The Fifth Column

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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…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

* 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 doctrine” translated
* Profiles in inconsistenty
* Doesn’t matter! Trump will “destroy your country” either way!
* The hangover
* Gorsu…

-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
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.wethefifth.com

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 …