The Radicalist

David Volodzko speaks with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about her new Substack project Restoration , the September 11 attacks, her father’s influence on her views, whether Islam can be reformed, the importance of Saudi Arabia’s political shift, what it would take for the West to win its conflict with subversive powers such as Islamism and Marxism, her conversion to Christianity, how to balance compassion with...

A shorter version of this essay was originally published as a Substack Note . If Trump wins, it will be because he has an immovable base. There’s nothing he can say to repulse them. At a campaign rally in January 2016, he claimed, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” If Trump wins, it will be because he’s actually funny sometimes. Elizabeth War...

David Volodzko speaks with Rio Veradonir about an Enlightenment-based liberal approach to gay rights as opposed to the extremism that characterizes so much activism today, neo-Marxist social justice warriors, the liberal solution to trans athletes and sexual displays at Pride festivals, the strategic mistake Democrats are making in highlighting certain concerns, the misconception that Pride is jus...

The socialist magazine Jacobin embarrassed itself this week by claiming the new miniseries Shōgun “shows something rarely seen on screen: the shocking hubris of the colonizer and dehumanization of the colonized.” 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 coloni...

David Volodzko speaks with Doug Klain ( website , X ), a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, where he focuses on Russia’s 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 Ukrain...

David Volodzko speaks with Stefan Tompson, the founder of Visegrád 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, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, TikTok as a Chinese psyop, the West’s enemies within, the origins of wok...

Arash Azizi reacted to my recent essay, The Case for Colonizing Gaza , by responding to a troll who had called the essay “blatantly racist,” to which Arash Azizi replied , “It’s not just racist but outright fascist.” 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...

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 arti...

Jonathan Choe ( profile , X ) is a journalist and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s 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...

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 writin...

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 conve...

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 a...

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 University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, professor emeritus of terrorism at t...

Julie Behling was a Christian missionary in Russia in the late 1990s. She earned a dual master’s 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...

This week, the Los Angeles Times announced that it has laid off at least 115 people, or more than 20% of its newsroom. They did it via Zoom, took no questions, and gave no answers. Jared Servantez, assistant editor of breaking news at the paper, said a colleague told him, “that was like a drive-by.” The L.A. Times is the 5th largest daily in the nation after The Wall Street Journal , The New York...

We had Bolsheviks in my family. The brothers Wołodźko. I remembered the story when I saw progressives in the West celebrating Hamas’s atrocities on October 7. How could thinking people persuade themselves they were fighting oppression by justifying the rape and mutilation of 1,400 innocent Jews? How could they give full-throated support to those that would see them raped, enslaved, or beheaded? Th...

Richard Nixon gave the first speech of his presidential campaign in February 1968 at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel in Concord. It was a volatile time in American life. Then as now, Americans lived with the looming threat of Russian aggression, North Korean hostility, and a distant war against barbaric forces that left American public opinion bitterly divided. So it wasn’t terribly surprising tha...

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 Can’t Talk About...

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 f...

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...

James Scaminaci is an independent researcher and former civilian senior intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Threat Analysis Center (ITAC) and the European Command’s 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 writte...

As you can imagine, there has been a lot speculation over Hitler’s psychopathology. Unsurprisingly, his monstrous behavior extended to his personal relationships—and to the bedroom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theradicalist.com/subscribe

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 “one of the greates...

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 t...

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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to disc...