Today I sit down with journalist Astead Herndon, whose award-winning political reporting has appeared in The New York Times, on CNN, and now in Vox, where he serves as editorial director.

Astead and I explore how President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory reshaped our own views of American politics. We disagree—cordially—about how much of Trump’s rise was driven by racism, and what that moment revealed about the country. From there, we discuss why more black voters have been moving to the right, and what that shift says about ideology, class, and generational change.

We also dive into Astead’s take on New York City politics, including Zohran Mamdani’s victory, touching on debates over Israel and Palestine, and Mamdani’s pivot away from “Defund the Police” and his evolving stance on rent control. 

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My guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Victor is one of the most articulate defenders of Donald Trump, and one of the few people willing to explain why millions of Americans still see him as a necessary corrective rather than a danger.

We talk about how his years farming in California shaped his politics, how “lawfare” now cuts both ways, and why so many conservatives feel the system has turned against them. We also dive into the strange new revisionism spreading on the American right—from the claim that Churchill “started” World War II, to the idea that the Nazis killed millions by accident—and why Tucker Carlson has begun platforming the people pushing those ideas.

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Today, I’m bringing you a special bonus episode with professor Shilo Brooks. Shilo is the host of a new Free Press books podcast called, 'Old School'.

For our conversation, I picked Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions. Although our conversation happened months before Mamdani's victory yesterday, I think Sowell’s theory of the two “visions” that shape modern politics is helpful to understanding this election cycle--and why some people buy into utopian projects of remaking society, while others trust the quiet power of incentive structures like free markets.

It was a great conversation and I am excited to share part of it with you today. This is just a section, for the rest of the discussion search for Old School with Shilo Brooks wherever you get your podcasts.

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My guest today is evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven. If you’ve followed her story, you know she was effectively pushed out of Harvard for articulating a basic biological fact—and doing it politely. We talk through her research on hormones, rough-and-tumble play, aggression, and libido; what puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones actually do; why sports can’t be reorganized around “hormone levels”; and how elite institutions reacted to her saying things they all once taught. This is a conversation about evidence, not slogans—and about the cost of speaking plainly.

Carole Hooven is a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an associate in Harvard’s psychology department.

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My guest today is Gelet Martínez Fragela, a Cuban journalist and political refugee whose outlet is banned on the island. We trace Cuba’s path from independence to dictatorship, and separate myth from reality on the embargo, healthcare, and poverty. Gelet describes ration cards, compulsory “labor camps,” and why Cuba’s incarceration rate is among the world’s highest. We also dig into the regime’s information warfare, from cozy ties with the PFLP to state media claiming Israel “nuked” Syria, and how Chinese paramilitaries trained Cuba’s anti-riot police. We end on the protests of July 11, 2021: what ignited them, why they mattered, and what a serious U.S. policy would prioritize now.

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On October 21, 2023, beloved Detroit community leader Samantha Woll was found brutally stabbed to death outside her home—two weeks to the day after the October 7 attacks on Israel. It looks like an open-and-shut case—a hate crime. But swiftly the police rule that out. Instead they eventually find themselves with two unrelated suspects. When they charge one with murder, the case takes a turn that raises questions about antisemitism, race, and justice in America.

Hosted by The Free Press’s Frannie Block, this podcast features exclusive interviews and explores the remarkable, too-short life of Samantha, and the impact she had. And Spiral tells the bizarre twists and turns of one of Detroit’s most haunting recent crimes.

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Dr. Gad Saad is a visiting scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom in Mississippi and an evolutionary psychologist. We discuss his forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, in which he argues that the political left has taken empathy to a dangerous extreme. We also talk about his childhood as a Jew in Lebanon and his family’s experience during the Lebanese Civil War. Has empathy gone too far? And is it really a phenomenon unique to the political left?

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Nicholas Wade is a former science writer for The New York Times and author of several books on human evolution, including A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History and his new book, The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations.

Today, I invite Wade on to discuss some of the toughest topics in modern science: the controversial territory of race and genetics, and whether there are fundamental genetic differences between right-wingers and left-wingers. We also dig into the fertility crisis. Birth rates across the developed world have collapsed below replacement level, and no country except religious Georgia has figured out how to reverse the trend. Wade explains why modern economic progress makes having children less appealing, and why the breakdown of the family matters.

Finally, we talk about how the modern nation-state stamped out tribalism, why the academic establishment refuses to engage honestly with genetics research, what evolutionary psychology tells us about foreign policy, and much more.

Whether you find Wade’s evolutionary framework persuasive or not, I hope our conversation raises questions that most political leaders and academics prefer to ignore.

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Note that this conversation took place before Hamas addressed some conditions of President Donald Trump’s proposed peace plan and said it agreed to release all remaining hostages.

This was the most requested conversation I've ever had, and one of the longest and most challenging. Dave Smith—comedian, podcaster, and libertarian foreign policy critic—joined me for three and a half hours to debate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American foreign policy more broadly.

We disagree on a lot. Smith recently published a video responding to my analysis of the conflict, and this conversation gave us the chance to unpack those disagreements directly—without dodging the hard questions or talking past each other. We covered Ron Paul's influence on Smith's worldview, whether 9/11 was driven by foreign policy grievances or jihadist ideology, the Iraq War, whether Israel wants peace, what Palestinians actually want, and what American foreign policy in Iran should be.

This is what substantive disagreement looks like: long, difficult, and hopefully enlightening.

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Recorded live at the Comedy Cellar in New York City: I sat down with Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, best-selling author, and world-class debunker of doom, to talk about his new book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows…:Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. 

We got into this idea of “common knowledge”: what we all know and know that everyone else knows. It may sound abstract, but really it underlies everything. It is our shared awareness that lets us coordinate, bluff, protest, and panic together. We also talk about assassinated Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the changing style of comedy and its audience, and more.

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