YouTube; buy the BluRay; here’s the trailer:

* Comment of the Week comes from Randolph Carter:

Yikes, it’s like when Chris Stirewalt subs for Jonah Goldberg, I thought Matt Welch was on this episode, he and The Honorable Member sound almost exactly alike!

Sendoff: Aww crap, with all the patriotic foofaraw I didn’t notice that the cop from The Village People died. Victor Willis was more than that, of course, but also excatly that. Meaning, 99.9 percent of the value of Willis’s musical career was contained within the meteoric rise and fall of the People from 1977 to 1979, but the officer was more than just a charismatic lead singer: He was the whole damn band when it started, a voice and burgeoning songwriter and stage talent (having starred in the Broadway version of The Wiz), attached at the hip to French disco producer Jacques Morali. The music came first, the costumed macho men later. Willis co-wrote all the biggies: “Macho Man” (#25), “In the Navy” (#3), and “Y.M.C.A.” (#2), the latter of which Willis rather improbably insisted in 2024 was not about gay stuff. Willis himself was not just hetero, he was married to damn Phylicia Rashad back when she was Phylicia Allen, and in fact co-wrote a concept disco album for her called Josephine Superstar. The disco backlash, as I wrote in Firehose #198, was a massive and sudden thing, wiping out careers overnight, and though the causality has almost certainly been exaggerated, anti-gay animus was part of it, and The Village People were the most notorious avatars. In the event, Willis quit the band right before their Can’t Stop the Music movie flopped, then after 1983 basically vanished for a quarter-century in a haze of drugs and obscurity. He did get a third act of reunion tours and political do/don’t-use-my-song micro-versies, and good on him for it. The macho man gave millions of us some infectiously upbeat ear-wormed joy. And I swear to God, the Navy came this close to using this as a recruiting song:

Let’s face it, you’re already not working. And even if you are, you’re certainly not going so hard that you can’t imbibe five hours of Fifth Column-flavored patriotic podcasty goodness!

On Sunday, we freed up our five-part, limited run Semiquincentennial series The Revolutionaries, so that those of you in the cheap seats could enjoy past the paywall, and also so that everybody so inclined could freely share with their favorite History Dad or Snek Mom. Well, today, we’re making it even easier—one email, five podcasts, July 3^rd, LFG.

In order, we have: The grrrreat Charles C. Mann, author of the groundbreaking books 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, who walks us through a fascinating revolutionary precursor: The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which early Americans, through coordinated violence, shook off the misrule of European imperialists:

Then comes the whiskey-throated stylings of Jack Henneman, impresario of the highly recommended The History of the Americans podcast, who lets us know how and why Paul Revere was more than all that:

Testifying for the also-rans is leathery-faced history skeevester Bill Schulz, who weirdly is the 7^th great-grandson of William Dawes, the other guy on that Midnight Ride:

Classing the joint back up is writer/midlife-History-Dad-crisis’er Robert Sullivan, author of the delightful My American Revolution: A Modern Expedition Through History’s Forgotten Battlegrounds, which inspired this whole miniseries in the first place:

And crowning the whole exercise off is my dear friend and frequent co-conspirator Ken Layne, of Desert Oracle fame, who tells us strange tales about Providential Revolutionary moments, and of course George Washington’s comical dogs.

This was a labor of love and patriotism and strong drink, and I hope they assist in your AmericaMaxxing!

As announced on episode #564, we teamed up with The Macklowe to produce a limited-edition bottling of their very fine port-cask finished Kentucky bourbon. With just 240 hand-numbered bottles etched with that familiar Fifth Column logo in honor of our 10th Anniversary, this is a one-and-done kinda deal.

Subscribers at the Never Fly Coach level get first dibs at the link below the paywall. 24 hours after that, the post will be unlocked for all paying subscribers. If there’s any left after that (don’t count on it), we’ll open it up to the masses.

Drink now or forever hold your peace. Shipping will begin the week of July 20. Note: Due to restrictions from THE MAN, shipping is not available to Alaska, Arkansas , Delaware, Hawaii, Mississippi, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

Get your bottle!

-Matt moves during a heat wave… Peter Meijer reports for duty

-Meijer, class traitor, explains the pied-à-terre tax

-Mayor Mamdani balances the budget, if you ignore the bailout

-Kmele gets Hayek’d

-Machine politics was bad, but graduate student politics is worse.

-Bannon’s old Leninist fantasy, now available in DSA packaging

-Kamala Harris genuflects toward Mamdani-world

-MAGA wants the factories back. The robots have other ideas.

-Ro Khanna’s children: landed gentry

-Midterm Madness, Rocky Mountain High

-Melat Kiros justifies 9/11

-Scott Wiener gets yelled at for insufficient revolutionary fervor

-Stalinism, but make it customer-facing

-The revolution will be staffed by PhD candidates

-Speaking of revolution: happy birthday, America

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

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-The N-word trap at the Hudson Yards gym

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-Phil Spector and the Wall of Sound defense

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-Trump loses, birth tourism maybe does not

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-A color-blind Constitution, except when it isn’t

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