May the Fifth Be With You: 2-Year Substack Anniversary Report

Our job—this year especially! —is to somehow help you stay sane.

On May 5^th, 2022, The Fifth Column, after 29 months of doing bonus subscription episodes on Patreon, took our talents to Substack. We celebrate this anniversary not just because we have thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from this partnership with a company that truly values free speech, but also because it’s an occasion to take stock of our previous 365 days, and talk about what the very near future has in store.

One thing about meeting you people in the wild is that you are never shy about giving feedback, negative as well as positive. Like your emails and comments and chat, every single one of which we read, these direct reports give us usable content about choice of guests (Batya Ungar-Sargon, Kat Rosenfield, Danny Polishcuk), what we’re missing (*cough* MERCH! *cough*), what we’re doing wrong (my list is longer than yours), but also what we’re doing right. It’s that last category on this anniversary report that I want to linger on a bit.

At our wonderful (and soon-to-be-repeated) Chicago meetup last month, one note outnumbered the rest combined: You guys help me stay sane. Here, let’s hit the “Paid Subscriber Notes” button in one corner of the Substack back-end that I haven’t yet folded into my regular feedback loop…. Sure enough:

* “The world has gone crazy. I appreciate that you guys are still rooted in reality :)”

* “I feel sometimes like you guys have the only sane takes in media.”

* “I subscribe because you are the only people who still sound sane and fucking reasonable these days (aside from B. Maher), even when I don't always agree.”

* “You wonderful people make me laugh and think. Thank you for that, and bringing sanity to the discourse. You also brought Chaya Leah and Yael together, one of the finest duos.”

* “One of the few podcasts that makes me feel sane (and one my friends would probably hate me for listening to). I'm sure you've never heard such a sentiment...................”

We have indeed heard, and been nourished by, the sentiment. (The other main subscriber-testimonial subthemes, FWIW, were because funny, and Moynihan kept badgering me, and no longer a poor.)

We shall leave aside for the moment the seeming incongruity of having two pill-heads and a wino leading some kind of sanity seminar from the rubble of their own personal/professional lives, and instead appreciate reality where it lays: People seek us out most when the news is most deranging. And you know what? The news is going to be hella-deranging for the rest of 2024 and immediately beyond. I’m not saying that your paid subscription is an investment in your mental health (as well as ours), but I’m also not not saying it.

The single most deranging news story of the last calendar year was the October 7^th massacre and mass kidnapping event perpetrated by Hamas against their immediate (and largely peacenik) Israeli neighbors on the other side of the Gaza border. October 9^th, as it happened, was our regularly scheduled Second Sunday Members Only Zoom taping, open to our paying subscribers. I think we reached our 500-attendee limit within about 15 minutes, including trusted (if insane) past guests Eli Lake and former congressman Peter Meijer. We, all of us, needed that.

Over the ensuing weeks we broke bread with knowledgeable people from all over the Israel vs. Hamas spectrum: Hawkish historian Oren Kessler, lefty ForPol vet Matt Duss, WashPost Israel critic Shadi Hamid, Israeli politician Asaf Zamir, tide-pool stalwart Andrew Sullivan, and many more. Were some of these episodes polarizing? Of course! The news—and its ongoing aftermath—was fundamentally deranging, and will continue to be throughout this presidential election year. We provide haven from such political/media storms, whether it be the 2016 election or the Russiagate freakout or COVID or the George Floyd protests or January 6^th.

And rest unreassured—2024 will bring the rain, and the pain. But also … live shows! There will be at least two live Fifth Column tapings this calendar year (about which more very soon), and that number could easily swell. It says right there in the bennies section on the paid-subscription page: “Early access to special events.” We’ll be having some.

Before we talk more about what’s cooking for the next 365 days, let’s look unflinchingly at last year’s promises:

* More published emails from you; more published responses from us.

Fact-check: True. In the form of Mailbuckets #1, #2, #3 & #4, very soon to be joined by #5.

* Interviews with 2024 presidential candidates.

Fact-check: It depends by what you mean by “s.” Which is to say, we did interview one, but just one, Vivek Ramaswamy. In fairness, the major-party presidential race was decided historically early, and some of our expected interviewees unexpectedly played nu-fone-who-dis. I’m confident we’ll get a third-party candidate or two over the coming half-year.  

* More original video content.

Fact-check: True, though not under the Fifth Column brand. There were the nine group (and six solo) appearances on The Megyn Kelly Show, Kmele’s terrific seven-part, what-is-life series Dispatches from The Well; The Reason Roundtable’s 2024 pivot to video, Moynihan’s recurring role on Noam Dworman’s Live From the Table Comedy Cellar podcast…. Speaking of which, here he is just this week with our pal Coleman Hughes:

I include such embeds on the weekend Firehose posts (formerly known as Working for the Weekend), always privileging video content, because A) it’s fun, B) many of you just consume podcasts this way, C) I feel bad that we haven’t given you more original video content. However! The wheels of progress grind slowly but surely here in Fifdom, and one of great developments of the past calendar year has been the generous inauguration of a fancy new big-enough-for-cameras studio in SoHo:

This and plenty of other behind-the-scenes whirring leaves me confident to say at least this: When we Pivot to Video, it will not be in coach. We eagerly look forward to the day when remote recording is mostly a bad memory, and all the bottles will be right out there on the table.

The last of last year’s promises:

* At least one limited podcast mini-series, available to currently paying subscribers.

OK, my eyes were bigger than my stomach, or however you say that. I had expected by now to have (for the first time!) recorded the audio of, and added bonus content to, my 2007 book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, but … the dog ate my homework? It is also true that my cassingle reminiscence last year of Richard Riordan and the never-launched L.A. Examiner newspaper was the first of what will be a limited series of hopefully humorous media-fails (another of which will drop this spring), but that’s not what my original promise was referring to. Fact-check: Snek got stepped on!

A quick finishing kick through last year’s traffic-generating highlights before we beat on to the glorious future:

* You people sure like it when Moynihan dishes on Vice News! (Members Only #173, M.O. #202.)

* You people sure like media beefs! (Firehose #84, M.O. #204.)

* You people sure like to come to us from, and go from us to, Andrew Sullivan, Blocked and Reported, Ethan Strauss, and Ben Dreyfuss!

A final note of appreciation to the Fifdom community, whose never-ending drinkfests and book clubs and WhatsApp channels are way beyond our basic comprehension, let alone responsibility. Podcasts beget podcasts, art begets art, memes beget memes, and so on. Ever it was thus, and yet the magic is real, and worthy of a HEY-O!

Since putting out this Substack shingle two years ago, our paid subs have doubled, and free tier quintupled. Thank you, merci, gesundheit. We will do more over the next 12 months to earn your business. Now let’s hear some guest-recs in the comments!