Zooming In at The UnPopulist

In this episode of Zooming In , The UnPopulist's editor-in-chief, Shikha Dalmia, talks with Greg Sargent of The New Republic about whether America has truly turned against immigration—or whether Trump's 2024 victory has been badly misread. Sargent argues that the election reflected a thermostatic, economy-driven backlash rather than a durable cultural shift, and that the past year and a half of ma...

Welcome to Zooming In . I’m Berny Belvedere for The UnPopulist . The World Cup is finally here! It’s hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. It’s the largest World Cup in history. On Thursday, Mexico kicked off the competition by beating South Africa 2-0, and the U.S. followed that up the next day with possibly its best-ever performance in the World Cup, a thoroughly convincing smackdown...

Welcome to Zooming In . I'm Berny Belvedere, senior editor of The UnPopulist . I'm joined today by Raymond Roberts, author of A Democratic and Republican Faith , a theologically serious and hopeful book that recovers what authentic Christian faith actually demands of its adherents, at precisely the moment when so much of American Christianity has lost the plot. Today we discuss what a genuinely Go...

Our latest installment of The UnPopulist Live took place on Friday, April 24, when senior editor Berny Belvedere sat down with Center for New Liberalism co-founder Jeremiah Johnson and New York City New Liberals political director Tibita Kaneene to discuss NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first 100-plus days in office. What follows is the full video and transcript (lightly edited for flow and clarity) o...

Welcome to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. The last few weeks have been, to put it mildly, politically difficult for the president—as his draconian deportation crackdown, the Iran war, soaring oil prices, and inflation crater his approval ratings. At this moment, it seems everyone except his core MAGA base has abandoned him, including staunch supporters in the influencer class. Meanwhile, with the m...

Trump Proved to be Unimaginably Bad for the Free Market Cause: A Conversation with Veronique de Rugy Thanks for checking out The UnPopulist ! Subscribe to support our project. © The UnPopulist , 2026 Follow us on Bluesky , Threads , YouTube , TikTok , Facebook , Instagram , and X . We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy . Get full access to The UnPopulist at ww...

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube With the Iran war expanding and President Donald Trump’s public behavior growing more erratic by the week, a question that has long been treated as too politically radioactive to raise is now breaking into mainstream discussion: Is there a path to removing this president...

This is Zooming In , and I’m Tom Shull, survey research director of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, the parent organization of The UnPopulist. American politics has always featured verbal jabs—often sharp and below the belt. But many of us can personally recall a time when American political discourse wasn’t so toxic, and when citizens and politicians who didn’t retain a mo...

Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist . The Trumpist right has a very specific vision of masculinity—one built on violence, domination, and a kind of romanticized manual labor. It’s a vision they promote loudly, and just as loudly resent when many men don’t find it compelling. In this episode, host Aaron Ross Powell is joined by Toby Buckle, host of the Political Philosophy Podcast and cont...

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube New Yorker staff writer and economist John Cassidy joins The UnPopulist's Berny Belvedere to discuss his latest book, Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI —a sweeping account of capitalism's resilience told through the eyes of its mos...

The first year of Donald J. Trump’s second term as the president of the United States has been not only tumultuous for America but also the rest of the world. Just as at home, he has disregarded existing international institutions and standing alliances to chart a very different foreign policy course. Trump has threatened long-standing European with steep tariffs and military action—and traditiona...

Today, we have Editor-in-Chief Shikha Dalmia in conversation with two of the foremost thinkers of our time, Frank Fukuyama, an American political theorist and public intellectual best known for The End of History and the Last Man who is now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute, where his work focuses on political order, governance, and democratic backsliding. And Tyler...

Immigration enforcement is the dominant focus of Donald Trump’s second term. He promised to get tough, and he has. Many who voted for him because this issue was important to them believed he would mainly crack down on criminal aliens. On today’s episode, host Shikha Dalmia and guest David Bier of the Cato Institute dismantle that illusion. They discuss how in his second term, Trump has launched an...

America’s religious landscape has always been complicated, but something striking is happening inside conservative Christianity today. A movement that once spoke the language of scripture and personal faith is now increasingly shaped by grievance, politics, and an embattled sense of cultural siege. To explore how we got here—and what this shift means for both Christianity and American liberalism—s...

A post-Trump America may feel distant right now, but the work of imagining what a liberal reconstruction could look like has already begun. After years of executive overreach, collapsing guardrails, and an unprecedented centralization of presidential power, the question facing the country isn’t only how to limit further damage—it’s how to rebuild a constitutional order that’s stronger, fairer, and...

For decades, American universities have been seen as bastions of free inquiry, attracting students and scholars from around the world. But what happens when this openness creates vulnerabilities? How do authoritarian regimes leverage financial ties and international student populations to stifle criticism and export censorship onto American campuses? And more urgently, are we now seeing these same...

The MAGA movement was once an insurgency within the Republican Party. Now, it is the party. But more than just a political takeover; this shift is the result of the consolidation of a movement defined by hostility toward its opponents and a vision of America based on a largely imagined past. Its intellectual and political leaders have a clear, authoritarian blueprint for reshaping the country. In...

Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist . I’m Landry Ayres. We find ourselves in a deeply troubling moment for American democracy, grappling with the stark realities of a political landscape increasingly defined by fear, performative cruelty, and a cons...

At a recent conference at the Heterodox Academy, an organization founded in 2016 to promote viewpoint diversity on college campuses and defend academic freedom from the “woke threat,” attendees grappled with the new threat to academic freedom, this time coming from the White House. There was real disagreement about how much attention each threat deserved and we explored these tensions in a podacas...

For decades, many observers held onto an optimism that, despite occasional setbacks, the arc of history inevitably bent towards a richer, freer, and better-governed world. However, the political turbulence witnessed across established democracies in the past decade has shattered this optimism and exposed deeper problems. Today, The UnPopulist’s Editor-in-Chief Shikha Dalmia is joined by Brink Lind...

Academia finds itself at a critical juncture, navigating internal debates over the lack of intellectual diversity and too much in the thrall of prevailing orthodoxies, while simultaneously facing unprecedented external pressures from political forces intent on reshaping higher education. How can institutions uphold their mission of truth-seeking and open inquiry amidst such formidable challenges?...

For generations, the idea of American liberty has been synonymous with limited government and individual freedoms. Yet, since the Founding, the reach of state surveillance has grown exponentially, often shrouded in secrecy and justified by the need to fight threats to safety and security. To explore the historic choices and institutional dynamics that paved the way for the modern surveillance appa...

When President Trump launched his so-called Liberation Day tariffs, he didn’t just ignite a global trade war—he may have also triggered yet another constitutional crisis. This week, first an international trade court and then a federal court ruled those tariffs unlawful, striking at the heart of Trump’s sweeping claims of executive power under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. But a...

America’s Founders believed religion and liberty could not only coexist but be mutually reinforcing. Today, some influential intellectuals on the right are flatly denying that idea of alignment and arguing for society to be reordered around their vision of Christian orthodoxy. In this episode, Berny Belvedere, The UnPopulist’s senior editor, sits down with Jerome Copulsky, research fellow at the B...

The executive branch is currently being run by an aspiring autocrat who neither respects institutional safeguards nor accepts the separation of powers. As part of his project to subsume all governmental authority under his control, he has empowered a tech billionaire to reshape and repurpose government agencies—through what they’ve called the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—so th...