The Fifth Column (private feed for erik.christian.wiest@gmail.com)

#527 - War is Over (If Hamas Wants It)

* Subscribe to our YouTube channel already!* A shirt full of toothpaste* Whiskey in a jar* Your dumb, complaining emails* A roundtable of cranks and weirdos* Happy 100 year anniversary Antifa!* People. People. It ain’t fascism. And it ain’t ISIS.* Wait, Twitter IS real life!!!!!!* The long shadow of 2020* Remembering Seattle’s WASP autonomous zone* Ted Cruz’s hoop dreams* Sammy Hagar vs. the government shutdown* Should we tariff Canadian stunt pilots?* Death to the paper tigers!* We’re cautiously optimistic...* When Bari met 60* Charm, offensive* I bet you don’t remember *this* shitty Vice deal* You CANNOT talk to TNC that way* Journo shock! Moron social media hyperventilates about unacceptable lesbian!* Norman Finkelstein does a yiddish racism* Sorry about these A*** C*** song titlesIf you prefer to watch this video over on YouTube, just click here.Thanks for reading The Fifth Column (A Podcast)! This episode is public so feel free to share it.Follow The Fifth ColumnYouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

UNLOCKED: Russ Roberts, on the Weight of History & the Elasticity of Memory

Last month, after years of you people begging us, we finally had on the great Russ Roberts—author, educator, and proprietor of the phantasmagorically influential podcast EconTalk. The extremely wide-ranging conversation, whose pre-Pivot-to-Video video is available to Never Fly Coach subscribers, one of the most could you please unpaywall this so I can share it? episodes in recent memory, and so here we are.You SAID you wanted to share this. So share this! Pretty please?* Russ’s drinks by the pool with Hitchens* How potato chips are made. And what it tells us about economics* Backwards towards “artisanal”* How will a NatCon economy perform?* It ain’t all doom and gloom (surprisingly)* Do academic economists matter?* Russ talks to Milton Friedman* Do long-term economic trends tells us anything??* On moving to Israel* On returning to a (relatively) calm America* Notes from Russ’s father* A TikTok war* Was Moneyball wrong? Or do people just not understand Moneyball?* The Close Encounters mashed potato mountain* And much, much more Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Members Only #279 - Behind the Scenes With Kanye West Documentarian Nico Ballesteros

The Fifth Column’s resident Kanye aficionado Kmele Foster sits down with Nico Ballesteros, director of In Whose Name?, a 100% verité documentary that follows Kanye West over the course of six tumultuous years. Just 18 years-old when the project began, and shooting on an iPhone, Ballesteros spent 15 hours a day recording every aspect of Kanye’s life from the explosive to the mundane, stringing together scenes from a singular life that includes cameos from Drake, Kim Kardashian, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Marilyn Manson, Elon Musk, Pharell, Kris Jenner, David Letterman, Sean “Diddy” Combs, Joel Osteen, and Anna Wintour.Paying subscribers get to hear the full episode, full stop.•Finding refuge in a Flip Video camera•Something like a phenomenon•Immersion in clout culture•Getting into Ye’s world•Mental health & Jackson Hole•Analyzing celebrity “performance”•Going all in on the Sunday Service•Tucker Carlson, death con 3, and White Lives MatterFollow The Fifth ColumnYouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

#526 - Megyn Kelly is All Out of Generosity

It’s fine if you want to listen to this episode on Apple podcasts or Spotify or Substack. We get it! That’s the way you’ve always done it! But you do realize that after 525 episodes (not including the hundreds of subscriber-only episodes), we’ve finally launched the Fifth Column video podcast, right? And you know that you are required by federal law to subscribe to the new Fifth Column YouTube channel? Ok...thanks...and now...Megyn Kelly...* Botox and Scotch* When Megyn went “temporarily insane”* To be frivolous and Oprah-like* You’re my inspiration, Ben* From traffic cop to a truncheon-wielding cop* Escalation is bad. “Yes, but one must fight fire with fire.”* Principle vs. vengeance* Does Andy McCarthy have Trump Derangement Syndrome?* Megyn “speaks fluent MAGA”* More MAGA than libertarian or NRO…* We need to talk about Candace* “Tucker is in a different camp”* Wait, Moynihan has some opinions about the awfulness of CandaceIf you prefer to watch video over on YouTube, just click here.The Fifth Column (A Podcast) is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Follow The Fifth ColumnYouTube: @wethefifthInstagram: @we.the.fifthX: @wethefifthTikTok: @wethefifthFacebook: @thefifthcolumn Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Members Only #278 -- Goliath’s Curse Author Luke Kemp on Why (and When) Empires Collapse

Oh sure, everyone’s go-to for imperial collapse tends to be Rome, but what broad lessons are there to be gleaned from every single other civilizational implosion, from Mesopotamia to the Mayans to the forgotten pyramid builders along the Mississippi River? Such is the intriguing set-up for Goliaths Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, the… Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.