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The socialist magazine Jacobin embarrassed itself this week by claiming the new miniseries ShĆgun âshows something rarely seen on screen: the shocking hubris of the colonizer and dehumanization of the colonized.â
Social media had a field day with this because, as we all know, Japan was not only never colonized but was one of history biggest colonizers. A friend asked me, why was Japan never colonized? Hereâs my answer.
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David Volodzko speaks with Doug Klain (website, X), a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Councilâs Eurasia Center, where he focuses on Russiaâs war on Ukraine. He is the former assistant director of the Eurasia Center and currently a policy analyst at the nonprofit Razom for Ukraine.
The conversation covers the recent German military leak and what was actually said, the kinds of weapons Ukraine needs, the general state of the war, the impact of U.S. politics, Ukrainian grain exports, a potential Trump presidency, whether Putin will stop at Ukraine if he wins the war, Russiaâs genocidal actions in Ukraine, the evisceration of Russian media, the impact of sanctions, Zelenskyyâs recent change in generals, Russia and Ukraineâs respective methods of waging war, Ukrainian drone warfare, why it matters for Americans to support Ukraine, his work with Razom for Ukraine, the impact of Samizdat Online, and more.
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David Volodzko speaks with Stefan Tompson, the founder of VisegrĂĄd 24, which aggregates and curates news and current affairs on various social media platforms including X, where it currently has over 900,000 followers.
The conversation covers disinformation on social media, the Israel-Hamas War, Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine, TikTok as a Chinese psyop, the Westâs enemies within, the origins of woke progressivism, the glories of Western civilization, the importance of civil discourse, immigration, the beauty of Muslim and black pride, slavery, white guilt, the Jewish community, drag shows, Roman Catholic faith, and more.
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Arash Azizi reacted to my recent essay, The Case for Colonizing Gaza, by responding to a troll who had called the essay âblatantly racist,â to which Arash Azizi replied, âItâs not just racist but outright fascist.â
There is nothing racist or fascist about it, any more than there was about the U.S. occupation of Germany since that is precisely what I am recommending. Moreover, when he was a guest on this show, he commiserated with me as I described my anguish over the suffering in the Israel-Hamas War, so he knows better than anyone not to accuse me of racism against Palestinians.
That said, here are some unprepared thoughts on this and the deplorable pattern of deliberate misunderstanding and accusations of racism on social media these days.
Update: Arash Azizi unfollowed me on X shortly after this post went live.
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David Volodzko speaks with David Brin about comet dust formation, anti-institutionalism in Hollywood, how science-fiction has saved humanity, the moral philosophy of Star Trek, how tolerance and diversity have metastasized into a cancer, the infantile nihilism of Star Wars, how AI may buttress authoritarianism, the sinister laws of Wall Street AI, the existence of alien life, his recent WIRED article on AI, his Newsweek article on âempathy bots,â and much more.
David Brin (website, X) is an astrophysicist and NASA consultant whose science-fiction novels have won multiple Hugo, Nebula, and other awards. His books include The Postman, which was adapted as a film by Kevin Costner, Earth, Existence, and Foundationâs Triumph, the last in Isaac Asimovâs Foundation series. His nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the Freedom of Speech Award. His new book is Vivid Tomorrows: Science Fiction and Hollywood.
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Jonathan Choe (profile, X) is a journalist and a senior fellow at the Discovery Instituteâs Center of Wealth and Poverty, where he focuses on the homelessness crisis in Seattle.
In our conversation, we talked about Korea, his family life, his firing from KOMO for covering a Proud Boys rally, the pattern of news outlets caving to radical leftists by firing their own journalists, crime in Seattle and the failure of âdefund the police,â Seattleâs stalled revitalization efforts, the homeless-industrial complex, the fentanyl epidemic, the pro-Palestinian protests in Seattle and their link to the cityâs communist protest network, the failures of corporate media, how platforms like X have democratized information, and the future of independent journalism.
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Ryan Ruffaner (Substack, YouTube) is an industrial-organizational psychologist specializing in organizational development and selection systems. He is also a member of the Committee for the Advancement of Professional Ethics (CAPE) in the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychologists (SIOP), a DEI researcher, and a member of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
His writing on DEI includes the Quillette essay âDitching Diversity Mythsâ and Substack essays such as âDEI May INCREASE Surface-Level Divisions, Hurt Information Elaborationâ and âDEI Destroys Organizational Justice.â
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Ramesh Sepehrrad is an Iranian-American international relations and conflict resolutions expert who is also the advisory board chair of the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC), a D.C.-based non-profit with 40 chapters nationwide. She is also an adjunct professor of Middle East studies at the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Baltimore.
During our conversation, we discussed Iranâs influence behind October 7, what the U.S. has done right and done wrong in its approach to Iran, the persecution of Sepehrradâs own family under the Iranian regime, the ongoing protests in the country, and prospects for the nationâs future.
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Christine Abely is the author of the new book The Russia Sanctions: The Economic Response to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine. She is also an assistant professor of contracts and international business transactions at New England Law.
Abely (website, university profile, X) formerly worked at several Massachusetts law firms in business litigation and international trade and sanctions law and was an adjunct lecturer at Boston University School of Law. She has written in the areas of compliance, contracts, and international trade and sanctions.
In this conversation, Abely explains everything you ever wanted to know about Russia sanctions, especially in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine.
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Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware are the authors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.
Hoffman is a senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations and has been studying terrorism and insurgency for almost half a century. He is a professor at Georgetown Universityâs Walsh School of Foreign Service, professor emeritus of terrorism at the University of St. Andrews, and the former corporate chair in counterterrorism at RAND Corporation.
