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 colonized? Here’s my answer. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other...

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 Ukraine needs, the general state of the war, the impact of U.S. politics, Ukrainian grain exports, a...

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 woke progressivism, the glories of Western civilization, the importance of civil discourse,...

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 on this show, he commiserated with me as I described my anguish over the suffering in the...

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 “empathy bots,” and much more. David Brin (website, X) is an...

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 and the failure of “defund the police,” Seattle’s stalled revitalization efforts, the...

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 “Ditching Diversity Myths” and Substack essays such as “DEI...

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 Iran’s influence behind October 7, what the U.S. has done right and done...

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,...

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 the University of St. Andrews, and the former corporate chair in counterterrorism at RAND...

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 Sheep’s Clothing: The Communist Takeover of Culture in the USSR & Parallels in Today’s...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit volodzko.substack.com Sam Nara is the author of the book Woke Palestinian Idiot. He lives in the West Bank and has come to understand both sides of the current conflict with more depth and good faith than most people ever will. In this conversation, we discuss how most Palestinians now believe October 7 did not happen, the unparalleled levels of racism in Arab culture, Al Jaz…

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] reviews facts about race, gender, and class that have become taboo in American society. His...

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,...

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. This is a public episode. If you’d like to...

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 written about the Christian Right in America, the Patriot militia movement, the Tea Party, and the...

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 volodzko.substack.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 greatest institutions of American democracy.” Nico is also the creator and host of FIRE’s So to Speak: The...

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...

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 discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit volodzko.substack.com 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 huntin…

The writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said, “The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened. You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.” Yet the history of the word holocaust itself tells the story of our collective refusal to learn this lesson. This feels to me the proper way to set into a history of the word holocaust, because so much of its history, as you will see, is...

Yevgeny Simkin is a contributor at The Bulwark and co-founder of Samizdat Online. During the Soviet Union, samizdat was the grassroots practice of evading censorship by reproducing banned publications, often by hand. Samizdat Online is the digital incarnation of this practice, publishing articles from an array of outlets while bypassing firewalls and protecting readers’ anonymity to bring truth to people living under authoritarian rule. Samizdat’s only requirement for publishing articles is...

We can defeat Hamas on the battlefield, but we must also fight the rot in Palestinians culture, and in our own, that embraces such ideologies. We must counter those who think Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Hamas, and Osama bin Laden are the good guys. These people are our enemies. Thankfully for us, the truth is their enemy. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit volodzko.substack.com/subscribe