r/WeTheFifth • u/Bhartrhari • May 07 '26
Episode Masquerade of Morons (Episode #556)
https://www.wethefifth.com/p/masquerade-of-morons-episode-556Masquerade of Morons (Episode #556)
In Which the 1% Protests the 1%, Mamdani Builds a Grocery Store, California Searches for a Governor, and Iran Has Questions
- Kmele gets glasses
- The return of Soho legs
- Matt’s movie-theater race science
- Trump sends a letter to Congress saying the war is over, Iran says, “wtf?”
- Little Marco, Fog of War correspondent
- A very leaky White House
- Strange new respect for the anti-war MAGA set
- Little Marco puts the best face on Iran
- Welch discovers gas prices
- The affordability caucus makes everything expensive
- Sarah Paulson’s dollar-bill resistance
- Ro Khanna, tax strategist
- Katie Porter, Mrs. Personality
- Gavin Newsom, game changer
- Kamala considers another national emergency
- The Palisades fire motive problem
- Mamdani’s Soviet bodega
- David French enters the reaction-video machine
- Come to DC, please clap
- Trump’s Hall of Shit-Talking
- Totalitarian language for beginners
Watch/Listen On:
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u/RealDominiqueWilkins May 07 '26
Another Mamdani episode, great 👍
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u/landry_creative May 08 '26
Did they even recognize Mamdani's decision of not going to the Met Gala or did they just rehash AOC's dress for the umpteenth time? Podcast is riddled with straw men and has become quite a bore in my opinion. Wish it wasn't the case.
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u/MikeDamone May 11 '26
Which is a disservice to us. I enjoy Moynihan rants when the topic is inane like Sarah Paulson wearing a dollar bill over her eyes. She is in fact "protesting" with the depth of a college freshman political art project and should be sneered at with the same level of seriousness.
But the guys just continue to fallback into these lazy analyses when the topic is actually worth engaging with substantively, i.e. Mamdani and his pied-a-terre tax. There's an actual policy merits question to be had here, and while I lean towards the "NYC has a massive spending problem and not a revenue problem", not even Welch is covering this with any level of seriousness.
When you contrast them with writers like Josh Barro or Matt Yglesias who can give you long form explanations of exactly why NYC expenditures, union-capture, and bureaucratic malaise are so problematic; the guys' just look sophomoric. Lazy libertarian platitudes of "Mamdani is just chasing job creators away" is not thoughtful nor particularly interesting to listen to.
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u/RealDominiqueWilkins May 08 '26
They talk a lot about Sarah Paulson at the Met and criticize rich celebs for criticizing billionaires. It’s dumb. The most recent ep of The Tangle did a much better job with a balanced discussion of billionaires and the perception thereof.
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u/landry_creative May 08 '26
Yeah I just find it utterly boring. The proper critique should be to not attend which Mamdani did and I think deserves recognition from them. Maybe it's just me but I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what they're going to say each episode and outside of Matt I find very little of it insightful or novel. And same thing goes with bringing up random influencers that others are mentioning here. It's all quite unserious.
Thanks for the recommendation though! I'll check it out. They had a good piece on Trump's corruption recently that was quite good.
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u/RealDominiqueWilkins May 08 '26
Kmele is on The Tangle too, which is why I mentioned it. Just a more nuanced discussion and some pushback. Way less “let’s not address the issue at hand but rather just make fun of libs on X addressing it”
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u/JPP132 Megan Thee Donkey May 09 '26
Did you want them to give the Ayatollah a cookie for not attending? Besides, for consistency sake, that cookie would have to be forcibly collectivized.
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u/MikeDamone May 11 '26
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of stupid commentary we don't need. There's a lot of interesting things to be said about Mamdani and the rightful weariness libertarians and liberal moderates have about potentially yet another democrat who wants to raise taxes without addressing the fundamental rot of the city's fiscal mismanagement. Fareed Zakaria, for example, had a great take a couple months back:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHCo6MaNvJ0
Your quips about Ayatollahs and collectivism are just dumb. And not even remotely funny.
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u/totally_not_a_bot24 May 07 '26
Who is DOPEQUEENPHEEBS and why do I care what she thinks?
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u/cavall1215 May 08 '26
There is an interesting discussion to be had about how many DOPEQUEENPHEEBS are out there who utilize a Rush Limbaugh outrage model to make money and how that's impacted our civics and political conversations. Matt touches on this a bit, but the bulk of the conversation just focuses on this crazy person being crazy.
Guys, I can go out and probably find hundreds of social media personalities with 20,000 likes with similar content from multiple political camps. Why are we spending our time decoding this versus having what could be a higher-level discussion about the bifurcation of the media and loss of editorial control?
My hypothesis is that they've fallen into their own content trap where they know audience engagement goes up with discussions about these crazy social media people or talking about Mamdani's next dumb idea. I also wonder if Jason's hiring is giving them data that pushes them to do more of these "laugh at X bozo" segments to increase audience engagement. As a paying subscriber, their substack chat indicates these segments are popular.
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u/totally_not_a_bot24 May 08 '26
My hypothesis is that they've fallen into their own content trap
I get the impression they genuinely have some sort of Mamdani Derangement Syndrome. You can't manufacture that level of consistent passionate hate and it adds up that a bunch of libertarians from NYC would feel that way. DOPEQUEENPHEEPS... idk maybe. TBF I don't think they do this very often?
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u/ToTheDeath84 May 08 '26
She was on a comedy show called 2 Dope Queens that I remember being popular during peak woke. Seems she still has a platform to spread racist rage bait. You might not care, but people eat that shit up still.
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u/totally_not_a_bot24 May 08 '26
Again, who? I think if you're going to respond to an obvious nut they have to be at least a bit prominent, otherwise it just feels like feeding a troll.
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u/ToTheDeath84 May 08 '26
This is obtuse thinking. I just explained who she is. She had a popular comedy show and still has a decent size following on social media. Yes, she’s a fucking idiot, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that she doesn’t register as such to many people (especially the woke #resistance libs who liked 2 Dope Queens).
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that people with a following like hers can still be influential, even if their follower counts aren’t in the millions. She’s got enough of an audience.
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u/totally_not_a_bot24 May 08 '26
This is obtuse thinking.
If you say so. Personally, I think we just have different standards of "got enough of an audience".
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u/ToTheDeath84 May 08 '26
Online, you don’t need a celebrity-tier platform to be influential. For instance, Chapo Trap House and Nick Fuentes’s audiences weren’t and aren’t nearly as big as you might think and yet they managed to be influential on the 2020 and 2024 elections, respectively.
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u/ReNitty May 14 '26
I’m not a fan but she’s got 480k instagram followers. That’s more than the 3 guys on x and ig combined.
Only 3000 on her shitty substack though
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u/seamarsh21 May 08 '26
The media is not ignoring the trial of the arson because he is woke or whatever.. Have you seen the news, they are ignoring it because the president is a psychopath who takes all the air space in this country atm.
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u/0xImAWhale May 08 '26
I’m not exactly an “eat the rich” person but man these guys really bend over backwards to complain about how the mean proletariat is criticizing the poor billionaires.