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown Universityâs Walsh School of Foreign Service and serves on the editorial boards for the academic journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism and the Irregular Warfare Initiative at the Modern War Institute at West Point.
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Julie Behling was a Christian missionary in Russia in the late 1990s. She earned a dual masterâs in Russian languages and literature as well as Russian and East European studies at Florida State University, working on the side as a Russian language teacher. She wrote her thesis on the survival tactics of underground Christian movements in the Soviet Union. In 2022, she published her book, Beneath Sheepâs Clothing: The Communist Takeover of Culture in the USSR & Parallels in Todayâs America. Now she has written and directed a documentary film based on the book. I saw the official trailer last week and contacted Behling for an interview. You can now also watch the filmâs intro.
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Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University who is known for fighting dogma with data.
His 2019 book Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, looked at a dataset of 409 allegedly false hate crimes and found that a substantial percentage are hoaxes, such as the Jussie Smollett case.
His 2020 book Taboo: 10 Facts [You Canât Talk About] reviews facts about race, gender, and class that have become taboo in American society.
His upcoming book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me is set to be released in June.
In this conversation, we discuss his motherâs influence on his thinking, what it means to have an honest conversation about race, whether diversity is always better, hate crime hoaxes, taboo facts about race and gender, the color-blind approach to race, race and IQ, his unfiltered frankness on social media, and much more.
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Elizabeth Spalding is the chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) and founding director of the Victims of Communism Museum. She teaches U.S. foreign policy and national security at Pepperdine University and at Hillsdale College, and she is the author of The First Cold Warrior: Harry Truman, Containment, and the Remaking of Liberal Internationalism and co-author with her father Lee Edwards of A Brief History of the Cold War.
In this conversation, we discuss North Korea, China, Russia, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and the centrality of the lie in communist states, the importance of honest journalism and the battle for truth and freedom in our era of disinformation, the reason people in the West are drawn to figures such as Vladimir Lenin, and just how many people have been killed by communism.
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This letter is a response to Benjamin Carlson, the author of the newsletter The Carlson Letter, the former executive editor of The Atlantic and former China correspondent for AFP. His work has also appeared in The New Republic, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and he was my colleague at GlobalPost. I contacted Ben with the idea of a letter exchange and he selected the topic. Before reading my response below, I suggest starting with his initial letter.
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James Scaminaci is an independent researcher and former civilian senior intelligence analyst for the U.S. Armyâs Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center (ITAC) and the European Commandâs Joint Analysis Center (JAC), specializing in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, counter-organized crime, and counter-terrorism.
He received his PhD in sociology from Stanford University and has written about the Christian Right in America, the Patriot militia movement, the Tea Party, and the concept of fourth-generation warfare.
In this conversation, we discuss Hamasâs massacre on October 7, the Christian Right in America, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement, Trumpâs connection to NAR, anti-LGBT bigotry in Russia, âspiritual kung fuâ in China, the racist roots of the pro-life and militia movements, the NRA, the corporate origins of the war on science, how woke leftists harm the lower class, why AOC is not really socialist, the military strategist John Boyd, the discursive force of identity politics, deep-fake propaganda, and much more.
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As you can imagine, there has been a lot speculation over Hitlerâs psychopathology. Unsurprisingly, his monstrous behavior extended to his personal relationshipsâand to the bedroom.
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In this episode, I spoke with Nico Perrino, the executive vice president at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which was founded in 1999 to protect free speech on college campuses in the United States and has since expanded its efforts beyond campuses to American society in general. As I wrote in my previous post, Fire in the Belly, his organization is âone of the greatest institutions of American democracy.â
Nico is also the creator and host of FIREâs So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, co-director and senior producer of the 2020 documentary âMighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Storyâ about the life and career of former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser, and was creative consultant on the 2015 film âCan We Take a Joke?â about censorship in stand-up comedy.In this conversation, we talk about the First Amendment and its philosophical grounding, the ongoing pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protests and the state of free speech at American universities, my firing from The Seattle Times and the state of free speech in American media, Ira Glasser, censorship in stand-up comedy, and much more.
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From the beginning of history, our ancestors have practiced the art of storytelling, wrapped in blackness as they huddled around the flickering fire, telling the legends of their people in the warm, crackling glow, passing on the best of themselves. This has always been the way, for we are storytellers.
Is it any wonder then that we would seek to protect the very instrument of our being, or that throughout history societies have celebrated and defended our freedom of speech?
In the 5th century BC, the practice of speaking freely or parrhesia was a necessary aspect of Athenian democracy, practiced in both the assembly and the agora, where citizens spoke openlyâprovided they were not women or slaves. Or think of the Roman Republic, which could not have existed had its senators been unable to voice critical concerns. And of course, the Enlightenment itself was nothing if not a flowering of ideas the sum total of which was not worth a single breath had it not been shared.
Freedom of speech is the most precious of all liberties, the one by which we defend all others, the horn we sound when another freedom is in peril, the shield we raise against the arrows of deception, and the spear we send into the ranks of oppression.
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This follows the first letter of my correspondence with Margaret Anna Alice in which we discuss fascism, censorship, and humor. Margaret Anna writes about propaganda, psychology, and health at Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass. If you find her letter below as fascinating and informative as I do, follow the link to her Stack and subscribe.
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Kris Goldsmith is an Iraq War combat veteran who came home from serving as a forward observer in the slums of Baghdad only to realize he had signed up after 9/11 but never had a chance to do the job he was trained to do. When he came home, he fought in veteran advocacy for 15 years before using his military training to protect freedoms at home by huntinâŠ
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