Honestly with Bari Weiss

In Bari’s view, Freddie deBoer is one of the best writers in the country. It’s not because she always agrees with him. Hardly. Freddie is a self-described Marxist. 

What she appreciates about him is that he is unflinching about criticizing “his side.” Freddie is one of the most trenchant critics of what he calls “Social Justice Politics”—which he argues distracts the left from the real issue of class. 

He is also unflinching in his views about mental illness and the way it is being glorified in our culture right now. Freddie knows about this subject intimately. He has severe bipolar disorder, and has been institutionalized in the past when he was on the verge of violently acting out.

Today: a conversation about “the gentrification of disability,” how sickness became chic, and how our society should handle the epidemic of mental illness.

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There are nearly 4000 universities in the U.S.. Many of them have billions of dollars in endowments and histories that go back to well before the country's founding. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that it would be a bit ridiculous to try and compete with those Goliaths. 

But that's exactly what the new University of Austin or UATX is doing. The premise, of course, is simple, and it goes like this. While the brand name schools have the money, they no longer have the mission. They have fundamentally abandoned the point of the university, which is the pursuit of truth. The good people at UATX, where I'm proud to be on the board, are not waiting for the broken status quo to change. They're not sitting around criticizing or whining. They are doing. 

Just a few weeks ago, UATX opened its doors to its first students at its inaugural summer school. I was blown away by the students that I met there, and I was honored to lecture alongside teachers like Neil Ferguson, Kathleen Stock, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rob Henderson and Thomas Chatterton Williams. And today I wanted to share with all of you the talk that I gave at the old parkland in Dallas to that first class of students. It's about the broken moment that we're in as a culture and a country, but more it's about what I think is required of us to meet this moment.

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No writer stokes more consistent envy among Common Sense editors than Walter Kirn. Two of his essays from last year—The Bullshit and The Power and the Silence—got our vote for the best of 2021. But we never miss anything he writes.

You might know Kirn’s name from his novels, including “Up in the Air” and “Blood Will Out.” We hope you’ll love his debut piece for us as much as we do.

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With everything going on here at home you can be forgiven for not focusing on what’s going on in Mariupol or Hong Kong.

But what’s going on in those faraway places has a profound impact on us. For evidence of that truth, look no further than Wuhan. Or at the current price of gas.

The point is that there is little distinction between domestic and foreign politics. If you are the world’s superpower—and at least for now we still appear to be—they are profoundly connected.

That’s the case former CIA head and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo makes in my conversation with him today.  In this wide-ranging and frank conversation, Pompeo answers my questions about China, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iran. But also: the stop the steal movement, the future of the GOP and whether or not he’s running for president.

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Few decisions could inspire so much anger and sadness in one group of Americans—and so much joy and relief in another—than last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Depending on where you sit, the Court just rolled back women’s rights by 50 years, or corrected an egregious instance of judicial overreach.

Today, a deep and honest conversation about the Dobbs decision with two women–both mothers–who represent the pro-choice and pro-life sides of this debate.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is the editor in chief of Reason Magazine. Bethany Mandel is the editor of the children’s series “Heroes of Liberty.”

Joining them is the head of the National Constitution Center, Jeffrey Rosen, who the LA Times called the nation’s most influential legal commentator.

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If you watched the Super Bowl this year, it was hard not to notice that cryptocurrency had fully arrived. Even Larry David was hawking crypto. 

But over the past several weeks, the crypto markets, like other markets, have been melting down. Some coins have completely imploded. Some crypto banks have shut their digital doors, refusing to give customers access to their money. And companies like Coinbase are laying off workers. Crypto winter has arrived.

Today: a debate. Is crypto really the future of money? And is this blip just a normal hiccup in an otherwise exciting, transformational technological advancement? Or was crypto always more hype than reality? 

Anthony Pompliano is a crypto believer. He’s an entrepreneur and investor and a former lead at Facebook. He's also the host of the Pomp podcast and the writer of a crypto newsletter called Off the Chain.

Michael Green is a major crypto skeptic. He has been an investor for more than 30 years. He recently joined Simplify, where he's introducing new innovations in ETFs. He's previously, among other jobs, been at Thiel Macro, where he managed the personal capital of Peter Thiel.

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If you read Common Sense, you know that the best day of the week is Friday, when Nellie Bowles delivers us all the news from the week that was.

This Friday, we bring you an Honestly special: TGIF! This time built just for your ears and brought to you by America’s favorite lesbians: Nellie and dear friend of the pod, Katie Herzog.Featuring: drag queens, inflation, prosecutors who just won't prosecute.

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We live in a culture that is driven by nay-saying. In one corner, people insist that the individual stands no chance against structural and systemic maladies. From the other, people say that we are in inexorable decline as a civilization and that decadence is everywhere we turn. Both wind up arguing against risk-taking, against the possibility of creating new things and new worlds.

How can we recover the adventurous, optimistic, forward-thinking, risk-taking attitude that has made America the most innovative country in the history of the world?

Today, the venture capitalist (and former journalist) Katherine Boyle explains how. She makes the powerful case that that spirit of building is very much alive in America—just not in the places that we once assumed we’d find it.

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Tulsa. Buffalo. Uvalde. Philadelphia. Chicago. And that’s just the past few weeks.

If you’re like me, you’ve had too many despairing conversations about the epidemic of gun violence in this country to count. This isn’t that. This is a conversation about what can actually, practically be done. 

David French is a senior editor of The Dispatch and the author of “Divided We Fall,” among other books. David is a veteran. He is also, as you’ll hear, a gun owner. 

Rajiv Sethi is a professor of economics at Barnard College at Columbia University who has been researching gun violence and writing about innovative solutions to the problem—even in a country with a robust Second Amendment.

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When Marianne Williamson stood on the presidential debate stage in 2020 and spoke about the “dark psychic force” unleashed in America, she became an instant meme. But these days—with our epidemic of loneliness and addiction, rising crime and violence like the kind we just witnessed in Uvalde, Texas—can anyone deny the existence of this darkness?

Long before others were willing to name the anti-human, anti-social sickness in our culture, Williamson was warning of it. She is one of the most beloved self-help authors in the world, having sold more than three million copies of her more than a dozen books.

If you are heartsick about the state of the country and find yourself asking how it can be made right, this episode is for you.

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